Category: The Dish

A reader writes:

A better question would be:

"How have occupying armies been successful in extricating themselves from a recently defeated country without becoming engaged in either a prolonged occupation or insurgency, while still achieving the national objectives for the war?"

If that question had been asked, answered, and heeded before the war, then we would be in a better position today. Unfortunately from what we are told in the press, my question was asked, answered and ignored.

I think the key issue in Iraq was actually the WMDs. Without them, the key rationale for the war – both for us, the world at large, and to the Iraqis – changed from self-defense to something far more nebulous. Democratic change was one reason for the war but it was never the sole reason, and if it had been the sole reason, there would never have been domestic support for it (especially among conservatives). But when it became apparent that the WMDs were not there, the war’s rationale became willy nilly a nation-building project which the president simply refused to commit sufficient resources or knowledge to. To make matters even worse, the defense secretary never believed such a project should be part of the military’s purpose – and refused to let any other wing of the government take responsibility either. And so we entered a no-man’s land in which we are still staggering.

Are you a conservative who feels that the Republicans no longer represent you in any way? Are you sick of the spending, the borrowing, the nannying, and the bungling of the war? Are you still uncomfortable thinking of yourself as a Democrat or a liberal? Me too.

We are not the only ones. The NYT explains.

A reader writes:

I find it painfully insightful that you are having a pedantic discussion of why our constitutional framers created such disjointed institutions and processes to govern this country.  The fact that we need to be reminded of why our country‚Äôs constitution was so cleverly crafted not to give one group ultimate power may be one of the reasons we find ourselves being governed by neocons who believe they know what is best for all of us.

Thank you for reminding us.

A reader writes:

You wrote:

"The entire mechanism of American government was designed to ensure that as little as possible is ever done by government, that doubt is welded into the core system"

Exactly! Madison’s writings in the Federalist Papers are about the merging of the conservatism of doubt with a post-revolution political landscape. While his words are a recipe for soothing the doubts expressed by many critics of the new Constitution, his own doubts about the power of the government are inherent in his arguments – he understands and embraces them. The fact that the movement toward independence was so deeply conservative is the very reason, in my opinion, that the grand experiment survived and thrived. The passions of the people were largely held in check – by themselves and government in the American movement, while in France the passions flamed out of control and its own revolution became disastrous. It is also why ideological purity such as reflected in the writings Thomas Paine, fell mostly out of favor in America in the post-Revolutionary period.

Doubt-based conservatism, in other words, is not just Burkean and English. It is Madisonian and American. This reckless era of big government fundamentalism is exactly the time to recover and celebrate it.

That’s the central issue in this campaign, as it should be, and as a new poll shows.

"The New Masses politicians knew exactly, at any given moment, what the true line on any event or problem was; and they saw it not only as their duty but as a therapeutic service to cram that line down the throats of believers, half-believers and disbelievers.

The New Masses ideologues, writing with the confidence possible only to those who have ceased to regard their own assumptions as an object of inquiry, were ready to claim the whole province of knowledge for their own, past, present, and future; nor did they hestitate to admit that the claim was made not on the ground of accumulated study but in the name of a general principle," – Irving Howe and Lewis Coser in The American Communist Party: A Critical History. They were writing about the political cultural magazine, "The New Masses".

Now substitute Sean Hannity’s radio show or Hugh Hewitt’s blog and see if you can tell the difference.

I’ll be on CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360 tonight, talking about this very dirty election campaign – and how the web may have made things worse than usual.

Another reader weighs in:

The theory in Iraq was that we would not need to occupy the nation, not need to impose martial law, not need to do the things that we did in both Germany and Japan because it wouldn’t be necessary. Iraqis were going to do by themselves and for themselves what Germans and Japanese did guided by the firm hand of occupation forces which dominated every aspect of their post-war civil life. 

If you wish to cite Germany and Japan as the examples, you’ll have to explain why our leaders believed, and repeatedly affirmed, that the aftermath of Iraq would require so much less time, effort and manpower than our occupations of those Axis powers. America and its coalition partners never lacked the competence to occupy Iraq, we embraced a theory that said occupation would be unnecessary.

As for the Soviet Union are you seriously suggesting that toppling Saddam could possibly have the same effect on his neighbors, some of whom were sworn enemies, that the collapse of the Soviet Union had on its component and client states?  The similarities between the two are limited to the term ‘change of government.’  You’re better than this sophist argument.

The point still stands. The philosophy behind our effort Iraq doomed it, not an incompetent implementation of that philosophy.

It was conservative members of the US government who predicted that Iraq would take longer, cost more, and require hundreds of thousands more troops to turn out the way Germany and Japan turned out. Their opinions were dismissed out-of-hand as ‘old thinking.’ Neo-conservatives predicted that we’d be pretty much done militarily in Iraq within a few months, that our efforts would cost next-to-nothing, and that the entire region would then change for the better. 

You say that we were just being over-optimistic. Optimistic thinking would be that it would only take 3 years, 300,000 troops and $300 billion dollars to succeed. The pre-war predictions of Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz weren‚Äôt ‘over-optimistic,’ they were magical thinking enshrined as policy.  Our nation acted upon those sunny predictions as if they bore any relationship with reality, and reality is now kicking our behinds.

Thanks. For my part (although I should go back and read my blog to make sure of this), I always believed that Iraq would be an enormously difficult endeavor, taking years of occupation and billions of dollars. But looking back, I think I didn’t fully realize the radical utopianism of some of the people I was backing. I also wrongly believed that the WMD threat was so real we had no choice; and I felt that the danger of radical Islam so profound that some space for democratic change in Iraq was essential to winning the long war. Part of me still believes that. On this book tour, I don’t have time right now to say more. But I hope to synthesize some of your points into a real piece soon that grapples with this deep question – and what it means for what we do now.

(Photo: Franco Pagetti.)

George Will – who has easily been the wisest conservative commentator these past five years – makes the case against banning online gambling. Well, it makes itself, actually. Money quote:

[G]overnments and sundry busybodies seem affronted by the Internet, as they are by any unregulated sphere of life. The speech police are itching to bring bloggers under campaign-finance laws that control the quantity, content and timing of political discourse. And now, by banning a particular behavior—the entertainment some people choose, using their own money—government has advanced its mother-hen agenda of putting a saddle and bridle on the Internet.

Apart from the horrifyingly mixed metaphor, I couldn’t agree more. Cluck, cluck. Neiiighhh!

Well it doesn’t quite qualify as an ’80s video, but a friend sent it to me anyway. It’s a 1993 video by Jan Terri. One scene actually appears to be set in a sewage plant. If this doesn’t put a smile on yourself, well, go read the Daily Gut.