Category: The Dish

Bellingham, Washington State, 4 pm.

One of my most trsuted sources in Iraq is a soldier actually commanding troops and filling me in occasionally (and taking me to task). Here’s his latest comment on the post-Zarqawi situation:

I really liked what you said today about being right (and wrong) on your views about the war. I fly about fifty hours a month in these Al Anbar skies and the first thing you realize here is that you have to be right 100% of the time. You must always correctly estimate the risks of the weather, the enemy threat and altitudes/airspeeds to fly. Now if you can multiply that by over fifty, you’ll understand what command is like. So, if you feel a bit of pressure to be correct, imagine if you were supremely responsible for fifty other bloggers who, if wrong, could lose their lives. Not complaining at all, really want to help you with some perspective as I would guess you have taken some very tough criticism recently (some from me).

I would say if I was to recommend anything to someone with a good amount of pressure, it would be the same as I recommend to my pilots. BALANCE! Embrace the pressure and the risk and go with it and at all costs, don’t let fear and emotions cloud your judgment.

You know as well as I do that Zarqawi’s death will not change things dramatically here as that is seriously a micro-event. The financial incentive to keep this war going – illegal corruption in the oil sector under the cover of chaos – is a macro-event that is so much larger that it trumps any desire to end this thing. The intensity, which most think has increased has dramatically decreased against US forces and turned toward the easiest means to keep this going, which is to have the Iraqis kill each other. Zarqawi was a master at stoking those flames so it will (already has) get very interesting.

More reason to hope, and to doubt. BALANCE!

Know hope. Some civil society is emerging.

On the lecture circuit, I have heard many stories in Coulter’s wake of her actual charm, nervousness, politeness, civility, reasonableness in person. Now we’re all a little different in print than in person. People who meet me often say I’m much mellower and, er, nicer in person than I sometimes come off in pixels or print. That’s defensible, I think. Writing is sometimes about provoking, and it’s fine for a man or woman to have slightly different persona in reality than in print or even TV. But Coulter seems to have taken this to a bizarre extreme. Another reader comments:

Just wanted to add my little bit of insight to the Ann Coulter discussion.  While interning at a cable news show a year ago, I was responsible for guest relations on a day when Ann Coulter was being interviewed in the studio.  I had to meet Ann Coulter in the lobby, take her to the green room, prep her and bring her to the set.  We chatted for a bit during that time, despite my intense dislike of her crude politics and television personality.  I was shocked by how pleasant she was, even when I told her where I go to school (a favorite target of Fox News, one of the maligned Northeastern "bastions of the liberal elite").  She had spoken there recently and received the typical poor reception that she thrives on, but despite that she had nothing but great things to say about my college and all the "bright students" and their "brilliant questions."  If she had been talking about my school in the media, however, there is no question that the only words out of Ann Coulter’s mouth would have been "liberal elite", "New England", "brainwashing professors", "traitors", etc.

I came away from our conversation with the distinct impression that her television personality is exaggerated and largely manufactured, and that she doesn’t believe many of the ludicrous things she says.  She’s not a radical of any sort, she’s just a coniving businesswoman.  The woman has simply figured out how to market herself and make cold, hard cash, and will say any controversial thing she deems necessary to do so.  That has become obvious after her outrageous attacks on the 9/11 widows, which have caused her book to shoot to the top of the Amazon charts.

What Ann Coulter does is worse than other media personalities who actually believe the vileness that they spew, because she does it solely for the money and notoriety, despite her hypocritical claims to the mantles of Christianity and patriotism.  Her actions show that she is devoted to just one thing: the church of the American dollar.  To borrow a line from Jon Stewart, cheap hacks like her are hurting America.

And hurting some people who lost their own families in a terrorist atrocity. I take Coulter as seriously as I take a fictional character. Except most fictional characters do not make millions by assassinating the characters and wounding the souls of other real human beings.

(Photo: Platon)

Our redirect server went down again. My apologies. We will soon be moving to a new company and server so this won’t happen again. As it is, I’ve spent the morning listening to some fascinating papers on Oakeshott, right, left, Idealism, Gehrke, and the "precautionary principle". An Oakeshott conference also brings together a wonderfully idiosyncratic and smart bunch of people. The company has been quite invigorating, even inspiring. Blogging will be sparser than usual. But I’ll be back as soon as I can. Money quote from lunch: "You are not an idea of mine. You’re eating lunch." Ah. Philosophy in a deli.

Can I second this comment?

My only answer about what the effect of Zarqawi’s death might be is to say with Tom Friedman, ‘the next six months will be crucial.’ When his repetition of that phrase over and over was pointed out in The Corner, I said I would have agreed with him every time he said it. Some readers asked why. Because every time Friedman said it, it was true. It was and is true because Iraq has never decisively tilted one way or the other. It has seemed at times that it was on the verge of doing so (I thought it was when I wrote, ‘We’re Winning’), but it never has.
This is why people are wrong to say that Iraq is lost and wrong to say victory is inevitable. It is still very fluid. Events matter, leadership matters, policy matters. All of them interact in a dynamic way.

I take flak for my intermittent optimism and pessimism on Iraq. Mickey Kaus, whose own clairvoyance is not exactly renowned, has ridiculed me for it. But Rich is right. This is what wars are like; and this is what history is like. On a blog, you reflect what you see at the time. The word "journalism" is rooted in the idea of something that is true for the day. You try and get everything right, not to jump too far ahead, not to give up too soon, and so on. But the world will foil you. All you can do is your best to make sense of a deeply opaque and difficult time. Or as I just emailed to one reader:

Try being right ten times a day for six years.

The good news is: sometimes we learn more by getting things wrong. All I can say is: I sure want to win this war and defeat this enemy. And everything I write and every criticism I make about the war is related to that overwhelming imperative.

A reader comments:

I heard Ann Coulter speak in Minnesota at our small, nice, liberal arts college. When she first walked in there was some heckling and boos. But then she began to talk and everything got quiet. You could visibly see her falter and rush in the silence. There were no outraged audience members, no yelling or protesting, just… boredom. She was terrible! It was like seeing WWF on TV and then getting a lecture from one of them. On politics. Just silly. In fact, the audience started to chuckle softly at points and then louder at others. But people do believe her and love her for the hate she spews. The college Republican leadership had "I heart Ann" and "Marry me Ann!" on their home made t-shirts. Like the WWF. Sad.

Actually, she’s sad. No core convictions; no arguments; ad-copy prose; pure partisan circus. And she now claims the mantle of Christianity. You can indeed imagine Jesus speaking of widows the way Coulter does, can’t you? May she one day forgive herself. No one else will.

From the Malkin Screamfest’s coverage of YearlyKos, a moment of terrible deflation:

People here are largely, disappointingly, golf-shirted, short-haired, and white bread. Grooming and hygiene are up to western business standards.

Where are the white people with dreadlocks?? For my part, I’m at a kind of unKos: the annual meeting of the Michael Oakeshott Association. I’m in the hotel in Colorado Springs. Tomorrow will be a series of seminars and papers. The three readers of this blog who care can find more details here.

One caveat about the Zarqawi killing. For a while now, various sources knowledgeable about Iraq have warned me not to take some claims made about Zarqawi too seriously. He was never a close or comfortable ally with Osama bin Laden, and the Atlantic profile has a fascinating account of the two monsters’ first meeting:

As they sat facing each other across the receiving room, a former Israeli intelligence official told me, ‘it was loathing at first sight.’

According to several different accounts of the meeting, bin Laden distrusted and disliked al-Zarqawi immediately. He suspected that the group of Jordanian prisoners with whom al-Zarqawi had been granted amnesty earlier in the year had been infiltrated by Jordanian intelligence; something similar had occurred not long before with a Jordanian jihadist cell that had come to Afghanistan. Bin Laden also disliked al-Zarqawi’s swagger and the green tattoos on his left hand, which he reportedly considered un-Islamic. Al-Zarqawi came across to bin Laden as aggressively ambitious, abrasive, and overbearing. His hatred of Shiites also seemed to bin Laden to be potentially divisive‚Äîwhich, of course, it was.

Zarqawi made a name for himself among the Sunni insurgency in the first few months after the liberation because of the sheer brutality and sectarian nature of his religiously-inspired violence. But he wasn’t the central figure in that insurgency, and had recently alienated many. His former mentor broke with him after the hotel bombings in Jordan. The Bush administration often hyped Zarqawi, many say, in order to retain the notion that al Qaeda and Saddam were joined at the hip, and to connect the struggle in Iraq more directly with 9/11 in the eyes of the American public. But the truth was more complicated than that. Again from Mary Ann Weaver’s profile:

"Even then — and even more so now — Zarqawi was not the main force in the insurgency," the former Jordanian intelligence official, who has studied al-Zarqawi for a decade, told me. "To establish himself, he carried out the Muhammad Hakim operation, and the attack against the UN. Both of them gained a lot of support for him—with the tribes, with Saddam’s army and other remnants of his regime. They made Zarqawi the symbol of the resistance in Iraq, but not the leader. And he never has been."

He continued, "The Americans have been patently stupid in all of this. They’ve blown Zarqawi so out of proportion that, of course, his prestige has grown. And as a result, sleeper cells from all over Europe are coming to join him now."

They’re still there. Perhaps the biggest reason to rejoice at his demise is not that he represented the core of the Sunni insurgency, but that his strategy of fomenting sectarian mayhem helped unleash the most destructive force in the nascent state. Maybe his removal will help abate that force. Or maybe it now has a momentum all its own. We’ll see.

The Atlantic scores for timing too – with this just released profile of Zarqawi.