Month: April 2007

The official report on the Israeli prime minister’s mishandling of last year’s war in Lebanon:

"The prime minister made up his mind hastily, despite the fact that no detailed military plan was submitted to him and without asking for one," the report said. "He made his decision without systematic consultation with others, especially outside the IDF, despite not having experience in external-political and military affairs."

Olmert was also censured for failing to "adapt his plans once it became clear that the assumptions and expectations of Israel’s actions were not realistic and were not materializing."

"All of these," the report said, "add up to a serious failure in exercising judgment, responsibility and prudence."

Sound familiar? The Israelis making this criticism will not, I suspect, be accused of being leftists or pro-terror. They are democrats forcing accountability from the responsible party. I want to know when someone in real authority will hold Bush and Cheney fully and personally accountable for wartime irresponsibility, recklessness, deceit, rigidity, arrogance, and war crimes.

The Dish was lively this weekend. From Christianist Democrats to prehistoric sex, from a powerful analogy between what happened to the Soviets in Afghanistan and what is happening to us today in Iraq, from a remarkable success in HIV prevention in San Francisco to Bill Buckley’s brutal take-down of Bush’s war: catch up if you can.

Dale Carpenter tracks the constantly shifting arguments of one of the more principled opponents of marriage equality.

The French trailer is above. You can find other versions, including the American trailer, here. It is about as moving and as profound a Christian film as I have ever seen. Depressed as one can be about the integrity of the church, the way in which the teachings of Jesus have been distorted and abused by politics, the vulgarity of much contemporary Christianity, the faith endures … in places like the Grande Chartreuse monastery in the Alps.

I walked a few minutes late into the theater with popcorn, sat down and as I munched my first bite, I realized that I was making the only sound in a packed room. I put the bag down. Two hours and forty minutes of silence followed. Toward the very end of the film, a blind, old monk speaks a few words of such sublime simplicity and love and truth that I am still absorbing them a day later. Go see this film if you can. Along with "Saint of 9/11" it is the finest documentary about real faith that I have seen in recent years. I’d especially recommend it to my many atheist readers. You think you may know Christianity. You probably don’t. These monks live it, exude it, breathe it – in the great silence of God, in whom and from whom all goodness and happiness comes. 

… I hardly knew ye. Jim Fallows reminisces and panics here.

… by abandoning conservatism. That’s Ross Douthat’s position, and Ramesh Ponnuru’s and Michel Gerson’s. It was, of course, the premise behind the entire Bush experiment of massive domestic spending and borrowing, aggressively religious social policy, utopian foreign policy, and evisceration of civil liberties. And it’s been such a fantastic success, hasn’t it? I mean, the right has never been more united, its ideas more appealing to the next generation and its reach across the country more expansive.

These people are more in denial about conservatism than they are about Iraq.

"As a third-party observer of the Muslim world, it seems to me that things like the AKP are exactly what we should be hoping to see — political mobilizations based around the appeal of Islam that nonetheless abide by democratic norms and don’t see Islamist politics as entailing violent confrontations with the West. If America takes the attitude that only rigid, Attaturk-style secularism is an acceptable form of political organization, then this is precisely the sort of thing that drives the view that the United States is engaging in the global persecution of Muslims and Islam," – Matt Yglesias, as of today my fellow blogger for the Atlantic.

He’s right, I think. I’m sympathetic to the secularists in Turkey. They worry about Islamists as I worry about Christianists in a putatively secular country. The secular Turks, even the Muslim ones, have more reason to worry, given the extremes Islam is now pushing throughout the world and region. But finding a way to allow religious expression in the public square more flexibly than Attaturk is not a capitulation to fundamentalism. It may be the best way to head it off.

Tbilisi, Georgia, 2 pm.

The 20 percent or so of Americans who still think we’re winning in Iraq happen to be the Republican base. And so the GOP in Congress has to pick between surviving their own primaries, maintaining civility with their own faithful, and potentially getting wiped out in the next election. The game of chicken is getting very intense. I guess we’ll know how strong the kool-aid is by September.

The paradox, of course, is that a major source of disaffection with the war is from the right. Conservatives don’t like half-assed wars – and this one has been under-planned, under-manned and chaotically strategized. Conservatives don’t like losing wars; and this president has been overseeing meltdown in Iraq and war without end. Conservatives tend to think armies should be about fighting and winning conflicts; but Bush has forced the US military to be nation-builders, religious peace-makers, torturers, and civil war policemen. Conservatives believe wars should be in the national interest; and let’s just say that grinding your military into the dust for the sake of "democracy" in a place where few even understand it and those who do have left is arguably not in the national interest.

And yet no major Republican candidate can yet express the sentiment articulated by William F. Buckley last week. McCain seems to be grappling toward such a posture. But the GOP would be well served by an actual debate on the war, how it’s metastasized beyond the original purpose, how it’s become a way to increase rather than reduce the terror threat, and how to win it or cut our losses. I see no way this necessary debate will happen unless an anti-war Republican runs for president. Senator Hagel, your time may be now.

(Photo: Win McNamee/Getty.)

And how it’s not Blair-lite. In his own words.