Category: Old Dish

Among the more bizarre notions gaining traction in the blogosphere is that there can only be two positions on the Iraq war: a) that it’s all good and that the critics are spineless anti-Americans (or, worse, reporters for mainstream media) or b) that it’s a calamity from Day One and will surely end in disaster. So those of us who have been critics of aspects of the occupation – from insufficient troop members to deployment of illegal torture, for example – are accused of being fair-weather pro-warriors. Or, because we still back the goals of the original invasion and want Iraq to shift toward democracy, we’re deemed Bush lackeys. The problem with this way of looking at things is that the stakes are far higher, it seems to me, than the question of whether you are pro-Bush or anti-Bush. The truth, it seems to me, is that Bush is a very mixed blessing. On the one hand, he gets the fundamental issue – the war for survival against Islamist fascism, and the critical importance of establishing some democratic space in the Arab world to undermine it from within. I’ve criticized this president for many things. But never for these two vital objectives, which I share and have always shared. But – again – it’s perfectly legit to criticize the methods of the war, while supporting its goals. In fact, it’s unavoidable if you’re being more than a cheer-leader for one side or the other. You can, of course, dismiss the mistakes, ignore them or say they’re not a big deal. Or you can argue genuinely that they aren’t mistakes. Or you can say that you disagree, say, with the troop level critique but agree with those who want accountability (and not just an “accountability moment”) for the use of torture by some American troops. But the notion that our debates have to be about whose side are you on in terms of domestic politics strikes me as depressing. I understand that partisanship isn’t always bad, and indeed inevitable. But the way in which the blogosphere has become more partisan over the last few years, rather than less, strikes me as a disappointment.

WHAT BLOGS CAN DO: Why? Because part of the point of blogging as a medium is that it empowers the individual. In big media, the pressures of conformity can be as great as they are subtle. At the Boston Globe or the Washington Times, you know what you’re getting. How many columnists in the mainstream media can be described as unpredictable in partisan terms? How many “liberal” columnists ever praise the president occasionally? How many conservative ones tear him a new one from time to time? (This is a moment to thank God for Tom Friedman, by the way.) The reason is subtle pressure from suits and colleagues and readers. But the point of blogging is that it can liberate you from such pressures. A political hybrid has a secure outlet at last – his or her own. So why, then, the preponderance of the partisans? I know that’s what happens more generally in a polarized polity. But the blogosphere had the potential to be a solvent of this rigidity. Instead, it has become yet another reflection of it (with a few honorable exceptions). Or have I missed some blogs in this regard that deserve more exposure?

Fascinating piece about Mosul in the Washington Post yesterday. There’s a big threat to the election in that city, which has been rocked by insurgents for quite a while now. So what has the military done to try and ensure the possibility of a fair vote? They’ve increased troop strength! Imagine that. Money quote:

Commanders have raised U.S. troop levels here by 50 percent since Jan. 1, from 8,000 to 12,000, doubling the number of battalions from three to six, according to officers involved in the buildup. The growing force includes light infantry battalions that conduct foot patrols in the heart of the city and the first tank companies seen in Mosul in over a year. The military has also called in 4,500 additional Iraqi troops, among them a freshly minted brigade known as the Iraqi Intervention Force. The buildup has dramatically altered the face of Iraq’s third-largest city, 220 miles north of Baghdad. Mosul has been convulsed by violence since Nov. 10, when insurgents launched an offensive in an apparent response to the U.S. assault on Fallujah. In a persistent show of force, F-16 fighter jets roar across the sky each day, Apache helicopters circle menacingly above the downtown traffic and 33-ton Bradley Fighting Vehicles patrol the city streets.

Has Rummy been informed? Someone better tell him order has broken out in Iraq. Well, stuff happens.

I have to say that the early “American Idol” shows are some of the most consistently entertaining and unbearably cruel programs in America. Last night gave us that tender line between delusions of talent and borderline personality disorder – and smudged it. Are those people for real or very clever plants? I’m hoping the latter.

How do you stop people snorting cocaine off toilet seats in bars? Spray the seats with WD40. No, I’m not kidding.

VIRGINIA IS FOR HATERS: Here’s an interesting piece on Virginia’s fierce campaign against gay relationships. When I wrote recently that even with a will, in Virginia, one spouse of a gay couple could still be denied any legal inheritance, many of you wrote to question whether I had lost my marbles. But that is indeed the potential impact of Virginia’s vile “Marriage Affirmation Act.” With any luck, the law will be ruled unconstitutional before it does too much damage. But it’s already working in one sense:

Another example is that of Fredericksburg-area couple Barbara and Tibby. Barbara, a therapist, and Tibby, a retired schoolteacher, have been together for 40-years and lived in Virginia for more than three decades. According to the Free Lance Star, in 2001, Barbara had a brain aneurysm. While she is still able to function, her long-term future is uncertain. Thanks to Del. Marshall’s Marriage Affirmation Act, the couple can’t be sure that the legal contracts they once drew up will sufficiently protect Tibby if Barbara passes away. Although they would much rather stay in Virginia, they are moving to Maryland. “The whole thing has been a nightmare,” Barbara, told the Star. “The law has already accomplished what it set out to do – to squash us and to hurt us.”

Sadly, it has also accomplished another objective: to help cleanse Virginia of gay people.

Several of you have urged me to link to this column by Richard Cohen. It’s a great one. Cohen has championed sanity wth regard to gay people for a long time. He’s a model of empathy and reason. His passion on the complete insanity that requires the military to fire twenty Arab linguists for being gay is well-taken. (Here’s one way to tell a conservative homophobe: he’d rather fire gay linguists than win the war.) And his observation of the callow dismissiveness toward the truth about Abraham Lincoln is also right on the money. Cohen shows me how many straight people are indeed capable of understanding and seeing through the artful casuistry that sadly tarts up so much prejudice on the right. (Speaking of which, Philip Nobile will be on O’Reilly tonight. Can you imagine the derision of Tripp’s thesis that will ensue? Let’s just see if Nobile says what he once wrote: that he believes that most Lincoln historians have been homophobes and that Lincoln was certainly bisexual. And let’s see whether he discloses – as he didn’t in the Standard – that after he quit the Tripp project, he tried to sell a rival book making the same case.)

As soon as I read that Joel Achenbach is now blogging, I felt a tiny bit better about Dave Barry’s retirement. He’s a natural. And perhaps the beginning of a merger between smart old media and new media methods. Now, if only someone could persuade Michael Lewis …

Germany’s Stern goes for the racist angle in profiling Condi Rice.

IS HE A BIGOT? Jonah Goldberg notes that Martin Luther King Jr III (unlike his mother, Coretta) hasn’t endorsed equality in civil marriage. Jonah cracks: “I guess he’s a bigot.” What King actually said was: “I think we need to find a way to honor partnerships, but I don’t think that marriage needs to be redefined.” I don’t know anyone who would describe that position – which is John Kerry’s – as a bigot. Now, opposing any recognition or protection for gay couples is a wholly different matter. Sorry, Jonah, but young King is not on the side of NRO in this.

The Pentagon is angrily denying reports that they’ve been sizing up Iran’s * nuke facilities for possible military action. I hope they’re bluffing. Isn’t that exactly what we need contingency plans for? Sy Hersh’s report says that

the United States has been conducting secret reconnaissance missions inside Iran to help identify potential nuclear, chemical and missile targets… The secret missions have been going on at least since last summer with the goal of identifying target information for three dozen or more suspected sites. Bush has already ‘signed a series of top-secret findings and executive orders authorizing secret commando groups and other Special Forces units to conduct covert operations against suspected terrorist targets in as many as 10 nations in the Middle East and South Asia.’

All of this is good news, it seems to me, exactly the kind of thing the government should be doing to protect us from the designs and aspirations of the mullahs in Iran. Whether we will ever be able militarily to disarm Iran is another matter. But if we can hobble them in any way, then we should be preparing to do so. Due diligence. If diplomacy fails. And, of course, it helps diplomacy work as well. (*I originally wrote “Iraq’s”. Brain fart. Sorry.)

“AN ACCOUNTABILITY MOMENT”: This quote might help clear up some misunderstandings about president Bush. It certainly helped me see the world as he sees it. For Bush, accountability in government is a total, once-every-four-years thing. Individual mis-steps or mistakes are not subject to accountability – whether in war-planning or fiscal matters or anything else. When someone fucks up, the most important thing is to extend loyalty, not reprimand. There’s only one moment of accountability for a president and that’s the election, which encompasses everything the president and anyone in his administration have done. So re-election logically means that the public waives its right to hold any individual in government accountable for anything for the next four years:

Well, we had an accountability moment, and that’s called the 2004 election. And the American people listened to different assessments made about what was taking place in Iraq, and they looked at the two candidates, and chose me, for which I’m grateful.

So our job as people not in the administration is now to sit back and hope for the best. We had our chance. We lost. As Mel Brooks almost observed, it’s good to be the president.

RE-THINKING GONZALES: This Washington Post editorial is a must-read.

“I know the Geneva Conventions, better than anyone else in my company. And we were called upon to violate the Geneva Conventions.” – Charles Graner, the sadistic monster of Abu Ghraib. I’m not so much shocked as intrigued by the relatively light sentence. It would be hard to find or invent a more graphic example of evil than that perpetrated by Graner in Abu Ghraib. And yet, he received only 10 years, rather than the maximum fifteen. Why? Could it have something to do with this:

Graner named a series of Army officers, ranking from lieutenant to full colonel, who gave orders, he said, to mistreat prisoners — particularly those described as “intelligence holds” who were believed to have information about the Iraqi insurgency that grew up after the fall of Baghdad. Those he named included Col. Thomas M. Pappas, commander of the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade in charge of the prison; Lt. Col. Steven Jordan, the senior Military Intelligence officer; Capt. Donald J. Reese, commander of the 372nd Military Police Company; Capt. Christopher Brinson, platoon leader; and 1st Lt. Lewis Raeder, platoon leader in the military police command. Several of the officers he named were also cited in sworn testimony during Graner’s trial, the first full-scale court-martial stemming from the Abu Ghraib scandal.

Graner is a brutal psychopath who deserves censure and no exoneration because he was following orders. But I don’t believe he acted alone, or without any guidance, support or encouragement. Did the jury agree? Money quote:

Even Army Spec. Joseph Darby, the whistle-blower who has been praised by Rumsfeld for his efforts to stop the Abu Ghraib abuse, said on the witness stand that he did not trust the Army chain of command in Iraq. Darby testified that he thought the abuse should be stopped but did not get a satisfactory response from his superiors.

Without the photos, the administration might still be pretending there wasn’t a problem. Just a reminder of one email from a captain in military intelligence from August 2003:

The gloves are coming off gentlemen regarding these detainees [those allegedly not protected by Geneva], Col Boltz has made it clear that we want these individuals broken. Casualties are mounting and we need to start gathering info to help protect our fellow soldiers from any further attacks… MI ALWAYS OUT FRONT!”

If all the abuses were, as the White House claims, the acts of rogue individuals completely out of line, why do emails like that one exist? And how many more exist that we don’t know about? The jury wasn’t dumb. What they didn’t do is just as instructive as what they did.

“Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging dark of segregation to say, “Wait.” But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can’t go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son who is asking: “Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?”; when you take a cross-county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading “white” and “colored”; when your first name becomes “nigger,” your middle name becomes “boy” (however old you are) and your last name becomes “John,” and your wife and mother are never given the respected title “Mrs.”; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you know forever fighting a degenerating sense of “nobodiness” then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience.” – Martin Luther King Jr, in his “Letter from Birmingham Jail.”

HOPING FOR THE BEST: My take on Bush’s second-term inauguration. The Middle East could be transformed in the next four years – because of Bush. No, he shouldn’t be left off the hook for his errors. But nor should he be denied credit for his tenacity in the war against Islamist terror.