Month: October 2011

Neocons In Glass Houses

Conor Friedersdorf is irritated by Jennifer Rubin's assertion that the Iraq withdrawal is strengthening Iran. Well duh:

The U.S. was always going to leave Iraq eventually, and Iran was always going to exert more influence on the region as a result. What writers like Rubin fail to understand is that, if the war you advocate requires for its success the indefinite deployment of U.S. troops, you've advocated a failed war. The American people have never and will never agree to a perpetual war of choice that costs billions of dollars each year and results in the ongoing death of American troops — especially if its proponents suggest before it begins that it will be a cakewalk costing $50 to $60 billion. That's hardly a difficult lesson, but neoconservatives still haven't learned it.

I suspect they may have internalized Israel's forever war as America's. No daylight, remember? No "greater ally", remember? And where war is concerned, the GOP establishment sees no fiscal limits at all.

The View From Your Window Contest: Winner #73

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Another tough one this week. A reader writes:

Dante's Hell doesn't seem to be in Google Maps yet, but based on his description in Canto VI of The Inferno, this must be somewhere in the Third Circle: "In the third circle I arrive, of show'rs / Ceaseless, accursed, heavy, and cold, unchang'd / For ever, both in kind and in degree" (H. F. Cary translation).

Seriously, I'm sure that wherever this is some of the inhabitants must be wonderful people, but human beings were never meant to live in places as bleak as this one.

Another writes:

No American cars, so this is definitely not any part of North America. The weather indicates that this is the northern hemisphere.  The building have a Soviet-style dreariness to them.  The landscape is extremely flat, and I get the feeling that this is near the sea.  So I'm guessing Vladivostok, Russia.

Another:

For no particular reason, I think it could possibly be Ulan Bator, in Mongolia. I have this book of photos from a tour a group of professional skateboarders and photographers took to Ulan Bator when they were traveling the Trans-Siberian railway, and the photo resembles every landscape shot in the book; dreary, vapid and ultimately, brown-colored. Just looks and feels desolate, although they say the kids really sprang to life in the presence of a skateboard. Pretty cool.

Another:

Vaguely Burmese pagoda-like inspiration for the tall building in the center, kind of Stalinesque feel to the rest of it, including a wide avenue and little traffic, buses. Low clouds and maybe a hint of mountains in the background.  Naypyidaw, Myanmar is my story and I'm sticking to it.

Another:

I love shots of urban bleakness and this one is hard to beat in that category.

I was watching "Radioactive Wolves" last night on Nature and this architecture seems comparable to that seen around Chernobyl.  Going to make a wild guess at Simferopol in Crimea simply because I like that name.

Another:

Boston? Just kidding. However it looks like what urban planners of the '40s and '50s envisioned for Boston, and did partially execute:

Governmentcentervista

Another:

I'm going with Turkey for a couple of reasons. 1) I think I can make out the distant outline of a multi-minaret mosque on the skyline. Multiple minarets tends to be a Turkish thing. 2) One of the buses appears to have a logo which might be that of the Turkish tour company Kamil Koc (I'm not actually very confident about this last point, but I'm not going to pass up a chance to say Kamil Koc). Once I settled on Turkey, the picture looks dusty and poor-ish, which probably means Anatolia. Nevsehir is a town small enough to be dusty, big enough to have apartment buildings, and close enough to a tourist destination (Cappadocia) to have buses. Kamil Koc buses.

Heh. Another:

This scene is typically Egyptian based on the semi-unfinished buildings, the desert environment, the tour buses, and the wide highways. However, because it is not dense in the picture it can't be Alexandria or Cairo, that's why I'm guessing an area on the desert road from Cairo to Alexandria, on the outskirts of Alexandria, Egypt's second city – the city where my parents are from, and the one-time "Pearl of the Mediterranean." Those days are long gone.

Another:

It looks like Heliopolis, the northeastern suburb of Cairo, on the way out to the airport. The construction technique of the buildings in the upper left of the photo – a concrete frame filled in with bricks – is characteristically Egyptian (although what looks like rain in the distance is not).

Another:

Somewhere in the Middle East, not too wealthy, a bunch of Westerners driving around in not especially nice cars, and looks like that might be a hurricane in the distance. Looking for recent hurricanes around there, I find one that hit Masqat and Abu Dhabi. Abu Dhabi is where they pave the streets with gold and make buildings out of diamonds, so I don't think it's there, so Masqat, Oman it is.

Another:

I think this photo shows Zubayri Street in Sana'a Yemen, from SW of the Officers' Club that is south of the old cemetery at the corner of Zubayri St and Abdul Mughny Street. The cemetery is southeast of Bab al-Yemen and the Old City. You can see where the intercity buses board – the ones that go to eastward destinations like Mareb and Hadhramawt. (There are other boarding points for other intercity buses.) I have no romantic stories of hotel rooms overlooking the bus depot, but I have traveled eastward from there many times. Such a wonderful country, Yemen, and I hope only the best for its people through their current transition.

Another gets close:

A complete wild-ass guess, but the flat-roof air-raid architecture, buses, and soccer on cement reek of dictatorship point to Sirt, Libya. Given your predilection for linking the VFYW to momentous events, this must be where Gaddafi/Qaddafi/Bob Dylan-on-cocaine was killed.  I'd write more but I have a nasty cold and the ephedrine has already said enough.

Libya it is. Another:

Tripoli? Guessing this building circled here in the attached image, on Shari An Nasr near the Dahra bus station:

Tripoliguess

I don't have any stories about Libya to make my case, but it looks like the classic dust storm, a "haboob" blowing up, and I know that the assault on Sirte was delayed a bit for a recent sandstorm, so I'm hoping this is close to being right. None of the major hotels in Tripoli looked quite right with their surroundings, so this is what I've come up with. I bet you'll get a lot of interesting guesses with this one, here's hoping this is the closest! At least I've been able to use the word haboob today, which both gives me the Beavis and Butthead jollies and pisses off the folks who worry that Sharia law is somehow supplanting the American judicial system, making it a double win in my book. Haboob!

But only one nailed the correct city:

This might be the week for a view from Libya.  I'm guessing it's by one of the bus terminals on Algeria St. in Benghazi just north of the city center.

A hearty congrats on one of our toughest ones yet. From the photo's owner:

It's from the second floor window of the Al-Nooran Hotel in Benghazi, Libya. The hotel is marked on Google Earth. There are a few hints – the architecture and palm trees are typical Middle Eastern/North African, green facade on on some of the buildings and the slightly rusty hue of iron oxide in the concrete, and the broad but uncrowded streets all hint at Libya. The odd structure next to the hotel is quite visible on Google Maps for someone who wants to spend hours searching every North African city intersection. Anyway, not an easy one.

(Archive)

Whatever Happened To Hell? Ctd

A reader writes:

There’s a problem with Rob Bell’s critique of Christianity, in particular, this:

This is why lots of people want nothing to do with the Christian faith. They see it as an endless list of absurdities and inconsistencies; and they say: “Why would I ever want to be part of that?”

Not quite. The problem for most people is not the “endless list of absurdities and inconsistencies.” Life is full of those. The problem is the abuse – the horrific emotional and spiritual abuse embodied in the dark twisted theology that says “God is going to send you to hell, unless…” – and all the guilt, shame and fear that comes after. That’s why lots of people want nothing to do with the Christian faith. That‘s why they say: “Why would I ever want to be part of that?”

That seems dead-on to me. Christianity is a contradiction – life through death, getting through giving without wanting to get – that peerlessly, to my mind, makes sense of the inherently contradictory human condition. And the doctrine of hell became a terrible temptation for those with authority in the church to abuse their momentous power over others’ minds and souls.

But here is a confession. I still believe in hell, not as eternal punishment but as a temporal, phenomenological reality. The human soul can indeed enter dark places and find it impossible to return without grace; evil is real; the banishment of God perfectly possible. The terrible loneliness of depression, of lovelessness, of self-hatred is a kind of hell while it lasts (and we can make it last a lifetime). To banish this spiritual despair from theology would be to put on blinders to our predicament. As a child, I found the idea that this despair could be eternal as beyond horrifying. But if “eternal” means we cannot see out of it, then it makes a kind of sense. If we create a hell in our own souls, we may eventually have nowhere else to live. And then we die. That’s the terror. I feel it. But I do not let others use such truths as means to power over me.

The point of Christianity is not that Hell does not exist, but that grace does too. Grace is the awareness that the force behind the universe loves us, redeems us, transforms us. I have felt it at times break into my life and the lives of those I love. It cannot be explained. It can merely be accepted and marveled at.

I should add at this point that I have rarely been as overwhelmed by an aesthetic rendering of grace as I was transfixed the other night by Terrence Malick’s recent film, “The Tree of Life.” It managed both to examine us humans in our microscopic dignity and insignificance and yet connect us to literally everything in existence, and to the good. It did so without hiding from tragedy or grief, which are at the heart of our lives, but relating them to the miracle of grace – mostly beyond words.

It seems to me that the holiest people are far more riveted by Heaven than interested in using Hell for their own purposes. It seems to me that God’s unconditional love cannot end at death. Because we will know then as we are known. And these former things, including the hell we construct for ourselves, will pass away.

Ask Me Anything: What’s Obama’s Biggest Mistake?

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Question? askandrew@thedailybeast.com

This, of course, brings to mind David Brooks’ column this morning, bemoaning Obama’s decision to abandon attempts to get Republican support for preventing a double-dip and to go it alone out there as a populist outsider. Strategically, I think David is right that Obama’s strengths do not lie in polarization. In my ideal world, the conciliatory, reasonable Obama would have reached some accords with a reasonable, chastened GOP and then fought an election on the future direction of the country. In the actual world, it seems clear that this GOP has shown itself dedicated to the destruction of this presidency and any promise it offered to the country – as well as doubling down in its heart on a repeal of much of the New Deal. The refusal to address any revenues at all as part of a bipartisan fiscal Grand Bargain made that perfectly clear.

David concedes that:

Republicans weren’t willing to meet him halfway — or even 10 percent of the way.

But he then argues that Obama should have stuck to his position nonetheless, even though the GOP seems actively intent on increasing the chances of a double-dip in order to pursue their path back to power. He twists the knife a little comparing Obama’s strategy to Netanyahu’s. Yes, that will get their attention.

The flaw in the case, however, seems to me that, after a while, Obama’s conciliatory response to a bunch of ideological thugs – especially after they tried to send the country into default – made him look weak and impotent. You can’t win an election that way. You can neither rally your base nor look strong to Independents. And you risk looking weak as the economy tanks for lack of demand – as the GOP is clearly hoping for.

My own view is that the dichotomy David draws is too stark. The Grand Bargain is completely compatible with a populist message, as long as it includes the kind of tax reform and simplification along the lines of the Bowles-Simpson plan. And populist measures, like a tax on millionaires, if they are cast as a means to restrain debt rather than to punish success, can be popular among liberals and independents. And without knowing the super-committee’s results, it’s hard to see what Obama can do in the meantime. A national tour highlighting the GOP’s desire to enrich the wealthiest even now seems to me a perfectly worthwhile exercize for this moment. Obama can and should shift if the super-committee somehow succeeds, and I agree with David that the Grand Bargain is almost perfect Obama policy.

But Obama wasn’t entirely about restoring reason and civility to the discourse. He was also about changing the country’s direction away from the debt and recklessness of the Bush years. He was concerned about the poorest. He was worried about inequality all along. He was a moderately liberal insurgent.

I see no reason why, as next year takes shape, he cannot repeat that formula, sharpened by the impact of the Great Recession. Not easy. But the GOP’s dickishness made anything else extremely hard.

The Lynching Of Qaddafi

We now have solid video evidence that some resistance fighter tried to sodomize him with a stick or a knife in the moments after his capture. One recalls what was done to Mussolini and, indeed, how the execution of Saddam Hussein turned, at the last minute, into a Shiite revenge fantasy. It’s an ugly, ugly thing – when dictators lose power. And not a great omen for a genuinely new start for Libya.

Perry On Birtherism: It’s Fun!

I kid you not:

It's a good issue to keep alive. You know, Donald [Trump] has got to have some fun. It's fun to poke him a little bit and say "Hey, let's see your grades and your birth certificate." I don't have a clue about where the president – and what this birth certificate says. But it's also a great distraction. I'm not distracted by it.

Perry "doesn't have a clue" where Obama was born. It's a distraction but he's not distracted. Then this remarkable answer:

Q. Even if your plan increases growth, that's going to take time. Year one, year two, you're going to blow a huge hole in the deficit, right?

A. I don't think it does.

No, it does. What Perry "thinks" it will do in the short term is irrelevant. And note the conservative indifference to the deficit and the debt. The GOP is actively preventing any attempt to forestall a double-dip recession because it would raise the debt in the short term, yet favor a tax cut/reform that would blow a hole in the immediate budget far larger! I guess the whole thing is a game for them.

The lesson of the financial crisis? You have to repeal Dodd-Frank, because the only thing wrong with the post-Rubin regulations was that they weren't properly enforced. After the last three years, the counter-intuitive aspect of this might be appealing. But doesn't it simply reek of denial? Wouldn't it be very very easy for Obama to describe Perry as Bush without the prudence, restraint and attentiveness to reality?

Why Perry Will Be The Nominee

Evan Smith puts it very starkly. It may be that we are currently at peak-Romney – but the talent of the opposition surely matters. Perry doesn't have it. If he pulls it out over Romney, it will be because ideology truly has seized his party, even as reality has shown the sharp limits of that ideology. It will be because the party's heart has triumphed over its head.

Malkin Award Nominee, UK Version

"Those on the Continent shouting that in seeking to manage its own affairs Britain is living in the past should remember that our interventions on the Continent of Europe over the last 200 years have been in response to the ambitions of Bonaparte, the Kaiser and Hitler to involve us in their nightmare visions of a European superstate. Sadly, the latest plans for a superstate look all too likely to end in yet another needless European disaster," – Norman Tebbit, who makes the Derb look like the Dalai Lama.

He may have a point, though, about Cameron's tactics this past week.