Category: The Dish

Readers are largely in agreement with my suggestion that, whatever else we do in Iraq, we should make sure we do not lose a free Kurdistan:

Yes. Please hammer on this. No matter what anyone concludes about the viability of the surge in southern Iraq, troop withdrawal dates and the war in general, abandoning Iraqi Kurdistan should be flat-out taken off the table by all sides. Unlike the rest of Iraq, the Kurds like us, are grateful for our help and want us to stay. They are precisely the sort of ally that we desperately need in the region, and moreover we owe it to them, in light of our abandonment at the end of the first gulf war. Michael Totten’s interview with a Peshmerga colonel is an excellent example.

Both Democrats and Republicans need to be reminded of this. Republicans especially need to realize by refusing to compromise on the war for long enough, when they inevitably lose the political argument, they risk ending up with a total withdrawal that abandons one of our only real allies in the muslim world. A deal now that leaves us committed to defending Kurdistan allows them to at least save face by having one success story to point to.

A reader writes:

In saying merely that the GOP has shown a contempt for gay voters, you are being far too fair. The more accurate statement is that the GOP has built its base on a political ideology that demonizes gays. And also feminists. And scientists. And anyone who doesn’t hold traditional Jewish or Christian views. That IS the culture war. When that old-fashioned God and gay hatred are used to define one side, that puts a lot of us on the other. And what are the rest of us to do, in our political efforts in a two-party system? Treat equally the party that demonizes us and the party that welcomes us?

Even if the latter party is a disorganized opposition party with historical obligations to a wide variety of special interest groups, even if one might prefer some of the specific planks of the first party, it’s hard to overlook that demonization. That counts for a lot in politics. And should. Gays, scientists, and atheists have been told by the GOP that they ARE the enemy. In practical politics, a group’s demonization by one of the two major political parties may look quite a bit like its "merger" with the other. It’s important, nonetheless, to understand the root cause of that shift.

Despite some accusations, I never intended the following post defending Fred Thompson’s right to a sex life to in any way suggest he’s gay (which strikes me as preposterous). Here’s the full post:

Outside the extremist, activist base, regular GOP voters turn out to be relatively tolerant when it comes to sexual minorities and private sex lives. They’re not well represented by their party leaders, as far as policy is concerned. This is good news for Fred Thompson. The man has had a colorful and wide-ranging sex life, as I’m sure we will soon find out.

Wonkette inferred some gay rumor, and then the blogosphere ran with it. Please. All I meant was that Thompson, as a single man, had had a lot of dates with a lot of women, something that strikes me – and a lot of Republicans as well – as completely fine. I have never heard a single gay rumor about Thompson and never intended to be interpreted as spreading one.

David Ignatius airs one:

Defense Secretary Robert Gates appears to recognize what’s necessary, politically and strategically. He is said to favor an announcement by September that the United States will withdraw some troops from Iraq before year-end as a sign that it is committed to a "post-surge" redeployment. The opportunity for a modest drawdown will arise this fall, when two battalions, several thousand troops at most, are scheduled to rotate out of Iraq. One of those is a Marine battalion in Anbar province, where the administration has been touting U.S. success. A good way to underline the gains in Anbar would be to reduce U.S. troop levels there.

Another chance for compromise is the United Nations authorization for the U.S. troop presence in Iraq, which must be renewed this year. Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki wants a plan to reduce the number of American troops in his country as much as any member of Congress does. Here’s the real opportunity for "timelines" on withdrawal — ones jointly negotiated by U.S. and Iraqi diplomats rather than imposed by Congress. In a perverse sense, that’s the greatest gift America can bestow on the Iraqi government — to engineer the joint "liberation" of Iraq from U.S. occupation, but "slowly, slowly," as the Arabs like to say.

Some thing like this will happen next year regardless. I’m not sure pulling out of areas where we have had success makes a lot of sense, though. In many ways, it seems smarter to stay in those areas where we have been able to gain traction with local power-brokers against insurgents or, in Sunni areas, pesky Qaeda-ites. But these are pragmatic decisions that will accompany withdrawal, and those decisions should be made with maximum input from commanders on the ground. The key direction is withdrawal. Making a clear declaration that we are out if there seems to me vital to shift the dynamic in Iraq to get the political decisions their dependency is impeding.

I think our withdrawal should facilitate soft partition, devolved local "government" of various sectarian forms, and tactical alliances between local leaders and US troops, combined with carefully vetted training of Iraqi troops. But I see no real prospect of reconstructing a unitary nation-state in the foreseeable future. If the process of withdrawal is clear and irreversible, then much can surely be done creatively with the process.

"The levers of power are not connected to anything," he said, adding: "We have placed all of our energies in creating the center, and the center cannot accomplish anything," – CIA director Michael Hayden on the political vacuum at the center of the region of the Middle East called Iraq. But this is the most interesting part of the Woodward piece to me:

Hayden catalogued what he saw as the main sources of violence in this order: the insurgency, sectarian strife, criminality, general anarchy and, lastly, al-Qaeda. Though Hayden had listed al-Qaeda as the fifth most pressing threat in Iraq, Bush regularly lists al-Qaeda first.

They’re still lying to us, aren’t they?

(Photo: David Furst/Getty.)

We have a winner. San Diego’s planned sky-scraper is positively flaccid compared with the "Green Bird" tower design proposed for London. No, I’m not making this up. More photos and discussion here. I’m not sure whether it is actually going to be built; but it’s a real design.

The leading gay money group did ask all the leading Republicans to attend a debate on gay issues:

The Foundation’s first ground rule was that we needed to get confirmations from at least two of the top three candidates on either side before we’d proceed with any forum. On the GOP side, Mitt Romney said no – and we never heard back from Rudy Giuliani or John McCain. That’s right: no response. Furthermore, not a single one of the Republican presidential candidates thought it was important for them to return HRC’s questionnaire. Without any responses from any of the top three Republicans, there would obviously be no GOP debate.

HRC should not be immune from criticism of its partisanship. Their decision to all but merge with the Democrats is unfortunate – but they’re not the ones fundamentally at fault here. The Republican party establishment really does exhibit contempt for gay voters. I know of no other group that doesn’t even merit a response or an issue on which so many Republicans have so little to say and staggering levels of ignorance, as was revealed in the South Carolina debate.

The firefighters fight back:

Absent some caveats, we agree again:

You speak of my party wanting to "choose defeat," while yours wants "victory." Is that stark opposition truly our only choice? Or has your party painted itself into a rhetorical corner with its polarized talk of victory and defeat? Isn’t it possible that you have created a nightmare of words from which we cannot wake up? I don’t regard the prudent preservation of American lives and treasure as a "defeat" but rather as a sensible acknowledgment of the reality principle. Not all of our desires, hopes, and ideals can come to pass. That is the human condition.

You say that if we don’t stay and win in Iraq, we’ll be back there in 10 years. I think you might well be correct. The Iraq chaos, which we instrumentally helped foment, will probably spread and destabilize the entire Middle East — a momentum that has already begun. By removing that despicable autocrat, Saddam Hussein, we conveniently did Iran’s work. There’s no stopping the jockeying of power now — Iran eyeing Iraq’s Shiite territories; Turkey ready to smash the independence movement among Kurds (who have been playing the United States for a fool).

But next time around, we will hopefully have the support of other powers in the region, such as Saudi Arabia (a corruption-riddled regime with strong Bush ties), which can’t afford the implosion of Iraq. Meanwhile, the massacre of our hapless soldiers, along with the waste of billions of our tax dollars, must stop. There is no clear way to define "victory" in this folly — which tried to jump-start Western democracy in a country with none of our long traditions of civil law or free speech.

It’s hard to remember now, but there was a time when writers didn’t use computers. Here’s a flashback to 1982 in the Atlantic, wherein Jim Fallows describes his first computer-writing experience:

I skip past the day during which I thought the computer didn’t work at all (missing fuse) and the week or two it took me to understand all the moves The Electric Pencil could make. From that point on, I knew there was a heaven.

What was so exciting? Merely the elimination of all drudgery, except for the fundamental drudgery of figuring out what to say, from the business of writing. The process works this way.

When I sit down to write a letter or start the first draft of an article, I simply type on the keyboard and the words appear on the screen. For six months, I found it awkward to compose first drafts on the computer. Now I can hardly do it any other way. It is faster to type this way than with a normal typewriter, because you don’t need to stop at the end of the line for a carriage return (the computer automatically "wraps" the words onto the next line when you reach the right-hand margin), and you never come to the end of the page, because the material on the screen keeps sliding up to make room for each new line. It is also more satisfying to the soul, because each maimed and misconceived passage can be made to vanish instantly, by the word or by the paragraph, leaving a pristine green field on which to make the next attempt.