The Dish

A reader writes:

It’s alleged that Hitchens has a drinking problem. If so, perhaps you’d be kind enough to pass on specifics regarding his daily intake, so I can emulate. Though I don’t always agree with him, I have nothing but admiration for someone who can knock out a weekly Slate column, an erudite review for the Atlantic each month, a longer, bimonthly piece for Vanity Fair and a book a year. I’m a journalist, and I just spent a week laboring over a relatively straightforward 1,200-word essay (on wine, coincidentally.) But I’m obviously not drinking the right stuff.

Me neither. The sheer quantity and amazing quality of Hitch’s output puts me to shame. And since I am not a member of the pleasure police, I have no problems with people actually enjoying their lives, rather than merely living them. Others, of course, clearly differ. And they are welcome to their asceticism. Just don’t mess with others’ recreation.

The Senator’s past keeps re-emerging. Ryan Lizza has two new details: 1) Allen had a Confederate flag on his truck at UVA. 2) An Allen campaign ad from 1993 had a Confederate flag in it. In today’s GOP, I wonder why anyone is surprised.

A reader comments:

I read this first with amusement then with a bit of irritation. Truth is, I like both Hitchens and Cole – they are way up on the list of writers I read compulsively. They both have strong suits – Hitchens is one of the most amazing wordsmiths of his generation, and a man of staggering rhetorical ability to boot. Cole runs a very interesting Middle East press clipping service with commentary (nothing quite like it) and he has an amazing depth of knowledge of Middle Eastern culture, religion and politics. Both Hitchens and Cole have an output which is little short of astonishing. And something which goes with the high volume output – both of them are quite frequently wrong, and are stubborn-headed when their errors are shown.

Surely Cole is wrong in defending Iran’s new nutcase president. On the other hand, Cole’s ideas about extending American influence in the region through soft power and education are spot-on and need to be listened to. Hitchens is in overdrive criticizing him. I am prepared to be forgiving to both of them, because they make important contributions to the discussion and are, in the end, educational and entertaining. Moreover, when I see someone with such immense output, I expect mistakes and am prepared to forgive them (though I’d wish for less pig-headedness). This is fundamentally the case for blogging, which I see as in a different category from print and broadcast media. It’s a more intimate medium. Somewhere in his notebooks, Ralph Waldo Emerson says that the best thing about friends is that one can afford to be stupid around them. This is very true for list-servs, and also true to some extent for blogging. So while I admire the pugilistic spirit, I say: enough already. Cole and Hitchens are both on my must-read list and no amount of intemperate assault is going to lead me to drop either one.

That’s the spirit of true liberalism – and the promise of the blogosphere.

Norelco unveils a WMD. I’m for a pre-emptive strike. 

Public support for one of the worst Supreme Court decisions in recent times is at an all-time low. But views on abortion itself have barely moved in over thirty years, and are roughly where they were in 1973. I think people are beginning to realize that saner abortion laws require legislative, not judicial action. And I say that as someone who opposes all abortion on moral grounds, but would prefer to see it kept legal in the first trimester, for prudential reasons and because of the valid interest of women’s freedom over their own bodies. I think legal, but restrictive abortion laws would be the end-result of a post-Roe world across much of America, although some states may have much more liberal laws than others. I support federalism in this as I do in marriage. And if some states were to ban all abortions, along theocon lines, then pro-choice groups should do all they can to expand access to contraception, the Morning After pill, adoption (including gay adoption) and access to out-of-state first trimester abortions if necessary.

One thing that today’s high gas prices strongly suggest is that, whatever else it was, the Iraq war was surely not about oil. If you care about cheap oil above everything else, you’d have found some deal with Saddam, kept the oil fields pumping, and maintained the same realist policy toward Arab and Muslim autocracies we had for decades. Or you could have just seized the Southern oil fields. Instead, we risked losing all of Iraq’s oil fields at the beginning of the war, and now face a crippled supply just as India and China are booming and the U.S. is growing fast. (Instability in Iran, Nigeria and Venezuala don’t help either.) I have unmixed feelings about this. The high price of gas is the best thing to have happened to the U.S. in a very long time. It alone, given the paralysis of the government, will force a market-driven push into new energy technologies, deter SUVs, and provoke the kind of technological research which will benefit us in the future. A smart overview of the entire situation can be read on this blog. I’m longing for gas at $4 a gallon. Yes, I know it hurts people. But pain is the only medicine for America’s oil addiction. And if you have an SUV, decisions have consequences. Live with them.

(Photo: Patrick Andrade/Polaris for Time.)

It still amazes me how the far left is still much, much more concerned with bringing George Bush down than in building Iraq up. The contempt some of them once had for the Iraqi people’s fate – they were quite happy to see Iraqis consigned for decades to Saddam’s tender mercies – is now matched by their zeal to abandon the country to Jihadists and theocratic Shiite thugs. Yes, the Bush administration richly deserves a shellacking for its conduct of the war. But handing al Qaeda a failed state on a plate right now seems to me an odd priority for a group that claims to want something they call "progressive." Tom Hayden echoes the Arianna line today in her celebriblog, and decides to take after George Packer. As you might expect, it’s the usual incoherence. Here’s one typical passage:

Packer sees the US troops not as occupiers, not the cause of violence, but as "buffers" between violent Iraqis. The same civilizing role was claimed by the British when they sent troops to Northern Ireland in 1969; thirty years later they signed the Good Friday Agreement but still haven’t permitted free elections. Baghdad is simply the next Belfast, in this view.

Huh? Does Hayden believe that U.S. troops have caused ethnic division and hatred in Iraq in three short years? Did such divides not exist beforehand? Were they not the critical force behind the construction of Saddam’s divide-and-massacre strategy? And of Iraq’s very borders? As for Britain’s colonial presence in Northern Ireland, it has existed for centuries, and represented one side in the conflict. The current coalition in Iraq have been there for three years, represent no ethnic faction, and are there as a support for an attempted multi-ethnic government. And then there’s this bizarre assertion that Britain has not yet allowed free elections in Ulster (with the implication that this has also been the case in Iraq). Huh? Ulster has had several seats in the House of Commons under free elections for decades. London and Dublin have been attempting to broker regional government there for decades. The Irish republic is a booming democracy. Moreover, Iraqis have had more democratic options in the last three years than in the previous several decades. Did Hayden not notice the moving spectacle of a people formerly in bondage finally getting to vote? Or is that something the left has no interest in any more?

A reader writes:

In your post, "What did Ahmadinejad Mean," to demonstrate his malign and undeterrable nature you quote Rafsanjani saying:

"If a day comes when the world of Islam is duly equipped with the arms Israel has in possession, the strategy of colonialism would face a stalemate because application of an atomic bomb would not leave any thing in Israel but the same thing would just produce damages in the Muslim world."

It is worth noting that this is almost exactly the same line that China took during the Cold War: That it did not need to worry about nuclear retaliation because the US and its allies had more concentrated targets, whereas China’s vast hinterlands would allow it to resist nuclear attack with manpower left to burn.  "As long as there are green mountains, who needs to worry about firewood?" asked Mao with characteristic directness; "It is the United States that should be afraid of using nuclear bombs against us, because its densely concentrated industries are more vulnerable."  But China in spite of its professed indifference to nuclear retaliation was and remains deterrable.

While you are a great fan of taking murderous dictators at their word, I think that you apply the principle too broadly.  No national leader speaks truthfully when pursuing a strategy of deterrance — the whole point of a deterrance strategy is to appear more crazy and undeterrable than your rival.  You postulate an odd sort of dictator who is rational enough to tell the truth but too crazy to know how to lie when it manifestly suits his interests.

Any approach to strategy that does not take account of deterrability, and make a serious effort to estimate it, is going to lead to all manner of grandiose invade-the-world schemes. Yet oddly enough one does not see a great deal of such analysis coming from the White House these days, or from its pundit and blog subsidiaries. The phrase "fundamentally unserious," though overused, might well apply here.

The problem with deterrence and Iran’s current regime, I think, lies in its fundamentalist religious orientation. When you live in the imminent expectation of a much-wanted Apocalypse, then deterrence may not work against you. We are dealing with a religious movement in which suicide bombing is a virtue. How do we deter suicide bombers? We cannot. How do we know that Iran’s leaders do not have the same psychology on a far greater scale? We do not. The Soviets, in comparison, were rational. Religious fanatics, especially those eager for eschatological oblivion, are not. There’s the rub.

This time, Weis versus Pollack. Chait keeps score.