Category: The Dish

It is a recurrent theme. A reader finds an anecdote in Peter Manso’s book on Norman Mailer:

"[Podhoretz] came over to me. I’m paraphrasing but it was about five sentences in a row, to the effect: ‘Ginsberg, you really have some talent…if you’d only get rid of those friends of yours like Burroughs and Kerouac…"

"To my eternal shame, I lost my temper…I started screaming at him, ‘You big dumb fuckhead! You idiot! You don’t know anything about anything!’"

"Now, true to his particular nature, Podhoretz thought I was going to get violent, because that’s all he thinks about … Podhoretz yelled, ‘He’s going to get violent.’ and Mailer came over and took my arm, so I had to reassure him I wasn’t going to hit anybody…"

There were many, many good reasons for some liberals to renounce the left-liberalism of the late 1960s and 1970s. And when I think of neoconservatives in the best sense, Nathan Glazer and Daniel Bell spring to mind (although Bell would disdain the term, I think). But Podhoretz, more than most neocons, seems drawn to the thrill of violence, as fanatics of the far left and far right often are. Podhoretz, of course, has partaken in the violent fantasies of both extremes in his own lifetime. And I have come to realize these past few years that I was blind to this streak among some neocons, their actual love of war, and hegemony, their suppressed desire to strike back at their perceived enemies – blacks, Arabs, liberals – sometimes literally. In that context, their support for torture makes more sense, doesn’t it?

Zallherr, Albania, 2.30 pm.

Their money quotes at the hearings today can be viewed here and here. Both strike exactly the right tone in front of Petraeus and Crocker. And both, I fear, are dead-on in their brutal criticism of the non-strategy we have in the Middle East.

Juan Cole’s sobering take on what the next few years will probably bring is well worth digesting. Money quote:

As for Iraq itself, the best hope for the Dems may be that Gen. Petraeus actually succeeds, over the next year, in significantly reducing ethnic tensions. It is a slim reed to hold onto, as they recognize.

But from the moment Bush went into Iraq, Americans were screwed. And that includes the Democratic Party, which is being set up to take the fall.

I’m a severe skeptic on the likelihood of anything that looks like success in Iraq. But I don’t think career public servants such as Ryan Crocker and David Petraeus are acting as partisan Republicans in their Iraq efforts. I think they both are sincere, experienced men attempting to retrieve what they can for America from Bush’s catastrophe. They may as well try, since the Democrats can’t over-rule Bush and get the troops out, anyway. If the troops are there, they may as well at least be deployed intelligently, which is what Gen. Petraeus is doing. I wish them well in their Herculean labors. Because if they fail, I have a sinking feeling that we are all going down with them, including the next Democratic president. And their success is a long shot.

What online social networking has wrought.

A test-case of the online encyclopedia’s lightning speed of news – and editing.

"The Vietnam experience left the military leadership feeling that they should advise against involvement in counterinsurgencies unless specific, perhaps unlikely, circumstances obtain — i.e. domestic public support, the promise of a quick campaign, and freedom to employ whatever force is necessary to achieve rapid victory. In light of such criteria, committing U.S. units to counterinsurgencies appears to be a very problematic proposition, difficult to conclude before domestic support erodes and costly enough to threaten the well-being of all America’s military forces (and hence the country’s national security), not just those involved in the actual counterinsurgency," – David Howell Petraeus, The American Military and the Lessons of Vietnam: A study of military influence and the use of force in the post-Vietnam era. PhD Dissertation, Princeton University, 1987. Page 305.

Here’s the key question: why is Petraeus now abandoning every counter-insurgency principle he spent many years articulating? The deeper question is: how badly is the surge threatening the U.S.’s national security? How much more danger is continuing this failed policy putting us in?

(Photo: Brendan Smialowski/Getty.)

I’ve know photographers who have lost much of their sight, but this story is somehow more poignant:

Of all the ways to learn that your brain has suffered an "insult," as medical professionals like to call the effects of strokes, one of the oddest is to get up in the morning and discover your Toronto newspaper seemingly printed in a mix of Serbo-Croatian and Korean. When 70-year-old Howard Engel came back inside with his Globe and Mail that hot July day in 2001 and found he couldn’t read his own books either, the bestselling mystery novelist headed for the hospital. Tests confirmed Engel’s own assumption: stroke, left side, rear. His memory was shot — still is, for that matter, especially for names — and he had lost a quarter of his vision, on the upper right side. But the essence of the diagnosis was a rare and almost incomprehensible condition: alexia sine agraphia. The elegant combination of Greek and Latin words meant that while Engel could still write, he could no longer read.

(Hat tip: BookNinja.)

That’s NRO’s Andy McCarthy’s instructive take on the Petraeus testimony. He cites this comment from the general:

We cannot win Iraq solely in Iraq.

I predict an echoing chorus from the far right. In fact, I think Petraeus’ testimony and the administration’s agenda makes the most sense if you see all of this as a prelude to a risk of the wider war that Cheney desperately wants. If you keep Iraq occupied and in a state of barely arrested civil war, the chances of a casus belli against Iran increase. You can see the risk in Kurdistan and the South already. The extremist mullahs in Tehran would gladly reciprocate Cheney. Both Bush and Ahmadinejad have a domestic political interest in increasing polarization and conflict. This, I suspect, may even be the fallback reason behind the Anbar strategy. Bush is emboldening the Sunnis not just to take on al Qaeda, but at some point to take on the Shiite government in Baghdad, which the administration fears is too close to Iran. Bush and Cheney may well be trying to leverage this endless, constantly shifting civil war in Iraq – under the guise of fighting al Qaeda – into a mobilization for a campaign against Iran, along with a bombing campaign against their nuclear facilities. They are rhetorically laying the groundwork for such an attack. And they are looking for a reason to extend the conflict. What they need to win the argument is more polarization. Hence the decision to pour as many resources and troops as they can into the quicksand of Iraq. Hence the exclusive cooptation of Republican party outlets like Fox News. They need to portray the complex implosion of Iraq as a war against those who murdered on 9/11; they need to create reasons to portray the war in Iraq as essentially indistinguishable over time from a war with Iran.

I can see the sensible reasons for hanging in there.

David Brooks makes the honest, good faith case for such a strategy today. It’s risky, probably hopeless but not totally irrational to hang in and hope for some kind of gradual partition without a massive genocide. But my fundamental worry is the unknown future actions of Bush and Cheney. They have no qualms about changing their rationale for the war at a moment’s notice. They’ve switched narrative and rationale so many times now it’s close to dizzying. What they’re really doing now, I fear, is finding a personal alibi for the defeat they engineered, playing the Weimar card against the Democrats, and looking for a way to go to war with Iran. Enabling them further by funding troop levels that are essentially unchanged from 2005 and early 2006 means the risk of catastrophe increases. Remember: they don’t believe a president is bound by the rule of law. Their own most-trusted staffers have voiced hopes for another terror attack on Americans so they can shred more constitutional restraints on a president’s dictatorial powers.

The debate on continuing to occupy a slowly disintegrating Iraq is only finely balanced if you believe we have a president and vice-president who can be trusted to act prudently and constitutionally. Do you?

Was it fear that the US would withdraw? An interesting theory.