Category: Old Dish

Here’s another must-read. It’s by Michael O’Hanlon in Policy Review, about the non-planning for the situation after the fall of Baghdad. We can and should have debates about whether we ever had enough troops to do what we needed to do after initial victory. I’d say it’s obvious that Shinseki was correct. Should we have gone to war under the circumstances then prevailing? Probably not. Given the lack of urgency with regard to Saddam’s WMDs (yes, this is hindsight, but so is all of this), we obviously should have waited. But even if we were concerned about WMDs and terrorists, it behooves any administration to plan very carefully for an occupation and to ensure that we have enough troops to keep order. Chaos breeds chaos. In any case, the administration doesn’t get the benefit of the doubt about this for one simple reason: they had no plan for occupying Iraq. Money quote from O’Hanlon:

Lest there be any doubt about the absence of a plan, one need only consult the Third Infantry Division’s after-action report, which reads: “Higher headquarters did not provide the Third Infantry Division (Mechanized) with a plan for Phase IV. As a result, Third Infantry Division transitioned into Phase IV in the absence of guidance.”

The rest is pro-Bush spin. David Adesnik has an excellent post about all this. I recommend it highly as an adjunct to the O’Hanlon essay.

MORE IMAGES: The NASA site is indeed a great one. Here’s a close-up of tsunami damage. I don’t mean to sound like Al Gore but this one is way cool as well.

“Please, Andrew, depair about something worth despairing over; but Glenn Reynolds’ use of wing-wang is no more proof of what he believes about gays than your link to Engrish says anything substantial about your beliefs concerning the Japanese. Glenn made his point. It just does not matter to him whether Lincoln was gay or not. If that’s the worst that straights can think about gays, then I say bring on the worst. And keep laughing.” Yeah, maybe I lost my sense of humor. Glenn is, as I said, on the side of the angels and I have long appreciated his matter-of-fact support for gay equality. More feedback on the Letters Page.

I didn’t mean not to credit Michael Crowley.

This, apparently, is Glenn Reynold’s view of what being gay is. And Glenn is on the side of the angels in this. It’s enough to make you despair.

Here’s a photo of an Iranian blogger, one of more than 20 detained by the theo-fascists for freedom of expression. Money quote: “My interrogator punched me in the head and stomach and kicked me in the back many times to force me confess to having illegal sex and endangered national security through my writings, Mazrouei said.” He was blindfolded for 66 days in solitary confinement. And yes, it pains me that now every defender of the Islamists can say that U.S. custody is just as bad as the Iranians – and, in many cases, far worse. We have squandered a part of the critical moral difference that justifies our fight.

Just a cool pic. (Hat tip: Volokh).

Michael Chertoff is a dead-ringer. Well, at least the nuclear power plants will be secured.

Yes, I miss the English English language sometimes. Labour deputies have been haranguing their two major leaders, Blair and Brown, for their personal rifts. Brown is quoted in a new book, compiled with his cooperation, as saying to Blair: “There is nothing you could say to me now that I could ever believe”. I think the Tories have found their electoral slogan. They’ll lose anyway.

“Andrew, re: Lincoln. I think the problem is that heterosexuals still don’t understand that “gay” isn’t only about sex. They think of homosexuals as defective straight people with uncontrollable sexual urges, and I guess a flair for drama. They don’t understand our emotional orientation towards members of our own sex. They can’t identify with this, or else they are scared of it (I’m not sure which). This is the source of the whole problem, I think.” I tend to agree. Of course, many heterosexuals have begun to understand. And, as I’ve said many times, homosexuality is very easy to understand. It is exactly the same as heterosexuality, with the gender reversed. Gays, however, cannot expect straights to understand this all by themselves. It’s up to us to explain, and keep explaining. One reason I have written sometimes painful accounts of my own life is not that I enjoy losing privacy, but that I feel it’s the only way to get people to understand what I’m actually talking about. Straights who don’t understand are not necessarily prejudiced. They’re just under-informed. Gay people should spend the bulk of their efforts in the difficult process of informing. And the most integral part of that informing is coming out.

This time, it’s the right that’s doing the distorting. Steve Clemons explains.