The Dish

A reader pointed me to this stunning passage in an ESPN.com story about the death of Pat Tillman:

[Lt. Col. Ralph] Kauzlarich, [formerly the Army officer who directed the first official inquiry,] now a battalion commanding officer at Fort Riley in Kansas, further suggested the Tillman family’s unhappiness with the findings of past investigations might be because of the absence of a Christian faith in their lives.

In an interview with ESPN.com, Kauzlarich said: "When you die, I mean, there is supposedly a better life, right? Well, if you are an atheist and you don’t believe in anything, if you die, what is there to go to? Nothing. You are worm dirt. So for their son to die for nothing, and now he is no more ‚Äî that is pretty hard to get your head around that. So I don’t know how an atheist thinks. I can only imagine that that would be pretty tough."

Asked by ESPN.com whether the Tillmans’ religious beliefs are a factor in the ongoing investigation, Kauzlarich said, "I think so. There is not a whole lot of trust in the system or faith in the system [by the Tillmans]. So that is my personal opinion, knowing what I know…

[T]here [have] been numerous unfortunate cases of fratricide, and the parents have basically said, ‘OK, it was an unfortunate accident.’ And they let it go. So this is ‚Äî I don’t know, these people have a hard time letting it go. It may be because of their religious beliefs."

What has happened to the U.S. military under Bush? Are non-Christians now unwelcome?

(Family photo of Kevin and Pat Tillman, from Kevin Tillman. Kevin’s open letter about the war can be read here.)

This is a striking statement from Mike Weinstein in the Salon interview:

"I was in Topeka, on a book tour, and the local Episcopal priest came out to support me and five hours later his church was burned down. And the local synagogue in Topeka, where I was to speak that night, was desecrated with spray paint saying, "F**k you, Jews" and "KKK," all that stuff."

Another church was burned recently by a Christianist. If any of this were racially motivated, it would be headline news. But because it’s religiously motivated – like Eric Rudolph’s terrorism – it gets ignored. At the very least, the national media should look into these stories and see if they pan out and if there’s a pattern.

A reader adds:

Your equating the situation in the Middle East today with the Thirty Years War is a great analogy.  But you must be kidding with trying to push the blame for it on to the US, or the start of it as now.

If anything the opening shot of the "Middle-East 30 years’ war" was the collapse of the Shah of Iran. The stated goals of the imams of Iran established that were would me no peace between them and the US – much like Luther posting his bull on the door of the Cathedral set the 30 years war in motion. It really got going with the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980’s. Since then it has been stewarded forward enthusiastically by the likes of Al Qaeda and Iran. During this time we have gone from stoking it (Iran-Iraq war) to trying to stop it (policy up until 9/11) to being thrown into the middle of it because of 9/11. We didn’t involve ourselves in their 30’s years war; they involved us in it by attacking us as part of it.

Take out 9/11 and the US goes back to a policy of trying to maintain the status quo in the Middle-East; the very status quo that Iran and al Queda were already working overtime to topple. Iran’s desire to be the regional hegemon and Al Qaeda’s desire to establish a Caliphate over the entire Islamic world are the real drivers of today’s middle-east instability. Unfortunately for them and everyone else, this increases stress on centuries old fault-lines in the region; Shia-Sunni, Arab-Persian, Arab-Turk, Arab-Kurd (noticing a pattern here?).

Unfortunately those stoking this don’t see that there is a much larger chance that it will all lead to a pointless 30 years war type decimation of the entire region and the destruction of both Al Qaeda and Iran, than to either of their desired results. They need look no further that what happened to the once high ideals of the Catholic League and Protestant Union in the historic 30 years war. Once these ideals were mixed with the ambitions of nations and fueled by the barbarity inherent in men who "know" they are doing God’s will, a terrible fate awaits.

My point is that we have every reason not to be in the very middle of this with 130,000 troops. Let the Sunnis fight the Shiites. Let the Arabs fight the Persians. We can play the conflict from a distance, but it would be fatal to be in the thick of it.

Update: Another reader adds:

Your reader who thinks that ‘Luther posting his bull on the door of the Cathedral set the 30 years war in motion’ should check his facts. The Thirty Years‚Äô War started in 1618. Luther by then had been dead for 72 years, having nailed his theses to the door of the church in Wittenberg in late 1517, a full century before the Thirty Years War began.

For three decades every major European power duked it out in Germany, not on their own territories. Life became a living hell of bare survival, agriculture receded, and the dark forests grew back with wolf populations that in time of famine preyed on stray kids – it’s no coincidence that this is the era when the frightening stories set down in Grimm’s Fairy Tales were first told. By the time the war was done, half the population was exterminated, and the rest reduced to poverty and ignorance. 

In fairness to my reader, you could argue that the Reformation was the religious split that made the Thirty Years War possible. At least, that’s how I took his email. And yes, it was a nightmare. But it took that nightmare to establish the need for an alternative form for organizing politics other than religion. Maybe the Middle East needs to learn that lesson first hand. Maybe no one can teach it. And in many ways, it has already started. What is Iraq today but a stage for murderous religious passion?

It’s found a new and unlikely place to prosper: Australia.

A reader writes:

I have continued reading you over the last couple of years, even though I strongly disagreed with the overall direction you were heading. But I have to say, I agreed with every word of your "Bush on Iraq" post today. And in the wake of the hysterical reaction to the Baker report, I’m finally beginning to take a second look at my fellow travelers, and I’m not liking what I’m seeing.  Ultimately, reality cannot be denied.

A word on the reaction to Baker.  This is what really got me.  I mean, you can’t be more of a typical Republican/conservative than James Baker.  He jammed through the 1986 Tax Act under RR for God’s sake! And now he’s being written out of the movement?  This is a bridge too far for me.

The Massachusetts governor has been taking hit after hit from the Christianist right. Here’s the latest shot across the bow from Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network. Their blogger, David Brody, has been bashing Romney for days now.

We haven’t had much sequined funk, so here’s Kool and the Gang. Big hair, Hammer clothes, weird eighteenth century wigs and drag queens. Classic.

Click here to see the other entries…

Chris Bowers unloads here about what blogging has done to his consciousness, sense of self, and general life. Money quote:

Try to imagine this: spend a week where you write for about sixty-five hours. Now, consider the following conditions on that writing:

    * Whatever you write will be read by tens of thousands of people
    * The material and research you use to produce that writing will almost never be of a personal nature.
    * What you write must mesh with a perceived set of expectations of the content you have previously published.
    * This is done almost entirely in virtual space, where your contacts take place over email, in comment threads, and on the front-page websites. Overall, you hve little human contact with either your colleagues or audience.

If you did this for a week, you might start to sense, however slightly, your ego merging with your writing. If you do it for three years, at some point you might notice that your ego has been largely subsumed into this activity. Think about this. First, your thoughts are always directed outward toward matters that do not directly refer to you. Second, commentary on you is always directed toward your writing and your blog, never to you personally. Third, there is basically no one with whom you can commiserate about your activities on a daily, or even weekly, basis. If you do this long enough, eventually your sense of self will be largely subsumed into the activity of blogging, and even into your actual blog. And maybe your blog connects to other blogs, and even to a wider movement. Your sense of self can be merged with those institutions as well.

It’s now over six years for me. I don’t feel the same way, and that may have something to do with the fact that I feel no part of any "movement" (the minute I did, I’d do my best to leave it). I also feel immensely connected personally to my readers, even though they never appear visually as more than email addresses. It helps that I had a pretty clear idea of what being a writer was before I jumped into this new medium. I’ve always seen blogging as a new medium and a new genre – but it’s still, for me, a form of writing. And, although my writing is inextricable from my life, it is also clearly separate. Even when I blog about myself, I write about a public self, not the real self. A blog is a mask, as all writing is. (See: Nietzsche, F.)

I get the creeps sometimes when I realize my friends and even my fiance read the blog and my blog and my life blur. I want a boundary but inevitably that boundary is porous. I can live with that, but it requires vigilance. The few weeks a year I stop blogging are a kind of elysium for me. The ability to have a thought and just kick it around for a while, the chance to think nothing, the chance to read at a leisured pace, or to have dinner with a friend in the knowledge that afterwards, you won’t have to check the blog: bliss. Next week, in my winter break, I hope to hang with some friends in NYC, maybe even stay out late and not worry about the 7 am post the next day. Joy to the world!

But the impact of blogging is not as scary as television. I do a fair bit but I have kept my distance from any serious gig because I really do want to maintain some semblance of normal life. TV destroys it. It interacts with your mental health like acid on wood. It makes it impossible to go places without having your public persona and politics follow you. Some of that is inevitable in public life; some is avoidable. But blogging is mild in comparison. I’ve seen the impact of TV on a few friends and I have to say I wonder how any of them stay sane. I guess, in the long run, most of them don’t.

Mikey Weinstein whose son endured anti-Semitic slurs from Christianist soldiers gives an interview to Salon.

Who knows? Waiting till January is not ideal, given the gravity of the situation. Trying to find a new governing coalition sans Sadr strikes me as Sysyphean at this point, but I suppose one more push can’t hurt. A troop surge might help such an effort, but, again, it’s just one last gambit, not a real strategy. But all this looks as if it’s in the works. I see, of course, no sign that we are going to seriously reboot the occupation, so all of this is simply a way to minimize the short-term costs of leaving. It’s face-saving, which only a huge amount of luck might turn into something better. So try it – but no illusions, please. McCain may do a photo-op with Bush in january, but wihout 50,000 more troops, it’s pure theater.

Moreover, I think the risk of hanging in with this strategy after February is far too great – because we are already on the verge of siding with one faction in the civil war, and that has dreadful ramifications, as the Saudis have reminded us. Our first objective must be to avoid becoming enmeshed in the civil war. Our second objective must be to do what we can to save Iraq in the short time left to us before a full-fledged civil war obliterates all other options.

So: one last face-saving effort, hoping for a miracle. Then: get the hell out. Perhaps six months redeployment to Kurdistan to protect the only secure haven left, before complete disengagement. Then use the Sunni-Shia regional war to divert Islamist terror away from the West and toward the Arab states that have enabled it. Meanwhile, massive new investment in human intelligence, language skills, and more attention to homeland security – and a new effort to salvage Afghanistan.

History will probably record that the United States accidentally jump-started a thirty year war in the Middle East. Oil prices will become terribly unstable, as it is used as a weapon by both Sunnis and Shiites. But that’s good in the long run for the West as well. Our politicians won’t take responsibility for the energy-environmental crisis, so we might as well let war take care of it.

It’s going to be a hellish few years, and not without some kind of catastrophe, I fear. But I see no way to avoid it; and plenty of worse scenarios in trying to do so. Alas, we have two years of ineptitude in the White House. But we already made that call in 2004. You do triage with the president you’ve got, as Rummy might say.

(Photo: Jim Young/Reuters.)