The Dish

Fouad Ajami declares a Shia state in Iraq a near-inevitability and urges the US to come to terms with it. The whole essay is worth a read, as all Ajami essays are. He sees the new power-structure and detects resignation among the Sunnis to their impending defeat. Nothing in the essay suggests that the civil war will end any time soon; much of it argues that we should maintain support for Maliki and/or Chalabi, while the war grinds on. The debate we’ve been having may end up in a somewhat banal place: how swiftly or slowly to begin the withdrawal. That kind of prudential judgment will have to be left to the major players. I expect no subtlety or deftness from Bush-Cheney, but the next president might have some opportunities. Money quote:

One can never reconcile the beneficiaries of illegitimate, abnormal power to the end of their dominion. But this current re-alignment in Iraq carries with it a gift for the possible redemption of modern Islam among the Arabs. Hitherto Sunni Islam had taken its hegemony for granted and extremist strands within it have shown a refusal to accept "the other." Conversely, Shia history has been distorted by weakness and exclusion and by a concomitant abdication of responsibility.

A Shia-led state in Baghdad – with a strong Kurdish presence in it and a big niche for the Sunnis – can go a long way toward changing the region’s terrible habits and expectations of authority and command. The Sunnis would still be hegemonic in the Arab councils of power beyond Iraq, but their monopoly would yield to the pluralism and complexity of that region.

"Watch your adjectives" is the admonition given American officers by Gen. Petraeus. In Baghdad, Americans and Iraqis alike know that this big endeavor has entered its final, decisive phase. Iraq has surprised and disappointed us before, but as they and we watch our adjectives there can be discerned the shape of a new country, a rough balance of forces commensurate with the demography of the place and with the outcome of a war that its erstwhile Sunni rulers had launched and lost. We made this history and should now make our peace with it.

(Photo: Iraqi Shiites and supporters of firebrand Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr shout slogans during an anti-US rally, in the holy city of Najaf, 09 April 2007. Thousands of Shiites carrying Iraqi flags converged in the holy city of Najaf for an anti-US rally called by radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr as the war-torn country marked the fourth anniversary of the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime. By Ahmad Al-Rubaye.)

A domestic partnership bill passes – with more rights and responsibilities for gay couples. There are several models unfolding across America. We have one state with real marriage rights (but no federal recognition). We have several other states with full civil or spousal unions that are identical to civil marriage in all but name. We have several more states where weaker civil unions and domestic partnerships exist. Then we have many where gay couples have no rights at all. And we have Virginia, which has constitutionally declared gay people in relationships as second-class citizens (that’s where Mary Cheney and her wife and forthcoming child live). Within a few years, we’ll begin to see what all this means, whether civil marriage collapses or declines in gay-inclusive states or recovers in states where stigmatizing gays has been deemed an incentive for straight couples to stay together. I have a feeling the impact on the general population will be minimal in most cases. The point of persecuting minorities is very often the persecution of minorities. It has no other effect. And it really isn’t intended to.

It shouldn’t be an issue for him – and it seems very shrewd to tackle it early and head-on. I must say, though, that the unbridled enthusiasm for Thompson on the right strikes me as more of a sign of the inadequacies of the present field than of the actual merits of Thompson. Conservatives, moreover, should not be looking for saviors. They should be looking for prudence and competence, for a change.

… with a technical difficulty.

Gob-smackingly so, of late. Pious doesn’t quite capture the guy’s preening vacuousness. Dean Barnett has just dug up the latest gem by Williams about the blogosphere:

"You’re going to be up against people who have an opinion, a modem, and a bathrobe. All of my life, developing credentials to cover my field of work, and now I’m up against a guy named Vinny in an efficiency apartment in the Bronx who hasn’t left the efficiency apartment in two years."

You looking at me? You looking at me? I wouldn’t mess with Vinny, would you?

I mentioned Rick Hertzberg’s dogged, Jack-Russell-like refusal to let go of the electoral college as an anachronism. Here are two pieces by him on that theme – here (go to final graf if the rest too boring) and here. I’ve never known someone as urbane and easy-going as Rick get so animated by something as dry as the electoral college. But that’s what makes him Rick: unlike me, he’s passionate about democracy. (I tend to get more passionate about liberty, and constitutional restraints, but all former TNR editors are weird in their own ways.)

A self-indulgence: a 1910 map from the Boston Public Library that allows you to navigate from street to street and wharf to wharf in Provincetown, Massachusetts. I think I’ve made out the wharf I live on each summer. But a lot has changed since 1910. Except everything, of course.

The Bush administration doesn’t quite realize it yet, but the president and vice-president will, in the future, become moral pariahs to a lot of people. Not pariah in the sense of Clinton, whose sexual addiction evokes both pity and anger that he kept lying about it. And not pariah in the sense of Nixon, who committed a crime against his opponents, his office and the constitution. What the revulsion of Brigham Young students – yes, Brigham Young students – suggests is that for many of the next generation of natural Republican supporters, Bush and Cheney are moral pariahs. Their wartime deceptions, their skewing of intelligence to suit their preferences, their authorization of torture, their renditions policy, Gitmo, Abu Ghraib, the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis in a bungled war, their warrant-free wiretaping: all of it combines to give us quotes like this from a devout Mormon student:

"The problem is this is a morally dubious man," said Andrew Christensen, a 22-year-old Republican from Salt Lake City [of Dick Cheney]. "It’s challenging the morality and integrity of this institution."

As Dan Drezner points out, the Bush administration cannot get leading figures in the military to take over the job of a new war czar, and West Point is seeing a sharp spike in graduates leaving the military altogether. When a Republican administration has lost Mormons and the military, you know it’s entering the twilight zone of collapse. I wonder if Bush or Cheney are even capable of understanding that – or the reputation that will cling to them for the rest of their lives.

(Photo: Win McNamee/Getty.)

"All great religions, in order to escape absurdity, have to admit a dilution of agnosticism. It is only the savage, whether of the African bush or the American gospel tent, who pretends to know the will and intent of God exactly and completely. "For who hath known the mind of the Lord?" asked Paul of the Romans. "How unsearchable are His judgments, and His was past finding out." "It is the glory of God," said Solomon, "to conceal a thing." "Clouds and darkness," said David, "are around Him." "No man," said the Preacher, "can find out the work of God." … The difference between religions is a difference in their relative content of agnosticism. The most satisfying and ecstatic faith is almost purely agnostic. It trusts absolutely without professing to know at all," – H. L. Mencken.

Another take.