The Dish

A reader writes:

I’ll make a neo-conservative critique of Iraq that is honest. The basic neo-conservative premise for going into Iraq was to effect democratic political and social change in the Arab world and in the Middle East, where the ruling kleptocracies and totalitarian states have crushed all hope in the general population and created a rancid environment in which hate and extremism is rampant. This basic premise – that the root of the problem in the Middle East lies with its dysfunctional ruling classes – is correct as far as it goes. It of course, needs to be more honest and further note that much of the present structure of the Middle East is rooted in its historical culture and social development going back literally thousands of years, and is one in which Islam and its lack of a chuch/state divide is a major contributing factor.  Nevertheless, the intervention into Iraq was made with the prospects of bringing, by force and by softer means, a change in this governing ethos in the Middle East.

I still believe in this basic concept, however, I am much chastened by the overweening and unrealistic optimism I and others like me felt at the onset of the Iraq experiment. In particular we were wrong about the place and time for effecting such change. In our hubris, we glossed over in many ways the longterm consequences coming from Saddam Hussein’s deposition.

However, the biggest single mistake neoconservatives made was that we placed our faith in the abilities of what has turned out to be a singularly incompetent administration. In the mission’s basic planning, forecasting, and execution, this administration has almost uniformly made the wrong choices for Iraq’s stabilization and progress. What the leftist and media critics get wrong about Rumsfeld, Cheney and Bush is that they screwed up by going in halfhearted and without demanding real sacrifice upfront from the American people. Rumsfeld sacked the Chairman of the JCS for speaking honestly and saying correctly that it would take hundreds of thousands of troops over several years to truly "win" Iraq.  That should have been a red flag to us all.  But conservatives and a lot of moderates rallied around Bush and Co. because of the unfair attacks from the left and the media, whose objectivity was never in evidence, and in doing so we ratified and enabled every bad decision Bush and Co. made in Iraq.

By the time we realized where we were, it was probably too late to save the experiment in anything but a very watered down version of what it was intended to be:  a de facto partitioned Iraq held together by a surged American offensive until the Shiite majority can join the Kurds in securing their territory, and (hopefully) with a growing number of Sunnis deciding to make their way in a Shiite-dominated status quo while the Americans still wield influence over events.

I still have some optimism, very long term, for the Iraq experiment.  But it is obvious now that it was a mission chosen by this Administration at the wrong time, in the wrong place and most certainly with the wrong means of bringing about its ultimate accomplishment.  In hindsight, we should have gotten Bin Laden first, wiped out the Taliban, forced Pakistan to secure its "wild west territories" either on its own or with the intervention of US troops, and gradually stepped up pressure on Saddam to become a good international citizen.  In doing so, we would still be in a position to effect changes in political attitudes in the ME, would have a much more secure Pakistan and Afghanistan, and we wouldn’t have an emboldened and largely unchecked Iran on our hands.  And we wouldn’t have 3,000+ probably wasted lives and several hundred billion dollars spent on what looks to be a marginal gain at best, and at worst a political debacle for American power and influence.

This is almost exactly my view. It doesn’t exculpate me from what I once supported; but it’s honest. And honesty is a start.

"I want creation to penetrate you with so much admiration that everywhere, wherever you may be, the least plant may bring to you the clear remembrance of the Creator … One blade of grass or one speck of dust is enough to occupy your entire mind in beholding the art with which it has been made," – St. Basil the Great.

The NBA gets tough.

The American Psychological Association is struggling over a proposed moratorium on trained psychologists at the torture sites run by the Bush administration for designated "enemy combatants."

A reader writes:

I’m a born and raised liberal from the California Republic. Although I now live in Philly,  I have impeccable hippy credentials: danced naked with Jefferson Airplane, called my parents by their first name, ate home-made granola, went to Powwows…

Imagine my shock when, just moments ago, my daughter asked me how to find your website. My 9 year old atheist liberal daughter, home on spring break.

"Mama said I could."

That horse…  That dancing horse has potentially done more for true conservatism than anything the Republicans have ever tried.

LOL. Here’s the horse again.

It is, one hopes, the sign of things to come. Consumers need to start demanding that all meat and poultry products come labeled as cruelty-free or not. The market is already responding:

In what animal welfare advocates are describing as a ‘historic advance,’ Burger King, the world’s second-largest hamburger chain, said yesterday that it would begin buying eggs and pork from suppliers that did not confine their animals in cages and crates.

The company said that it would also favor suppliers of chickens that use gas, or “controlled-atmospheric stunning,” rather than electric shocks to knock birds unconscious before slaughter. It is considered a more humane method, though only a handful of slaughterhouses use it.

The goal for the next few months, Burger King said is for 2 percent of its eggs to be ‘cage free,’ and for 10 percent of its pork to come from farms that allow sows to move around inside pens, rather than being confined to crates. The company said those percentages would rise as more farmers shift to these methods and more competitively priced supplies become available.

I’m a McDonalds fan, but I’m switching. The more of us do it, the more likely it is that the rest of the food industry will follow Burger King’s lead.

How do we keep up with the nightmare of Iraq? You get numb, until some new atrocity leaps out from the void:

In Kirkuk, residents walked in shocked silence behind a funeral procession for two nuns, who were sisters and longtime residents of the city. They were killed early Tuesday.

Sister Margaret Saour, 80, and Sister Fadhila Saour, 71, were known in their neighborhood for their devotion to the church and to charitable works. On Monday, they attended evening prayers at the Chaldean cathedral, said one of the cathedral’s priests, the Rev. Saoor Shamel.

Their last minutes were filled with terror. After midnight, gunmen entered the nuns’ house, which is near the Kirkuk government building. They shot Sister Margaret, who was blind, and then turned to Sister Fadhila. Terrified, she tried to flee, but before she could cross the yard, the attackers stabbed her to death, according to Col. Taha Salah, the Qouriya neighborhood police chief.

There is one thing that this president has gotten right in this war. We face an enemy that at its core is pure evil. It’s a tragedy that he has gotten almost everything else wrong. And evil is therefore winning the early battles of this war.

Even NRO is ditching him.

Is environmentalism becoming a form of religion? This is a meme sometimes found on the anti-enviro right, and in some extreme cases, they have a point. There is something fundamentalist about those who think of the earth as somehow an entity to be obeyed rather than a place to be simply lived in. The totalism of some animal rights activists has the smack of rigid orthodoxy. We all know how green the roots of the Nazi party were.

But this is an extreme fringe. For the vast majority of people who care about the environment, the impulse is usually to preserve something we love. At its root, this is a conservative impulse. In America, in particular, love of the land has long been a part of patriotism. And where religious faith appears, it isn’t necessarily a paean to Gaia. "America, The Beautiful" is an environmentalist hymn. America’s greatest poets, Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, are intoxicated with the natural beauty of this continent. Part of their intoxication is their sense of the divine saturating the natural. Read Thoreau or Emerson and the same American interaction with nature is palpable. Americans, after all, forged a relationship with wilderness more recently than any Europeans. And there is, therefore, a deeply patriotic form of green thought in America that has been overly neglected by environmentalists and that can and should be reclaimed by political leaders, especially on the right.

There is also, it seems to me, an authentically religious approach to the environment that is completely orthodox and defensible. Christians believe that we have dominion over the earth, and that dominion carries with it a responsibility not just to the creatures we control but to the earth and sea and sky we inhabit. This has been on my mind this week watching the ravishing new series, Planet Earth on Discovery HD Theater. It’s a collaboration with the BBC and took five years to make. They use innovative camera techniques – floating a self-stabilizing camera from a balloon to glide across the tree-tops of rain forests or diving equipment to capture the diversity and beauty of the ocean depths. And they photograph everything in high definition. It’s lung-filling in its capacity to provoke wonder. If you want to know why this planet is worth conserving, watch it.

Mercifully, the narration (impeccably done by Sigourney Weaver) doesn’t get too preachy. Nor does it spare us the brutality of the wild. But the impact of seeing the planet in this detail is enough to drive anyone to environmentalism. I don’t believe in a neurotic resistance to all climatic and environmental change. But I do believe in responsible guardianship. The possibility that our carelessness and selfishness in carbon production could rid the world of whole species or transform rich flora into deserts, or drown delicate eco-systems, is a terrible one. And the urge to conserve, to pass the world on unharmed to the next generation is not a radical or necessarily atheist impulse. It’s also a conservative and Christian one. How we lost sight of that is a mystery to me. But technology may help us both see the danger more clearly, and give us new sources of energy to avoid it.

Adventures in totalitarianism.