Category: The Dish

Liberals Against Withdrawal, Ctd

A reader writes:

Your reader is right, we do owe it to Iraq to fix what our elected leaders have broken.  As Bush et al like to point out, however, only the executive branch can execute the war. Since the only available commander-in-chief has proven himself radically incompetent, unaccountable, and prone to dubious military engagements, we have little reason to believe that we can expiate our obligations to the Iraqis by allowing the White House to be even more profligate with our collective blood and honor.

It is possible to incur a debt one cannot repay, and I fear that is what we have done.  I hope – though I by no means assume – that if our next president is both very clever and has a strong sense of honor he or she will find a way to make good.  In the meantime I doubt it will help to leave that future president an exhausted, demoralized military with which to work.

Yes, this is the problem. Even if we were convinced that we should stay in Iraq to prevent genocide, how can we morally keep entrusting the troops to Bush and Cheney? And how, with Bush and Cheney in charge, can we know they won’t continue to make the same appalling mistakes they have made so far? Bush himself has said he disapproved of his own war-management last fall. One might ask if he won’t say the same about his war management today a year from now? I’m afraid Petraeus is not an answer. He’s a good and decent general; but he cannot perform miracles, or defy reality. The reality is: Iraq no longer exists. Right now, we’re asking young Americans to die to keep Bill Kristol’s grand political narrative from being one notch less than absurd. I’m not sure that’s a good idea. Another reader writes:

Nice piece by the anti-war liberal who rightly is concerned at the moral implications of withdrawal.  But he had a more cogent point when he noted there was a reason Saddam was so brutal – that he had to be to keep a lid on all the centuries of brewing tension.  And that’s the problem with staying…we can only bring peace to a unified Iraq by imposing draconian measures on the country, a la Saddam, or by picking a new Saddam and sticking around long enough for him to do so.  I don’t think it would be moral to do so.  Nor do we have the stomach for it.  I fear the only outcome that offers a prayer of bringing the violence to a relatively quick end is to partition the country – Kurd, Shia and Sunni – and stick around long enough for each group to get out of the other’s territory.

Soft-partition via withdrawal. It may be the best we can do. And it could be leveraged against Iran’s leadership.

Tom Wolfe On Blogs

He’s agin ’em:

One by one, Marshall McLuhan’s wackiest-seeming predictions come true. Forty years ago, he said that modern communications technology would turn the young into tribal primitives who pay attention not to objective "news" reports but only to what the drums say, i.e., rumors.

And there you have blogs. The universe of blogs is a universe of rumors, and the tribe likes it that way.

The Saudi War on Iraq

Want a handle on the foreign powers actually intervening in Iraq? Fascinating data from the LA Times:

Although Bush administration officials have frequently lashed out at Syria and Iran, accusing it of helping insurgents and militias here, the largest number of foreign fighters and suicide bombers in Iraq come from a third neighbor, Saudi Arabia, according to a senior U.S. military officer and Iraqi lawmakers.

About 45% of all foreign militants targeting U.S. troops and Iraqi civilians and security forces are from Saudi Arabia; 15% are from Syria and Lebanon; and 10% are from North Africa, according to official U.S. military figures made available to The Times by the senior officer. Nearly half of the 135 foreigners in U.S. detention facilities in Iraq are Saudis, he said.

Fighters from Saudi Arabia are thought to have carried out more suicide bombings than those of any other nationality, said the senior U.S. officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the subject’s sensitivity. It is apparently the first time a U.S. official has given such a breakdown on the role played by Saudi nationals in Iraq’s Sunni Arab insurgency.

He said 50% of all Saudi fighters in Iraq come here as suicide bombers. In the last six months, such bombings have killed or injured 4,000 Iraqis.

The Saudis, of course, are among the Bush family’s closest friends, so we neither mention nor tackle this. The gulf between the reality in the Middle East and the president’s account of it grows wider and wider.

Order of the Brown Nose

The Stephen Hayes fellatio of King Dick is a classic of the genre. Think of some low-level party functionary writing a glorious history of Andropov in the 1980s. Or think, at a lower level of apparatchikery, of Blumenthal and Clinton. But I don’t think even Sid was infatuated with Clinton’s furniture:

Cheney’s office is quite spacious – longer than it is wide, with high ceilings – particularly for the cramped West Wing. His large, mahogany desk sits opposite the entrance to the room, beneath a map depicting the Battle of Chickamauga, one of several Civil War battles that his great-great grandfather survived. In the far left corner of the room is a small television perched on a walnut-stained stand that matches the desk. Four flags sit on either side of a thin table behind Cheney’s chair: the American flag and the Wyoming state flag on the left; the secretary of defense’s flag and the vice president’s flag on the right. The table is filled with photographs of Cheney’s wife, his children and their partners, and his grandchildren. The white walls are spare, with only two gold-framed oil paintings–portraits of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams–and a map of the world as decorations. Two windows on the left side of the room provide light, and the royal blue sofa in front of Cheney’s desk matches the carpet exactly. Two chairs on each side of the sofa form a semicircle. Sewn into the carpeting directly in front of the fireplace is the seal of the vice president of the United States.