Author: Andrew Sullivan

Joe Klein has a good and tough column on Kerry this week. I too found Kerry’s recent attempt to make the fiscal case against the Iraq war almost comically awful. But then I find most things about the Kerry candidacy almost comically awful. But Joe makes a really good point about how Kerry should tackle Bush’s incompetence in war-management:

Bush has chosen not to fight in the Sunni triangle, and the war cannot be won until he does. “You can’t allow the enemy to have sanctuaries and expect to win,” John McCain told me. “You have to go in and dig them out.” Kerry could have challenged Bush: “Fight the war, Mr. President, or bring the troops home.” It would have been blunt, strong, simple-indeed, simplistic, just as Bush often is-but it might also have put the President on the defensive for a change. Kerry wouldn’t even have to say what he would do: he could legitimately argue that would depend on the situation on the ground in January. It would also, I suspect, reflect Kerry’s true feelings: that Bush has waged an incompetent war in Iraq, which he is in serious danger of losing.

The only trouble here is that this would sound far more convincing from someone (like yours truly) who has always been an enthusiast for a well-managed war to democratize the Middle East and rout terrorists in their lairs. Kerry has a credibility gap on this, to say the least. But it’s still the right message: Mr president, you have the courage to launch vital wars; you just don’t have the competence to win them. Get out of the way before we lose this battle – and make things even worse than before 9/11. (Hat tip: Noam).

Glenn Reynolds makes a very astute point about the factual superiority of the blogosphere. I’m beginning to believe that Rathergate is a tipping point.

How the White House bungled the Fallujah siege – against the advice of the military on the ground. Money quote from Lt. Gen. James T. Conway:

“When you order elements of a Marine division to attack a city, you really need to understand what the consequences of that are going to be and not perhaps vacillate in the middle of something like that. Once you commit, you got to stay committed.”

Now just imagine if a president Gore had done such a thing. Do you think Republicans would have stayed mum?

“‘The Entertainers For Bush coalition is not just for entertainers or the famous, but it is for anyone involved in the entertainment community, full- or part-time, or those that volunteer,’ says [founder] Wayne Alan, a world-champion illusionist.” – Washington Post today.

A useful debunking of some myths and a helpful exploration of other dangers. Bottom line: as Jon Rauch has put it, Iraq is now a mess, not a disaster. Or rather, it is a mess with a potential to become a disaster. How we turn things around should be the central issue in this campaign. Too bad it isn’t.

If you haven’t read Jim Fallows’ harrowing piece about the past year in Iraq, you should. But you should also take a look at Gregg Easterbrook’s response. Gregg manages to criticize the Bush administration’s miscalculations without demonizing them:

The White House, Rumsfeld, and the National Security Council thought: Afghanistan is unconquerable, it overcame the British and the Soviets, we want to have limited involvement in Afghanistan and set expectations low. Iraq, on the other hand, will be a cakewalk like in 1991, and they’ll cheer us in the streets as we arrive. The administration believed that all-out commitment to Afghanistan would lead to embarrassing mess, while invading Iraq would be a big success, bringing praise and perhaps stabilizing the Middle East – maybe even changing the psychology of the terror war if Al-Jazeera showed throngs of Muslims cheering U.S. soldiers in the streets of Baghdad. What happened turned out to be the reverse of the plan on both counts; Afghanistan went surprisingly well (in part because the Afghans wanted us, whereas they despised the Soviets) and Iraq couldn’t have gone much worse. But it’s hardly irrational to avoid the place where you think you will fare poorly and act in the place where you expect victory, which is essentially what Bush decided.

Of course, what we do now is another matter. Gregg thinks we’re killing hundreds of mujahideen on Iraq, which can only be a good thing. Yes it is – as long as the conflict doesn’t create many replacements. And the poor people of Iraq surely deserve more than being in the middle of an open-ended exercise in urban warfare in which their country is slowly destroyed. My early hope was that, having stabilized the country, U.S. forces could indeed have attracted professional terrorists to Iraq and killed them. But the Bush administration never sent enough troops to pacify the country, and so provoked the terrorism without being able to suppress it effectively. That’s the worst of all possible worlds. Look, we have to tough it out. But how much confidence can anyone still have in the president who engineered this in the first place, and who still refuses to recognize that anything is fundamentally awry?

Here’s a link to a longer version of the U.S. News story on Bush’s Guard service.

Here’s a quote that unnerves me. It’s from a Sunni insurgent who was once, he says, pro-American. What turned him into an enemy? The incompetence of the occupation, in part, beginning with the post-liberation looting: “When I saw the American soldiers watching and doing nothing as people took everything, I began to suspect the US was not here to help us but to destroy us … I thought it might be just the chaos of war but it got worse, not better.” My own hope a year ago was that the sheer amount of reconstruction money that would be spent in Iraq would surely win over the population. But I was dumb enough to believe that the Bush administration was competent enough to spend it. Barely five percent of reconstruction funds have been disbursed. I wish the blogosphere would focus more on this particular scandal than on the provenance of type-writers in the 1970s. And what’s worrying about this particular ramshackle terrorist is that it appears he has taught himself. He isn’t sponsored by Iran or the Baathists or al Qaeda. I guess the Observer could be peddling propaganda, but the story reads persuasively to me (the terrorist reveals his own racism, for example, hardly an interpolation by his p.c. British interpreters). We have to face facts, I’m afraid: we have helped create a classic guerrilla insurgency in Iraq in which the U.S. is struggling not to be defeated politically. The consequences of failure are exponential. And yet I see no awareness in the administration – or even among many of their supporters – that they even have a problem.

His brilliance as a war-leader, so heralded at the New York convention, bears new fruit. The Iraqi government is beginning to lose control of Baghdad now. I think the Rove political strategy must now be simply to hope that no one notices anything that is happening in Iraq before they vote in November. Just say after me: 9/11, 9/11, 9/11. If anyone brings up Iraq today, just put your fingers in your ears and start singing loudly. Thank God the campaign is more focused on what Bush did in the National Guard thirty years ago and what Kerry’s votes were in the 1980s. Otherwise we might have to debate reality.

RATHERGATE: It seems pretty clear to me that CBS’s documents were forged; and that Dan Rather’s Rainesian excuses are getting lamer and lamer. This strikes me as a big deal for CBS. It’s not just that they made awfully big claims on documents they obviously failed to check out thoroughly enough; but Rather subsequently blustered about their legitimacy. Shouldn’t he quit after such a display of recklessness? What would Rather be saying if an Internet site had pushed these docs?

Nevertheless, it seems to me that the basic issue here is: did a president happy to see his opponents’ war-medals dragged through the mire get some easy passes during the Vietnam war? The answer is obviously yes. Check out this U.S. News story for more details (yes, that left-wing rag). Does this matter? Not to me. I always assumed that Bush got cushy treatment his entire life in everything he did from military service to business to politics. I don’t see how that really affects the important question of whether he’d be a the best pick to lead the country for the next four years.

THE MEDIA WARS: My take on the new confluence of 527s, cable news dominance and blog power is now posted. So’s my recent TNR piece on Dick Cheney’s latest “go fuck yourself” gaffe, if you couldn’t read it through the TNR firewall last week.

THE MEDICARE DEBATE: And if you’re not already depressed about this campaign, the Medicare premium issue shows why you should be. The senior lobby – the people outraged that the huge new entitlement for prescription drugs isn’t generous enough, even though people in my generation will be working their butts off to pay for it for the rest of our lives – are upset that their premiums have just gone up. The effrontery! The very idea that pampered seniors should actually pay for something! And both campaigns are blaming each other. The vital question – how can we afford all this stuff for decades to come? – just isn’t addressed. There is no fiscally conservative presence in this election. At least Kerry supports the pay-as-you-go rules for Congressional spending, which Lyndon B Bush won’t. But the rest is pandering and lies.