Month: January 2007

The Onion leads the way, as usual.

A Princeton professor outs the rigid theology of Robert P. George.

Here’s a post that deserves a quick response:

Andrew Sullivan can’t be so excused – he was supporting "more troops" virtually up to the moment Bush began signalling support for the idea. Coincidence? He just happened to stop bashing Bush for not supplying more troops to stabilize Baghdad at the very moment he decided to bash Bush for doing precisely that?

People can have differing opinions on the surge, but one person can’t possibly have so many positions, all of which seem to be suspiciously driven by an automatic gainsaying of whatever Bush might be doing this week.

Er, my position has long been that this occupation was under-manned, from the first months on. That’s still my position. My worry about the surge is that it is too little and too late. I wanted more troops all along, and deemed 50,000 to be the minimum needed to make a real difference now. No gainsaying; no positioning; a clear principle maintained consistently, applied to shifting circumstances on the ground. I agree with Fred Kagan and John McCain that an insufficent surge for too short a time is the worst of all worlds. But unlike Kagan and McCain, I haven’t abandoned that view for short-term partisan purposes.

Scott Johnson piles on. "Sickening."

In case you missed it, here’s some exciting news about the blog – from Friday.

One reader is guardedly optimistic:

Just this weekend I had a very interesting conversation with a grad school friend of mine who recently came back from 12 months working in the US Embassy in Baghdad.  This guy studied insurgency extensively for years before shipping out, so I trust much of what he says.

My friend believes the surge has a chance of working.  He asserts that most of the violence in Baghdad is happening in a relatively small area of the city, such that an extra 20,000 has a real chance to solidify control. 

He told me something very important about the nature of the sectarian violence, which is that being Sunni is only one of a number of ‘profiles’ used by Shi’ite militiamen to select targets for torture and execution. They believe that they are being selective in going after ‘terrorists.’ While he (and I) believe that profiling is highly inaccurate, it does suggest that improvements in government control needn’t necessarily lead to genocide of the Sunni population. According to my friend, the presence of American forces is essential, because it acts as a constraint on the militiamen, forcing them to be more careful, more selective, and less violent overall.

My personal objection to this analysis is that Baghdad is simply the tip of the iceberg. There is no doubt in my mind that consolidation of control in Baghdad will lead Sunni insurgents to shift location to less densely occupied areas.  What then?

Indeed: what then? But we need to hope for success for Petraeus even if we don’t expect much. Wars are dynamic things.

There are still few safeguards for the innocent, as a new study of Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama, and Virginia shows.

Ted Haggard explains why the born-again have better sex lives. Does he include those who pay for male prostitutes and crystal meth?

Did Richard Perle just tell the Israelis that the president is preparing to attack?

(Hat tip: TPM.)

Glenn Reynolds unpacks his position on "Plus Up." His main point is that the number of troops is less important than what we do with them; and he is "disappointed" in the Bush administration’s strategy so far in this respect.