Category: The Dish

It’s an excruciating read. Here’s my summary: we’ve made real progress against the organized professional leadership of al Qaeda. Everywhere else, we’ve lost ground. One reason we’ve lost ground – both strategically, ideologically and politically – is because of the bungled war in Iraq, which has produced the worst of all worlds: an ineffective occupation that doesn’t bring democracy, has turned the image of the U.S. into Abu Ghraib, and has inspired many more decentralized and dangerous Jihadists across the globe. As a supporter of the war in Iraq, it’s clear that over three years later, it has spawned more terrorism, and is now causing more innocent deaths on a daily basis than Saddam’s vile regime. Whether this was inevitable or a function of the way it was conducted will be debated for decades. But this much we know: it was conducted dreadfully anyway, on the cheap, and without even minimal strategic intelligence and care. At this point in time, there’s no way to spin this except as a fiasco that has obviously made us less safe right now and in the immediate future. The only arguments the Bush administration has left is that in 2050, historians may regard it as a turning point, and that leaving now would be even worse. The first argument is pathetic; the second argument is true but only underscores their unforgivable recklessness.

The NIE further concludes that our continued ineffective presence in Iraq is spawning more terrorism, and that our departure would also be a huge morale boost to the Jihadists and foment even more hell. Great. (What the war has done to increase Iran’s power and potential danger is not addressed in the sections I’ve read. But it surely adds to the negatives.) What’s clear to me is that we therefore have a gamble ahead of us: do we withdraw from Iraq in some way – either completely or to Kurdish areas – or do we seriously try and get the occupation right? At this point, I’d say the argument is very finely balanced. Obviously, the first step must be to get rid of the people so far responsible for the Iraq disaster. Until Rumsfeld is dismissed, we have no hope for any improvement. General Casey needs to be fired as well, along with several other military leaders who have presided over this mess. For the first time in this administration, we need some accountability. Then we have a decision to make. Do we have the troops necessary to make this work? Or do we not? If we need a draft, do we have the guts to say so and debate it?

My own view is that we should either drastically up the ante in Iraq – by adding tens of thousands of new troops in a serious, concerted attempt to provide order for the first time; or we should withdraw. Anything in between continues the same worst-of-all-worlds nightmare. We knew occupying a Muslim country would be a very high-risk venture. Which is why it had to be done with overwhelming force, meticulous planning, and an equally painstaking political strategy for the aftermath. We know now that Rumsfeld and Cheney just wanted to bomb the crap out of the place to prove they had more testosterone than the Democrats and to scare a few leaders in the Middle East. But the time for their amateurism is over. Either get serious or leave, guys. And make up your mind soon.

(Photo: U.S. troops in Baghdad this month, by Yuri Kozyrev for Time.)

I have a simple question: were all of Power Line’s trio of Dartmouth alums students of Jeffrey Hart in college? Was he their mentor in conservatism at the time? Their blog has mentioned him several times in the past glowingly, and Scott Johnson has identified himself as a disciple of the professor "emeritus and extraordinaire." They speak warmly of him here and recommend an essay of his. Here they imply that they were former students. Scott Johnson here recalls how "everything I think I know about literature I learned as a grateful student of Professor Hart." There’s a poignant reminiscence here, and an endorsement of a new book by Jeffrey Hart. Scott Johnson wrote the following about his former mentor here:

Professor Hart disabused me of my addled adolescent liberalism and smugness over the four years I was his student as an undergraduate. I remain his grateful student … Professor Hart joined the editorial board of National Review in 1969. In the course of his long association with the magazine he met up with virtually all of the magazine’s great characters. In the current issue of the New Criterion, Professor Hart brings his gifts for portraiture to bear on an autobiographical reflection on the founding father of National Review and the modern conservative movement: "Buckley at the beginning." This brilliant essay is difficult to excerpt. Please read the whole thing.

Of another essay by Professor Hart, Johnson wrote: "There won’t be a better essay published this year."

And yet, strangely, the most brilliant essay of this year by Jeffrey Hart is ignored by the trio of his former students. Here it is. It’s a brutal excoriation of the toxic brew of authoritarianism and Christianism that Hart’s former students now try to pass off as "conservatism." Money quote:

If [Bushism] amounts to a worldview, it’s certainly not that of Burke. Indeed, Bush would probably be more at home among the revolutionary French, provided his taxes remained low, than among Burke’s Rockingham Whigs. (Burke would of course deny Bush admission to the Whigs in the first place, as Bush would be seen as an ideological comrade of the philosophes —if a singularly unreflective one.) It’s no surprise that longtime conservatives such as Francis Fukuyama, George F. Will, and William F. Buckley have all distanced themselves from Bush’s brand of adventurism.

The United States has seen political swings and produced its share of extremists, but its political character, whether liberals or conservatives have been in charge, has always remained fundamentally Burkean. The Constitution itself is a Burkean document, one that slows down decisions to allow for “deliberate sense” and checks and balances. President Bush has nearly upended that tradition, abandoning traditional realism in favor of a warped and incoherent brand of idealism. (No wonder Bush supporter Fred Barnes has praised him as a radical.) At this dangerous point in history, we must depend on the decisions of an astonishingly feckless chief executive: an empty vessel filled with equal parts Rove and Rousseau.

Equal parts Rove and Rousseau. With a sprinkling of Carl Schmitt. Add torture for flavor. And you have what conservatism has now become.

Is it becoming an oxymoron? A Muslim journalist vents here:

The writer in a Muslim society is in shackles. Every time I put pen to paper it is a struggle against the tyranny of community-imposed self-censorship. Nowhere is Rousseau’s statement that "Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains," truer than in the House of Islam.

Everything is a taboo. Whenever a Muslim writer takes up a pen he starts tiptoeing in a minefield. You have to follow the flag signs of religious, cultural and social taboos. You should tread carefully avoid shame, social estrangement or even death.

The beheading of the Sudanese journalist Mohamed Taha Mohamed Ahmed in early September was the latest example of community punishment of a journalist/writer…

In the House of Islam, you cannot have a principle other than that of the community. Every thing you do is referred to Islam. The mantra is "that’s stupid BUT … But we cannot do this because we are Muslims." One hears this expression ad nauseam. In the Islamic world you cease to be a human being. You become only a Muslim, whatever that entails.

You are not allowed to be a person with vices and virtues, you cannot follow your own reasoning, and you cannot be unpopular or defend an unpopular idea. You cannot go out of the circle. To express yourself freely means to risk death. And death indeed if you change your faith. Invention itself is considered as an act of blasphemy.

And so the backwardness deepens; and the ressentiment intensifies; and the censorship grows. Somehow we have to reverse this cycle of conformity and fear – there, and, to a mercifully much lesser extent, here.

"This is one of the most important cases which the House has had to decide in recent years. It calls into question the very existence of an ancient liberty of which this country has until now been very proud: freedom from arbitrary arrest and detention. The power which the Home Secretary seeks to uphold is a power to detain people indefinitely without charge or trial. Nothing could be more antithetical to the instincts and traditions of the people of the United Kingdom… The real threat to the life of the nation, in the sense of a people living in accordance with its traditional laws and political values, comes not from terrorism but from laws such as these. That is the true measure of what terrorism may achieve. It is for Parliament to decide whether to give the terrorists such a victory," – Lord Hoffmann, opposing the British government’s attempt to detain anyone indefinitely without charges or trial on suspicion of being in some way a party to terrorism.

A reader writes:

I went to the Family Research Council/Focus on the Family/American Family Association "Values Voters" summit this weekend at the Omni.

It is much, much worse than we know.

The first woman I spoke to (from Erie, PA) railed on about how Chuck Hagel is a flaming liberal and John McCain should be tried for treason. I thought that maybe I’d run into an isolated crazy. Oh no – it only got worse from there. The level of contempt for anyone who diverges from the Holy Word of W is beyond description. I was sort of ‘undercover’ so I could just let people talk to me, not leading the conversation, not baiting, and it horrified me to hear how many were perfectly comfortable with any form of torture in the name of patriotism if the Commander In Chief gave it the ok.

Meanwhile, in the plenary I got to hear from George Allen on how he’s been done wrong by the media and watched a ballroom of about 1,700 people seem to feel permission to let their hate for The Gays run wild every time a black minister hit the stage. (I have my own copy of the very popular brochure, "The Rape of the Civil Rights Movement: How Sodomites Are Using Civil Rights Rhetoric To Advance Their Preference For Sexual Perversion.")

There is no room for disagreement, because it is tantamount to evil. Dissent is the same as blasphemy, and everything is approached in orthodox terms. I’ve always been a conservative because I believe that there is such a think as good and evil and that moral relativism is a crazy road on which logic can rarely stick. I believe in limited government and individual liberty. I know I can do things better than any bureaucracy ever will. But what conservatism has become with these people is horrifying. They’d trade liberty for a handshake from W., compassion for power. And they’ve got one amazing plan in place to make sure that future generations have a tighter, more limited, and clearly more hostile worldview. I went there hoping to prove myself wrong about what I thought was happening, but I just couldn’t do it.

Another journalist friend visited as well. He emailed me about it. ‘So you’re saying it’s as bad as I feared," I asked. "Much, much worse."

I’ll be on AC360 tonight, discussing the torture and detention-without-charge bill.

Talking and thinking this over, I’m trying to look on the bright side. The bill allows this president to continue torturing detainees (and possibly innocent ones). But it doesn’t actually authorize the torture methods. And it doesn’t formally breach Geneva. So "the program" continues in the shadows of Bush’s shadow government. The truly disturbing part is that the only criterion for detaining anyone without charges – citizen or non-citizen, at home or anywhere in the world – is the president’s discretion. If Rumsfeld decides you’re an enemy combatant, you can be whisked away into a black hole, tortured, or have to prove your innocence in a military commission while he insists on your guilt. The "battlefield" is everywhere; and the war is endless.  This is not, to put it mildly, what the founding fathers had in mind. It is one of the darkest hours for Western liberty in a very long time. And most conservatives are cheering. Watching habeas corpus go down the plughole is not something I ever thought I would have to contemplate. Well done, Osama. You won this one big time.

Greg Gutfeld reports on the real England.

A reader writes:

As a Presbyterian pastor, I continue to be stunned by the unthinking support of many evangelicals for a policy that permits torture. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry when the so-called "Traditional Values Coalition" decided that torture was among the traditional values that they feel compelled to support.

When Jesus was put on trial and handed over to Pontius Pilate, he rejected violence and said, "My kingdom is not of this world." He was then tortured and brutally murdered (three hours in a "stress position" on the cross, as one of your readers aptly noted). "Caesar", of course, went on to torture and brutally murder innocent Christians who were "threats to the state." Now, 2,000 years later, in their wordly lust for power, Christians are hopping into bed with Caesar and signing off on anything Caesar wants, especially if Caesar takes care of the Christian "base".

In my Presbyterian tradition, we are called to stand outside the halls of power and speak truth to those in power, no matter what party is in control. We are not called to become that power ourselves; Jesus’ kingdom is not of this world; his values are not Caesar’s values.

Last year on Good Friday, my church had our traditional worship service at which we read the story of Jesus’ torture and execution. To make the story more than just a past event, we read three contemporary accounts of innocent individuals who had been tortured. If we were going to shed tears for our innocent Lord Jesus, we also needed to shed tears for other innocent victims of torture. One story we read was about Christians in China – "threats to the state" – including a mother who was brutally interrogated while hearing the cries of her son being tortured in the next room. Interestingly enough, the Christian Right would join me in expressing outrage against innocent Christians.

Another story was of a man who described these conditions:

"I saw a cell almost the size of a grave. 3 feet wide, 6 feet deep, and 7 feet high. The cell had no light in it; it only had two thin mattresses (two thin blankets) on the ground … I was kept in that dark and filthy cell for about 10 months. The worst beating happened on the third day … they were asking the same set of questions and they would beat me 3-4 times. They would sometimes take me to another room where I could hear other people being tortured … at the end of the day I could not take the pain anymore and I falsely confessed of having been to Afghanistan."

We read that story last Good Friday. The man’s name? Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen, who was arrested at JFK airport in New York. He was then deported by the American government via Jordan to Syria, where he was detained in the cell described above. Just last week Arar and his claims of innocence were completely vindicated by the Canadian government. The Traditional Values Coalition would probably respond: an unfortunate mistake, but torture is still a necessary policy.

And What Would Jesus Do?

Jesus wept.

The Berlin Opera surrenders to Muslim sensitivities.

It really does look as if Rick Santorum is going to lose.