The Dish

Solon, Ohio, 3 pm. (And, yes, I know it looks professional, but after corresponding with the reader, it’s legit.)

A reader writes:

The reason Democrats haven’t attack GWB’s "unseriousness" on the war is because their left wing base is so anti-war, anti-American power, that they would repudiate any Democratic Party leader who tried to run to the right of Bush on the conduct of the War.

Its enough to bring me to despair.  We have on one hand a party that recognizes that we are in a war with an implacable enemy, but it has waged that war in an incompetent manner, taking on burdens for the country without fully explaining them to either the American people or to itself.  On the other hand we have political party that gives lip-service to "internationalism" but which is at heart actually isolationist and unwilling to see American power projected beyond the confines of our borders even when it is necessary and just. 

For persons of my mindset, who believe in the Powell doctrine (which is really only Jacksonian foriegn/military policy for the 21st century), it is a state of affairs which leaves us despairing of any hope for the future.

Is there someone out there that can rescue the country from the follies of our two political parties?

McCain? Giuliani? Obama? Gore?

"I think what they’re trying to do is to take the fact the specific scenes portrayed were fictional and to try to refute the underlying reality that the Clinton administration just didn’t get it. And by the way, before 9/11 neither did the Bush administration," – 9/11 Commissioner John Lehman. I have no idea why the Clinton administration should get a pass in dithering while a mortal threat gathered in the 1990s. I hope ABC stands firm.

Charles Krauthammer seems to me to be on the right track. But even as he sketches the only potential hope for securing non-defeat in Iraq, it seems implausible. I fear Maliki’s government is powerless against the Shiite militias that have increasingly infiltrated it. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do our best still to salvage the situation. But it behooves us to be realistic about the chances for success. For all the reasons Tom Friedman lays out today, they’re slim. The news of the revised body-count for August is sobering as well: a tripling of previous estimates. Money quote from TF:

Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld told us we are in the fight of our lives against a new Islamic fascism, and let’s have an unprecedented wartime tax cut and shrink our armed forces. They told us we are in the fight of our lives against a new Islamic fascism, but let’s send just enough troops to topple Saddam — and never control Iraq’s borders, its ammo dumps or its looters. They told us we are in the fight of our lives against a new Islamic fascism, but rather than bring Democrats and Republicans together in a national unity war coalition, let’s use the war as a wedge issue to embarrass Democrats, frighten voters and win elections. They told us we are in the fight of our lives against a new Islamic fascism — which is financed by our own oil purchases — but let’s not do one serious thing about ending our oil addiction.

Bush has never been serious about this war. I don’t know why every Democrat hasn’t been making this argument.

This blog and several others immediately focused on the real news of the president’s speech last Wednesday – that it would actually legalize torture, prevent the Supreme Court from striking it down, create a special CIA unit to perfect it, and grant legal impunity for Bush’s civilian officials for any war crimes they may have committed since 9/11. At first, the MSM ran the stories the Bush team wanted: the headline-catching shift of KSM et al to Gitmo. But today, the NYT has the balls to point out that the president clearly lied in his accounts of two al Qaeda terrorists and their role in gaining intelligence. We also find a clear agreement between someone like Marty Lederman and someone like John Yoo about what the president’s proposed law would do. Will some reporter please demand soon that the president answer specifics on techniques like waterboarding and the "cold cell"? If he wants to legalize these methods and call them not "torture" or compliant with Geneva, then let him say so in plain English in public and defend it. Let’s get specific. Ask him on the record if he has authorized "waterboarding". Demand an answer. Get off the floor and fight back.

From the Washington Post chat session yesterday:

Foxboro, Mass: I’m confused. Bush made this bold statement that the US doesn’t torture that I thought should have already happened. Yet water boarding of prisoners has been documented. Did he miss the memo?

Dana Priest: Okay, under the rules in which the CIA was operating – rules judged by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel to be legal – waterboarding was not considered torture. If you read the so-called Torture Memo of August 2002, you’ll see that torture, as defined by the OLC there mean only techniques that cause severe mental or physical damage, organ failure or death. Water boarding does not cause such damage, does not result in organ failure or death. that’s what the interpretation would be. Note: The DOJ repudiated the memo once it became public.

The question you, dear reader, have to answer is whether you consider "waterboarding" to be

"an act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession."

The second question is what you think of a president who believes waterboarding isn’t such an act.

Warner, McCain and Graham are not budging, apparently, on the president’s war crimes bill. And neither are the JAGs. It really is astonishing to see so many in the military openly and uniformly resist their own commander-in-chief. But Bush’s stupidity has given them no choice. This is what Power Line calls "the left." Yep: McCain, Warner and Graham are "the left"; so is the military’s legal elite:

Brig, Gen. James C. Walker, the top uniformed lawyer for the Marines, said that no civilized country should deny a defendant the right to see the evidence against him and that the United States ‘should not be the first.’

Maj. Gen. Scott C. Black, the judge advocate general of the Army, made the same point, and Rear Adm. Bruce E. MacDonald, the judge advocate general of the Navy, said military law provided rules for using classified evidence, whereby a judge could prepare an unclassified version of the evidence to share with the jury and the accused and his lawyer.

Senate Republicans said the proposal to deny the accused the right to see classified evidence was one of the main points of contention remaining between them and the administration.

‘It would be unacceptable, legally, in my opinion, to give someone the death penalty in a trial where they never heard the evidence against them,’ said Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who has played a key role in the drafting of alternative legislation as a member of the Armed Services Committee and a military judge. ”Trust us, you‚Äôre guilty, we‚Äôre going to execute you, but we can‚Äôt tell you why’? That’s not going to pass muster; that’s not necessary.’

Amazing. Inspiring. But the battle has just begun.

"The question history will ask is whether Bush’s presidency was as bad as Richard Nixon’s or only as bad as Jimmy Carter’s … If the country seriously intends to prevent terrorism, then spying at home, detaining terror suspects, and conducting tough interrogations are practices that the government will need to engage in for many years to come. Instead of making proper legal provisions for those practices, Bush has run the war against jihadism out of his back pocket, as a permanent state of emergency. He engages in legal ad-hockery and trickery, treats Congress as a nuisance rather than a partner, and circumvents outmoded laws and treaties when he should be creating new ones. Of all Bush’s failings, his refusal to build durable underpinnings for what promises to be a long struggle is the most surprising, the most gratuitous, and potentially the most damaging, both to the sustainability of the antiterrorism effort and to the constitutional order," – Jonathan Rauch, the Atlantic.

Jon thinks Bush’s failure as president is more like Carter’s than Nixon’s, i.e. recoverable within the foreseeable future, if the Congress changes hands and a new president can tackle the fiscal disaster and Iraq fiasco. I hope he’s right.

(Photo: Chris Gardner/AP.)

We are now reduced to parsing whether links to other reviews is part of my own commentary. A reader writes:

Argh, stop it!! Everytime I see that guy on tv I can’t turn it off fast enough, but you are really arguing in bad faith here. The fact is, you had far too many references to and posts about his book without reading it. Everything else is beside the point. If anyone wrote about your book over and over again without reading it you’d be pissed. And you’d be right.

If you think that mentioning other reviews of a book approvingly or otherwise is itself commentary on the contents of a book, then Ponnuru and Goldberg and my reader are correct. I don’t see it that way; and don’t see a blog that way. I went out of my way to reserve comment on Ponnuru’s book, while criticizing its inflammatory title and Coulter cover-blurb. (I should say that any book that has Ann Coulter’s advance blurb on its cover is demanding not to be taken seriously.) My minor point is that, unlike Mark Steyn who actually quoted a passage from a book he hasn’t read to make a point about its general thesis, I have restricted myself to criticizing the title and blurb of a book, which in themselves bespeak a partisanship and extremism that make me reluctant to read any of it. Yes, I’ve linked to other commentary, but again, I think readers can tell the difference between linking to other reviews and writing my own. Still, the split hairs are getting mighty thin. I guess I should now vow never to mention the book again. With any luck, Ponnuru will return the favor with respect to mine.

Good for the Pentagon brass. They know that their own established, constitutional procedures for trying terror suspects are the best way to bring the perpetrators of 9/11 to justice. They know that Bush’s ad hoc, unconstitutional and illegal "tribunals" will only reverberate to al Qaeda’s propaganda advantage. They don’t want the bill that the White House has sent to the Congress. The three key Republican senators on the armed services committee are expressing reservations as well: McCain, Warner and Graham. But this detail from an AP story struck me as remarkable:

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., said he wants a vote on the bill by the end of the month and will likely decide Friday morning when the bill should reach the floor. House Majority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, has promised a vote on the administration’s measure there during the week of Sept. 18 …

A leadership aide said Warner, McCain and Graham were given "24 hours to think their position over," indicating a possibility the bill could be routed around the Armed Services Committee and placed directly on the Senate floor.

I would say Frist should be a little careful here. I’d also say this suggests that the White House is deadly serious in maintaining its breach of the Geneva Conventions – and cementing it in law.