The Dish

Good news for Mickey Kaus: I’m taking a vacation for two weeks starting tonight. Better news for you guys: my guest-bloggers will be three in number. They’re Ana-Marie Cox, the former star of Wonkette and now the Washington editor of Time.com; Michael Totten, who’ll be blogging directly from the Middle East; and David Weigel, one of the sharpest young bloggers in the libertarian universe. This trio will be a blogging ensemble until Labor Day, when I hope to return all rested up. Give them a warm welcome.

It goes to Heather Mac Donald, whose dogged refusal to acquiesce to the usual juvenile nonsense from JPod earns her some cred. Here’s part of her latest attempt to disentangle conservatism from the fundamentalist vines now strangling it:

I agree with Jonah that the truth claims of religion are “slippery.” Yet I hear them made all the time. A recent article on The Da Vinci Code in The American Spectator stated that it was a matter of “historical fact” that Jesus was born of a virgin and ascended to heaven after the crucifixion. I simply don’t know what to make of that statement or its appearance in a powerful, justly respected journal of conservative opinion. It does not conform to what I thought was a common understanding of “historical facts.” Ditto when the president claims that freedom is God’s gift to humanity. He is not talking here about free will. I see little evidence in the Bible that God advocated the democratic government that we are bringing to (or imposing on) Iraq, not to mention the gender quotas that we fixed for the Iraqi National Assembly. The Bible seems to be relatively easy about slavery, patriarchy, and despotic tribal leadership; its concerns lie elsewhere. And if the freedom that we have created in the West is indeed God’s gift, it sure took a long time for us to open it. If it turns out that our conception of political freedom is in fact a human creation growing out of very specific cultural soil, that may explain why it is not blossoming forth as we expected it to following the invasion of Iraq.

Ouch.

A reader writes:

There’s one aspect of your Cheney & Rumsfeld theory that really is paranoid. I very much doubt that they actually WANTED democratization to fail in Iraq — I just think that they had little belief that it would succeed, and believed that in any case it wasn’t worth the huge amount of military and economic effort we would have to pour into it to be reasonably sure of making it work. The trouble is that their alternative Shock & Awe strategy hasn’t worked, either – Iran and the various terrorist groups are singularly Unshocked & Unawed by us now.

Morever, if Woodward’s quotes are correct, Bush agreed with them on this from the start – if a modest, short effort succeeded in reforming Iraq, fine, but if not he didn’t believe in wasting any more time or military effort on it.  What tripped all of them up was the fact – the one real shock of the war which caught absolutely everybody off guard — that Saddam had gotten rid of all his WMDs.  So, to avoid making it look to the entire world as though the war had been totally unjustified (after all, we hadn’t even given the UN inspectors time to finish looking for WMDs before we went in), they grabbed for "democratization" as an alternative justification – while still being unwilling to provide the huge supply of resources (probably including a draft) that would have been necessary to give it a good chance of success. They just kept trickling support in and hoping that a miracle would happen and the place could be reformed anyway.

That miracle hasn’t happened. And in the process the US has managed to look spectacularly impotent and incompetent militarily speaking to Iran and the Islamic Fascists, which of course is not what C. and R. had in mind at all.  They seriously overestimated the degree to which our jumping up and down and yelling "Boogabooga!" would scare the Iranians and the theocratic Moslems in general.

I think that’s about the best inference right now. Some in the administration and among Bush-supporters, like me, believed in democratization as well as WMD-removal as twin pillars of the war. But the war-plan proves that this was not what Cheney, Rumsfeld and Bush really had in mind. The most plausible interpretation is that they expected the discovered WMDs to provide complete justification for the war – and then wanted to get out as fast as possible, with a friendly exile like Chalabi installed. They wanted merely to send an intimidating signal. And they have achieved exactly the opposite. And so they have made us less safe, with more enemies, who are more dangerously armed and less intimidated.

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 8.55 am.

There’s been an interesting exchange over at NRO. Just scroll for the last couple of days. The Buckley view, apparently, is that it is perfectly possible for a conservative to be an atheist, but that respect for religion and a lack of disrespect for the faithful is also part of conservatism. I tend to agree. The only thing I’d add is that "religion" is a very broad and inchoate term for the purposes of this discussion. It matters a great deal what kind of religious faith we’re talking about. Faith is not, to my mind, an on-off switch, in which you either believe completely or not at all. This model is shared by fundamentalists and atheists, but not by many, many Christians.

The most natural religious complement to conservatism is a faith in God, tempered by a deep humility about our ability to know surely much about what God is, an emphasis on mystery, on charity, individual responsibility, and sacramental worship. But when religion becomes absolutist and abstract and political, when it become fundamentalist, it is much less compatible with conservatism, and, in the end, actively hostile to it. What we are seeing resurgent in the world today is the rise of a religious sensibility – in Islam, Hinduism, Judaism and Christianity – which has far more in common with the statist absolutist totalitarianisms of the last century than with, say, Anglicanism or post-Vatican II Catholicism. In fact, as I argue in my book, I think the collapse of the last centuries’ totalitarianisms has opened a cultural and psychological vacuum for this kind of religion to occupy, as it once did before the Enlightenment. A passage from my upcoming book makes the point:

In this non-fundamentalist understanding of faith, practice is more important then theory, love more important than law, and mystery is seen as an insight into truth rather than an obstacle. This is the Christianity that the conservative clings to; and it is a form of Christianity the fundamentalist rejects. That is his right. But it is the great lie of our time that all religious faith has to be fundamentalist to be valid.

Alas, many conservatives have conflated these rival forms of faith. And, often with good intentions, they have thereby helped erase conservatism’s critical, definitional distinction between transcendent truth and practical wisdom. From that confusion, so much damage has been done. So much – in so short a time.

Lewis Black on quail-"hunting". I worship him.

Gerard Baker has been one of the British journalists most open to supporting the Bush administration, most prepared to give neoconservatism the respect it deserves, most willing to give president Bush the benefit of the doubt. Here’s what he’s writing now:

[T]he US could take the risk of alienating the world and discarding international law only if its leadership was going to be effective. Instead its leadership has been desultory and uncertain and tragically ineffective.

It tried unilateral pre-emption in Iraq, but never really had the will to see it through. So with Iran, it went all mushy and multilateralist. In Lebanon, it thought it would cover all the bases — start by aggressively supporting Israel, then go all peacenik, holding hands with the UN in a touching chorus of Kumbaya.

Now we have the worst of all worlds. Not only is the US despised around the globe, it can’t even make its supposed hegemony work.

It’s one thing to be seen as the bully in the schoolyard; it’s quite another when people realise the bully is actually incapable of getting anybody else to do what he wants. It’s unpleasant when people stop respecting you, but it’s positively terrifying when they stop fearing you.

He regards Bush’s foreign policy as in the midst of a nervous breakdown.

"I’m watching an AP video of this freak, and he seems more like a homosexual pedophile to me. According to this story, Karr was married with children," – LaShawn Barber, commenting on the suspect in the Jon-Benet Ramsey case. (Hat tip: Malcontent.)

A woman gets her throat slit in Italy for dating a non-Muslim.

This piece about the British converts to Islamism prompted some thoughts. Money quote:

Myfanwy Franks, a researcher who has studied converts to Islam and is the author of "Women and Revivalism in the West: Choosing Fundamentalism in a Liberal Democracy," said, "Being troubled does not necessarily lead people to conversion ‚Äî people who aren’t troubled convert ‚Äî but it could lead to extreme radicalization."
Mentioning reports in the news media that Mr. Waheed was a heavy drinker and drug user before turning to Islam, Ms. Franks added: "I think there’s a tendency for some people, when they stop using some kind of addictive substance, to be left with a big hole in their lives. To do something extreme is the easiest way to go, because it fills that big hole."

The path that some addicts take – not to go into lengthy, difficult recovery but to adopt, cold-turkey, the most absolutist religious position as the panacea for their addiction – is a fascinating one. I think it helps explain the strange management style and worldview of the current president.