Category: The Dish

"I would not leave the region. I would not even threaten to leave the region. The idea that by threatening to leave the region will cause the political players to become sufficiently frightened that they will get their act together politically—I don’t necessarily believe that. I would stay in the region because we cannot afford this to become a regional conflict, but we might need to back away from the center of the conflict and let that fire burn, while keeping our troops in the north and perhaps on the southern border. And there is much that we can do, to keep both Iran and their Sunni neighbors from coming in massively to augment that conflict between the Shi‘a and the Sunnis. To let the fire burn in the center—this is an Arab conflict; it’s not Kurdish conflict; it’s an Arab-Sunni-Shi‘a conflict—and let conflict burn itself out," РGeneral Charles G. Boyd, National Interest.

That’s pretty much where I’ve come out on this. Get to Kurdistan and the borders and let them have their civil war. We can even exploit it for our own purposes, if we get smart enough.

A reader writes:

I agree with Rod Dreher, and with you, except that I am not "conflicted to be called" a conservative. I am still conservative, whether or not the Republican White House and congress were true to conservative principles.

However, the failure was really one that religious people have talked about for centuries: pride.  I think all of the greatest Republican errors over the past six years were committed as the result of it.  Politicians are never very short on it, are they? I do think that Bush had good motivations in invading Iraq, whether to find WMDs or to topple the cruel Hussein regime, but only pride and arrogance can explain the attempt to establish democracy in the Middle East, especially in an Islamic country.  He meant well, perhaps, but there never really was a chance. The old-fashioned religious virtue of humility would not have changed anything about 9/11, but might have prevented the current mess in the Middle East and the foreign policy disaster that has followed.

This is why conservatives stand not only for fiscal responsibility and governmental restraint, but also for traditional values. There might be some we should give up, but not hurriedly and definitely not without a careful analysis of the costs.

If by traditional values, we mean honesty, manners, personal responsibility, marriage, family and friendship, then I’m for them as well. If they mean government’s intervention in people’s bedrooms, end-of-life and reproductive decisions, and religious beliefs, then I’m against them.

Hong Kong, 9.22 am.

Dan Drezner sees through the flim-flam:

[W]hat Bush is proposing now is exactly what happened in Vietnam, Beirut and Somalia.  In each case:

1) The United States suffered a pivotal attack that altered their perception of the enemy (the Tet Offensive, the 1983 Beirut barracks bombing, and the 1993 Black Hawk Down incident);

2) The American response at some point after the attack was a show of escalation, not de-escalation (Nixon/Kissinger escalation in Vietnam, naval and air bombardments in Lebanon, six-month force expansion in Somalia);

3) After this display of strength, the U.S. withdraws;

4) Despite the increase in forces and retaliatory attacks, everyone recognizes the withdrawal for what it was.

I see very little reason to go through this charade again … but I’m willing to listen to commenters who disagree. To them, I must ask – how will the surge option be anything other than a more grandiose version of the Clinton administration’s response to the Somalia bombings?

What Glenn says – I agree with every word of it.

I don’t really know Rod Dreher very well. Our friendship has been entirely via email, and for a while back, it seemed he was none too fond of my work. But I always found in him, even when I disagreed with him, a passionate honesty, especially about the big things in life (faith, life, death, justice). So I’m not surprised that Rod has been driven to a moment of political catharsis by the last few years. He has already been condescended to by Jonah Goldberg, a man for whom the mention of "conscience’ is greeted with a scoff. But Rod’s honest words about what has been done by Bush ring true to me. They do not deserve to be dismissed as some kind of reversion to a cliche-ridden hippiedom. They deserve to be seen as the honest attempt of a conservative to ask himself: what were those people, for all their extremes and failures, actually trying to say? Is there any merit to it? Have we re-learned a lesson some of them artlessly may have tried to convey forty years ago?

Here’s a section of Rod’s NPR cri de coeur that Glenn Greenwald has also noticed:

As President Bush marched the country to war with Iraq, even some voices on the Right warned that this was a fool’s errand. I dismissed them angrily. I thought them unpatriotic.

But almost four years later, I see that I was the fool. In Iraq, this Republican President for whom I voted twice has shamed our country with weakness and incompetence, and the consequences of his failure will be far, far worse than anything Carter did.

The fraud, the mendacity, the utter haplessness of our government’s conduct of the Iraq war have been shattering to me. It wasn’t supposed to turn out like this. Not under a Republican President.

I turn 40 next month – middle aged at last – a time of discovering limits, finitude. I expected that. But what I did not expect was to see the limits of finitude of American power revealed so painfully. I did not expect Vietnam. As I sat in my office last night watching President Bush deliver his big speech, I seethed over the waste, the folly, the stupidity of this war.

I had a heretical thought for a conservative – that I have got to teach my kids that they must never, ever take Presidents and Generals at their word – that their government will send them to kill and die for noble-sounding rot – that they have to question authority.

On the walk to the parking garage, it hit me. Hadn’t the hippies tried to tell my generation that? Why had we scorned them so blithely?

Will my children, too small now to understand Iraq, take me seriously when I tell them one day what powerful men, whom their father once believed in, did to this country? Heavy thoughts for someone who is still a conservative despite it all. It was a long drive home.

I had dinner recently with a former Bush official. I was taken aback by the horror now felt even by those who once worked for Bush at the consequence of his recklessness. For my part, this experience has shaken me too to my roots, which is why I felt the need just to clarify for myself why I was once so proud to be a conservative, and why I am now so deeply conflicted to be called one.

Fish Island, London, 4.08 pm.

They’ve never really gotten along, have they? But the more you think about it, the threats of a Pentagon official, Cully Stimson, against lawyers doing a constitutional duty defending terror suspects speaks volumes about the core malice of this administration. Sources among the heroic community of pro bono lawyers who are defending some of the innocent and some of the guilty at Gitmo tell me that Stimson’s comments are not isolated, that there has been a full program dedicated to the harassment of Gitmo lawyers – surveillance, pettty harassment, pressure on their law firms. Now ask yourself: why would a government that has competently captured and detained dangerous terrorists not want good legal defenses for them to show beyond a doubt that they have been fairly detained? The Bush administration acts and sounds like a defensive police state when it comes to terrorism detainees. Maybe that’s because, in many cases of competely unfair detention, they are.

Of course, there’s one way to make amends: fire Stimson and end the campaign of harassment.

The National Interest has a constantly expanding symposium. Check it out.

A reader writes:

I’m behind on my reading and am just now getting through The Conservative Soul.  I’m only about 60 pages into it now, in the midst of your dissection of fundamentalism, and I have to say – as someone raised in a fundamentalist home, as someone who at one time was among the most fundamental of fundamentalists, believing the Bible to be inerrant, and so on – I don’t think I’ve read a more clear, honest, understandable assessment of fundamentalism, its logic, its allure, and its dangers.

There’s a semi-obscure quotation from Sir Francis Bacon that has become a motto of sorts for me, in my middle years:

"If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties."

The fundamentalist will never understand the beauty of that statement; conservatives must, if they wish to "get back" the "soul" they have "lost."

Thank you for capturing what so many conservatives are thinking but have not yet had the forum or talent to articulate.