“Cut And Run”

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Readers know that I don’t support any timetable for withdrawal from Iraq. This puts me in the excruciating position of supporting a war conducted by an administration whose key players are manifestly incompetent and reckless. This is, I think, also the position of several pro-war Democrats, like Senator Clinton, and many pro-war Republicans, whose complete disgust at the way this administration has handled Iraq is more often expressed in private than public. Unable to access intelligence, forced to rely on news reports, blogs and other sources for information, I don’t have an alternative master-plan to win either. I would support an increase in troop levels, a clear-and-hold strategy, a more aggressive military commitment to protect the infrastructure, and the kind of outreach to alienated Sunnis that Maliki and Khalilzad are attempting. But as long as Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld are running the show, I cannot say I am optimistic that such a sane strategy will be employed or that it will succeed. It’s like asking Ken Lay to turn Enron back into an ethical, profit-making company. But what else can I do? I agree with John McCain that peremptory withdrawal or a fixed date would amount to surrender to an enemy that seems to be gaining momentum and strength. It would mean a historic betrayal of all those Iraqis who want a better future; and consigning Iraq to a new and more lethal version of the Taliban’s Afghanistan. It would put us in a more vulnerable position than we were on September 10, 2001.

The Democrats, alas, seem hopeless to me. Their ambivalence about the war before and during it makes them seem unreliable stewards of a fight we have no choice but to join. Their flirtation with withdrawal only reinforces this impression. But they do have an opening, if they only had the conviction. If a Democratic candidate emerged who promised to stick to the Iraq war to victory, but conduct it in a more aggressive, ethical and competent way than the current crew, Americans would be more than receptive. Such a position would also help them expose the scandalous incompetence in the White House, while not being vulnerable to charges of defeatism. It won’t happen, alas. And Rove will ruthlessly exploit the war for partisan gain, as he has from the beginning. He has no scruples. For him, national security is simply part of a political game. I should therefore break the news to my liberal and Democratic readers: Rove is winning this game for now. If you stick to your anti-war position, you are left with hoping for catastrophe, which a great political party should be above. Until the Democrats confront this, the rest of us are left with the hope of McCain – but not much else. Well: prayer, I guess.

(Photo: Franco Pagetti for Time.)

The Betrayal of Reagan

This email speaks for itself:

Thank you for quoting Bukovsky. Like him, I escaped from a communist country twenty years ago and have embraced American style democracy.

I share your views regarding torture but haven’t been able to write about it because both my grandfathers were sent to labor camp in the 50’s. I did a documentary film about them and uncovered many facts about how they were treated. First of all they were tortured psychologically. My mother’s father was told that his daughter was being raped in the next room (not true, it was a record player) in order to make him talk. He was not allowed to sleep, he was subjected to electro shocks and at the end he lost his mind and left wandering the streets. A kind Gypsy took him home to my grandmother who nursed him back to life. He spent the rest of his life afraid of any man in uniform and much more … At least I got to know him. My father’s father was simply killed. Maybe he was luckier, we’ll never know. The fact is he was brutally tortured too.

Needless to say my family put all its efforts in escaping communism.

Needless to say I always believed Americans to be better.

Needless to say I watch with great horror and sadness as the Bush/Cheney America slowly uses the same tactics.

This one is on Republican shoulders. No wonder they don’t want to hear from people like Bukovsky. After all it was Ronald Reagan who ended the cold war. Now his party has stooped so low that moderate people like me are agreeing with Noam Chomsky!

Irony of all ironies …

Not quite: tragedy of all tragedies.

Email from Nebraska

A reader writes:

I just discovered you after reading "My Problem with Christianism." I seriously read the essay at least 10 times because I could not believe someone wrote into words what I have been feeling for years! I have shared it with so many of my friends and they too have all had the same reaction. I live in Nebraska and I feel like I’m walking with a bunch of pod people. They follow this administration like some sort of cult, zombies, afraid to question it because of their religious beliefs. Somehow it goes against God to question Bush because he prays and is "moral" because he’s pro-life, wants to ban gay marriage and fight evil around the world! (like some sort of super hero). It’s very frustrating.

I’m not running this email as some kind of self-puffery. I’m running it because it’s an on-the-ground account of what sustains this administration’s base level of support. When you get down to the last twenty percent, it’s not political support; it’s religious. We have the first truly sectarian, religious administration, appealing for support on theological grounds, and relying on churches to sustain it. I find this deeply troubling both for government and for religion. If support for a president rests on his religious faith rather than a judgment of his policies, then civil, secular politics – whether on the right or left – is finished. Faith cannot be debated; it can merely be asserted. If it is the core basis for politics, as we see in Iraq or the Balkans or Northern Ireland, a multi-faith society ceases to function as a democracy. Conservatives, while respecting religious faith, should nonetheless strongly resist this temptation to turn politics into religion. It is a tiger you cannot ride for long.

Desperation

It’s almost poignant to see the way in which some are seizing on this story as a way to reassure themselves that the Bush (and Clinton) administrations didn’t gravely misjudge Saddam’s WMD programs in the five years before the invasion. Of course, Santorum is desperate, as reality-based conservative Professor Bainbridge explains. And we always need to keep an open mind. But the discovery of depleted, unusable chemical weapons from before 1991 is not, alas, the salvation some hope for. Money quote:

A Pentagon official who confirmed the findings said that all the weapons were pre-1991 vintage munitions "in such a degraded state they couldn’t be used for what they are designed for."
The official, who asked not to be identified, said most were 155 millimeter artillery projectiles with mustard gas or sarin of varying degrees of potency.
"We’re destroying them where we find them in the normal manner," the official said.

In October 2004, the president dutifully reported:

"The chief weapons inspector, Charles Duelfer, has now issued a comprehensive report that confirms the earlier conclusion of David Kay that Iraq did not have the weapons that our intelligence believed were there."

Of course, if more evidence emerges from classified documents, we should keep our minds open. But does anyone believe that if the administration had real evidence, it wouldn’t have used it already? 

Rumors in Iraq

Omar hears one; and it’s encouraging for those who think Maliki can still succeed:

Two weeks ago the forces of the interior ministry arrested a group of militants that are believed responsible for a number of crimes. Those terror suspects turned out to be members of the Badr organization whose leader is Abdul Aziz al-Hakeem.
Al-Hakeem paid PM Maliki a visit and asked him to order the release of the detained Badr members, a request that upset Maliki and to which he responded by telling al-Hakeem "I am trying to build a state here and you come to ruin it?!! There’s no way I’m doing what you are asking me to do".
The two men exchanged very harsh words and al-Hakeem was so angry when he rushed out of al-Maliki’s office.

A good sign, if true. But the rumor itself is a good sign. We need Iraqis to believe that Maliki is a serious national figure, able to stand up to sectarian pressures. Rumors like this help.

Suskind Update

I’ve started on the book and find it well put together and plausible. With books with anonymous sources with axes to grind, it’s hard to know for sure what to believe. You have to use your own judgment as best you can. Woodward, Barnes, Gordon/Trainor and Suskind make for a helpful quartet. It seems clear to me from Suskind’s book that it’s payback time for the CIA in their war against the Cheney-Rumsfeld axis. It also seems clear that payback may well be merited.

You don’t expect a man like Dick Cheney to panic after an incident like 9/11; but it seems in retrospect that he did; and his panic over-rode critical safeguards against error. Looking back, I think we can excuse our leaders of making some early errors in assessing a dark and near-invisible enemy, devoid of scruples and any decency. That doesn’t mean we should forgive their arrogant persistence in those mistakes; or their subsequent cover-ups. Cheney would have been better advised to be obsessing over Zarqawi in the summer of 2003, rather than Joe Wilson. Suskind also seems to have gotten one significant detail wrong with respect to the London 7/7 bombings: he may have muddled up one Mohammed Siddique Khan with one Mohammed Ajmal Khan. Here’s the Telegraph story on the alleged error, which Suskind denies. Make your own mind up.