Month: August 2008

John McCain offers to whore out his wife to bikers.

Heh:

A reader writes:

I harbor no ill will towards Suskind, but I’m calling bullshit.

A) The Bush administration is not a John Grisham novel. People do not order the CIA to break the law on creak colored White House stationary. If this sort of thing is done, it’s not done with a paper trail

B) Reporting at the time on the Con Coughlin story, or rather a month later, pinned the intel on Atta in the camp on Iyad Allawi. That doesn’t rule out the White House per se, but remember according to the Suskind narrative its the White House that backs Chalabi and the agency and MI6 that backs Allawi. See this entry from Juan Cole here.

C) Suskind apparently quotes lots of ex-CIA people for this stuff. But why didn’t they say this to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence when they were under oath.

D) Suskind has gotten important details wrong before.

E) Tahir Jalil Habbush, the ex Iraqi intel chief is by almost every other account at large and on the military’s list of people it can kill. See this piece for example from long war journal. Suskind’s allegation that he is being paid off and living in Jordan is the first I’ve heard of it.   

I haven”t read the book myself – and neither has my informed reader – but these points are worth airing.

Whitman, of course:

        After the dazzle of day is gone,
        Only the dark, dark night shows to my eyes the stars;
        After the clangor of organ majestic, or chorus, or perfect band,
        Silent, athwart my soul, moves the symphony true.

(Photo: Ursa Major Rising by Phil Hart.)

A really cool interactive graphic about torches through the ages from the NYT. The biggies are getting much better at figuring out what the web can bring to journalism.

I suggested that the world could live with it – certainly in a way that many Israelis feel they cannot. The judgment required to determine if a fanatically theocratic regime can indeed be trusted with that kind of power is an excruciatingly nuanced one, especially since the alternative – a pre-emptive strike – is so fraught with peril. There are no great options in front of us. But Jeffrey Goldberg moves the goal-posts further in his latest post, trying to forge a debate about Iran’s nuclear capacity beyond the Israel question alone. Money quote:

Can we really live with a Middle East that has eight or ten nuclear powers? And will our allies succumb to Iranian pressure and one day line-up against us? Right now, we have enormous influence in the Gulf states, influence that helps us fight terrorism and assure the smooth flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz. All this changes if Iran becomes a proven nuclear power. Our Gulf allies will have to make impossible choices, between the country that has guaranteed order in their region, and the rising Shia power.

Something else changes: Terrorist groups that threaten, or have threatened, American targets – terrorists in Iraq, Hezbollah in Lebanon – will come under the protection of the Iranian nuclear umbrella.

Hezbollah’s rockets have helped the group establish a local deterrent to Israeli attack; an Iranian bomb would strengthen Hezbollah in Lebanon, and well beyond Lebanon.

An Iranian bomb would also set off new tension between India and Pakistan, an ally of Saudi Arabia that would almost certainly turn to Pakistan for help with its program, making the Indians, who are already distressingly close to India, exceedingly nervous. 

All these points are well taken. But the rise of the Shia is probably unstoppable and nuclear technology simply cannot be uninvented. If it isn’t developed by the Iranians, they may one day purchase it. I like the status quo, in which Israel and Israel alone has nuclear power in the Middle East. But I see why its neighbors and enemies do not see things that way; and I don’t see a future in which such a unipolar nuclear situation in the Middle East is permanently feasible. The question is how we manage that perilous transition toward deterrence – and who we trust in the coming years to avoid catastrophe.

One reader – who works in Big Bend National Park in Texas – sent the photo below from his "work-place" and one sent this poem by Emily Dickinson, "We grow accustomed to the Dark":

We grow accustomed to the Dark—
When light is put away—
As when the Neighbor holds the Lamp
To witness her Goodbye—

A Moment—We uncertain step
For newness of the night—
Then—fit our Vision to the Dark—
And meet the Road—erect— And so of larger—Darkness—
Those Evenings of the Brain—
When not a Moon disclose a sign—
Or Star—come out—within— The Bravest—grope a little—
And sometimes hit a Tree
Directly in the Forehead—
But as they learn to see—

Either the Darkness alters—
Or something in the sight
Adjusts itself to Midnight—
And Life steps almost straight.

This poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins, also sent in by a reader, is another classic:

Look at the stars! look, look up at the skies!
O look at all the fire-folk sitting in the air!
The bright boroughs, the circle-citadels there!

Down in dim woods the diamond delves! the elves’-eyes!
The grey lawns cold where gold, where quickgold lies!          
Wind-beat whitebeam! airy abeles set on a flare!
Flake-doves sent floating forth at a farmyard scare!—
Ah well! it is all a purchase, all is a prize.
Buy then! bid then!—What?—Prayer, patience, aims, vows.
Look, look: a May-mess, like on orchard boughs!         
Look! March-bloom, like on mealed-with-yellow sallows!
These are indeed the barn; withindoors house
The shocks. This piece-bright paling shuts the spouse
Christ home, Christ and his mother and all his hallows.

Bibilodyssey has complied a fantastic series of satirical cartoon-maps from various artists depicting the slaughter of the First World War. I have a feeling Niall Ferguson would love the one above.

Mozart meets phone tone:

My new colleague, Ta-Nehisi Coates – welcome! – pulls up this helpful quote in understanding McCain’s biggest backer, Joe Lieberman:

"Lieberman’s problem is not that he supported the Iraq invasion, nor that he thinks we need to stay in and finish the job," Suzanne Nossel, a young ex-State Department official and a fellow at a think tank called the Security and Peace Initiative, wrote the other day. "He has lots of mainstream Democratic company in both those positions. The crux of Lieberman’s problem is his unwillingness to acknowledge the severity of what’s happened in Iraq, and to demand accountability for it."

Put like that, Lieberman is a pretty good stand-in for a lot of other pro-war types who are now hailing the decline in US casualties as "victory" in Iraq. Their victory dance would be a little less galling if there was any serious accounting of the strategic blunders, tactical errors and moral crimes of the last five years, and even the slightest acknowledgment of the enormous ongoing costs of occupying that country for the indefinite future. Instead we get cheer-leading like this from Bret Stephens:

Saddam is dead. Had he remained in power, we would likely still believe he had WMD. He would have been sitting on an oil bonanza priced at $140 a barrel.

He would almost certainly have broken free from an already crumbling sanctions regime. The U.S. would be faced with not one, but two, major adversaries in the Persian Gulf. Iraqis would be living under a regime that, in an average year, was at least as murderous as the sectarian violence that followed its collapse. And the U.S. would have seemed powerless to shape events.

Let’s take this one by one. Yes, the end of Saddam is wonderful. But we know now that his WMD parade – the core casus belli – was a charade, and that his ties to al Qaeda were at best marginal when not fabricated; and we also know that his murderousness was emphatically not on the scale of the hundreds of thousands of fatalities and millions of refugees and countless victims of torture and ethnic cleansing in the post-invasion chaos for which the United States bears a great deal of responsibility. And we know Saddam would, moreover, have been a counter-weight to Iran, not in alliance with the Tehran mullahs, as a future Shiite government is likely to be. And the US is, pace Stephens, to a great extent, still powerless to shape the future of a country still riven by sectarian conflict and suspicion, still unable to stand on its own feet, and still opaque to outsiders. And you have to add to the costs of the invasion the profound moral costs of the torture regime, exposed so indelibly at Abu Ghraib, the shift of resources away from Afghanistan and Pakistan, and the costs to the European alliance of the invasion, and to US credibility in intelligence, and up to $3 trillion in treasure.

Apart from that, Mrs Lincoln, how did you enjoy your war? Especially when you realize that the entire endeavor, if McCain wins this election, will almost certainly be a mere platform for the next war. Is all this justified by 9/11? I thought so once. I don’t see how you can any more, however relieved we are by a reversible respite in the mayhem.