Category: The Dish

We’ll be drawing down troops in Iraq next spring regardless of the posturing in Washington. The reason is quite simple, as Joe Klein explains:

There is another clock, not often mentioned, that sits in the Pentagon. It is the Broken Army clock, the service timeline for an exhausted force. Petraeus and his staff were deeply concerned when rumors of another tour extension, from the current 15 months for soldiers, spread in mid-June. "It would be a last resort," Secretary of Defense Robert Gates told reporters — but troop morale is so iffy that Petraeus quietly urged his commanders to "get the word out" to their soldiers that the extension rumors were false.

According to the Broken Army clock, troop levels will begin to wane in March 2008, no matter what Congress decides in September; the current 20 brigade combat teams will be reduced to 15 by August 2008. There is growing speculation in the military that Bush will try to pre-empt the Petraeus testimony by announcing a gradual drawdown from 20 to 15 combat brigades later this summer. "As if that isn’t going to happen anyway," a senior officer told me. "But it may give us some political breathing space" — that is, it may subvert the Democrats’ calls for a more rapid withdrawal — "if the President makes a big deal of announcing we’re drawing down."

The war is coming to an end. Beware the looming spin.

That’s how Michael Gerson sees a free market society. Yes, he was for Jimmy Carter. And then George W. Bush. And he gets his political theory from online gaming.

Up more than a third over 2006. Surging is expensive.

Gerard Baker worries about a p.r. coup:

Let’s never lose sight of a simple chilling fact that unites the suicidal maniacs in Britain and the sweet reasonable hostage-saviours in Gaza. Hamas was the big winner this week. That makes us all, whether we’re sipping beers in pavement cafes in Israel, boarding planes in Glasgow or out for a ladies’ night in the Haymarket, much, much less safe.

Just because the Republican blogs are steadfastly ignoring this is a good reason to stay focused. Matt’s question remains foremost in my mind:

If there really was no crime – then it seems we ought to get some kind of explanation from Libby as to why he lied.

Quite. Or from Libby’s defenders. If you go back and read my archives on this, you’ll find I was simply puzzled from the start. None of it made much sense to me back then. In retrospect, it makes much better sense today, after all we have found out about how this administration functions. My best guess is that the explanation for Libby’s perjury is pretty obvious. For Libby and Cheney to take the risk of outing a CIA operative’s cover (and even if there was some doubt about the law and her status, it was still a risk), they must have had a very pressing reason. It may be that they were just engaged in aggressive press manipulation to keep their own story out here. Let’s give them the benefit of the doubt, shall we? But why so aggressive as to risk law-breaking? Why the risk for a careful lawyer like Libby? Why not just write another op-ed refuting the claims? I still have no explanation unless Libby had something major to hide and Cheney something major to fear.

Like the fact that he and Cheney knew the WMD evidence was weak, misled us, and then, busted more brutally than they ever expected, tried to cover their tracks. We can’t know this yet for sure. But it surely remains the most plausible explanation for the entire affair.

It means of course that they knowingly exaggerated the causes for war. That’s why this story still rankles, because it’s the closest the outside world has really gotten to the real nexus of decision-making on Iraq that obviously took place in Cheney’s circle. I can still just about believe that Bush thought the WMD case was sound. I can’t believe, given all that we now know, that Cheney did. He’s too smart. The data he read, we now know, was far more equivocal than the data the public was provided with. He’s not new at this. He probably never wanted to make the WMD argument anyway, put it in to appease the UN crowd, and certainly wasn’t going to query its validity. We may never know, of course, because Cheney will have destroyed the evidence, but if I had to guess, I’d say it’s obvious Cheney knew all along that the WMD line was a cover, not a real threat, but realized by the summer of 2003 that any hint of this leaking (even from a two-bit blowhard like Wilson) needed swift and brutal rebuttal. They were embarrassed enough by the WMD bust, but if it was revealed that they had ignored all the caveats beforehand, it could get really dicey. One has to assume that Libby and Cheney are indistinguishable in their knowledge and involvement. Miller was also trying to cover her tracks that, in retrospect, had begun to look shady. Hence the weird Cheney-coordinated hit on Wilson and Plame. Hence Libby’s clumsy perjury. Has Libby ever done something as clumsy in his entire life? Sometimes, even the smoothest cannot escape their own lies.

That’s not just worth 30 months in jail. It’s worth impeachment. At this point, I think the weight of the evidence suggests they did all this. Maybe the deception crept in after the fact. But I know from the torture debate that they are all capable of bald-faced lies to hide embarrassment and advance their agenda. Why would they not have deliberately deceived us about WMDs before the war?

Well, it worked. I believed them. Many of you did as well. We trusted them. And they got away with it. The one man whose perjury did threaten to hold him, in some minor way, accountable has been reprieved by the man at the top of the decision-tree for war, and given every incentive not to get bitter and start talking. Is there a simpler explanation?

(Photo: Mark Wilson/Getty.)

A classic:

"Will the student deferments for these fellows never end? The act reeks of cronyism. The perception is that Scooter Libby got preferential treatment, a get-out-of-jail-free card because he was chief of staff to Cheney and assistant to Bush. That perception is correct. Because of whom he knew, Scooter got preferential treatment, big-time. The Godfather took care of the consigliere.

Nothing new. After all, one recalls that the attorney who rustled up a pardon for Marc Rich from Bill Clinton was also a Beltway hustler by the name of Scooter Libby. The insiders take care of their own. And that is how the game is played in the big city."

A college contemporary dies. I never went to any of his fabulous parties, alas. I wasn’t the right sort. The Telegraph provides the best obit:

Count Gottfried von Bismarck, who was found dead on Monday aged 44, was a louche German aristocrat with a multi-faceted history as a pleasure-seeking heroin addict, hell-raising alcoholic, flamboyant waster and a reckless and extravagant host of homosexual orgies.

The great-great-grandson of Prince Otto, Germany’s Iron Chancellor and architect of the modern German state, the young von Bismarck showed early promise as a brilliant scholar, but led an exotic life of gilded aimlessness that attracted the attention of the gossip columns from the moment he arrived in Oxford in 1983 and hosted a dinner at which the severed heads of two pigs were placed at either end of the table.

When not clad in the lederhosen of his homeland, he cultivated an air of sophisticated complexity by appearing in women’s clothes, set off by lipstick and fishnet stockings. This aura of dangerous "glamour" charmed a large circle of friends and acquaintances drawn from the jeunesse dorée of the age; many of them knew him at Oxford, where he made friends such as Darius Guppy and Viscount Althorp and became an enthusiastic, rubber-clad member of the Piers Gaveston Society and the drink-fuelled Bullingdon and Loders clubs.

Perhaps unsurprisingly he managed only a Third in Politics, Philosophy and Economics.

I love that last "perhaps". May he and all his late fellow-partiers rest in peace. Another charming obit for a dead British homosexual with less self-destructive tendencies also appeared yesterday: of the fabulous George Melly.

A new blog shepherded by Juan Cole; and a sane proposal:

Attention now needs to shift to holding back the forces unleashed in Iraq from spreading more widely. US credibility is now very limited in the region. We need to think in multilateral terms. We need to think in political and not military terms. We need to launch a political initiative along with the European Union in support of a political process led by the moderate countries of the region to do the necessary to halt the spreading cancer and to stabilise Iraq.

There are now more U.S. contractors in Iraq than actual soldiers. IraqSlogger has a helpful and balanced round-up of reports on mercenaries and private contractors in Iraq. He focuses on T. Christian Miller’s LA Times story:

Miller’s watershed piece focuses on the vast scope and scale of for profit activities in Iraq. Companies that are virtually unknown in the US are shoulder to shoulder with better-known names like KBR or L-3. What is disturbing is even the U.S. government freely admits it has no idea how many contractors are on the battlefield.

Miller’s best guess is 21,000 Americans, 43,000 foreigners and 118,000 Iraqis make up this massive work force. “Best guess” because Miller points out that

"There are also signs that even those mounting numbers may not capture the full picture. Private security contractors, who are hired to protect government officials and buildings, were not fully counted in the survey, according to industry and government officials."

Miller also points out that there is concern about the use of privatized for profit violence in the battlefield. He builds on previous articles that have highlighted alleged and egregious violations of moral conduct by individual security contractors working for companies like Blackwater, Triple Canopy and Aegis

"We don’t have control of all the coalition guns in Iraq. That’s dangerous for our country," said William Nash, a retired Army general and reconstruction expert. The Pentagon "is hiring guns. You can rationalize it all you want, but that’s obscene."

The other concern is the use of trafficked labor to perform functions once performed by U.S. soldiers and employees.

Another vent from Marty Peretz:

It was from the beginning a politically motivated case, as Dershowitz argues in this morning’s Post, the appointment of the special prosecutor, the prosecutor’s own obsessions, the case itself with the doubtful and understandably doubtful but diverse memories of many witnesses, including the defendant, the especially harsh sentence pronounced by the judge, the refusal of the appellate court to continue Libby on bail – all of these were politically motivated.

This is an argument? Marty does not provide a scintilla of evidence that any of these things was "politically motivated". Not one. How was John Ashcroft’s appointment of a special prosecutor politically motivated? What exactly are Patrick Fitzgerald’s unnamed "obsessions"? How is the sentence out of line with usual standards endorsed by the Bush Justice Department? How does Marty know that faulty memory as oposed to lying is why the jury convicted Libby of perjury? He knows none of these things. So he just repeats his assertions loudly, as if volume is a substitute for reason. It isn’t.