Category: The Dish

"Liberals’ assertion that they ‘knew all along’ that the war in Iraq would go badly are guilty of the hindsight bias. This is not to say that they didn’t always think that the war was a bad idea. It is to say that after it was apparent that the war was going badly, they assert that they would have assigned a higher probability to that outcome than they really would have assigned beforehand," – Hal Arkes, a psychologist at Ohio State University, who has studied "hindsight bias" and how to overcome it.

Iain Murray reports from England:

In general, the mood seems to be that things will improve for the alliance once the current President and Prime Minister leave office.

Now imagine how the rest of the English feel. When an American president has alienated – deeply alienated – the most pro-American British party, you get a glimpse of how deep the damage is elsewhere.

A TPM reader makes an obvious point:

Once ABC got hold of the e-mails, it took them one day to flush out the IMs. That’s what an actual investigation looks like. The Republican leadership simply didn’t want to know how bad the Foley situation was. That’s just as morally negligent as if they had started digging and found the IMs.

The parallels between the RNC and the Vatican just got a lot stronger.

Well, we’ve had Reagan Democrats. And we’ve had Goldwater Republicans. Why not a new version: Goldwater Democrats? By Goldwater Democrats, I mean old-style libertarian conservatives who actually believe in fiscal responsibility, small government, prudent foreign policy and live-and-let-live social policy. After being told we are completely unwelcome among Republicans, should we shift to the Dems?

I have never thought of myself as a Democrat or left-liberal in any way. And there are plenty of people among Democrats I do not agree with at all. But it’s getting to the point that the illiberal, authoritarian big government Christianism of the GOP makes me completely supportive of backing the Democrats this time around. My one reservation is, of course, spending. But at this point, could they be worse than the GOP? No Congress has been worse on spending than the current crew since FDR! The war? Again, at this point, we desperately need some check on an administration utterly without prudence or a capacity for self-correction.

And so I find myself in a very uneasy alliance with Markos Moulitsas, who writes the lead essay in the libertarian magazine Cato Unbound. Strange bedfellows. But these are strange times.

He opposed it in all circumstances. He was no liberal. In World War II, the Japanese added "amendments" to the Geneva Conventions for the specific war with America. Sound familiar? Money quote from my friend Niall Ferguson:

[E]ven if you don’t see any resemblance between Bush’s "administrative regulations" and Imperial Japan’s "necessary amendments" of the Geneva Convention, consider this purely practical argument: As Winston Churchill insisted throughout the war, treating POWs well is wise, if only to increase the chances that your own men will be well treated if they too are captured. Even in World War II, there was in fact a high degree of reciprocity. The British treated Germans POWs well and were well treated by the Germans in return; the Germans treated Russian POWs abysmally and got their bloody deserts when the tables were turned.

Few, if any, American soldiers currently find themselves in enemy hands. But in the long war on which Bush has embarked, that may not always be the case. The bottom line about mistreating captive foes is simple: It is that what goes around comes around. And you don’t have to be a closet liberal to understand that.

It’s hard to disagree with some of the sentiments in this piece by Greg Mitchell, following the bombshell revelation in Bob Woodward’s book that Condi Rice had been warned on July 10 in very graphic terms about the threat from al Qaeda. Here’s why the July 10, 2001 meeting matters:

Woodward describes the meeting, and the two officials’ plea that the U.S. "needed to take action that moment – covert, military, whatever – to thwart bin Laden." The result? "Tenet and Black felt they were not getting through to Rice. She was polite, but they felt the brush-off‚Ķ.Tenet left the meeting feeling frustrated. Though Rice had given them a fair hearing, no immediate action meant great risk. Black felt the decision to just keep planning was a sustained policy failure. Rice and the Bush team had been in hibernation too long….

"Afterward, Tenet looked back on the meeting with Rice as a lost opportunity to prevent or disrupt the attacks. Rice could have gotten through to Bush on the threat, Tenet thought, but she just didn’t get it in time. Black later said, ‘The only thing we didn’t do was pull the trigger to the gun we were holding to her head.’"

And yet Rice has no recollection whatever of such a dramatic meeting and strongly denies it ever took place in the manner described:

Responding to the Woodward book, Rice told The Washington Post for Monday’s edition that an aide was checking on the meeting, but added, "What I am quite certain of, however, is that I would remember if I was told–as this account apparently says–that there was about to be an attack in the United States. The idea that I would somehow have ignored that I find incomprehensible."

So someone’s wrong. If Condi is, and she never told the 9/11 Commission, she’s in deep doo-doo.

(Photo: Alex Wong/Meet The Press/Reuters.)

The Foley scandal has some people saying some strange things, as Dave Weigel notes.

"Conservatives came to office to reduce the size of government and enlarge the sphere of free and private initiative. But lately we have increased government in order to stay in office. And, soon, if we don’t remember why we were elected we will have lost our office along with our principles, and leave a mountain of debt that our children’s grandchildren will suffer from long after we have departed this earth. Because, my friends, hypocrisy is the most obvious of sins, and the people will punish it," – senator John McCain, to the British Tories.

You can see this argument made at greater length in "The Conservative Soul: How We Lost It; How To Get It Back," out next Tuesday.

(Photo: David Y. Lee for Time.)

St Louis, Missouri, 5 pm.

"If I catch anyone who leaks in my government, I would like to string them up by the thumbs – the same way we do with prisoners in Guantanamo," – president George W. Bush to Canadian prime minster, Jean Chretien, in March 2002. That’s according to Chretien’s closest political advisor in a new book. (Hat tip: Robin Rowland.)