Category: The Dish

If you’re looking for an essay that tries to portray the shifting sands of Iraq in the most optimistic light, Bartle Bull’s piece in the British Prospect is well worth a read. It almost cheered me up. One of its premises is that sectarianism really isn’t that powerful in Iraq and that the various factions in the country are more reliably motivated by their long-term interests. The strongest evidence for this comes in this passage:

This summer, Maliki’s office reached out to Baathist ex-soldiers and officers and received 48,600 requests for jobs in uniform; he made room for 5,000 of them, found civil service jobs for another 7,000, and put the rest of them on a full pension. Meanwhile leading Baathists have told Time magazine they want to be in the government; the 1920 Revolution Brigade—a Sunni insurgent group—is reportedly patrolling the streets of Diyala with the 3rd infantry division, and the Sunni Islamic Army in Iraq is telling al Jazeera it may negotiate with the Americans. The anecdotes coming out of Baghdad confirm the trend. The drawing rooms of the capital’s dealmakers are full of Baathists, cap in hand. They are terrified of the Shia death squads and want to share in the pie when the oil starts flowing. Both Izzat al-Douri, the more prestigious of the two main Baathist leaders, and Mohamed Younis al Ahmed, the more lethal, have been reaching out from neighbouring countries to negotiate an accommodation. Since the summer, the news coming out on the Sunni front has consistently been in this one, inevitable direction.

Meanwhile, the latest data on violence does seem to show real progress from the nightmare levels of last winter. It seems to me extremely premature to believe that there is a national reconciliation going on. We’ve also learned the hard way not to under-estimate the power of sectarianism. The police force in particular appears to be a stronghold of Shiite sectarianism. But it seems to me also that we should be constantly looking for signs of success, in order to understand this enigmatic country a little better, and to expand on whatever local or regional revival exists. That is not the same as national revival. But it may be the best we can do for now.

(Photo: US soldiers from Alpha Company, 1/38 Infantry Regiment, play football in front of their Stryker Armoured Personnel Carrier (APC) at their combat outpost in Baquba, 02 October 2007. By Alexander Nemenov/AFP/Getty.)

Steve Chapman almost gets it. A constitutional federal hate crimes bill can only target a minuscule number of "hate crimes" that are related to interstate commerce:

For all its grand intentions, the bill doesn’t really do much at all. Supporters would like to make every hate crime a federal offense. But they can’t. And the ones they can outlaw are so few and far between that it’s hard to see why they bother…

The provision in question snares only those crimes in which someone crosses state lines, uses "a channel, facility or instrumentality of interstate or foreign commerce," or uses a weapon that has traveled across state or international boundaries.

What’s the relevance to the murder of Matthew Shepard, or to most of the other attacks on gays? None whatsoever. You might think it’s better to do nothing than to do something irrelevant. But for a lot of senators, there’s no gesture like an empty gesture.

And when you realize that the Shepard case was nothing like the incident the interest groups made it out to be, the pointlessness of this exercise is overwhelming. Except it isn’t, of course. The primary point of such a federal bill is to raise funds for a federal interest group like the Human Rights Campaign. It’s a perfect fundraising vehicle because it is emotionally visceral, can be framed as a simple case of "are you for beating gay people to death or not?", and gives HRC a slim reed of legislative achievement to sell to its trillions of members and donors by direct mail. It’s about the money. Period.

An engrossing series of journals and photo-journals from Iraq in civil war.

$5 million is real money. It’s five times as much as Huckabee. Marc asks:

Imagine if he finishes second or third in New Hampshire ….

Yeah: imagine.

By all accounts, a stunning speech at the Conservative Party conference in Blackpool, England. Here’s the kicker: an hour long, with no formal text and no Teleprompter. I’m proud of my roots. Could any American politician pull that off?

Does any new research debunk the influence of genes on our lives? Here’s the latest:

An international team of researchers including an MIT graduate student has demonstrated for the first time that genes exert influence on people’s behavior in a very common experimental economic game. Traditionally, social scientists have been quite hesitant to acknowledge a role for genes in explaining economic behavior. But a study by David Cesarini, a Ph.D. student in MIT’s Department of Economics, and by colleagues in Sweden indicates that there is a genetic component to people’s perception of what is fair and what is unfair.

Good timing for the next movie:

I’m always bashing the Cornerites for not being conservative, so it behooves me to point out when the kind of conservatism I admire reveals itself. Jonah Goldberg is not what most would call a drug-legalizer (with the possible exception of pot). But neither is he a defender of the current "drug war." (I don’t know how anyone with a base-line intelligence and concern for individual liberty could be.) And so his position is inherently unsatisfying: the kind I admire but am not that temperamentally suited for. I’d legalize pot and soft drugs, and focus on meth, heroin and those drugs that can be shown to have unusually serious social consequences. But it’s worth conceding that there’s much we don’t know, and that any approach is worth pursuing gingerly and with pragmatic care. Anyway, this is the kind of thing we need to hear more of among the dead-certain conservative moralists out there:

What’s my solution? Well the first answer has to be, I don’t know. In fact, I’m not sure we can know. Some problems are hard and if not permanent certainly enduring. I don’t have a solution to robbery, murder, or rape. All I have is an idea of how society should respond to such things in order to minimize their occurrence and to apply justice to those who perpetrate them (these are related but not identical issues). Secondly, much as with global warming and all sorts of things, I place my hopes on technology. I think treatments will only get better as we understand the brain and neuroscience better. And, I’m pretty sure we’ll come up with much better drugs that will make smoking crack or shooting heroin seem comparatively unappealing but will also be far less destructive.

In the meantime, I’m all in favor of thinking creatively and, as a consistent federalist, I would be willing to tolerate local experimental legalizations even though I think such policies are folly.

Amen.

Jake Tapper notes that Obama’s assertion at DePaul that many in Washington misleadingly argued that Saddam had serious connections with al Qaeda is borne out by the historical record:

As Don van Natta and Jeff Gerth have written in their book about Clinton and the New York Times, Clinton’s linkage of Saddam and al Qaeda was unique among Democrats and "was unsupported by the conclusions of the N.I.E. and other secret intelligence reports that were available to senators before the vote."

Former Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Sen. Bob Graham, D-Florida, said it was a spurious claim: "I don’t think any agency pretended to make a case that there was a strong linkage between Saddam Hussein and 9/11. It wasn’t in the N.I.E."

"Nevertheless," van Natta and Gerth write, "on the sensitive issue of collaboration between Al Qaeda and Iraq, Senator Clinton found herself adopting the same argument that was being aggressively pushed by the administration. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and other administration officials had repeated their claim frequently, and by early October 2002, two out of three Americans believed that Saddam Hussein was connected to the Sept. 11 attacks. By contrast, most of the other Senate Democrats, even those who voted for the war authorization, did not make the Qaeda connection in their remarks on the Senate floor."

But she won the news cycle this week.

The post-Ames bump has evaporated. Huckabee is showing surprising strength. I bet you Huckabee surprises a lot of people in the new year. If you’re a Christianist, why would you not want one of your own as the candidate? Especially when he helps debunk the idea that every political evangelical has to be a total asshole. Then there’s the simple fact: The GOP now is a big government religious movement. Why would they not pick a big government religious candidate?