Category: Old Dish

Tim Kaine seems to be leading the way:

Kaine defended himself against Kilgore’s attack on the subject by saying that it is his beliefs as a deeply religious Catholic that lead him to oppose the death penalty and abortion. But he also said he would follow the law on capital punishment and advocate laws that protect the right to abortion.
“The elite never really got that argument,” said David Eichenbaum, one of Kaine’s media advisers, referring to columnists and others who wondered how Kaine could be, in his words, “morally” opposed and yet pledge not to try to change the law. “But people who heard him got it.”

And Benedict XVI wants him denied communion.

I’m leery of seeing a national trend, but the GOP certainly has little to celebrate today. The Schwarzenegger losses are the most dispiriting to me. Texas’s enshrinement of anti-gay prejudice in its own constitution is depressing but hardly surprising (they’re still proudly naming their towns “white”). The vote in Maine, moreover, confirms the federalist approach to gay issues. Let tolerant states compete with intolerant ones – and lead the way toward a more inclusive America. One thing I would say to my Democratic friends: if you think merely opposing Bush will win you back the Congress next year, dream on. Or, better still, read on. You need constructive ideas, not more Kossian rants.

“I have the tall, bony English physique that Heinrich Himmler admired so much,” – John Derbyshire, NRO, today.

Terror suspects in Britain can now be detained without charge for 28 days, not the 90 days as proposed by Blair (and the 14 days required previously). The country that invented habeas corpus keeps a sane balance between security and freedom. I wish it were true in the U.S. Politically, the Commons vote is a stinging rebuff for Blair. I give him twelve more months in power at this rate, before his own party cashiers him.

I agree with John Derbyshire that science is being attacked by an unholy alliance between the religious right and the p.c. left. I think he under-estimates the danger from the right, but his broader point is correct. The deeper reality is that the religious right and p.c. left are merely two sides of the same coin: both have contempt for truly liberal education. They both put their own notions of virtue above the principle of unfettered thinking and research. Both require resisting, just as the fundamentalist distortions of Islam and Christianity deserve resisting.

Jim Fallows has a deservedly great rep right now as someone who saw, before a lot of other people (including me), that the post-invasion situation in Iraq would be far harder than deposing Saddam. He has a new report out on the critical task in Iraq: training the new army. Alas, it’s firewalled away at the Atlantic, but the magazine is worth buying for the piece alone. Fallows describes the now-unbelievable insouciance of the Bush administration to the role of the Saddamite army in keeping some semblance of order in post-invasion Iraq, and its reluctance to throw enough resources into the military side of nation-building. By sending too few troops to keep order in 2003, and disbanding the entire previous army shortly thereafter, the Bush administration threw gasoline on simmering flames and created the chaos we are now trying to beat back. Critical time was wasted before this mistake was both recognized and anything like enough attention was paid to rectifying it. In 2003, this is what Fallows reports:

Throughout the occupation, but most of all in these early months, training suffered from a “B Team” problem. Before the fighting there was a huge glamour gap in the Pentagon between people working on so-called Phase III – the “kinetic” stage, the currently fashionable term for what used to be called “combat” – and those consigned to thinking about Phase IV, postwar reconstruction. The gap persisted after Baghdad fell. Nearly every military official I spoke with said that formal and informal incentives within the military made training Iraqi forces seem like second-tier work.

The truth is we embarked on a war that required significant nation-building and we had a defense secretary who didn’t believe in it and a president who couldn’t or wouldn’t over-rule his defense secretary. In 2004, things did not improve:

All indications from the home front were that training Iraqis had become a boring issue. Opponents of the war rarely talked about it. Supporters reeled off encouraging but hollow statistics as part of a checklist of successes the press failed to report. President Bush placed no emphasis on it in his speeches. Donald Rumsfeld, according to those around him, was bored by Iraq in general and this tedious process in particular, neither of which could match the challenge of transforming America’s military establishment.

Too bored to win.

THE FRUITS OF CHAOS: None of this should detract from the heroic work of many soldiers on the ground who performed astonishingly in trying to train and retrain neophyte Iraqi troops. (Thanks, General Petraeus – but why has been brought home??) That valuable work is still going on. It is the most critical work now underway. It’s hard. The disorder fostered by Rumsfeld made it much harder, because in chaotic situations, the old allegiances – tribe, family, clan, sect – get stronger. Fallows lets soldiers speak to this:

Half a dozen times in my interviews I heard variants on this Arab saying: “Me and my brother against my cousin; me and my cousin against my village; me and my village against a stranger.” “The thing that holds a military unit together is trust,” T. X. Hammes says. “That’s a society not based on trust.” A young Marine officer wrote in an e-mail, “Due to the fact that Saddam murdered, tortured, raped, etc. at will, there is a limited pool of 18-35-year-old males for service that are physically or mentally qualified for service. Those that are fit for service, for the most part, have a DEEP hatred for those not of the same ethnic or religious affiliation.”

This was always going to be a long, difficult venture. The incompetence of Rumsfeld has made it that much harder.

STILL HOPE: It seems to me, and it does to Fallows, that the new prescription – “We will stand down as the Iraqis stand up” – depends on a new and massive focus not just on the political process (thanks, Zalmay!), but on training the new army. That will take at least a decade and it’s time the president told the American people that. It also requires various reforms. Fallows lays out some suggestions:

If the United States is serious about getting out of Iraq, it will need to re-consider its defense spending and operations rather than leaving them to a combination of inertia, Rumsfeld-led plans for “transformation,” and emergency stopgaps. It will need to spend money for interpreters. It will need to create large new training facilities for American troops, as happened within a few months of Pearl Harbor, and enroll talented people as trainees. It will need to make majors and colonels sit through language classes. It will need to broaden the Special Forces ethic to much more of the military, and make clear that longer tours will be the norm in Iraq. It will need to commit air, logistics, medical, and intelligence services to Iraq – and understand that this is a commitment for years, not a temporary measure. It will need to decide that there are weapons systems it does not require and commitments it cannot afford if it is to support the ones that are crucial. And it will need to make these decisions in a matter of months, not years – before it is too late.

For all that, it seems to me we need a new SecDef. Urgently.

A former general counsel for the agency argues against Dick Cheney’s case for legally codifying torture as a lawful activity for the CIA. Meanwhile, new evidence emerges that individuals within the CIA have warned that illegality was occurring. Here’s one question I hope the press asks the president some time soon: does he believe that “waterboarding” constitutes torture and has he ever authorized it himself? Since we know that the CIA has been granted permission to water-board detainees, this doesn’t violate anything classified. And since no specific case is mentioned, it doesn’t tell us anything but general policy. So why not ask the question? An important element of this debate has been euphemism. The terms “coercive interrogation” or “aggressive interrogation” or even “abuse” can obscure as much as they reveal. These techniques need to be described as Orwell would have demanded. What is actually done to another human being? Exactly? And who specifically authorized which techniques? There’s a reason that politicians use Orwellian formulations as Bush does and Clinton did: to obscure reality. Except Clinton used them to cover up sexual embarrassment and perjury. Bush has used them to cover up rape, murder, near-drowning and torture of defenseless detainees.

From Christopher Meyer’s new book, a story about former British prime minister, John Major, on September 11, 2001:

John Major was due to head off to a meeting of the Carlyle Group, one of the most powerful private equity firms in the US, whose European arm he chaired.
Catherine urged him not to go downtown [in Washington], but he did. He returned at lunch to say there had been a brief meeting of the Carlyle Group people, who had then gone their separate ways. “I met Mr Bin Laden this morning,” he reported. This was, it transpired, one of Osama’s many siblings, a major Carlyle investor.

Business must go on, I guess.

Polling contrasts and compares the public’s reaction to two perjury cases. Memo to the GOP: stop digging.

A REPUBLICAN AGAINST TORTURE: There’s growing sentiment in the House to follow the Senate and pass a version of the McCain Amendment. Chris Smith is among those in the forefront. Smith, of course, is also pro-life. Good for him. How anyone purporting to support a culture of life and human dignity could back a policy that has resulted in over a hundred deaths in U.S. detention is beyond me.

“I’ll say this much: the last time I read about someone being hung by their hands, with their hands tied behind their back, it was the Nazis who were doing it. Of course, that was before reading this. And people like Peggy Noonan wonder why it seems like everything’s going to hell in a hand-basket. It’s because we’re really acting like fascists.”