The Dish

The movie, “Brokeback Mountain,” looks set to be a fascinating cultural moment. What’s interesting to me is that it takes the question of same-sex love and places it firmly in the center of American folklore, especially the cowboy West. Now, of course gay cowboys existed and exist. But that two very hot Hollywood leading men would be prepared to take on these roles, that a director as accomplished as Ang Lee would direct the movie, and that a studio as mainstream as Universal would produce it strikes me as a significant development. A few years back, it would have been unthinkable for bankable, heterosexual stars like Ledger and Gyllenhaal to have embraced such a venture. But they are of the generation that is mercifully over the bigotries of old Hollywood. Think of the greatest actor of his generation, Philip Seymour Hoffman. Three of his most powerful, accomplished, career-making performances – in “Boogie Nights,” “Flawless,” and “Capote,” – are of gay men, each very different, each very human, each poignantly and brilliantly brought to life. In his case, taking on homosexual roles has helped Hoffman reach the career heights he now commands. Ledger and Gyllenhal take this to a new level, because, unlike Hoffman, they are handsome beyond measure, and have played macho heterosexuals for years. Now they get to play macho homosexuals – itself an inversion and abolition of a certain stereotype. I have yet to see the movie, so I cannot judge it on its merits. But so far, its potential cultural impact looks riveting. If it wins a wide audience, it will be one more sign that the old cliches of “gay culture” are indeed dying fast. I think Red State America is less fearful of the truth than its political representatives. But we’ll see, I guess.

The emergence of Christianism in this country – a political movement founded on evangelical doctrine – is arguably the most significant political development of the new millennium. And what’s critical about this new movement is its relationship to government: there’s nothing Christianists like more than active, interventionist government to right wrong, police private lives and uphold their version of morality. Now take a moment to ask yourselves: who do they resemble? This busy-body, moralizing tendency was once the province of what we once called the left. Like the old left, Christianism puts virtue before freedom, even if its idea of virtue is very different than those in the old left. But the usual facets of leftism – massive public spending and borrowing, growth in regulations, tampering with the constitution for political ends, use of churches for political campaigns – are now just as powerfully represented on the Christianist right. Eventually, it was inevitable that they would join forces in a common cause – and the environment is one of them. What’s interesting here is not whether the policy proposals have merit; but the confluence of these two interventionist, big government philosophies. Some parts of the environnmental movement – the loopy parts – are very similar to eschatological religious phenomena in any case. Their fusion is a sign of our new politics – where bigger and bigger government and less and less freedom is now the ruling consensus.

This is important and good news from Iraq. The critical things to watch in the next couple of months are, it seems to me, the potential splintering of the Sunni Arabs, between die-hard dead-enders and pragmatic pols, and the pace of reconstruction. Developments in Syria and Iran matter too. More here.

There is a critical distinction between forbidding abuse of detainees already in captivity and micro-policing all military combat. The British troops in Basra are apparently demoralized because they fear legal consequences for shooting insurgents. That’s nuts. These soldiers have enough stress dealing with Baathists and Jihadists and Sadrites without worrying about being prosecuted by their own courts for casualties in legitimate combat. Money quote:

The combination of knowing that death might come at any time from a roadside bomb and that shooting back at Iraqis who attack them might result in their being court-martialled is putting immense pressure on young soldiers.
The doctors described morale in some units as very low with soldiers cynically suggesting they needed a solicitor with them before they shot back at any Iraqi who attacked them.

Blair needs to back his own troops on this one. So does the British public.

“I don’t understand it, and neither does Bill Kristol. The Democrats are mounting the most scurrilous political campaign that has been seen in American politics since the Civil War.” – Powerline blogger, John Hinderaker.

I haven’t given up yet. My latest mood-swing in the Times of London.

THE LITTLE LIES: Two stories in the NYT this morning point to a paradox at the center of the administration’s case for war. Since, in my view, they got the big issue right, why did they get the little things so wrong? Two examples: if they knew that the captured Qaeda operative, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, was fibbing as early as February 2002, why did they include his tainted info in subsequent arguments for war? If they knew the real story behind the tragic death of Pat Tillman, why did they immediately lie about it? The same goes for the Niger connection. In my view, the case for not trusting Saddam with our security was solid without these embellishments. A candid, clear laying out of what we knew and didn’t know for sure would have won majority support for war against Saddam. So again, why these cut corners and shaded spin?

LIBBY AND LIBI: The same goes for the absurdly petty attempt to exact revenge on Joe Wilson. To put it bluntly: why did anyone in the administration give a flying turd about Joe Wilson? He was a bit-player, a liar, a non-entity, whose information did not even undermine the very carefully crafted words about Brits, uranium and Africa in the State of the Union. How paranoid, bitter, and defensive do you have to be to do what Libby did (in my view, almost certainly with Cheney’s permission)? Worse: these unnecessary fibs, spins, and deceptions have inevitably come back to haunt the very people who committed them – and to weaken public support for a war that it is still critical to win. A reader sharpens the point here:

There is an enormous difference between what you describe — “insufficient skepticism” — and what the evidence before us (some of which has been on the table for ages, some of which is now appearing to supplement the original case) suggests. You seem to think that there are only two options: willful deception and innocent “insufficient skepticism.” But there is a lot of room in between for reckless and irresponsible doctoring of the evidence. You keep mentioning the great risk (and consensus at the time) as if that justifies suppressing evidence that runs the other way. You’ve got it exactly backwards! In the face of such risk, it’s all the more important for our leaders to level with us about what they know! It’s not as if the only choices were to recklessly disregard opposing evidence or sit on our heels. The administration could have been upfront about what it knew, and what it didn’t know. It could have come forward with the opposing evidence, and made a strong case that, even despite this evidence — even despite Chalabi’s obvious lack of reliability, etc. — still the dangers were too great to do anything but invade. The public probably would have been on board — and if not, that would reflect the public’s judgment about what the right thing to do was.

Whether or not the actions were deliberately intended to deceive, or simply reflective of a reckless disregard for what the evidence showed, the upshot is that Cheney and his supporters put the entire enterprise at risk by ignoring — or attempting to suppress — opposing evidence. We are now witnessing what happens when a public feels that it didn’t get the full story about why it should send its sons and daughters to their deaths.

It seems to me that we are getting a better picture every day of how this administration screwed up its own war. They were defensive when they should have been candid; they were reckless when they should have been meticulously prepared for every outcome; they were insecure when they should have been forthcoming; they decided to divide, rather than unite the country. None of this means we should follow the anti-war movement and abort the mission. It simply means we have to be very skeptical of the key players in this war – Cheney and Rumsfeld above everyone – and try and prevent them from inflicting more damage on a noble cause.

He’s still furiously lobbying Senators to protect his right to torture. A man who avoided service in Vietnam is lecturing John McCain on the legitimacy of torturing military detainees. But notice he won’t even make his argument before Senate aides, let alone the public. Why not? If he really believes that the U.S. has not condoned torture but wants to reserve it for exceptional cases, why not make his argument in the full light of day? You know: where democratically elected politicians operate.

It seems that Judge Alito would regard the deliberate abuse of symbols of someone’s religious faith as arguably tantamount to “torture.” Since mockery of Islam has now been documented in many instances of the Cheney-Rumsfeld detainee-abuse policy, this strikes me as worthy of bringing up in Alito’s hearings. A legal reader discovered Alito’s opinion in Fatin v. INS, 112 F.3d 1233, where Alito held that asylum might be available for an Iranian immigrant who refused to wear a veil. Money quote:

In considering whether the petitioner established that this option would constitute persecution, we will assume for the sake of argument that the concept of persecution is broad enough to include governmental measures that compel an individual to engage in conduct that is not physically painful or harmful but is abhorrent to that individual’s deepest beliefs. An example of such conduct might be requiring a person to renounce his or her religious beliefs or to desecrate an object of religious importance. Such conduct might be regarded as a form of “torture” and thus as falling within the Board’s description of persecution in Acosta.

Alito should be asked whether Koran abuse, the forcible eating of pork, the mandatory swallowing of liquor, sexual humiliation, and other documented anti-Muslim instances of abuse under the Cheney-Rumsfeld rules constitute “torture.” (In the end, Alito did not grant the woman asylum, however, because the record did not show that the exile refused to wear a veil under all circumstances. But he set a clear, new, progressive standard in asylum cases. More here.)

Rows and rows of unbought Hummers.

What if we have over-estimated the extent of Jihadist influence in the Iraq insurgency? The bad news is: we’re still fighting Saddam. The good news: the insurgents are mainly rational actors trying to rule Iraq again, not crazy Wahabbists intent on Armageddon throughout the Middle East. This is why Zalmay Khalilzad has had some success at brokering some small deals with the Sunni elites. If this is the scenario, even Juan Cole might be hopeful. From a blogger’s account of a recent Cole college talk:

From this theory, though, Juan Cole draws an improbably optimistic conclusion — optimistic at least in a relative sense. Both the insurgency and the government are signaling that their objectives are political, not existential. They each want to rule Iraq, not exterminate the other side — although both sides have their eliminationist wings.

This creates the hope that in Iraq, as in Clausewitz’s doctrine, civil war is the continuation of politics by other means, not the opening salvo of the war of the all against the all. And this at least holds out the possibility (hope would be too strong a word) that the various sides will eventually realize they have to compromise — just as the warring factions in Lebanon brokered a workable peace once the leaders of the major factions decided it was no longer in their interests to keep fighting.

If this is the case in Iraq — if the war is essentially political — then America might not face the Hobson’s choice I’ve feared: Withdraw quickly, leaving behind a genocidal civil war, or stay, and get sucked into a brutal counterinsurgency campaign that itself could turn genocidal. U.S. forces could, in theory, be drawn down gradually, while disengaging from direct combat operations and playing more of a balancing role — preventing the Ba’athists from shooting their way back into power, while trying to stop the Kurds and the Shi’a from overreaching in ways that could break up Iraq entirely and trigger a regional war.

That’s exactly the scenario I lay out in a column tomorrow in the Sunday Times. We should by all means subject our own government to scrutiny. But we are still at war. And it would be insane to give up now, when all sorts of opportunities lie ahead.