Month: July 2008

The new – and, one must say, agreeable – debate over Iraq is whether, even if we manage to get out of there without full-scale catastrophe now, the entire adventure has been worth it. Obama’s op-ed this morning emphatically says no. Pete Wehner makes the opposite case:

It is far from clear that Iraq will be judged a strategic blunder at all, let alone the “greatest strategic blunder in the recent history of American foreign policy.” It is now plausible to argue that the Iraq war will lead to a defeat of historic proportions for al Qaeda. It has already triggered a massive Sunni Muslim uprising against al Qaeda, a repudiation of violent jihadism from some of its original architects, and a significant shift within the Muslim world against the brutal tactics of jihadists. Iraq is also, right now, the only authentic democracy in the Arab world. And Saddam Hussein, the most aggressive and destabilizing force in the Middle East for the last several decades, is dead, and his genocidal regime is now but an awful, infamous memory.

The last part is, it seems to me, obviously true. Whether removing Saddam was worth the deaths of hundreds of thousands, displacement of millions, empowerment of Iran, ethnic cleansing on a massive scale, $1 trillion, $145 a barrel oil, up to 5,000 coalition deaths, and the resurgence of al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan is another matter.

Whether we could have found a less traumatizing, expensive, fatal path past Saddam will be for historians to judge. But it is worth remembering, as Pete somehow omits, that the fundamental casus belli – the WMD threat from Saddam – was false. And we removed Saddam over five years ago. The war since is what we are discussing.

So then the next argument: "a defeat of historic proportions for al Qaeda." We can hope. But it remains a fact that the only reason al Qaeda needed to be defeated on such a scale in Iraq is because the US created the perfect conditions for its flourishing: anarchy, social disintegration, and sectarian clashes. To have cleaned up the mess we made is not some kind of world-historical step forward. It’s treading water. And it must also be noted that in many ways, al Qaeda defeated itself by its extreme tactics. The same could be said for al Qaeda in Jordan, for example. Democracy in Iraq? Well, it is a fragile achievement so far, but it would be very premature to believe it’s stable or long-lasting or irreversible.

The question now is whether these tentative signs of calm in Iraq are a good opportunity to leave or a reason to stay for the very long haul. Or whether we’ll just stagger on in some kind of unresolved middle.

Roatan, Honduras, 7 am.

Here’s the question of the day:

"Where does he get his porn?" conservative talk show host Michael Smerconish asked me in an interview just now. "That’s what I want to know."

The first Bush, that is. Fareed has an excellent and detailed interview with Obama on foreign affairs. Obama’s historical mentors? Drum roll …:

One of the things that I want to do, if I have the honor of being president, is to try to bring back the kind of foreign policy that characterized the Truman administration with Marshall and Acheson and Kennan.

But also characterized to a large degree — the first President Bush — with people like Scowcroft and Powell and Baker, who I think had a fairly clear-eyed view of how the world works, and recognized that it is always in our interests to engage, to listen, to build alliances — to understand what our interests are, and to be fierce in protecting those interests, but to make sure that we understand it’s very difficult for us to, as powerful as we are, to deal all these issues by ourselves.

Here’s his reply on the question of how to deal with rising Islamic fundamentalism:

We have to hunt down those who would resort to violence to move their agenda, their ideology forward.

We should be going after al Qaeda and those networks fiercely and effectively.

But what we also want to do is to shrink the pool of potential recruits. And that involves engaging the Islamic world rather than vilifying it, and making sure that we understand that not only are those in Islam who would resort to violence a tiny fraction of the Islamic world, but that also, the Islamic world itself is diverse.

And that lumping together Shia extremists with Sunni extremists, assuming that Persian culture is the same as Arab culture, that those kinds of errors in lumping Islam together result in us not only being less effective in hunting down and isolating terrorists, but also in alienating what need to be our long-term allies on a whole host of issues.

Nuance. Remember that?

On many issues, getting past the culture war means an erosion of deep ideological differences. This is what McCain’s Teddy Roosevelt conservatism means for the right and Obama’s post-boomer liberalism means for the left. Of course they agree where others once didn’t:

On immigration, faith-based social services, expanded government wiretapping, global warming and more, Obama and McCain have arrived at similar stances — even as they have spent weeks trying to amplify the differences between them on other issues, such as healthcare and taxes. Even on Iraq, a signature issue for both candidates, McCain and Obama have edged toward each other.

The remarkable thing about this election year is that in many ways, a big shift away from the polarization of the past has already happened.

I guess they deserve each other.

I wouldn’t be complacent, but one Republican strategist believes that civil marriage equality will survive this fall’s vote in California:

Putting Proposition 8 on a high-turnout November presidential election ballot is dumb. Trying to pass it once same-sex marriages have become a legal, daily occurrence throughout the state is dumber. And now, if Californians vote it down, conservatives can’t blame judicial tyranny for imposing same-sex marriage on the unhappy masses.

If marriage equality survives in the most populous state, the debate is all but over.

The 3G version: will it blend?:

All is not well, according to Art Goldhammer:

The French feel, yet again, that they are adrift, as in the final years of Chiraquie. But Chirac was old and worn out, as Jospin said. It was almost to be expected that he would be out of ideas, running on empty, serving out his time. Sarkozy was to have been the new. His accession was to have marked the "passing of the torch," as Kennedy said, to a new generation. That is why so many people turned out to vote. But all the careful staging of this national as well as personal redemption–the jogging, the sweat, the New England summer,, the chest-poking of union stewards in railway yards, the personalization of the presidency–came to naught. And with frustration have come nastiness and arbitrariness. If he could not be Jack Kennedy, he would become Margaret Thatcher.

He gloated that under him the unions had become invisible (but Thatcher had waited longer before crushing the unions, and when she crushed them, she hurled bolts that were real, not rhetorical). He moved against state television. He prosecuted a hapless citizen whose T-shirt had mocked him. He denounced institutions that displeased him: the army, the courts, the media. Yet none of this vituperation seems to have reversed his slide. None of it seems to be making him wildly popular or prompting a cult of idolators. He has denounced the state theater for serving up stale classics that leave him bored to tears, yet his own second act seems thus far to be that stalest of French presidential classics, la fuite en avant into the vapid marches of foreign policy.

(Photo: Joel Saget/AFP/Getty.)