“Man Up”

A reader vents:

What is up with your recent post, "It could get worse dept"? A ridiculous tirade. I can easily think of "another likely path": we’re going to withdraw to Kurdistan.  From there we can still try to guide the civil war to a quick finish by diplomacy and force projection if need be. And who knows. Maybe we can still negotiate a positive outcome.

Strategy aside, you need to stop with the depressing and defeatist attitude or I’m not reading your blog anymore. You supported this war.  Man up and start talking about solutions, instead of entertaining different scenarios about how we could maximize our losses.  You never should have assumed war would be predictable and that this would be easy.

I never believed it would be easy but I didn’t believe the Bush team would ever have been this reckless or incompetent. I’ve offered several constructive thoughts: a big ramp-up of forces, a redployment to Kurdistan, or complete withdrawal. The latter two are compatible. We could withdraw to Kurdistan while threatening to leave altogether, and leverage the chaos to get Iran to cooperate. I’m just leery of taking sides in a sectarian civil war, and gloomy about the capacity of this administration to manage any of this halfway competently. At this point, more optimism is unwarranted.

The Harmonic Convergence

Einsatz1

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad:

"Sixty million people died in the Second World War. World War II was a gigantic crime. We condemn it all. We are against bloodshed, regardless of whether a crime was committed against a Muslim or against a Christian or a Jew. But the question is: Why among these 60 million victims are only the Jews the center of attention?"

Mel Gibson: 

"I mean when the war was over they said it was 12 million. Then it was six. Now it’s four. I mean it’s that kind of numbers game. I mean war is horrible. The Second World War killed tens of millions of people. Some of them were Jews in concentration camps. Many people lost their lives. In the Ukraine, several million people starved to death between 1932 and 1933. During the last century 20 million people died in the Soviet Union. Okay? It’s horrible."

A Total Non-Sequitur”

A reader writes:

Upon reading your post titled "The Thing About Mary", I thought it was a total non sequitur for you to jump to the extreme of asking if same sex marriage opponents stand against the insemination of lesbians. For your information, a very significant number of same sex marriage opponents support same sex couple adoption if a reasonable search for a stable man-woman relationship cannot be found for a child. You are absolutely wrong to presume that "Christianists" – your misguided term for people who believe in universal justice and standards that come from a universal source – desire mandatory husbands for lesbian or single moms. Why does one have to support such draconian measures if they simply believe that government has the right to determine which type of institution is ideal for childrearing, and reserving the term "marriage" for that type of institution?

For you to trot out the few extremists, like there are in every bunch, as evidence of the supposed close-mindedness of same sex marriage opponents reveals a lack of desire on your part to confront the very reasonable, non-religious based, and non-bigoted arguments against the redefinition of this institution.

My point is to ask how opponents of gay marriage and parenting hope to enforce their view of the world. And if there’s nothing to be done, except ensure the instability of children brought up by gay couples, then maybe they need to rethink their strategy for the sake of the children. My further point would be to ask what empirical evidence there is that children brought up by two mommies or two daddies end up less advantaged than those brought up by a mother and a father. I’ve read countless studies, and, frankly, there’s no evidence to suggest any advantage to heterosexual rearing. The studies are not very good or very reliable. But the literature points to no reason for such a position other than prejudice. I published the full data of such studies, by the way, in my reader, "Same-Sex Marriage: Pro and Con."

It Could Get Worse Dept.

Here’s one prediction I fear might come true and sure hope doesn’t:

I understand that Iraq doesn’t offer many pleasant options right now. ‘Stay the course’ died years ago, we can’t build up troops if we don’t have them and the various ways of mitigating our current nightmare run up against the problem that we are governed by people who cannot or will not do the right thing. We might as well admit that our homebaked plans (for example) are just so much intellectual wankery. The president is emotionally incapable of admitting the depth of our problem and darth veep will veto any plan that can’t be pushed out the rear of a C-130 transport.

In that light I think that we should recognize this idea of actively promoting the ethnic partition of Iraq for what it is ‚Äì a horrible, debatably effective plan (the implementation seems guaranteed to produce tragic screwups on a massive scale) that will never happen. My feeling is that Iraq will play out just like the ‘preparations’ for insurgency did. For political reasons withdrawal will be treated as a naughty word, stifling discussion and heading off planning until it becomes absolutely unavoidable. Then when the light finally goes on we will have a chaotic bugout with huge, avoidable losses of men and materiel.

As far as putting a date on B-day, manpower and equipment shortages won’t let us go on for too many more years. Or we could bomb Iran. In that case B-day would come approximately one week later, with much dynamiting of stuff that can’t be airlifted out. I would love to be proved wrong, but if there is another likely path out of there I just don‚Äôt see it.