Category: Old Dish

He’s been back in Iraq and writing about what he saw. The piece is complex and nuanced and you should read it all. But I was srtuck by this concession from someone previously implacably opposed to intervention:

For Iraqis, there was no pro-war or anti-war movement last spring when the United States invaded their country. That, in their view, was a predominantly Western debate. They’re used to war; they’re used to gunshots. What is new is this tiny seed and taste of freedom. It is a compelling experience to have been in Baghdad just one year ago, where not a single Iraqi expressed to me opinions outside Baathist party lines, and just one year later, when so many express their opinions and so many opinions compete for attention. Where the debate is similar to that in the United States is over the way in which the business of war will administer the opportunity for peace and freedom, and the reasonable expectation of Iraqi self-rule.

There is still, of course, immense danger and instability. But it is good to see the left regain some of its moral bearings and also see the good that we have done.

Interesting defense of unilateralism as a last resort by Howard Dean in USA Today today. My support for his fiestiness, and left-liberal clarity is beginning to wilt a little under the weight of some of what he has been saying. There’s a difference between a conviction politician and someone who’s just wacko. Bush planned an invasion of Iraq because of psychological problems? There was no middle-class tax cut, but I’ll try and retain part of it in my upcoming tax plan? I’m committed to staying the course in Iraq but also running ads decrying candidates who had the temerity to vote for the actual funding for it? Oy.

THE HIV BAN: I recently wrote briefly about the injustice and cruelty of the ban on any HIV-positive visitors, tourists, or full-fledged immigrants. Jonathan Rauch has just written a much more detailed and sane piece, exploring this piece of discrimination. It’s a must-read. If the administration really supports compassionate conservatism in immigration, this is a real test of their seriousness. If legal immigrants can show they will not be a public charge because of their medical condition, they should not be discriminated against just because they have HIV. And even those conservatives who first endorsed the ban have now begun to come around.

THE GERMANS AND IRAQ: Even the Saddam-backers have begun to notice improvements:

Business is booming especially with no taxes to pay. Office furniture is currently in high demand as new companies are being established all over. … There are modest loans from the occupational authority for those seeking to start a small business. … In Baghdad the internet cafes are shooting out of the ground like mushrooms. Even in distant small towns you find some.

That’s from the Berlin Morning Post.

Some of you have queried me for making criticisms of the president with regard to Iraq. I think I’ve earned a certain amount of credibility on this one. I’m a big admirer of the both the aims and methods of this administration in the war on terror. But that doesn’t mean they haven’t made some real mistakes. They got the WMD question wrong. The intelligence was faulty and they failed to be sufficiently skeptical about it. They did have elaborate plans for post-war Iraq, as Jim Fallows details in the current Atlantic, but largely ignored them, perhaps dismissing such details as cover for an anti-war agenda. This insouciance led to debacles like the disbanding of the Iraqi army in the middle of last year. I don’t think it would kill the administration to fess up to this. They were human errors, compounded by a certain ideological fervor. I think, given the overall achievement, that they were entirely forgivable. And I guess the White House has learned to concede nothing, because when they do, it backfires (remember uranium from Niger?). But people did screw up. One consequence of that screw-up is that almost any future argument for pre-emption based on intelligence will be extremely hard to win. Ditto, the view that deficits don’t matter could well lead to an inability to take military action in the future, since the country will be unable to afford it. In that sense, the Bush administration’s errors have undermined the crux of their own foreign policy. That’s a loss. And, with a little more modesty and skepticism, it was preventable.

BUSH AND MARRIAGE: I have no objection to and much support for the president’s proposal to encourage marriage, especially for low income people. As long as the government isn’t indoctrinating or imposing itself, helping marriages prosper and last helps all of us: the couples, the potential or actual kids, and society itself, because such families are more able to take care of themselves. Marriage matters. And government has some responsibility to help foster it. But, of course, it begs the question. If marriage is so good for straights, why is the government so intent on preventing it for gays? Don’t gay men, in particular, face all sorts of problems and issues that the responsibility of marriage helps ameliorate? And then you realize: for this administration, gay and lesbian citizens are regarded as beneath responsibility. There is no need for a social policy toward them, since they have no human needs or aspirations. If gays try to build responsible lives, and families, the important thing is not to help or encourage or reach out to them, but to prevent their relationships at all costs and in any way possible – even if we have to amend the constitution to keep them excluded from families and society. Above all: don’t ever mention them in public. It might lead to some sort of social policy that could help them. They can pay taxes, but the government has no interest in helping them construct relationships that last. That’s roughly it, isn’t it?

No one even pretends to be for free trade any more. Ryan Lizza’s new blog explains.

SONTAG AWARD NOMINEE: “Sixty-seven Japanese cities were firebombed by the B-29s in the spring of 1945 and three hundred and fifty thousand civilians burnt to death – and the war in effect won – well before Hiroshima… Now, thanks to our sleek modern weaponry, Americans no longer have to kill civilians in indiscriminate numbers in wartime, and can despise and fear enemies who hold to the idea that anyone can be targeted for death in the name of a fervent cause.” – Roger Angell comparing the United States fighting the Japanese in World War Two to Al Qaeda bombing the World Trade Center in the New Yorker, January 19, 2004.

BUSH IS HITLER WATCH: Here’s a classic from Canada. Of course, he takes pains to say that there are differences between Bush and the Nazi dictator, but then goes on to milk the parallels:

Like central European nations of the 1930s, Canada finds itself next door to a powerful nation led by an unusually aggressive and perhaps slightly unhinged man. What to do? It’s generally forgotten now, but in the mid-’30s Hitler was not universally condemned as evil personified. Indeed, he had many admirers in Europe and North America – people who lauded his “leadership,” who lionized his moral certainty (no namby-pamby moral relativism there) and who either forgave, or actively applauded, what was then called anti-Semitism and today would be labelled racial profiling. World leaders were wary and respectful. Canada’s then-prime minister, Mackenzie King, confided in his diary after meeting Hitler in 1937 that the dictator was “one who truly loves his fellow men and his country and would make any sacrifice for their good … a man of deep sincerity and a genuine patriot … a teetotaller.”

When Democrats accuse Bush of creating hostility across the globe, they fail to see that some hostility is simply a function of ignorance, ideology and insufferable smugness.

That’s according to Drudge. It’s all you need to know really, isn’t it?

The liberal interventionist, Paul Berman, expresses my view entirely about the rationale for the war against Saddam, even accounting for the WMD embarrassment:

What was the reason for the war in Iraq? Sept. 11 was the reason. At least to my mind it was. Sept. 11 showed that totalitarianism in its modern Muslim version was not going to stop at slaughtering millions of Muslims, and hundreds of Israelis, and attacking the Indian government, and blowing up American embassies. The totalitarian manias were rising, and the United States itself was now in danger. A lot of people wanted to respond, as any mayor would do, by rounding up a single Bad Guy, Osama.
But Sept. 11 did not come from a single Bad Guy – it was a product of the larger totalitarian wave, and the only proper response was to comprehend the size and depth of that larger wave, and find ways to begin rolling it back, militarily and otherwise – mostly otherwise. To roll it back for our own sake, and everyone else’s sake, Muslims’ especially. Iraq, with its somewhat antique variation of the Muslim totalitarian idea, was merely a place to begin, after Afghanistan, with its more modern variation.

For me, September 11 told us we faced a huge problem – one that would annihilate our civilization if we did not confront it. Confronting it meant engaging the Arab Musim world and finding a way to bring it into modernity. Only dangerous, time-consuming, casualty-incurring involvement would achieve this. Iraq is the very beginning, not the end game. My fundamental concern with the Dean candidacy is that he doesn’t recognize this. He doesn’t see the bigger picture: that the terror we face is not a function of mere criminality but of ideology. But unless we have leaders who understand the depth of the problem and the threat, we are doomed not just to defeat but to catastrophe.

What to make of the former Treasury secretary’s complaints? The paranoia about planning for war against Saddam early on is silly: of course, there were plans. Regime change had been national policy under late Clinton. Less easy to dismiss are O’Neill’s complaints that fit with John DiIulio’s, when he quit. To wit: This White House is all about politics. Yes, and banks are full of money. But with this White House, there is a level of politicization that’s striking. When challenged on the important question of whether stockpiles of Saddam’s WMDs have been found in contrast to mere infrastructure, plans, and scientists, the president told Diane Sawyer, “What’s the difference?” The glibness of that response still rankles. There was no difference to the president as long as the politics worked out okay, and, in general, he made the right decision. But someone who cannot anguish over his own mistakes may be doomed to repeat them. Integrity means the ability to question yourself. It does not mean the peremptory dismissal of all criticism.

POLITICAL BUSH: The supremacy of politics over everything accounts, of course, for some spectacular coups – like the immigration proposal – and some hideous errors – like the steel tariffs. But it remains one of the most illuminating prisms through which to understand this administration. The second criticism is one I’ve also seen close-up: an absolute refusal even to contemplate that they have a spending or deficit problem. Josh Bolten’s response is to ignore actual spending totals and focus on what the administration intended to disburse. Mankiw cannot defend the deficits and when he does, it’s painful. Rove abruptly dismisses any discussion of deficits – on the grounds (surprise!) that they don’t swing votes in a growing economy. So what? They destroy economies in the long run. Money O’Neill quote from Time:

In an economic meeting in the Vice President’s office, O’Neill started pitching, describing how the numbers showed that growing budget deficits threatened the economy. Cheney cut him off. “Reagan proved deficits don’t matter,” he said. O’Neill was too dumbfounded to respond. Cheney continued: “We won the midterms. This is our due.”

That rings true to me. There is, within this administration, a deep antipathy to questioning certain shibboleths. I wonder who has dared to tell the president that his space program ideas cannot be funded responsibly and so should not be funded. I bet no one. The same kind of blank refusal to consider alternative views can be seen in the fact that, despite enormous (and good) research from within the administration on how to prepare very carefully for the post-war in Iraq, much of it was ignored. Some of this blindness can help a president be decisive and drive events. Some leads into disaster. Much of the O’Neill stuff can be dismissed as sour grapes. But there are some worrying themes about the way this administration runs itself that rightly endure. The only sure bet is that the administration will ignore them.

Is Howard Dean the only one popping off bizarre accusations against the Bush administration? I’ve written before that Wesley Clark is arguably far more loopy than Dean, more prone to paranoia, weird conspiracy theories, and reversals of opinion that are dizzying in scope. Chris Suellentrop has been on the trail and discovering more. My favorites: “[the president] is continuing to associate Saddam, Iraq, and the problem of terrorism. Yet the only terrorists that are in Iraq are the people that have come there to attack us.” Yeah, right. Abu Nidal was on a vacation in Baghdad. “Newsweek magazine says [Osama bin Laden] is in the mountains of western Pakistan. And I guess if Newsweek could find him there, we could, too, if we wanted to.” Sure, the president wouldn’t want to find bin Laden in an election year. Why would he want to do that?

THE SELF-ESTEEM OF BULLIES: They have plenty of it. But we knew that, didn’t we? “They don’t show any signs whatsoever of depression, loneliness or anxiety,” Dr Juvonen said. “They look even healthier than the socially adjusted kids who are not involved in the bullying.” Duh. They’re mainly boys; they have testosterone; their social cachet comes from becoming Alpha Male. The last thing you need to do is psychoanalyze them: they have to be disciplined. Like dictators.

An amazing op-ed in Kentucky from a Pentecostalist lays out the extraordinary double standards on marriage from the Christian right:

Even in the conservative Christian community, divorce is rampant. As the only lawyer in my church (a very conservative Pentecostal congregation), I frequently receive telephone calls from fellow church members requesting assistance on child custody matters, property division and other divorce-related questions.
I have fielded so many questions about divorce that I am sometimes surprised when I encounter middle-aged congregants who have not been previously married. The gay community could not treat their marriage vows any worse than many Christians treat their own.

What matters, in other words, is what virtues marriage contains, not what people it excludes. Jesus was not interested in drawing bright lines about groups of people and barring them from full inclusion in society. He was interested in how all of us live our lives. It’s the content of our lives, not the label society places on us that matters. But the current Christian right is far more concerned about keeping gay people out than in the true meaning of marriage. The op-ed continues:

In the days, weeks and months to come, we can expect to hear many conservative commentators decry the continuing decay of our culture. In the debate that follows – and as accusations of intolerance and immorality fly between left and right – remember that Christians and conservatives long ago met the real enemy of the sacred institution of marriage – and we are that enemy.

Ouch.

EMAIL OF THE DAY: “First, a little about me. 30, media professional, married with a young son, Brooklynite, registered Democrat, long-time TNR subscriber, pro-Iraq war, great fan or yours.
Now that we’ve established the basics, here’s my plight. I am horrified by my own party, and have been for quite some time. Al Sharpton as our moral arbiter? Check. Continued obeisance to the failed domestic and foreign policies of a bygone age? Check. Failure to learn the lessons of history? Check. Movement away from the Party’s few voices of reason (read: Lieberman)? Check.
So I guess we’ve settled it: can’t stick with this mangy dog. Which leads me to the other guys…
Abandonment of fiscal sanity? Check. Hateful, close-minded bedfellows? Check. Unchecked rapacity? Check. And that’s just Cheney. Bush, by all accounts, is the least curious-intellectually, or otherwise-President in modern history. Guess they’re out, too.
So what is a reasonable, patriotic, inclusive, urban professional to do? My peers are closet socialists who want to present Bush’s head to Kofi Annan as a peace offering. On the other hand, I’m not ready to make my peace with a party that still counts on the religious right to mobilize the vote. It’s as if I’m caught in vortex, between the two parties, but seemingly light-years from either. My secret fear, of course, is that I and my ilk do not represent an underserved silent majority, but we, in fact, are just a tiny, sane minority standing between the radical fringes on either side. Sadly, I do not see the situation improving anytime soon. Any words of encouragement for a man without a party?” – from a beleaguered reader. You read my mind, sir. Too depressing for words.

“And, Tim, you can hear the advertisements now; so can I. We saw what they did to challenge the patriotism of Max Cleland, a triple amputee, a man who left three of his limbs on the ground in Vietnam. They challenged his patriotism. His regret is he didn’t stand up and fight back.” – John Kerry, Meet The Press.