Category: The Dish

"Men, do not rest content with parrying the attacks of a superior, but often strike the first blow to prevent the attack being made. And we cannot fix the exact point at which our empire shall stop; we have reached a position in which we must not be content with retaining but must scheme to extend it, for, if we cease to rule others, we are in danger of being ruled ourselves. Nor can you look at inaction from the same point of view as others, unless you are prepared to change your habits and make them like theirs," – Alcibiades’ Oration before the Sicilian expedition, Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War.

(Photo: Fallujah by Roslan Rahman/AFP/Getty.)

Just a thought after reading the Thomas Sowell column. Sowell basically says that rebuilding Iraq from scratch is a fool’s errand – the classic conservative case against nation-building – but that we still have to spend hundreds of billions of dollars in the next decade doing it in Iraq because, well, because … Over to Sowell:

This is not a plea for withdrawal. Whatever the situation when we went in, international terrorists have chosen to make this the place for a showdown battle. We can win or lose that battle but we cannot unilaterally end the war. It is the terrorists’ war, regardless of where it is fought.

This is a meme often deployed by the Bush-Cheney cabal: ‘This is the ground on which the terrorists have chosen to fight, therefore we have no choice.’ Note a few things. If this is truly their argument, it seems to me to behoove Bush, Cheney or Sowell to concede that the president actually goaded international terrorists to come to Iraq in the first place – "Bring them on!" This precedent means that any president can start a war, and use the chaos of disorder that such a war creates as an indefinite argument for prolonging it. It’s a war that keeps on giving. Failure means it’s even more necessary to keep failing. The dollar auction continues.

Second, why exactly is this "the terrorists’ war"? Why is our strategy necessarily determined by battlegrounds and terrain of their choosing and not ours? Has Sowell ever pondered the idea that some terrorists might actually be smart enough to choose terrain where they are strongest and we are weakest? Has it occurred to him that fighting these people among civilian populations whose languages we do not speak, whose cultures we do not understand, and whose countries we have invaded and destroyed may not be the ideal theater to fight in?

Steve Clemons calms the nerves.

The CBO puts the price of a permanent military occupation of Iraq – the current policy of all the leading GOP candidates – at $10 billion to $25 billion a year, depending on how tough it is to keep the occupation going. This does not include such things as veterans’ care, economic costs to the US of deaths and injuries, and other peripherals. It seems to me that the Republican candidates need to explain how they can reduce spending in other areas by the annual $25 billion the Mesopotamian provinces (for they are and would be plural) will absorb.

Jon Stewart summed it up best last night:

An unfortunate combination of police over-reaction and what appears to be student douche-baggery.

From the Atlantic in 1947: an essay on the increasing tackiness of Hollywood’s product. From 1947. Heh.

Thomas Sowell gets off the bus. A reader comments:

I generally like Thomas Sowell and find a great deal of well and simply stated wisdom in his columns. He has now joined the ranks of the Peggy Noonan types, who have quietly but decisively changed their tune without really acknowledging their complicity in the recent pro-war fervor. The linked column below, had it been written in February 2003 would confirm his conservative bona fides, but in September 2007?!? Where are the mea culpas? Where is the sense that he was wrong?  The detached, inclusive way the column is written ("we" this, "we" that: don’t the "we" include people he would have labelled wackos or even traitors only months ago?), betrays an ongoing blindness that "we" are to blame and have indeed lost a great deal of credibility by not espousing these views not in 2007 but almost five years ago. 

Very few conservatives should write this kind of column today: George Will, yes; Pat Buchanan, obviously; Jeffrey Hart, certainly; Andrew Sullivan, yes because we have been able to follow his painful journey from fellow-Kool-aid imbiber to bruised, disillusioned and wiser Burkean; but Sowell, who has been part of the echo chamber on Iraq since the beginning without any sign of a slow journey to (self-)awareness. Hard to swallow.

I’ve given up hoping for intellectual accountability from most on the right. Taking responsibility for one’s past views and actions is not apparently in the current conservative book of virtues.

West Chester, Pennsylvania, 12.25 pm.

Michael Totten emails:

I wish I disagreed with what you wrote on your blog, but I don’t.

The "Awakening" model is spreading elsewhere in the country, which is good, but something else will need to happen in Baghdad, especially, for the reasons you outline.

Also, the Mahdi Army will be tougher to beat than Al Qaeda because they are less extreme and less likely to be rejected by the society as a whole. So while the Anbar model is exportable to an extent – it is being exported to Diyala Province, Salah a Din Province, and even to some places in the South – winning everywhere in Iraq (if it’s even possible, and I really don’t know if it is) will require something more. The success in Anbar Province is real, but it would be a mistake to assume that solution can be applied to the entire country. It probably can’t. I wouldn’t say reconciliation between Sunnia and Shias is impossible, but if it is possible it won’t be because of what happened in Anbar.

A voice of sanity from the ground. Hit his tip jar. Tom Ricks echoes Michael’s judgment here.

The GOP’s chief mullah issues a fatwa:

"Isn’t Thompson the candidate who is opposed to a Constitutional amendment to protect marriage, believes there should be 50 different definitions of marriage in the U.S., favors McCain-Feingold, won’t talk at all about what he believes, and can’t speak his way out of a paper bag on the campaign trail? He has no passion, no zeal, and no apparent ‘want to.’ And yet he is apparently the Great Hope that burns in the breasts of many conservative Christians? Well, not for me, my brothers. Not for me!"