The Dish

"I know Iraq is a mess and we have screwed up seven ways from Sunday. We underestimated how hard it would be. But the fundamental idea behind Iraq is still correct. If we back out of this fight … your children and grandchildren will never know peace," – Republican Senator, Lindsey Graham, on Sunday.

There are few messages more obvious in the Gospels than a disregard for the biological family and a rejection of earthly wealth. Jesus says nothing about abortion or homosexuality, but he is quite clear about abandoning your spouse, parents and children and divesting yourself of all worldly goods. These are terribly difficult doctrines; and few of us who call ourselves Christians are able to live by them. But most Christians have at least not deceived themselves into thinking that the Gospels are actually about family life above everything and wealth as a critical element of Christian life. Until now. The Prosperity Gospel is one of the greatest blasphemies against the message of Jesus – but it is increasingly a part of the American "Christian" landscape. After all, why lambaste the wealth your congregants crave when you can demonize the minorities outside? This Time cover-story is chilling about what has happened to Christianity in some parts of the country. Just dont expect the religious right to criticize it.

(Photo illustration: Michael Elins.)

Security in Baghdad continues to deteriorate. A Sadrite brags here that he can easily get weapons into the Green Zone. And Anbar province seems to have become a new haven for terror, because of Rumsfeld’s war-management:

The chief of intelligence for the Marine Corps in Iraq recently filed an unusual secret report concluding that the prospects for securing that country’s western Anbar province are dim and that there is almost nothing the U.S. military can do to improve the political and social situation there, said several military officers and intelligence officials familiar with its contents.

The officials described Col. Pete Devlin’s classified assessment of the dire state of Anbar as the first time that a senior U.S. military officer has filed so negative a report from Iraq.

One Army officer summarized it as arguing that in Anbar province, "We haven’t been defeated militarily but we have been defeated politically — and that’s where wars are won and lost."

A reader writes:

Re: your comparison of Bush’s and Clinton’s lies. While you very appropriately pointed out the similarities between the two equivocators, the differences are just as instructive.

Clinton is the more intelligent, calculating, and verbally acrobatic of the two presidents, and he knew damn well that he was splitting hairs when he denied having sex with Monica Lewinsky.  Somehow, I don’t see Bush’s remarks about torture in quite the same light.  They are just as disconnected from the facts as Clinton’s were, and probably have far more serious, long-term consequences than Clinton’s sleazy evasions.  But Bush does not have a black belt in semantics like Clinton did ; he isn’t fudging facts, calculating consequences, chopping logic, or coolly hedging his bets based on the probability of having to defend his statement in court at some future date.  I wish that were all he was doing.  Instead, the man actually believes his own lies.  He  is seriously deluded and appears to be suffering from a god complex that allows him to shout things into and out of existence, ignore or violate existing laws, and ultimately be accountable only to himself.

A shrewd liar or someone in complete denial? In a president, I think I prefer the former.

This year, I almost decided this would be my last summer in Ptown. I’ve been coming here for seventeen years; every year it gets a little harder to transplant two adults and two beagles for two months or so to the end of a wharf at the last curve of a peninsular question-mark. If Al Gore’s right, my property won’t outlast me; a rise in sea-levels of a few inches would put my place under-water. And then I get here, and slowly, the real world flakes off, and the harbor seduces again; and I realize that my attachment to this place is some kind of gift I have no right to refuse. If I have a home, it is somewhere out here. It’s where I want my ashes spread when I die, out in the farthest moors where the first Englishmen first encountered America, and where they rightly decided to move on in search of more permanent ground.

So we’ll pack up today, and drive home for ten hours and leave the tides and skies and dunes and freaks behind again. How not to feel sad? This place has a safe transience to it: a sand-bar created by thousands of years of mere tides, on which a crew of us hang out each summer, a gaggle of different equals, with dirty feet and faded clothes and the occasional tattered boa. It couldn’t be more different than Washington, D.C.. Which is the point, I guess. It’s an elsewhere that makes somewhere endurable: a little, translucent heaven on a darkening, serious earth.

A reader writes:

I don’t have a link, youtube or picture for you, just a personal anecdote.

I was on London’s Oxford Street this lunchtime. Coming out of the tube station was a group of men, maybe half a dozen in total, carrying placards that proclaimed "9/11 was an inside job!" and things of that nature.

My initial reaction was mild annoyance, but then I thought about the possiblity of men walking down the busiest shopping street of Riyadh, Tehran or Saddam-era Baghdad accusing their governments of such massive atrocities.

There will be many tributes this day, and rightly so. But the fact that a group of people are allowed to walk down a London street saying the most hateful and offensive things, without violent reaction by the people, without imprisonment by the state, speaks volumes of the moral superiority of Western values over the barabarity of Islamism.

And it’s a real-life reminder of how freedom is the best tribute of all.

Hence my celebration today. Because we still can say what we think. Because freedom is still ours’ – if we do no succumb to the temptation to surrender it for a false sense of security.

A reader writes:

I am a black American woman, born into a family of Democrat civil rights activists.
On this fifth anniversary of 9/11. I am filled with many mixed emotions. That day was our worst, and our best in many ways. We were a nation united for a shining moment. But it seems it was fleeting. I am moved when I hear our anthem. And yes, hearing the Buckingham Palace band stirred in me fierce feelings of love for my country and our British allies.
The last time I felt such strong flutters in my chest … was the student protest in Tiannamen Square. As they linked arms, they were singing. When I realized what they were singing, I wept. The song? ‘We Shall Overcome’.

And we shall.

The Dutch defender of free speech, Pim Fortuyn, was assassinated for his stance on Islamist intolerance in the Netherlands. Here’s how he saw things:

"I don’t hate Islam … It’s a bit like those old Reformed Protestants. The Reformed lie all the time. And why is that? Because they have norms and values that are so high that you can’t humanly maintain them … Then look at the Netherlands. In what country could an electoral leader of such a large movement as mine be openly homosexual? How wonderful that that’s possible. That’s something that one can be proud of. And I’d like to keep it that way, thank you very much."

"Annihilating the author may make the Leader happy, but there is no fear of death when it is for the sake of freedom and respect for human rights. The "game of death" began a long time before today. It is not possible to block the flood of freedom by criminal acts. Be assured that the horizon of freedom will open and the children of the land of Iran will witness, in the not so distant future, a government that is obliged to respect human rights.," – Akbar Ganji, Iranian dissident, predicting a future in which religious fascism will not govern the great civilization of Persia.