Month: December 2006

This is what a key American ally in Baghdad is saying about the Baker-Hamilton report:

"We can smell the attitude of James Baker in 1991 when he liberated Kuwait but left Saddam in power."

"There are plenty of funny women, way more than there used to be, but as a rule women are not as funny as men. The reasons are simple, and fairly boring. Hitchens quotes at length from a Stanford University study that proves conclusively that women don’t respond to punch lines as enthusiastically as men do; I can’t imagine why he even brings up the study unless he has a word count he’s trying to meet. Why not just get right down to it? Men love jokes, women don’t. Men tell jokes, women can’t. Men have cocks, women don’t. End of story," – Nora Ephron, at HuffPuff.

Don’t bother reading the rest of her post. It’s not even faintly interesting, let alone funny.

A neocon rewrites his own history. Maybe he should sue himself.

Austin, Texas, 7.20 am.

She seems to believe it was okay for Romney to be pro-gay in 1994 because "gay marriage ‚Äî what we are talking about today ‚Äî wasn’t really on the table in 1994." Actually, the first state court recognized the right to marry in Hawaii in 1993. in 1994, it was quite the hot topic. Kathryn-Jean Lopez was around twelve then so she can be forgiven for forgetting. DOMA was in 1996. During the height of the first Christianist hysteria about gay marriage, Romney clearly took a proudly pro-gay stand. I think that’s telling. He’s now against even civil unions. What gives?

K-Lo then suggests that Romney’s new position is the real one, and that the last few years have led him to this position. So that means that a Republican candidate who supported ENDA (the federal Employment Non-Discrimination Act for gays) in 1994 is going to be less likely to do so in 2006? Run that logic by me one more time, will you? As for me and LCR never entertaining Romney as a candidate, I reserve judgment. If Romney proposes healthcare reform on the basis of the Massachusetts experiment, if he backs gay civil unions and ENDA, if he reaches out to LCR, if he leaves marriage to the states to decide, and if he has a sane and serious strategy for fighting Islamist terror, I’d be perfectly open to backing him. If he is serious about cutting spending, I could even get enthusiastic. He seems more of a conservative than a fundamentalist to me. He’s just posing as a fundie for the primaries. Alas, he won’t be able to pose for much longer. He’ll have to deliver. And then, as K-Lo says, "we’ll see…"

This is it:

In my description of our only two real options in Iraq as "double-down" or complete withdrawal, I of course have to grapple with the moral consequences of a swift withdrawal. A reader writes cogently:

You’ve been remarking recently on your blog about how our only options in Iraq are a) doubling-up on troops, or b) ‘getting out completely, and finally giving the region the civil and religious war it so obviously and deeply wants’. This last option strikes me as glib and shortsighted. Most Iraqis don’t want civil or regional war, they want stability. It’s a minority of thugs with guns and bombs who want civil war. Our invasion set loose all of these thugs, so don’t we have a moral obligation to at least limit the damage? In other words, if option a) (doubling-up) is politically impossible, doesn’t ‘stay the course’ (slow-burn civil war) remain a less irresponsible option than complete withdrawal (fast-burn civil war, possibly raging for years)?

Most estimates conclude that the current sectarian violence is killing tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians a year. Well, the Iran-Iraq war killed a million people. I fear that withdrawing merely out of frustration with Bush‚Äôs incompetence and Iraq’s inability to police itself would mean consigning millions of ordinary Iraqis to total anarchy rather than limited anarchy. The difference between those two states of anarchy could be hundreds of thousands of lives.

I think this is the gist of David Brooks’ column today, but it was written so artfully I cannot tell whether it is an endorsement of allowing the place to go to hell or a warning that we cannot afford to. It could be that David, like me, is simply pinioned between fear and what’s left of hope.

The "slow burn and fail" option may indeed restrain the toll of the civil war and ethnic cleansing in the short run. But that ethnic cleansing is happening anyway. And in order for the US to actively stop the civil war, we would have no option but to get involved on one side or the other, depending on the circumstances, and provoke those sectarian hatreds into targeting us as well. The danger of this is that we actually get ourselves embroiled in an insane new Thirty Years War in which we have no real stake. By that I mean no sane American cares for theological purposes whether the Shiites or Sunnis deserve to win, or the minute details of their ancient hatreds. We have already lost treasure and human beings in the attempt to build a democracy where no one with any power wants it. The one chance we had – a quick, overwhelming invasion, a long and lucky process of nation-building, winning over the people with massive investment and the establishment of order – has been lost.

I want to believe we can endure and win. But a conservative looks at the world as it is, not as he wants it to be. The small chance we had of achieving our goals of a stable, democratic Iraq is gone for ever. Maybe there is a chance to leverage the neighboring powers’ fears of a regional bloodbath  into some kind of deal to stabilize the "country". But that is a long shot, and risks enmeshment in a civil war that is increasingly hard to control or even monitor.

Meanwhile, Oakeshott’s dictum rings in my ears;

"Those who in fields Elysian would dwell
Do but extend the boundaries of hell."

(Photo: Mohammed Sawaf/AFP/Getty.)

Time’s sources say there’s a faction in Tehran fearful of Iraqi chaos and willing to talk to the US. The reason? They think they are in a relative position of strength right now … but also potentially threatened in the medium term by Iraq’s disintegration:

Iran is also increasingly concerned about the need to stabilize Iraq, say TIME’s sources, in contrast to U.S. charges that Tehran is fueling instability there. The sources indicate that Iranian officials essentially agree with the Baker-Hamilton conclusion that while Iran gains an advantage from having the U.S. mired in Iraq, its long-term interests are not served by Iraqi chaos and territorial disintegration. "Iran would love to see the situation stabilized in Iraq," says a source. "That is a very important concern for Iran. But Iran doesn’t want to see the U.S. declare victory, in case the Americans would like to attack Iran next." The sources say that among the ways Iran could be helpful is to try to persuade groups representing the Shi’ite majority and Kurds in Iraq to be more conciliatory to the Sunni minority whose grievances fuel the insurgency.

Leveraging Arab chaos against Persia’s long-term interests is one of the few cards the U.S. has left. The question of when and how to play it is now the central one.

Jeffrey Goldberg reviews president Carter’s new book on Israel and the Middle East. Ouch. The stiletto is always more fatal than the sledgehammer.

This strikes me as an astonishing admission on the part of a writer who has been writing on national security for the past five years:

I haven’t engaged much in the parlor game of identifying mistakes in the occupation, because none of them (and there were many) reached a magnitude of those in World War II (e.g., daylight bombing without fighter escort in 1942-3, intelligence failures about the hedgerows, surprise at the Bulge, etc) or Korea (surprise at the Yalu). Nor were any fatal to our cause, despite the ‚Äòdisbanding‚Äô of the army, Abu Ghraib, etc.

If there were any serious blunders, they concerned the sense of hesitation that gave our enemies confidence—the sudden departure of Gen. Franks, the pullback from first Fallujah, the reprieve given Sadr, etc. In other words, once we were in a war, whatever public downside there was to using too much force was far outweighed by losing our sense of control and power, and ceding momentum to the terrorists. So we can learn from that, and begin again cracking down hard on the insurgents before calling for more troops."

This is Victor Davis Hanson. What can one say? That he does not believe that disbanding the Iraqi army was a serious blunder. Nor Abu Ghraib. Nor the troop levels. The only failing is that we did not kill enough of the enemy, that we didn’t conquer the place more effectively. Would that have meant more troops? Ooops. Didn’t mean to go there. That’s a question for those in a "parlor game".

Revealed here is the empty shell of the denialist right. No record of any constructive or even trenchant criticism during the most appalling military and foreign policy fiasco since Vietnam. Blather about World War II. No criticism of the president. Just a recipe for "cracking down hard on insurgents" with the troops we already have. Gee. No one thought of that already, did they?