The Dish

The old country – at least its capital – is hard to distinguish from an American blue state any more. And its most american characteristic is is anti-Americanism. My take on a week in England can be read here.

I wonder if in the next national security debate, there may not be some on the left who favor a harder line against Iran than some on the right. Iran, after all, is the ultimate exemplar of fundamentalist religious right government. Its regime is brutal toward women and gays and Jews. If you distrust American Christian fundamentalists, who do not condone violence or terrorism, and who are restrained by something called the Constititution, how can you not be horrified by Tehran? Rod Liddle has been a Guardian columnist, and editor of the highly influential BCC Radio Four Today program for several years. He shouldn’t be pigeonholed ideologically; but he sure isn’t a conservative. He hired Andrew Gilligan, of "dodgy dossier" fame. And he’s hawkish on nuclear mullahs:

Never mind such niceties as verifying Iran’s nuclear aims: there is still a large tranche of the western world that believes with bovine obduracy that because we and the Americans and the French and the Israelis have nukes, why shouldn’t poor old Third World Iran? Fair play to the burka boys, don’t you think? The answer is simple and yet — in some quarters — quite unsayable: because it is Iran.

I think we have more time to exhaust every other option against Tehran; and I suspect that Ahmadinejad is deliberately trying to provoke reaction right now for domestic reasons. But in the end, I agree with Liddle. Giving eschatological, anti-Semitic religious fanatics a nuclear capacity is not an option. It cannot be allowed to happen.

Another astonishing piece of contempt for democracy from vice president Dick Cheney:

A standing executive order, strengthened by President Bush in 2003, requires all agencies and "any other entity within the executive branch" to provide an annual accounting of their classification of documents. More than 80 agencies have collectively reported to the National Archives that they made 15.6 million decisions in 2004 to classify information, nearly double the number in 2001, but Cheney continues to insist he is exempt.
Explaining why the vice president has withheld even a tally of his office’s secrecy when such offices as the National Security Council routinely report theirs, a spokeswoman said Cheney is "not under any duty" to provide it.

Is this veep not only above the law but also above obeying presidential executive orders? Just when you think the hubris of this crew couldn’t intensify, you see more evidence. I think Richard Cheney needs a new middle name. Milhous.

Frank Rich’s opposition to anything George W. Bush has ever done or might ever do led him to be much more prescient about the failures in Iraq than many were (including me). Today, he writes (TimesDelete) about the attempt to hold Donald Rumsfeld accountable for his persistent botching of the war:

Mr. Rumsfeld is merely a useful, even essential, scapegoat for the hawks in politics and punditland who are now embarrassed to have signed on to this fiasco. For conservative hawks, he’s a convenient way to deflect blame from where it most belongs: with the commander in chief. For liberal hawks, attacking Mr. Rumsfeld for his poor execution of the war means never having to say you’re sorry for leaping on (and abetting) the blatant propaganda bandwagon that took us there.

This is a little glib. I don’t know of many conservative hawks critical of the war who don’t hold Bush accountable for keeping a defense secretary of such manifest failures of judgment. It’s just that in a presidential system, short of the extreme option of impeachment, we’re stuck with the president we have. We’re even stuck with his veep. But we’re not necessarily stuck with a SecDef. Hence the focus. As for liberal hawks, many have said they’re sorry for their own past mistakes, but, unlike Rich, don’t want to throw in the towel, for the sake of the Iraqi people and America’s longterm interests. Out of genuine concern for the security of thwe West and genuine revulsion at the evil of Saddam’s regime, we believed WMD intelligence before the war; and, after 9/11, felt it reckless not to assume the worst. That is not the same as "abetting propaganda". And if it was, it was certainly unwitting.

Rich was right about the character and judgment of some of these people in the White House; and he was certainly right when I was wrong. I genuinely didn’t think they’d be this incompetent or doctrinaire. I genuinely didn’t think one of the most experienced foreign policy teams in high office would throw out the Geneva Conventions almost off-handedly; or dismiss serious military concerns about troop levels, when evidence of crisis was staring them in the face. So my and other criticism of Rumsfeld is driven not as a way to distract from our past misjudgments, which we’ve acknowledged, but to do as good a job as we can to help rectify and atone for them. After all, this is not about us or Rich; it’s about Iraqis, the sacrifice of so many to bring a better future to that region and the world, and doing all we can to salvage what’s left.

Yep, they have to wear headscarves in order to play. And that goes for Western visiting teams as well.

"I’m about as pro-US as they come, but I have to say I’m beginning to run out of patience – and hope," – Clive Davis, on his blog.

Unmissable.

I’m not claiming this. The Army is. Marty Lederman explains:

Today’s Army charge under UCMJ Article 93 against Lt. Col Steven L. Jordan, [a military intelligence officer who was second-in-command of interrogation operations at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq] – for conduct that the SecDef actually authorized as to some detainees – demonstrates that Rumsfeld approved of, and encouraged, violations of the criminal law…
If the conduct at issue is so clearly unlawful, why did Haynes and Rumsfeld think that it could be approved? The answer to this question lies, I think, in the final DoD Working Group Report of April 4, 2003, which acknowledges that assault, cruelty, and maltreatment are offenses under the UCMJ, but which ominously adds, in a subsection heading, that there are "legal doctrines [that] could render specific conduct, otherwise criminal, not unlawful." The text refers to a "discussion of Commander-in-Chief authority, supra."

Don’t you love that phrase: "legal doctrines [that] could render specific conduct, otherwise criminal, not unlawful"? If president Clinton had used such terminology abut sex, can you imagine how the Republicans would have torn him apart? And yet George W. Bush has used it about criminal abuse of military detainees.

Some have been saying that the president doesn’t get enough credit for the strength in the economy. Since we’re running unsustainable trade and budget deficits in order to keep the whole thing afloat, I’d say that’s debatable. But doesn’t the reasoning go the other way as well? If the economy is this strong and Bush still has only 32 percent support, what could happen if we hit the skids? I wonder how low he could go?

So far, it’s around 17 percent in Massachusetts, which may be distorted upward because of pent-up demand. Only time will give us more solid data. My own view is that we will only be able to guage the true rate once an entire generation of gay kids has grown up in the knowledge that one day, they too can get married like their parents. Only then will the psychological wounds inflicted on gay youth’s self-esteem be healed enough to compare them with their heterosexual peers. Dale Carpenter speculates on what all this might mean, if anything, here. And he has some useful additional reporting on the end of gay culture here.