The Dish

"Let me add, that the great inlet by which a color for oppression has entered into the world is by one man pretending to determine concerning the happiness of another, and by claiming a right to use what means he thinks proper in order to bring him to a sense of it. It is the ordinary and trite sophism of oppression," – Edmund Burke, "Tract on the Popery Laws," published posthumously.

Here’s a recent report from the Sunni insurgency in the Guardian:

Like Abu Omar before him, Abu Aisha, a mid-level Sunni commander, had come to understand that the threat from the Shia was perhaps greater than his need to fight the occupying Americans. Abu Aisha fought in Baghdad’s western Sunni suburbs, he was a former NCO in the Iraqi army and followed an extreme form of Islam known as Salafism …

On his mobile phone he proudly showed me grainy images of dead bodies lying in the street, their hands tied behind their backs . He claimed they were Shia agents and that he had killed them. "There is a new jihad now," he said, echoing Abu Omar’s warning. "The jihad now is against the Shia, not the Americans."

Jeff Weintraub comments here.

(Photo of detained Sunni man by Chris Hondros/Getty.)

Read the case for it here.

He’s not buying it:

The critical thing about the much-bruited surge is that it, too, belongs in the all-important realm of the symbolic. A few thousand extra troops in Baghdad and in Anbar are of scant use in themselves, unless they in some way represent a commitment to stick to Iraq no matter what. And if the Iraq to which they stick is in fact symbolized by Maliki’s surly confessional regime, then the United States is not baby-sitting a civil war so much as deciding to take part in it.

That’s the conclusion of the government’s own study into "coercive interrogation techniques" deployed by the Bush administration, and approved by president Bush and defense secretary Rumsfeld. There’s no evidence it works, and considerable evidence that it is actually helping us lose the war on terror. Read the full Intelligence Science Board report (PDF) here. Money quote:

"There is little systematic knowledge available to tell us ‘what works’ in interrogation," wrote Robert Coulam, a research professor at the Simmons School for Health Studies in Boston. Coulam also wrote that interrogation practices that offend ethical concerns and "skirt the rule of law" may be narrowly useful, if at all, because such practices could undermine the legitimacy of government action and support for the fight against terrorism…

The new study finds that there may be no value to coercive techniques.

"The scientific community has never established that coercive interrogation methods are an effective means of obtaining reliable intelligence information," wrote Col. Steven M. Kleinman, who has served as the Pentagon’s senior intelligence officer for special survival training.

Kleinman wrote that intelligence gathered with coercion is sometimes inaccurate or false, noting that isolation, a tactic U.S. officials have used regularly, causes "profound emotional, psychological, and physical discomfort" and can "significantly and negatively impact the ability of the source to recall information accurately."

But the point of torture is torture. Ask the president who authorized it.

Eau Claire, Wisconsin, 11 am.

Here’s my take on how a civil war in Iraq need not be the end of the world, if we handle it right. Money quote:

Wars are not just about guns and military action. They are also about ideas and ideology. Long wars, especially, are won by those who gain control of the narrative. The West won the cold war when it became understood globally as a battle between totalitarianism and freedom. Defining the conflict that way helped a great deal towards winning it, and in retrospect the Helsinki accords which publicly endorsed that narrative were the beginning of the end for the Soviet Union.

Similarly, redefining the war on terror as essentially the product of ancient feuds within Islam immediately shifts the argument onto terrain favorable to the West. For the first time in five years, it takes the narrative out of Bin Laden’s hands.

With Greg’s latest update (scroll down to the end), you realize that the 17,500 troop Baghdad surge advocates are much less interested in whether this can work – even on their own terms – than in political positioning in America.

Heather Mac Donald continues her path:

I attended a New York cocktail party in 2003, for example, where a prominent columnist said to the group standing around him: "We all know that what makes Republicans superior to Democrats is their religious faith." This sentiment has been repeated in print ad nauseam, along with its twin: "We all know that morality is not possible without religion." I didn’t then have the courage to point out to the prominent columnist that quite a few conservatives and Republicans of the highest standing had no religious faith, without apparent injury to their principles or their behavior…

I need not rehearse here how Bush’s invocation of the divine gift of freedom overlooks the Bible, the persistence throughout history of hierarchical societies that have little use for personal autonomy, and the unique, centuries-long struggle in the West to create the institutions of limited government that underwrite our Western idea of freedom. Suffice it to say, the predictable outcome of the Iraq invasion did not convince me that religious belief was a particularly trustworthy ground for political action.

Ahem.

Gyllenhall pays tribute to his "unique fan base." And he’s not even lip-syncing.