Category: Old Dish

I presume this is false until proven otherwise. But we can hope, can’t we? Maybe these barbarian theocrats have finally done themselves in. The darkest hour and all that …

John Burns has been a pretty reliable guide to reality in Iraq. His piece today makes sobering reading. The next phase looks messy, but not necessarily more disastrous than what has happened up till now. (Yeah, I know that’s not exactly a high standard). I’m hanging in there with David Brooks. It’s not intellectually easy to continue supporting a war when you’ve lost faith in the honesty and competence of the president who’s leading it, but what choice do we have? There are other good people struggling to make this work: Casey, Rice, Khalilzad, McCain; and the thousands of troops who are risking their lives in this project. They key is to grasp how little we know, how badly we’ve screwed up, but also not to throw in the towel when, in fact, there is still a chance for leveraging the current situation to our and to Iraqis’ advantage. One thing I wish were more insisted upon. It’s not just that we have no interest in seeing Iraq degenerate into a brutal civil and possibly regional war. By removing Saddam, we created this vacuum. We own it. We have a moral responsibility to see this through.

QUOTE OF THE DAY: “These mullahs fucked up this country. The country is sick right now. I can’t live in a sick situation. For that reason, I couldn’t vote yesterday. I’d give my life for America, but not for Iran. Because, if I work a lot there, I may achieve something. In Iran, when you want something, plan for it, work your ass off for it, you cannot make it and have no clear future.” – young Iranian, Arash, as reported in the current New Yorker in a splendid piece by Laura Secor (that is, alas, not available online). One fascinating nugget: in one of the world’s most repressive religious regimes, Iranians have the highest opiate addiction levels in the world. Opium is smoked as often and as casually as pot is in the United States. You want high levels of drug addiction? Get yourself a theocracy.

QUOTE OF THE DAY II: “I have never seen a Party so full of shit when it comes to supporting the military. They fight wars on the cheap and get people killed unnecessarily, instead of fighting with everything we’ve got under a coherant and cohesive strategy that ensures military victory. They let domestic politics trump military necessity, preferring to lie and shift the blame rather than address the problems and solve them like real men. They care about image rather than substance, empty rhetoric instead of courage, mediocrity instead of excellence, and machiavellian maneuvering instead of strong moral character. They have demonstrated nothing but contempt for us and for those that have served honorably in the past. They play us for suckers and weep crocodile tears at our deaths as their stock values rise. They are strangers to integrity and completely bereft of the basic values that we hold dear. They are without honor. They can go to hell.
If this is what Republicans mean by ‘supporting the troops,’ then they can by all means support the insurgents. We’d have a free and democratic Iraq by the end of the year.” – blogger “Stryker,” on the blog, “Digital Warfighter.” (By the way, this is the same guy who used to blog on the SgtStryker military blog. He was strongly pro-war. He’s just become enraged by the way it has been conducted.)

Krauthammer and “intelligent design.” In case you missed it.

There is a big difference between withdrawing troops when we believe that the Iraqi security forces are capable of taking over, and declaring defeat and withdrawing them according to a fixed time-table. That’s why I oppose Jack Murtha’s position, oppose the straw-man amendment voted yesterday in the House, and support McCain’s basic line. But it is nevertheless interesting, isn’t it, that General Casey, who has been doing by all accounts as good a job as he can, has already offered Rumsfeld a plan for troop reduction next year, according to CNN. I wonder when the GOP sheep in Congress will start calling Casey a coward.

“I was being told by my leaders that these people were not enemy prisoners of war, and therefore, we could really sort of do whatever we wanted, but I don’t know if that’s even true. I don’t know.” – former U.S. Army interrogator Specialist Tony Lagouranis, explaining how the detainee abuses throughout the theater of war were ordered and condoned by the chain of command, which, of course, includes someone known as the commander-in-chief. The official line from the Bush administration is and was that all prisoners in Iraq were covered by the Geneva Conventions. They were and are lying. From the interview with lefty Amy Goodman on a lefty radio station:

TONY LAGOURANIS: When the Navy SEALS would interrogate people, they were using ice water to lower the body temperature of the prisoner and they would take his rectal temperature in order to make sure that he didn’t die. I didn’t see this, but that’s what many, many prisoners told me who came out of the SEAL Compound, and I also heard that from a guard who was working in our detention facility, who was present during an interrogation that the SEAL had done.

AMY GOODMAN: Where is the SEAL Compound.

TONY LAGOURANIS: It was in the same place. It was at the Mosul airport, but I never actually went inside the compound myself.

AMY GOODMAN: Did you use hypothermia as a means of interrogating?

TONY LAGOURANIS: We did. Yeah, we used hypothermia a lot. It was very cold up in Mosul at that time, so we — it was also raining a lot, so we would keep the prisoner outside, and they would have a polyester jumpsuit on and they would be wet and cold, and freezing. But we weren’t inducing hypothermia with ice water like the SEALS were. But, you know, maybe the SEALS were doing it better than we were, because they were actually even controlling it with the thermometer, but we weren’t doing that.

Who were these detainees? Money quote:

We all talked about it. I discussed this with my team leader all the time. The people I was working with all the time. You know part of the problem back then too, is that I was still under the impression that we were getting prisoners who had intel – who had intel to give us, and you know, I still thought that these were bad guys.
I was believing the intelligence reports that came in with the prisoner. I believed the detainee units, but later it became clear to me that they weren’t — they were picking up just farmers, you know, like these guys were totally innocent and that’s why we weren’t getting intel. And it just made what we were doing, like, seem even more cruel.

Torturing the innocent. No useful intelligence. Alienating our allies. Setting back our cause. And still Cheney won’t relent.

It’s now posted.

HABEAS CORPSES: Julian Sanchez connects the dots.

“This war has become the Democrats’ best hope for 2006 and they are going to do whatever it takes to get the maximum advantage from it. The more American lives that are lost between now and then, the better they think it will be for them. That is the sad truth. Hopefully, not even the mainstream media will not be able to disguise that strategy.” – Lorie Bird, standing in for Malkin herself. (Hat tip: The Reaction.)

Key West is going straight. This emailer makes a salient point about the limits of acceptance:

I’m happy for the 20-year-old poli sci major at UCSB. I’m happy that his coming out was easy, and that his friends have accepted him for who he is. That’s all good. But it’s not quite the reality for most gay kids in America.
For starters, he lives in LA. Although acceptance of gay people has improved everywhere in the country it’s still a very different situation for someone coming out in rural Arkansas or suburban Detroit or a small town in Upstate New York.
More important, our hero is an athlete, straight-looking, straight-acting, popular, and all that. Things tend to come easily for guys like that. Try being a scrawny, effemiate high school drama queen. You might not surprise anybody by coming out, but chances are you’re not going to feel like “one of the guys,” either.
Gay culture as we have known it may be fading away, but I suspect it will be with us for a long time in some form because there will always be some of us who can never feel like one of the guys.

Point taken. Because I consider myself a political integrationist, I have sometimes been accused in the gay world of slighting gay men who do not conform to gender norms, or even disparaging them in some way. I truly hope that I have not left that impression. I’m a classical liberal in many ways, and do not believe that government should be in the business of affecting culture through law, in so far as that is possible. I believe it should restrict itself to treating all citizens equally under the law, and that’s it (hence my opposition to hate crime laws, for example). That means that some cultural and social unfairness, even cruelty, will endure. I don’t endorse it; I loathe it; anyone who knows me knows I harbor no hostility to effeminate men, drag queens, trans-gendered people, and others. I need to do a better job of understanding their issues. But I also believe in limited government. One of those limits is eschewing the temptation to alter the hearts of minds of free people. That job should be left, in my view, to private institutions and human interaction. Anything else gives government too powerful and invasive a role in our lives. (If you want my extended take on this, Chapters Four and Five of Virtually Normal make the case.)

A Republican fights back:

“Why do Democrats get a free pass? Why isn’t anyone else entitled to their opinion? Murtha is obviously pressing the Democrats’ attack on President Bush. His past heroism doesn’t make him right when he engages in partisan politics. Are you so naxefve as to think he wasn’t picked to deliver the surrender message because of his past military history? Passing on another marine’s opinion is just as relevant as his and just as fair. Liberals like you won’t be happy until President Bush is impeached. You can’t win an election legally, so you resort to slimy tactics in an effort to win. If it takes losing the war and wasting all those who gave their lives in the cause of freedom, it is worth it for you. What do you care? You live a privilege life made possible by our military’s sacrifice. And you show your appreciation by stabbing us in the back.”

I think this email does indeed represent the bitter core of the Bush-Cheney GOP.

Republican Congresswoman Jean Schmidt called Jack Murtha a coward this afternoon, unworthy of the Marines, on the House floor. Money quote:

The fiery, emotional debate climaxed when Rep. Jean Schmidt, R-Ohio, the most junior member of the House, told of a phone call she received from a Marine colonel. “He asked me to send Congress a message – stay the course. He also asked me to send Congressman Murtha a message – that cowards cut and run, Marines never do,” Schmidt said.

She later withdrew her remarks from the record. But those words linger as a reminder of what these Republicans have become. For the record: Murtha served 37 years in the Marines, and has Purple Hearts to his name. He visits wounded soldiers at Walter Reed every week. Three years ago, he won the Semper Fidelis Award of the Marine Corps Foundation, the highest honor the Marines can confer. Every time you think these Republicans can sink no lower, even after their vile smears against Kerry’s service last year, they keep going. They make me sick to my stomach.