The Dish

Sandpoint, Idaho, 9.55 am.

Jack Shafer re-asks the question.

The execution of Saddam is turning into a much bigger deal. For all the painstaking attempt to conduct a trial that represented justice, the execution made it all look like a sectarian lynching. Actually, strike that. In the end, it was a sectarian lynching. And the lynchers were the people we are now supporting in government in Baghdad. Don’t get me wrong. I loathe Saddam with every ounce of my being, and am relieved he is now gone. But my hatred of him makes me even more angry that we have enabled him to secure a final victory. The manner of his death means a deepening of the sectarian vortex into which the president is about to send more young Americans. It has rendered a regional Shia-Sunni war much more likely. It has destabilized many other Sunni governments; and given new life to the Sunni insurgency in Iraq. It has made the very idea of a functioning national Iraqi government almost unthinkable. In its way, it captures the entire effort that is and was the Iraq war: well-meant, catastrophically run, and ultimately overtaken by the pathologies that make the Arab world what it is.

(Photo: Salah Malkawi/Getty.)

Maybe Charles Krauthammer’s disavowal of a "surge" to support Maliki will somehow give cover for other sane conservatives to look at how best to manage and exploit a withdrawal from most of Iraq. Rich Lowry acknowledges that sheer force is insufficient:

Trying to securing Baghdad is going to involve lots of patrolling and policing (which [Victor Davis Hanson] warns against) and lots of negotiations and compromise (which [Ralph] Peters warns against), just inevitably. If we could win by sheer aggression and offense, this would be a much easier proposition — like the initial invasion.

But, as Lowry concedes, this is not like the initial invasion. It never has been. A light force to decapitate the regime was a brilliant stroke. But a light force to restore order and construct a democracy? That was always a self-contradiction, as many of us saw as long ago as 2003. That was the year in which a long-term surge would have been appropriate. Bush’s too-little-far-too-late proposal for Iraq reminds me of his handling of Katrina: he recognized the need for action long after it was really needed; and then he failed to follow through. His only real goal throughout was managing the politics of it. Hence the idiotic support for incompetents like Brown and Rumsfeld and Cheney. The problem is the president. And we’re stuck with him for two more terrifying years.

Yes, the Kamber-O’Leary test is dated. It’s still fun. I spent several minutes trying to figure out whether I distrusted the Postal Service more than the Pentagon. The funny thing is: I end up more conservative than either Glenn Reynolds or Ann Althouse. And Bainbridge is swinging left fast.

"Although Gov. Mitt Romney brings what many describe as intelligence, solid management skills, optimism, and charisma to the presidential race, an increasing number of Catholics are concerned that Romney’s recent conversion to pro-life, pro-family conservatism contrasts dramatically with his public record of speaking and governing as a social moderate or liberal, routinely backing down when the going gets tough, and accomplishing few conservative successes," – theocon Deal Hudson of the Morley Institute and once a leading figure on the Catholic right.

From Pulaski County in Kentucky:

While presiding over his first fiscal court meeting, new county judge-executive Barty Bullock wanted to make it clear to everyone that he would be the county’s leader.

"I’m the judge and I‚Äôm going to run county government," said Bullock during his first fiscal court meeting yesterday … Bullock went on to add that he had not chosen anyone by who they are, but by who he believed will do a quality job. Bullock said he formed a committee to select his employees, one made up of a chairman and a member ‚Äî God as the chairman and himself as the member.

Bradford Plumer suggests an explanation for the following comment on NPR about the appalling treatment of Jose Padilla:

Indeed, there are even some within the government who think it might be best if Padilla were declared incompetent and sent to a psychiatric prison facility. As one high-ranking official put it, "the objective of the government always has been to incapacitate this person."

Or, in Orwell’s words, the point of torture is torture. I’m still reeling from the notion that a "high-ranking official" of the U.S. government would actually say that the Bush administration, rather than try and interrogate a terror suspect legally, would choose to drag a suspect off the street, detain him with no charges for three and half year and torture him into insanity. Hey, it’s another terror suspect off the streets, after all. But again, one wonders where the allegedly Christian right is on this? Today, Ramesh Ponnuru writes:

Dave Weigel asks: "Is the shadow of Mengele over any proposal of ‘experimenting’ on a captured prisoner, no matter how bad the prisoner and how promising the experiment?" I hope so.

If this is true of abusing Saddam, isn’t it also true of abusing Padilla? Or are all moral strictures abandoned when Bush is violating them?

A reader writes:

Did you see or read the play? I never had a chance to see it, but I did read the play.  The movie is quite faithful to the original until the end. The play is significantly more depressing for the Posner character … He goes to Oxford, fails to complete a degree, has a nervous breakdown, and is on the dole when he tracks down his former tutor, now a paraplegic journalist, who had been his rival for the attentions of the handsome classmate. Posner never, to my recollection, becomes a teacher in the play. His final defeat and humiliation is essentially eliminated from the screenplay.

As an out gay high school teacher (I teach French!… my students are ages 15-18), I must agree with your reader who saw more of the old tortured-homosexual-syndrome at work in this otherwise brilliant play/screenplay. Our distance from the oppressive atmosphere portrayed by Bennett’s film is more significant than you initially supposed.

I’m grateful for the info about the play, which I have neither seen nor read. Poor Alan Bennett.

Last fall, I argued that fiscal conservatives should vote Democrat to jolt this fiscally uber-liberal president toward balancing the budget. It worked! Without Democratic pressure, the president would never have signed on to a balanced budget by 2012, or a pushback against pork. Money quote from the WaPo:

Bush has never proposed a balanced budget since it went into deficit, never vetoed a spending bill when Republicans controlled Congress and offered little sustained objection to earmarks until the issue gained political traction last year.

But now for the first time since he took office, both parties have set a mutual target for eliminating the deficit — an implicit agreement that raises the profile of the issue and may create a political imperative that prods the two sides to find ways to meet the goal or be held accountable for failing.

Congrats to those of you who switched from Republican to Democrat in 2006. Of course, ignoring the entitlement crisis is still the Beltway consensus. And the entitlement crisis – which Bush and the Republicans profoundly exacerbated with their Medicare expansion – is 90 percent of the problem. But tackling ten percent of the fiscal problem is better than nothing. And in order to get a semblance of fiscal sanity in Washington, you now have to vote Democrat. That tells you something about what has happened to conservatism.