The Dish

A reader writes:

You missed the biggest flaw in Victor Davis Hanson’s statement, which is its historical inaccuracy. This country did not fight and defeat Germany, Italy and Japan all at once. We defeated Japan with some help from the British Empire and Commonwealth, and China; we defeated Italy with substantial help from the British Empire and Commonwealth, as well as Free French, Polish, Czech and other forces; the Soviet Union defeated Germany, with major help from us as well as the British Empire and Commonwealth, as well as Free French, Polish, Czech and other forces.

Had the Soviet Union not broken the back of the German Wehrmacht and its allies before Moscow, at Stalingrad and at Kursk, and thereafter, there is serious doubt whether even the combined forces of the U.S., the British Empire and Commonwealth, and their allies, could have defeated Germany in northwest Europe. Read Max Hastings.

This is an example of the pride and hubris in an all-powerful U.S. that does not have to resort to mere diplomacy and alliance building as it goes boldly forth to impose its military will abroad – pride and hubris that directly led us to the dire circumstances in which we now find ourselves in Iraq.

A reader writes:

Having been an army linguist, allow me to set the record straight:

1) There is no shortage of individuals who want to become linguists. Linguists are better paid (we got an extra $100+ a month per language for being linguists).  We had far better living conditions, and were generally treated as mini-officers in many circles, as most of us were highly skilled, educated, and generally quite intelligent.  Furthermore, linguists are given Top Secret clearances, which do wonders for post-service employment potential.  The life style and perks for linguists in the army can’t be beat.

2) Depending on one’s DLAB score (Defense Language Aptitude Battery), one is thrown into a suitable language program. Languages come in five levels with languages such as Swahili in level I, Chinese, Arabic, Russian in level IV, with English being the only level V language.  All candidates for the linguist program are sent to DLI (the Defense Language Institute) in Monterey California for six to fourteen months depending on the difficulty of their language. Arabic linguists take about twelve months to train.  To be fair to Snow, the fail rate at DLI is about 50 to 75% per class, so one really can’t claim that they program can be sped up.  And the student to teacher ratio is about one to eight, so it’s well staffed.  After DLI, graduates of the language portion of training are sent to Goodfellow Airforce Base (a joint service base) where they spend three months learning the secret side of their craft.  In total, we’re talking about 15 months to train an Arabic linguist.  That is, if the military really wanted to, they could have flooded the streets of Iraq with Arabic linguists by 2004.

That is: if we had had a halfway competent defense secretary and halfway competent president. We had neither. You want to know who lost Iraq? Bush. Period.

I missed this gem. Ann Althouse speculates that they put U.S. citizen Jose Padilla in blackout goggles and sound-proof ear-muffs to prevent him "blinking in code" in a walk outside his cell. Blinking to whom? After four years in total isolation? This is from his lawyer’s brief:

Mr. Padilla was often put in stress positions for hours at a time. He would be shackled and manacled, with a belly chain, for hours in his cell. Noxious fumes would be introduced to his room causing his eyes and nose to run. The temperature of his cell would be manipulated, making his cell extremely cold for long stretches of time. Mr. Padilla was denied even the smallest, and most personal shreds of human dignity by being deprived of showering for weeks at a time, yet having to endure forced grooming at the whim of his captors…

He was threatened with being cut with a knife and having alcohol poured on the wounds. He was also threatened with imminent execution. He was hooded and forced to stand in stress positions for long durations of time. He was forced to endure exceedingly long interrogation sessions, without adequate sleep, wherein he would be confronted with false information, scenarios, and documents to further disorient him. Often he had to endure multiple interrogators who would scream, shake, and otherwise assault Mr. Padilla.

All of the original headline accusations against Padilla have been dropped. There are no charges of "dirty bomb plots" any more. The indictment is vague about his connections to global jihad, and if this president had had his way, there would never have even been an indictment. The worst he is accused of is being recruited to an Islamist cell linked to conflict in Bosnia and Chechnya. Maybe Padilla is guilty. But nothing he is now charged with can justify either the length of his detention or the sadism meted out to him. After all these years, you think he has anything more to say? You think this defenseless, bare-footed, manacled, disoriented shell still represents a threat so dire he requires three riot police to escort him blind and deaf down a corridor? In the end, as Orwell noted, the point of torture is torture.

As for "blinking in code," Padilla is so traumatized that he no longer fully controls his eye movements or body:

"During questioning, he often exhibits facial tics, unusual eye movements and contortions of his body," Mr. Patel said. "The contortions are particularly poignant since he is usually manacled and bound by a belly chain when he has meetings with counsel."

But let me say this in defense of Althouse. She is at least conceding that the shameful treatment of Padilla is worth discussing. And her defense of the sadism is about as plausible as it will ever get. She sees there is an important principle here – something we once knew as habeas corpus. Here you have a U.S. citizen detained on American soil, kept without charges for 3 and a half years, accused of plotting a dirty bomb attack (an accusation never substantiated in any way), tortured until he may be mentally incapable of standing trial … and the conservative blogosphere is completely, utterly silent. Habeas corpus disappears not with a bang, and not even with a whimper, but with deathly quiet. Well, we know what American conservatism now stands for. You can see the visual above.

Bush’s apparent acceptance of the Blair-Baker position that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is central to resolving Iraq is the end of neoconservatism in the Bush administration. But the new realism is utterly unrealistic, as George Will eloquently explains today. Double-down or get out. Those remain the only real options, in my view. Increasingly, I lean toward getting out completely, and finally giving the region the civil and religious war it so obviously and deeply wants. We had our chance; and we blew it. Bush doesn’t or won’t get this; and it’s pretty clear he has little or no grip on reality. The terrible costs of our withdrawal are primarily on his hands; but they are also on the hands of the Iraqi factions who prefer tearing each other apart to dealing with the modern world.

He may continue – forcing America into a brutal period of political civil war to save his own face. He won’t save his own face – it’s too late for that. And my bet is he will do nothing on the scale necessary to save Iraq. This is the consequence of re-electing a patent incompetent, who is now reduced to enforcing the policies of the man he defeated in 2004, with none of the advantages Kerry would have had. If Bush finds 50,000 to 75,000 troops, we’ll know he’s serious. But I suspect he isn’t. He never has been, has he?

I set up a bunch of posts to self-publish while I went to the shrink and had lunch. Typepad malfunctioned, hence the gap and now the glut. No idea when future publishing will work again – so I’m glued to the laptop.

"In point of fact, we strap people to wooden boards and make them feel like they’re drowning all the time in this country. Mostly at theme parks like Six Flags," – Ann Coulter, Townhall.com.

"I mention this only to show that the Iraq adventure has made fools of many of us bystanders. That is not of much consequence by comparison with the fools it has made of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell, Rice, and the rest; and that is not of much consequence when set against the brave Americans maimed and killed in this war, and the stupendous waste of national resources and prestige the war has involved. As we bloviators fret over our wounded egos, we should remember that a wounded ego is utterly nothing by comparison with an actual wound, let alone a death, or the humiliating of a great nation in the eyes of her enemies," – John Derbyshire, NRO.

Baghdad, 2.20 pm.

Jake Tapper ponders some lessons learned from covering the Mary Cheney story. Money quote:

This is what we got out of the White House when we asked, over and over, if the President, as he declared in 1999, still opposed same sex couples adopting children. Our intrepid White House off-air reporter, Karen Travers, asked if that position still stood.

"When Vice President Cheney told President Bush that his daughter was pregnant, the President congratulated him," the White House spokesman said. "President Bush is happy for the Cheney family."

Right. Okay. Travers tried again: does he still oppose same sex adoptions?

"In 2005, the President said he believes the ideal is for a child to be raised by a man and a woman, but children can receive love from gay couples and private adoption firms can make their own decisions," said the spokesman.

Jake thinks that means Bush is still opposed. I’m not so sure. I don’t think the president has the slightest problem with his veep’s daughter having a committed relationship and having a child. It’s just that he cannot say that in public. Hypocrisy is now hardwired into sustaining the Republican coalition.

(More criticism for the vice-president’s daughter from anti-gay activist Peter LaBarbera here and the Christianist group, Concerned Women for America, here.)

I’m reading and absorbing it. I hope to have something more detailed to write when I’m done. Here’s my first basic impression. It’s absolutely not more of the same. It’s a a clear declaration that we’re leaving. Money quote from Lee Hamilton to ABC News:

"We did not find one single person, and we interviewed over 200 people, who thought we should stay the course …  The Iraqis must be under no misapprehension here. We are going to pull out our combat troops out of Iraq in a responsible way over a period of time and they have to begin to accept the new mission and we have to begin to accept the primary mission of training and embedding troops."

But it’s also a very realist "Hail Mary" which involves so many simultaneous things to happen right that its chance of success, even using the Baker-Hamilton premises, can only be in the 20 percent range. Overhaul Iraqi army training to wean it from sectarian loyalties and give it a capacity to enforce peace on the whole country? Get Iran and Syria to back off? Do all this while we’ve declared we have no intention of sticking around for much longer than a year in any real force strength? And do it all while civil war spirals further? Yeah, right.

But the key claim of the ISG is that the only alternative to this – the current strategy with the current force levels, however massaged – has a zero percent chance of success. And the other claim is that any alternative to this – all of this, including the Israeli-Palestine issue – will fail to get actual bipartisan support at home. You can see why Bush looked yesterday like a dog being given a bath.

The only truly new aspect of the report, apart from its insistence that we are absolutely leaving soon, is the notion that Iran has an interest in stabilizing Iraq and that we have leverage in that respect. Many neoconservatives argue that Iran has precisely the opposite intention, and so we have no leverage; and even if we did, Ahmadinejad is not someone any rational actor can negotiate with. I don’t want to go all Baker-Hamilton on you, but both sides may have captured parts of the truth. Let’s assume the neocons are right (and I think they are) about the nature of the Tehran regime. Is there a point at which civil war in Iraq really does threaten the mullahs in Tehran? And if there is, are we there yet?

I don’t know. Perhaps it’s unknowable in the time and place such decisions have to be made. But I do think we can over-estimate the stability of the Tehran regime, and that revolutionary unrest and disintegration in its neighbor might rattle the forces in Iran’s leadership that are halfway sane. Think of hundreds of thousands of restive Shiite refugees pouring over the border. Think of growing ethnic unrest within Iran. Think violence spreading in from the Kurdish region. So Baker may be right: we may have more leverage than we think. But we may not yet have enough to get Iran to back off in any meaningful sense.

So we have two awful options, it seems to me. First: throw everything we’ve got at this thing, do all the Baker-Hamilton commission wants (including the Iran and Syria gambits) except withdraw troops. But merely maintaining current force levels is, as Baker argues, a non-starter. If Bush wants to pursue something called "victory" in his head, then the acid test will be his troop commitment. He needs to embrace much of Baker-Hamilton and add more than 50,000 and probably closer to 75,000 new troops into the theater – in the next three or four months. And why not talk to the regimes in Syria and Iran? If they are what the Bush administration says they are, the diplomacy will go nowhere, and we can then be seen to have at least tried. The new troops should then be used to prop up Maliki, train the Iraqi army, and finally police the borders. No timelines. Full Metal McCain.

If we don’t do that, we should leave – rapidly, and let the real war begin. It may already have. I don’t see a third way working, especially given the incompetence in the White House, the profound weakness of Maliki, and the complete lack of domestic confidence in this administration’s conduct of the war. Asking young Americans to die for a slower, longer civil war between Sunnis and Shia is, at this point, the real non-starter. In fact, a third way may make us even more complicit in the conflict we will eventually have to escape from. That’s my first take, open to revision and correction. Double down and deal; or get out in a matter of months.

(Photo: Haraz Ghanbari/AP.)