Category: The Dish

You can either fight a war on drugs or fight an effective war on terror. You can’t do both in Afghanistan. Johann Hari shows how the drug war brought the Taliban back from the near-dead. Money quote:

Over the past five years, with British and American military support, a sinister corporation called DynCorps has been going to the fields of the poorest farmers in Afghanistan and systematically destroying them. This is because they are growing opium poppies, used to make heroin that is freely bought on the streets of the West. Emmanuel Reinert, the Executive Director of the Senlis Council, explains, "The Taliban revival is directly, intimately related to the crop eradication programme. It could not have happened if the US was not aggressively destroying crops. It is the single biggest reason Afghans turned against the foreigners."

My take on the president’s bid to keep his military tribunals, enshrine torture in law, and use the issue – and the 9/11 families – as his electoral ace card. My Sunday Times column is here.

Elanora, Australia, 7 am.

More doubt is shed on the veracity of the president’s account last week. The best I’ve read is in Ron Suskind’s "The One Percent Doctrine."

Mean Girls: a Cartoon fantasy about a future campaign between Condi Rice and Hillary Rodham-Clinton.

Next week, I’m informed via troubled White House sources, will see the full unveiling of Karl Rove’s fall election strategy. He’s intending to line up 9/11 families to accuse McCain, Warner and Graham of delaying justice for the perpetrators of that atrocity, because they want to uphold the ancient judicial traditions of the U.S. military and abide by the Constitution. He will use the families as an argument for legalizing torture, setting up kangaroo courts for military prisoners, and giving war crime impunity for his own aides and cronies. This is his "Hail Mary" move for November; it’s brutally exploitative of 9/11; it’s pure partisanship; and it’s designed to enable an untrammeled executive. Decent Republicans, Independents and Democrats must do all they can to expose and resist this latest descent into political thuggery. If you need proof that this administration’s first priority is not a humane and effective counter-terror strategy, but a brutal, exploitative path to retaining power at any price, you just got it.

(Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty.)

"Among all the governments in the world, the only legitimate government endorsed by the Almighty is the Islamic Republic of Iran. The Islamic Republic is an extension of God, its Leader is appointed by God, its Revolutionary Guard is God’s Army, and all its citizens are members of the Party of God (Hezbollah)," – Ayatollah Ali-Akbar Meshkini, Iran’s President of the Assembly of Experts, that selects key government posts. Some consider him the second most powerful figure in Tehran.

Wilmington, Ohio, 10.45 am.

Once again, gay men led the way with the bear phenom. Next up: Hollywood:

A little while ago, movie stars like Heath Ledger and Hugh Jackman and then just regular dudes started turning up at parties with their shirts unbuttoned. Not, like, all-the-way-to-the-navel, Vinnie-at-the-club unbuttoned — but undone enough to let a few tendrils of chest hair curl out suggestively, as if to say, I am Man. Feel me.

It’s not that I’m a chest hair fetishist, exactly. I just prefer it. The bald male chest is disconcerting to me in the same way that a hairless dog is. It seems unnatural, as though it’s been engineered by science, and it’s sort of vain. Plus, I like a little something to stroke and pet and tug on, a springy, hairy pillow on which to lay my head. A quick text-message poll confirmed that fourteen of fifteen female friends agreed. "Yes!!!" wrote one. "Liking lush forest!" replied another.

The fight continues.

It’s becoming clearer and clearer that Donald Rumsfeld is a worse defense secretary than Robert McNamara. Why was there no post-invasion war-plan in Iraq? Because Rumsfeld forbade one, and threatened to fire anyone who devised one. Money quote from an eye-witness in the military:

Planning continued to be a challenge.

"The secretary of defense continued to push on us … that everything we write in our plan has to be the idea that we are going to go in, we’re going to take out the regime, and then we’re going to leave," Scheid said. "We won’t stay."

Scheid said the planners continued to try "to write what was called Phase 4," or the piece of the plan that included post-invasion operations like occupation.

Even if the troops didn’t stay, "at least we have to plan for it," Scheid said.

"I remember the secretary of defense saying that he would fire the next person that said that," Scheid said. "We would not do planning for Phase 4 operations, which would require all those additional troops that people talk about today.

"He said we will not do that because the American public will not back us if they think we are going over there for a long war."

Unbelievable. Even more unbelievable is that this man is still secretary of defense. Even after the fiasco in Iraq; even after the torture policy; even after Abu Ghraib; even after a deteriorating situation in Afghanistan and a civil war in Iraq. Democrats, Independents and sane Republicans who want to win the war against islamism should unite this fall in a single rallying cry: Fire Rumsfeld Now.

(Hat tip: Kevin Drum).