Category: Old Dish

Like all of you, I have been trying to make sense of the various reports emerging from Iraq about the escalating violence there. There’s no point in attempting to ignore this or spin it away. It’s a critical moment in the struggle for a new Middle East, which is inextricable from a safe West. The war to depose Saddam, it now seems, has unfolded slowly. The sudden quick victory was followed by a low-intensity war against the remnants of the Saddam regime and elements among the displaced Sunni miniority. Then there was something of a lull – months when the U.S. casualty rate declined and progress seemed to be made. Then the Shiites began resisting the terms of the handover, some Sunnis in Fallujah tried a Mogadishu, and the most radical Shiites, under al Sadr, made their move. I don’t know what to make of al Sadr’s declaration of an alliance with Hamas and Hezbollah or of Debka’s claims that Iran and Syria are implicated in the latest violence. But what I do know is what I learned from Hobbes. The entire enterprise of attempting to bring some kind of normalcy to Iraq can only be accomplished if the coalition forces have a monopoly of violence. Right now, we don’t. At this point, establishing that monopoly is far more important than in any way showing reluctance to take the battle to the enemy. The Sadrists must be confronted and as effectively as possible. If that means more troops, send them. If that means more firepower, get it. In some ways, it seems clear to me that the Sunni hold-outs and the Sadrists were always going to be trouble. Better that they play their card now than after the handover of sovereignty.

THE RISK: The enormous risk, of course, is that such a strategy could actually alienate the mainstream Shiites and make a rational transition to democracy essentially impossible. This is what Sadr is banking on: that the pathologies of the Middle East can be inflamed sufficiently to destroy any semblance of what might be thought of as modern or representative government. (I’m waiting for the first moron to start calling this violence an Iraqi intifada.) The anti-war movement in the West, which has long believed that the Arabs are incapable of representative self-government, will say this proves the entire enterprise is misguided. So will anti-war types on the Tory right. Here’s the argument, put subtly and strongly by Charlie Crain, a Baghdad blogger who deserves more attention:

I don’t think Moqtadr Sadr is what we have to worry about. He’s a nuisance whose movement will probably not survive him, and it seems likely he’ll be dead or in prison by this time next week. The problem is what he represents: a conspiratorial worldview that, without evidence, holds America responsible for every ill that befalls Iraqis, and refuses – not rhetorically, but emotionally and intellectually – to acknowledge the difference between the American occupation and life under Saddam Hussein. The people who follow that line seem to be better organized and more willing to fight than anyone else in the country. Significantly, the same mindset that causes al Hawsa to blame the US for bombing Ashura comes into play when Shi’ites deal with Sunnis, when Sunnis deal with Kurds, and when Kurds deal with Shi’ites. The ethnic divide has been papered over so far, but may be impossible to overcome.

Again, it would be comforting to believe that we blew it – that if we’d done something different everything would have worked out for the best. But it may be that what we’ve got is pretty close to the best we could have expected. I don’t think the invasion was a bad idea, necessarily, but we probably need to lower our expectations of what a free and independent Iraq might look like. This may be an overreaction based on being too close to events. But even though it looks like Sadr has made his play and lost, things have been very tense in Baghdad lately. My friend Howard said an Iraqi crossed the sidewalk to bump into him with his shoulder the other day, and a British journalist here said that, for the first time, he’s considering “tooling up.” You can get a very reliable pistol in Baghdad for about $500.

But the response to this cannot be withdrawal. Military power still matters; and the coalition has the overwhelming advantage. In some ways, perhaps, the war has now entered the most critical phase – more critical than Afghanistan or the war against Saddam. This war is for the future against the past, for representative government against a vicious theocratic dictatorship from the Leninist vanguards of the Sadrists. The president needs to tell the people this. His failure to communicate what is actually going on, why we’re there, what we’re doing, and what the stakes are is the prime current fault of the administration. We need a real speech and a thorough explanation of what is going on. We need an honest, candid, clear war-president. Where is he?

“As always, Andrew, you’ve done a great service in throwing a monkey-wrench into the common understanding of conservatives as necessarily haters of all things environmental by your admission that (horror of horrors!) you don’t drive and that you even advocate a gas tax as part of a solution to the massive budget deficits that show no sign of decreasing. One of the things that’s always surprised me about many supposed conservatives is their refusal to acknowledge what I’ve always believed in, and what strikes me as the essense of classical liberalism, i.e. personal responsibility, which applies to environmental concerns as well. Yes, it is your free choice to drive a Humvee, but with that freedom comes the responsibility to pay for the consequences of your choice: increased dependence on Middle-Eastern oil and increased air pollution. I do have a small car that I use for certain things that would be very difficult to accomplish otherwise, but I choose to live in a central part of my city so that I can ride my bike pretty much wherever I need to go in often less time than it would take to drive. The bicycle is, I’m all with you here, the ultimate form of transportation for us freedom lovers: complete reliance on oneself for getting the thing going, exercise while you go (instead of sitting in a car for hours and then paying to go to a gym to work off your laziness), no need for government registration and infinitely greater freedom in terms of where and when you can go. I don’t necessarily condone the deliberate flouting of traffic rules, but on a bicycle they certainly are a lot more flexible. Conservatives need to stop being hypocrites about this issue and be willing to pay the actual, non-subsidized cost of their gas-guzzling choices.” My feelings entirely. Conservatism should include conserving things, like the environment. Just because the enviro-left is loopy doesn’t mean that taking care of our environment is somehow a bad thing, or that animals don’t deserve better treatment from human beings, that what is now being done to the earth in China isn’t an appalling scandal, or that a higher tax on gas doesn’t make sense. More feedback on the Letters Page.

I feel it’s necessary for me to write something about what’s going on in Iraq but this is also one of those moments when the reality is so opaque and events so fluid that it’s hard to know what to say. I’m not ducking this. It looks both terrible and also an opportunity. Better these tnesions flare now than later. But the flaring could also become a wildfire. More tonight when the facts are clearer.

POLARIZATION: Tim Noah has an excellent piece in Slate on geographic political segregation. He looks at counties in America and finds an astonishing development – landslide counties:

Bishop blames this heightened partisanship on the proliferation of “landslide counties.” He defines a landslide county as one in which the presidential nominee of one party receives at least 60 percent of the vote. In 1976, 26.8 percent of American voters lived in landslide counties. By 2000, that proportion had nearly doubled, to 45.3 percent.
And it’s getting worse. The GOP has a lot more landslide counties where the partisan imbalance continues to widen (939) than do the Democrats (158). But because the Democrats’ landslide counties are much likelier to be more populous urban counties, the aggregate number of growing-landslide-county Democrats (15.2 million, or 14 percent of the national vote) comes out roughly the same as the aggregate number of growing-landslide-county Republicans (16.5 million, or 16 percent of the national vote).

Maybe it’s the country that’s polarizing the politicians and the pundits, not the other way round.

That all depends on what the meaning of fundamentalism is. And it’s complicated. I mean, it’s complicated within the relatively homogeneous world of Catholicism (with which I have infinitely more familiarity), and I confess I sometimes miss the nuances among various stripes of Protestants. I’m also guilty of talking about the “religious right” as a homogeneous bloc. At times, in the political sense, they are. But in the theological sense, it’s much more complicated. Here’s an interesting article deconstructing some of the more hysterical liberal worries about president Bush’s religion and its influence on our politics. Money quote:

Two points, then, should emerge: First, there are differences between evangelicalism in general and the subset called fundamentalism; and second, those differences are hard to specify because they are matters of tendency and preference rather than doctrine or belief. Basically, all evangelicals (fundamentalist or not) believe that Jesus died on the cross to save us from our sins; that people need to repent of our sins and “accept Jesus as Lord and Savior”; that we must preach the Gospel to those who don’t know or don’t believe; and that the Bible is the authoritative Word of God. The hard part begins when we get down to asking what the Bible actually says.
For many fundamentalists, the way other evangelicals (such as myself) interpret the Bible makes us indistinguishable from liberals: when we say, for example, that the universe is more than 6,000 years old, or approve of the ordination of women, or a hundred other things. You know you’re an evangelical if the fundamentalists think you’re a liberal and the liberals think you’re a fundamentalist.

Welcome to today’s America. Everyone gets a demographic. And they’re getting narrower and narrower all the time.

EMAIL OF THE DAY: “Don’t equate security with numbers. If that were the case we would have won Vietnam just based on numbers – but that didn’t happen. Whether there be 130,000 troops in Iraq or half a million it wouldn’t have prevented Sadr’s calculated call for violence. Indeed, more troops and more American presence might have given his movement more followers. Furthermore, more troops mean more humvees roaming around which in turn means more easy targets for the layers of roadside bombs. We have to defang Sadr. You’re right about Sistani; he’s sitting back waiting for the coalition to come to him for help as an alternative to Sadr. Sadr’s increasing influence, while threatening to Sistani, actually could empower Sistani. We also have to get the Iraq forces involved – preferably using them to get Sadr. Putting an ‘international face’ on this is bunk – protesters attacked Spanish forces as well. We have to put an Iraqi face on this.” – more feedback on the Letters Page.

I was a little surprised to hear the president dress down a reporter for apparently not addressing him as Mr President. Drudge ran with it; so did many other sources. It’s to Josh Marshall’s credit that he points out that this incident may actually have been due to the fact that the reporter asking the question had a cell-phone up to his ear. In that context, “Who are you talking to?” is not so crazy a question. In fact, if this was the case, it seems to me that it was the reporrter who was being ill-mannered, not the president.

QUOTE FOR THE DAY: “We have both made the choice of Europe and the European Union as a principal vehicle for our economic and political aspirations. For both of us this does not, nor should not, in any way weaken our strong ties of friendship with the United States. These are complementary relationships.” – Queen Elizabeth II, in Paris, spreading a little cordiale on the entente.

This, one recalls, is the battle John Ashcroft was really hoping to wage. Terrorists are one thing, but porn-consumers – now there’s a real threat. With the Justice Department having nothing better to do, like catch Jihadists, it’s very important that they keep a fierce and unrelenting eye on adults enjoying themselves in the privacy of their own homes. Hey, they can’t even arrest homos any more. You’ve got to give the feds something important to do. Now, excuse me while I surf the, er, web.

DODD-GATE: It’s now reached Fox News. Fred Barnes, who always liked Trent Lott, thinks it proves the Republicans were too hard on nostalgics for segregation. C’mon, Fred. You’re so much classier than that.

KEEPING TABS: Two sites worth checking out: No-Pasaran keeps its bloggy eye on the European amd especially the French media. Fact-Check is also an excellent non-partisan resource for dissecting and deconstructing the lies, er, I mean, messages of the Bush and Kerry campaigns. So far, I’ve found most of the official ads appallingly crude and misleading. The Bush ad citing Kerry as wanting to raise taxes 350 times was almost self-parody. But it worked. Sigh.

THE BEEB AGAIN: More sarcastic grilling of soldiers with their lives on the line.

Here’s a quote from a Sadr relative that speaks volumes: “We may be unable to drive the Americans out of Iraq. But we can drive George W. Bush out of the White House.” The violence in Iraq is designed to exert pressure indirectly by leveraging opposition to the war in the U.S. and Britain. The sadr-masochists know they cannot overwhelm the coalition militarily, so they need to destroy its morale at home, as well as create constant instability in Iraq. One obvious point: this uprising isn’t over and it’s having its effect.

That’s the Pew poll’s latest finding on Bush’s approval rating. And that’s with the public behind him on Iraq.

David Beckham reels under a tabloid assault in London. An icon is toppled, or at least wobbled a little. And how have the mighty fallen:

The just-gay-enough metrosexual hipster, the uxorious one, the guy who tattooed his baby son’s name on to his back in Gothic script… suddenly he looked like every nylon-shirted commercial traveller sleeping with a drunk stranger in a motorway services hotel on a three-day break from his wife.

Ouch.