Month: December 2006

Baghdad, 2.20 pm.

Jake Tapper ponders some lessons learned from covering the Mary Cheney story. Money quote:

This is what we got out of the White House when we asked, over and over, if the President, as he declared in 1999, still opposed same sex couples adopting children. Our intrepid White House off-air reporter, Karen Travers, asked if that position still stood.

"When Vice President Cheney told President Bush that his daughter was pregnant, the President congratulated him," the White House spokesman said. "President Bush is happy for the Cheney family."

Right. Okay. Travers tried again: does he still oppose same sex adoptions?

"In 2005, the President said he believes the ideal is for a child to be raised by a man and a woman, but children can receive love from gay couples and private adoption firms can make their own decisions," said the spokesman.

Jake thinks that means Bush is still opposed. I’m not so sure. I don’t think the president has the slightest problem with his veep’s daughter having a committed relationship and having a child. It’s just that he cannot say that in public. Hypocrisy is now hardwired into sustaining the Republican coalition.

(More criticism for the vice-president’s daughter from anti-gay activist Peter LaBarbera here and the Christianist group, Concerned Women for America, here.)

I’m reading and absorbing it. I hope to have something more detailed to write when I’m done. Here’s my first basic impression. It’s absolutely not more of the same. It’s a a clear declaration that we’re leaving. Money quote from Lee Hamilton to ABC News:

"We did not find one single person, and we interviewed over 200 people, who thought we should stay the course …  The Iraqis must be under no misapprehension here. We are going to pull out our combat troops out of Iraq in a responsible way over a period of time and they have to begin to accept the new mission and we have to begin to accept the primary mission of training and embedding troops."

But it’s also a very realist "Hail Mary" which involves so many simultaneous things to happen right that its chance of success, even using the Baker-Hamilton premises, can only be in the 20 percent range. Overhaul Iraqi army training to wean it from sectarian loyalties and give it a capacity to enforce peace on the whole country? Get Iran and Syria to back off? Do all this while we’ve declared we have no intention of sticking around for much longer than a year in any real force strength? And do it all while civil war spirals further? Yeah, right.

But the key claim of the ISG is that the only alternative to this – the current strategy with the current force levels, however massaged – has a zero percent chance of success. And the other claim is that any alternative to this – all of this, including the Israeli-Palestine issue – will fail to get actual bipartisan support at home. You can see why Bush looked yesterday like a dog being given a bath.

The only truly new aspect of the report, apart from its insistence that we are absolutely leaving soon, is the notion that Iran has an interest in stabilizing Iraq and that we have leverage in that respect. Many neoconservatives argue that Iran has precisely the opposite intention, and so we have no leverage; and even if we did, Ahmadinejad is not someone any rational actor can negotiate with. I don’t want to go all Baker-Hamilton on you, but both sides may have captured parts of the truth. Let’s assume the neocons are right (and I think they are) about the nature of the Tehran regime. Is there a point at which civil war in Iraq really does threaten the mullahs in Tehran? And if there is, are we there yet?

I don’t know. Perhaps it’s unknowable in the time and place such decisions have to be made. But I do think we can over-estimate the stability of the Tehran regime, and that revolutionary unrest and disintegration in its neighbor might rattle the forces in Iran’s leadership that are halfway sane. Think of hundreds of thousands of restive Shiite refugees pouring over the border. Think of growing ethnic unrest within Iran. Think violence spreading in from the Kurdish region. So Baker may be right: we may have more leverage than we think. But we may not yet have enough to get Iran to back off in any meaningful sense.

So we have two awful options, it seems to me. First: throw everything we’ve got at this thing, do all the Baker-Hamilton commission wants (including the Iran and Syria gambits) except withdraw troops. But merely maintaining current force levels is, as Baker argues, a non-starter. If Bush wants to pursue something called "victory" in his head, then the acid test will be his troop commitment. He needs to embrace much of Baker-Hamilton and add more than 50,000 and probably closer to 75,000 new troops into the theater – in the next three or four months. And why not talk to the regimes in Syria and Iran? If they are what the Bush administration says they are, the diplomacy will go nowhere, and we can then be seen to have at least tried. The new troops should then be used to prop up Maliki, train the Iraqi army, and finally police the borders. No timelines. Full Metal McCain.

If we don’t do that, we should leave – rapidly, and let the real war begin. It may already have. I don’t see a third way working, especially given the incompetence in the White House, the profound weakness of Maliki, and the complete lack of domestic confidence in this administration’s conduct of the war. Asking young Americans to die for a slower, longer civil war between Sunnis and Shia is, at this point, the real non-starter. In fact, a third way may make us even more complicit in the conflict we will eventually have to escape from. That’s my first take, open to revision and correction. Double down and deal; or get out in a matter of months.

(Photo: Haraz Ghanbari/AP.)

Dahlia Lithwick reminds me how effortlessly she brings legal and constitutional writing to vivid, insightful life:

When you’re sitting close enough to see that Supreme Court justices actually wear socks, their differences are stark. From the moment he takes the stage, Justice Breyer looks outward. He shifts in his seat constantly to catch the eye of the moderator, ABC’s Jan Crawford Greenburg, and then to make eye contact with individual audience members. When Scalia speaks, Breyer nods and bobs. Justice Scalia turns inward, folding up his arms and gazing raptly into the middle distance. As Breyer speaks, Scalia first smirks, then giggles, then sort of erupts with a rebuttal, usually aimed right at the tips of his shoes. Where Breyer is ever striving to connect to the world, Scalia is happiest in his head. Throughout the debate, Breyer continues to measure, aloud, whether he and Scalia are "making progress." Scalia laughs that Breyer’s hopes for the evening are too high.

Scalia is charming and‚Äîas ever‚Äîriotously funny. For each time Breyer says his own constitutional approach is "complicated" or "hard," Scalia retorts that his is "easy as pie" and a "piece of cake." And if this debate mirrors a marketplace of ideas, Breyer will make the sale through the earnest personal connection of a Wal-Mart greeter, while Scalia opts for the aloof certainty of the Tiffany’s salesman: "Sure, you can buy some other, cheaper constitutional theory, but really. Ew."

A reader writes:

Robert Knight describes Mary Cheney’s child as being conceived "With the express purpose of denying it a father"?

MARY CHENEY:  So would you like to have a child?

HEATHER POE:  No, not really.

MC:  Neither would I.

They continue watching Seinfeld. Mary’s Partner frowns.

HP:  Wait, I just thought of something.

MC:  What?

HP:  If we did have a child, we could deny it a father.

MC:  Wow, I never thought of it that way before. What should we name it?

A reader writes:

She’s probably the most literate film critic out there. I don’t agree with her much of the time, but at least she is willing to see films as an art form, as a form of literature, and not as a disposable product.

Think about it. If you are a film critic, what the f*** are you supposed to write when reviewing dreck like "Happy Feet"? So a David Lynch movie comes along – pretentious, self-indulgent, natch – and she’s now able show off her years of film knowledge, her ideas and theories, while, perhaps, overwriting and extending metaphors here and there. So f***ing what. If you read her regularly, you’ll learn that she will tackle almost any movie in any genre and, for the most part, review ’em on their own terms. She appreciates both David Lynch and George Romero.

And talk about overwrought. You might be the most melodramatic queen east of the Mississippi. Look in the mirror. So go back to your sermonizing and hand wringing, but, from now on, back off Dargis, punk.

This quote is a classic:

"We felt it was extraordinarily important to try and keep this process out of politics if we could."

Because politics is not about how to fight and win wars? Or because the people are not be trusted to make such decisions? And Baker is.

One wants to admire Victor Davis Hanson. And then he says something like this:

They’re talking about a country that once fought Italy, Japan and Germany all at once, defeated them, and then turned around and started the Cold War … I mean, the Cold War resistance of the Soviet Union, and they’re saying that this same country, now twice the size, with much more material and military wealth, can’t fight in Afghanistan and Iraq at once. That’s sort of the poverty of their imagination, that we’ve taken our eye off the ball in Afghanistan, got bogged down in Iraq, and now we’re helpless. We need Jim Baker to come in, we need Syria to come in, we need Iran to come in to help us. It’s absurd, but it seems to be the prevailing opinion now.

An obvious point: all those wars cited by VDH were classic armed combat, not intractable insurgencies. The most recent such insurgency dealt with by American military – Vietnam – was also a failure. Another obvious point: the Cold War was won in part by containment, not pre-emption. But the larger issue is this: Does VDH seriously believe that the problem in Iraq is insufficient support from the American public? This president got all he wanted and more – for a longer period than World War II. He assumed total power and control, by-passed even the Republican Congress when he felt like it, ripped up the Geneva Conventions, got to decide everything in Iraq for three and a half years … and it’s now the public’s fault and the press’s fault that almost every sane analysis concludes it has been botched beyond belief?

I might add that continuing bromides by VDH in which no serious criticism of the Bush administration was entertained did indeed contribute to the failure. He enabled failure rather than confronting it. If there are any members of the American public who bear responsibility for the debacle in Iraq it is those of us who passionately supported the war in the first place – and above all, those who refused to criticize its conduct once the failures became manifest. About a month after the invasion.

"In all my time in Washington I’ve never seen such smugness, arrogance, or such insufferable moral superiority. Self-congratulatory. Full of itself. Horrible," – Bill Bennett on the ISG report, with little apparent self-awareness.

This is Tony Snow’s response to the dearth of Arabic-speaking military in Iraq and elsewhere:

"You don’t snap your fingers and have the Arabic speakers you need overnight."

How about after five years’ notice that we desperately need better intelligence in the Arab world?