Month: January 2007

Silver City, New Mexico, 10 am.

This reader captures it well, I think:

I too share your skepticism with the "surge" and am tired of witnessing almost four years of mis-managed war, so I am hardly sympathetic to Bush or his plan.  However, Jim Webb, while speaking very eloquently and forcefully, contradicted himself by first saying that America would not precipitously withdraw from Iraq, but then later saying we should responsibly redeploy so that American troops would be out of Iraq "in short order".  Maybe it’s me, but one sounds like the other. 

I realize this president has put us in the situation we are in, but in choosing between giving the surge time to work or pulling out of Iraq in short order, I’m choosing the former (reluctantly). One thing Bush did effectively was lay out the consequences of abandoning of Iraq, and I don’t think the Democrats’ position laid out by Webb addresses this reality by advocating a quick withdrawal.

I’ve been talking about the war during this SOTU with CNN’s Iraq correspondent, Michael Ware. He too fears that withdrawal of any kind right now could unleash almighty hell in the region. But he recognizes, as I think we all must, that the current strategy cannot work either. "Plus Up" is a euphemism for hoping for the best. It’s less a strategy than a wish.

At this point, the forces necessary to bring order to Iraq – to "shape the outcome" toward victory, in the president’s words – are probably in the region of several hundred thousand more. Victory, in the president’s terminology, probably requires a draft – or a much more drastic increase in military spending and manpower than is now planned. I think the reason Americans are so negative toward this president is that they intuitively know that he has not provided the resources to win. He still hasn’t. And his administration does not have a scintilla of the skill to manage the situation in their absence. And so we are at the mercy of forces beyond our control. Hence the unease, which the president just did nothing to dispel.

Junk science, apparently.

It was, I think, the most effective Democratic response in the Bush years. He managed to bridge economic populism with military service and pride: a very potent combination. He did so with a sense of responsibility. The message, in short: "Lead us toward responsible redeployment in Iraq – or get out of the way." And he said it with testosterone and authority – more authority than this president now has.

The amazing "God Hates Fags" video has been removed. You can still see it here.

10.02 pm. Brave but not so humble. The subway dude is spreading the love. I’m letting go and giving in. America! Yay!

10.01 pm. Baby Frigging Einstein?

10 pm. The NBA dude is next to the Asian heroine or whoever. There’s around six feet between his head and hers. Best shot of the night.

9.58 pm. I’m looking at the script. The hero section is looming. Oy.

9.55 pm. He wants more recruits for the armed forces. Six years late, he endorses Al Gore’s position in the 2000 election. Still: it’s a good move. Maybe next time, we will go to war with sufficient strength and intelligence to win.

9.52 pm. "Whatever you voted for, you didn’t vote for failure." Damn right. But this president gave us failure. He failed in his task of basic competence and decency in the war. That is why the situation in the "here and now" is so grave. Because of his delinquency and arrogance. The American people are not stupid. And their approval rating simply reflects the reality they see.

9.50 pm. "Chaos is their greatest ally in this struggle." The president is speaking of Islamists, Sunni and Shia. I agree. So why did the U.S. sit back and let chaos spread across Iraq for three years? Why did this president refuse for three years to send sufficent forces to succeed?

9.45 pm. The president forces the Democrats to stay sitting when he urges "victory" in Iraq.

9.40 pm. "The Shia and Sunni extremists are different faces of the same totalitarian threat." Is this the formulation by which the president tries to frame a Muslim civil war as a single war against the West? Rather than attempting to exploit the differences among Islamist terrorists, the president seems eager to unite them. I can’t say it makes any coherent sense to me.

9.34 pm. "The challenge of global climate change." Could he be any vaguer?

9.32 pm. I like the energy stuff. I have no idea if it’s serious, but I like it – and the connection the president made to national security.

9.29 pm. "Without animosity and without amnesty." Nice one, Matthew.

9.28 pm. Deathly silence greets the words "temporary worker program."

9.20 pm. It takes a Democratic Congress to put fiscal conservatism at the front of this president’s priorities.

9.13 pm. He can’t help himself. He begins with a graceful nod to the first female Speaker; then he wrecks it by talking of the "Democrat Congress". The transcript says "Democratic Congress." No biggie – but it does rub the other side the wrong way.

Who is Fitzgerald really after? Here are some excerpts from the news feeds:

"Vice President Cheney himself directed Scooter Libby to essentially go around protocol and deal with the press and handle press himself … to try to beat back the criticism of administration critic Joe Wilson."

Cheney personally "wrote out for Scooter Libby what Libby should say in a conversation with Time magazine reporter Matt Cooper."

"Scooter Libby destroyed a note from Vice President Cheney about their conversations and about how Vice President Cheney wanted the Wilson matter handled."

This may be the moment in the Bush administration when the huge liner splits in two, points upward and goes under for good.

(Photo: Charles Dharapak/AP.)

I have an office; and interns; and a tech staff. In my orientation today, the techies told me they were in the process of "sucking down" my blog archives. I didn’t ask any more questions after that.

A reader writes:

Carter was a hawk, but he wasn’t a traditional one because realists and other practitioners of realpolitick don‚Äôt sufficiently appreciate the importance of political legitimacy. Playing the ‘freedom’ card, if you will, undermined the raison d’etre of the Soviet Union by stating the simple truth ‚Äì that a system that can only survive through massive applications of violence against its own people is a system destined for the dustbin of history. Human rights was a way to highlight the fear and moral cowardice of the communist dictatorships and so destroy the implicit public support that underpinned and propped up communism in a way that no gun, bomb, or army could ever defend against. The Soviet Union and its empire collapsed not because we pushed it over, but because no one wanted to keep it propped up.

Sure, Carter laid the foundation for the future Reagan military buildup and did things like aiding the Afghan resistance, but the strongest blow ever dealt to Soviet communism was the one that pointed out what an evil, corrupt, and bankrupt system it had become. Stalin once quipped, ‚Äòhow many divisions has the Pope?‚Äô That Stalin’s heirs are now footnotes and Catholicism is alive and well in Poland goes to show just how much Stalin misunderstood the importance of political legitimacy in a contest like the Cold War. Ideas are weapons too, often the most important ones.

That goes for the current war as well. It will be won – or lost – in people’s minds.

"We are living through one of the most transformative periods in history. If we are going to make it, we need a far greater appreciation and respect for others, or we’re going to blow up mankind. Look at what zealotry can do. Religious zealotry has been responsible for killing more people than any other thing. Look at the Middle East today. It’s all about religion. We need to move past those divisions and learn to be tolerant and respectful. If we go out there full of intolerance and hatred, we’ll never make it," РSenator Chuck Hagel, in GQ.