Category: The Dish

The small British withdrawal from Basra is not a watershed. Its miminal nature and indeterminate timing make it the least that Blair can still do to appease the overwhelming sense of public opinion in Britain, while not rupturing the alliance, or leaving irresponsibly. It is not, whatever the unhinged vice-president says, a sign of great success. Blair, a man of good faith who is yet another victim of this presidency, was candid about that:

"What all this means is not that Basra is how we want it to be," Mr. Blair said, "but it does mean that the next chapter in Basra’s history can be written by Iraqis." The city, he said, "is still a difficult and dangerous place."

What’s more telling is how unpopular the war is in Britain, and how an entire generation of Brits have now grown up thinking of the United States as a bullying, torturing force for instability in the world. That’s not the America I love – but it is the image of America that Bush and Cheney have built for the largest generation of human beings ever to grow up on the planet. In Italy, the government has fallen because there is no longer support for even a minimal presence in Afghanistan, let alone Iraq.

Soft power can be over-hyped. It’s no substitute for military prowess. But soft power still matters. Once, for all the residual anti-Americanism out there, it was a significant plus for the U.S. Bush has somehow managed to give the U.S. a soft-power deficit – in a war against some of the most barbaric, evil enemies we have ever faced. That really is an achievement. And it will take another generation to fix it. It’s one reason Obama is so appealing, I think. Electing him after Bush-Cheney would amount to the strongest signal that America is moving past the Bush-Cheney era. That’s a message the world is desperate to hear, and it would make enlisting more allies in the war against Islamist terror much easier.

(Photo: Peter McDiarmid/Getty.)

It doesn’t look like a quick verdict. The jury has requested a "large flip chart, marking tape, post-it notes" and "any one of the documents where there are pictures of the witnesses." PDF documents here and here.

HBO has an important documentary debuting tonight at 9.30 pm on the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld policy of torturing terror suspects. It’s directed by Rory Kennedy. Here’s a brief interview with her. She began the documentary interested in the psychology of people who torture others. But when torturer after torturer told her that they were following instructions, she pursued an investigation. Some don’t want us to go there. Some want to euphemize it. Some want to describe it as self-actuated. The evidence won’t allow us such easy outs. This happened. It was policy. Under mercifully more constrained conditions, it still is. And something deep in America has died. We can, I think, discuss whether such a shift away from America’s historic abhorrence of torture is somehow necessary. But before we can debate that, we have to face the truth. America is now a torturing nation.

Albany, New York, midnight.

The war between Cheney and McCain went up a notch again yesterday, and I’m glad McCain isn’t taking the abuse and condescension lying down. Money quote:

When asked about the administration’s environmental record, Mr. McCain said, "I would assess this administration’s record on global warming as terrible."

Asked by a reporter about his comments about Mr. Rumsfeld, Mr. McCain said, "The criticism of the conduct of the war I have voiced for more than three years when I saw that this train wreck was taking place."

Some minutes later, after the news conference had ended, Mr. McCain, unbidden, said to the reporter, "Sir, I stand by my comments about Secretary Rumsfeld, by the way."

It’s good to see a simple and accurate phrase deployed to describe the Bush-Cheney war in Iraq: a train wreck. It’s also good to see a leading Republican place the blame squarely on Rumsfeld. McCain, it seems to me, grasps two essential facts in a way few others do. Those two facts are that America is a nation dedicated to the rule of law; and we are engaged in a lethal war with ruthless and fanatical enemies. He also believes in crafting domestic policy to address actual problems, rather than to support electorally important constituencies. His isolation in today’s Republican party is a sign of its sickness, not health. And the compromises the man has made to stay even faintly viable in such an atmosphere have made that sickness worse.

I should add that, at this point, the vice-president should have the self-respect to keep his views to himself. He does not realize it but he is a ridiculous figure. The record of his public statements over the last few years, from the idiotic "last throes" comment to the absurd "enormous successes" boast have rendered him a deeply unserious public official. The fact that he is ridiculous does not, alas, make him any the less dangerous to the constitution or to the successful conduct of the war. There is plenty of damage he can still wreak, given the chance.

You thought Bob Corker was unscrupulous? You don’t remember George Wallace. (Well, I was five and in England.)

Jonah Goldberg runs an interesting email from a partisan Republican. It reminds me how much the base really does suspect McCain. Money quote:

The big problem with McCain is that he repeatedly takes a high profile stand for the Democrats on important partisan issues. He does this on important policies like W’s tax cuts and torture legislation, and of course campaign finance. Even on the war he has often given credibility to the left’s rhetoric about Rumsfeld, torture, administration incompetence, etc., even though he’s been solid on the core substance. Its not just that he occasionally votes with the Democrats, its that he’s willing to become their chief spokesman when he does it. Sure he may hold conservative views on 80% of the issues, but the other 20% seems to be what he really cares about.

What’s interesting to me is that the writer doesn’t actually discuss the merits of the issues involved. On the vital matter of a critical war, what is important is not whether a Republican senator address failures or missteps, but that he either support the administration’s talking points or side with the Democrats. That’s the only relevant choice. You see here the poisonous influence of faction, as the founders feared, inhibiting critical debates about strategy in wartime. But it is good to see more candor from the emailer. The president has indeed proposed and had enacted "torture legislation". The bad news is that the mainstream right now acknowledges the authorization of torture and supports it.

"The Road To Serfdom" in cartoons. Just 18 pages!

There is hope for the gay rights movement – just don’t expect it from the failed Hillary cronies at the Human Rights Campaign. Here’s a fascinating piece by Josh Green in the new Atlantic on the efforts of mega-wealthy Tim Gill, founder of Quark, to jump-start gay political organizing. Believe it or not, Gill’s people are actually organizing in several states; they have outreach to … Republicans! And they are getting results. Money quote:

In 2000, [Gill] gave $300,000 in political donations, which grew to $800,000 in 2002, $5 million in 2004, and a staggering $15 million last year, almost all of it to state and local campaigns… On Election Day, fifty of the seventy targeted candidates were defeated, Danny Carroll among them; and out of the thirteen states where Gill and his allies invested, four — Iowa, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Washington — saw control of at least one legislative chamber switch to the Democratic Party.

But Gill is too smart to believe that gay equality will be achieved through the Democratic party alone. He comes from a Republican family, has made some key Republican hires, and hopes one day to give equally to both parties. It’s an obvious strategy – focused, bipartisan, local. Funny how the Human Rights Campaign has sucked millions out of gay wallets and never achieved anything like this success. Still, they have a big new building, more fundraisers than lobbyists, and lots of jobs lined up for the Hillary administration. By their own objectives, they’re doing fine. But their record in national legislation? Close to absolutely nothing.

A chronology.