The Dish

My take on the pajama people, in Time.

“Have to agree that both parties would probably benefit from losing this one. Maybe we could install some sort of regent or administrator to run things for 4 years and they try again in 2008? Ok, probably not a good idea.
Kerry gets elected – Iraq slides from chaos to disaster to catastrophe. There’s very little Kerry can do but find some way to declare victory and get out. What’s left of Iraq becomes a vassal/client state of Iran, except perhaps for Kurdistan. The infinitely superior republican spin machine manages to stick Kerry with this stinkburger. After a mediocre 4 years, John McCain wins in 2008. The man who should have won in 2000.
Bush gets elected – Iraq slides from chaos to disaster to catastrophe. There’s very little Bush can do but find some way to declare victory and get out. What’s left of Iraq becomes a vassal/client state of Iran, except perhaps for Kurdistan. They try to stick, I dunno, Tom Daschle with this one but that’s too much of a stretch. The war on terror fizzles out as foreign adventures look much less attractive. Bush sinks well below 50% approval rating as his administration slides into the typical second term lame duck scandal fest. Scandals both venal and serious (Plame, who knows what else) blow up. Republican fatigue grows very noticable. President Hillary Clinton is elected in 2008 and serves two terms. The Senate also goes democratic.” More feedback on the Letters Page, edited by Reihan Salam.

THE RIGHT WAKES UP: Rick Brookhiser, sane as ever, notices the threat to Bush.

Slowly but surely, the Bush administration is trying to undo the protections that gay government employees gained under Clinton. The latest example is the Social Security Agency, according to this report:

Social Security Administration officials are trying to remove language protecting employees from discrimination based on sexual orientation from the agency’s labor contract, union leaders claim. During negotiations on renewing the contract, SSA officials proposed eliminating a clause that allows gay, lesbian and bisexual workers to file discrimination grievances, said Witold Skwierczynski, president of the American Federation of Government Employees Council 220.

The Bushies preposterously claim they only want to “protect” marriage. But quietly they pass amendments and laws that would make even basic protections for gay couples legally vulnerable and renegotiate employment contracts so they can fire homosexuals at will. Maybe some gays will vote for Bush this time around. But they must know it’s a little like chickens voting for Colonel Sanders.

Jonah Goldberg’s column today strikes me as excellent – honest, candid, and largely persuasive. It reminds me why he’s easily the best conservative writer of his generation – because he’s immune to the kind of ideological cocoon that can prevent others from seeing things clearly. And because of that, it’s striking that his ultimate choice for Bush in this war is premised almost entirely on Kerry:

So sure, Bush hasn’t done everything right – never mind perfectly – in Iraq. Churchill didn’t conduct World War II perfectly every time either. Dunkirk wasn’t the sort of thing that happens when the war goes swimmingly. But Bush gets all of this. John Kerry doesn’t, in my opinion. Or, to be more accurate, John Kerry “gets” everything and therefore nothing. If the choice were between Bush and a better commander-in-chief, I might not vote for Bush. But that’s not the choice, now is it?

Hard to dissent. There are two Kerrys in my mind (and about a few hundred other ones in Kerry’s). One is Carter-Redux: former military peacenik, paralyzed by indecision, unable to win a peace, let alone a war. The other is the Honorable Bore: the establishment guy who won’t be terrible and whose steady, consensus-ridden hand we might need after the recklessness of young Hal. I’m torn between the two. I really do worry that Bush is out of his depth in this conflict, and that his handling of Iraq these past twelve months essentially disqualifies him from re-election. But better the devil you know? If the war was the only issue – and the fiscal lunacy, social intolerance and institutional arrogance were not also in play, I might have to swallow hard and go for Bush. But a vote for wimping out in Fallujah, bigger government and the social policy of James Dobson? Please. Bush’s crude, see-no-problems campaign has also done a lot to persuade me that he’s not up to the job. Lowry sums up why Kerry’s new strategy is not crazy. I do the same in TNR. I’m glad we’re talking.

Today’s must-read is a nuanced and fascinating account of what’s going on in Fallujah, the dangerous power vacuum caused as we wait for Iraqi soldiers to be trained, the potential for Zarqawi to over-play his hand, and the inevitability of an intense future conflict. The piece made me both more hopeful and more concerned at the same time. Which may be the only rational response to the current mess in Iraq.

QUOTE OF THE DAY: “Everybody has a game face on. Too bad this is not a game.” – George Will, in a quietly chilling column today on Iraq.

The question lingers: why would anyone in the administration want to leak to Robert Novak that Bush is contemplating a quickish exit from Iraq? An obvious thought is that the leak comes from someone diametrically opposed to such a stance. An admission of any plan of that kind would demoralize the president’s supporters (and war supporters) and probably prompt a question in the debates or upcoming news conferences. The president might then be forced to dismiss such an idea, boxing himself into the neoconservative position before the election. Tada! You scotch the withdrawal idea by raising it. The beauty of this is that it uses that anti-war curmudgeon, Novak, to bolster the president’s resolve. Alternatively, it’s less an attempt to corner the president than to wake him up. “Look,” someone might be trying to say from within the cocoon. “You might still think we’re marching to victory but almost no one else does. We’re in a situation where withdrawal is increasingly a least-worst option.” That comports with the allegedly despondent mood of Paul Wolfowitz, addressing a bunch of Iraqi exiles last week. Wolfowitz is a smart and principled man. He knows the extent of the failure since the fall of Baghdad and may be doing his best to rescue something from it. So you have Wolfowitz, Hagel, McCain, and Graham all trying to wake the president up – or bounce him into a concrete commitment of more money, troops and attention before the election. All this is purely my conjecture. Whatever scenario is more accurate, the underlying message is clear. Most of Washington now believes that the war in Iraq is all but lost and that Bush has to tell us soon how he intends to turn things around. People are coming out of denial. And that’s dangerous for the president if it becomes widespread before November 2.

THOUGHTS ON KERRY: It also behooves John Kerry to say what he would do about, say, Fallujah. His speech yesterday was not, to my ears, an anti-war speech, although David Brooks is spinning it that way this morning. It was an attempt to mount an attack on the president on the basis of his incompetent war-management. But because of that, Kerry must also offer concrete differences between him and the president on the issue of how practically to defeat the insurgency. We heard none. No, it’s not his primary responsibility right now. But if he wants to be president, it will be his responsibility next year. Again, you have both sides evading responsibility. One side won’t say whether he intends to ratchet up the war soon; the other side won’t say if he will either and offers a vain hope that the problem can be internationalized. It’s a game of vague chicken. We deserve better.

I wonder if either candidate has pondered the benefits of actually losing this election? If Kerry wins, you can see how the Republicans would then blame all the inevitable mess in Iraq on his vacillation (even if he doesn’t budge an inch), and marshall a Tet offensive argument that implies that if only Washington hadn’t given up, the Blessed Leader would have seen the war to victory. Kerry wouldn’t be able to win, whatever he does. And because he’d be more fiscally responsible than Bush (could anyone be less fiscally responsible?) he wouldn’t have much in the way of domestic goodies to keep his base happy. But if Bush wins and heads into a real, live second Vietnam in Iraq, his party will split, the country will become even more bitterly polarized than now (especially if he’s re-elected because he’s not Kerry) and he’ll become another end-of-career Lyndon Johnson. The presidency of the U.S. is never an easy job. But it could be a brutal one these next four years. Which sane person would want the job?

THE ADMINISTRATION’S OPEN MIND: Here’s a fascinating little vignette about the way in which this administration is prosecuting the war. It’s a fawning account of a recent Rumsfeld speech. Money quote:

The crux of the speech came during the question-and-answer session, when an audience member posed the following: “The Financial Times today editorializes that it is ‘time to consider Iraq withdrawal,’ noting the protracted war is not winnable and it’s creating more terrorists than enemies of the West. What is your response?” An irritated yet good-natured Rumsfeld responded, “Who put that question in? He ought to get a life. If he’s got time to read that kind of stuff, he ought to get a life.”

Yep. Anyone who even reads bad news has the wrong attitude and should “get a life.” And people wonder why this White House did not listen to internal advice about post-war planning before the war or seems divorced from reality in so many ways. Rather Ratheresque.

For the sake of open-mindedness on this blog, let me reprint an email from Hugh Hewitt’s blog from a marine in Iraq. I can’t “authenticate” it, and I hope Hewitt vetted it. (Hewitt is, alas, a pure partisan – his own site’s motto is about the destruction of Democrats, whoever they are – but the email rings true to me.) Here it is:

The naysayers will point to the recent battles in Najaf and draw parallels between that and what happened in Fallujah in April. They aren’t even close. The bad guys did us a HUGE favor by gathering together in one place and trying to make a stand. It allowed us to focus on them and defeat them. Make no mistake, Al Sadr’s troops were thoroughly smashed. The estimated enemy killed in action is huge. Before the battles, the residents of the city were afraid to walk the streets. Al Sadr’s enforcers would seize people and bring them to his Islamic court where sentence was passed for religious or other violations. Long before the battles people were looking for their lost loved ones who had been taken to “court” and never seen again. Now Najafians can and do walk their streets in safety. Commerce has returned and the city is being rebuilt. Iraqi security forces and US troops are welcomed and smiled upon. That city was liberated again. It was not like Fallujah – the bad guys lost and are in hiding or dead.
You may not have even heard about the city of Samarra. Two weeks ago, that Sunni Triangle city was a “No-go” area for US troops. But guess what? The locals got sick of living in fear from the insurgents and foreign fighters that were there and let them know they weren’t welcome. They stopped hosting them in their houses and the mayor of the town brokered a deal with the US commander to return Iraqi government sovereignty to the city without a fight. The people saw what was on the horizon and decided they didn’t want their city looking like Fallujah in April or Najaf in August.
Boom, boom, just like that two major “hot spots” cool down in rapid succession. Does that mean that those towns are completely pacified? No. What it does mean is that we are learning how to do this the right way. The US commander in Samarra saw an opportunity and took it – probably the biggest victory of his military career and nary a shot was fired in anger. Things will still happen in those cities, and you can be sure that the bad guys really want to take them back. Those achievements, more than anything else in my opinion, account for the surge in violence in recent days – especially the violence directed at Iraqis by the insurgents. Both in Najaf and Samarra ordinary people stepped out and took sides with the Iraqi government against the insurgents, and the bad guys are hopping mad. They are trying to instill fear once again. The worst thing we could do now is pull back and let that scum back into people’s homes and lives.

The last sentence reflects my feelings entirely. And I’m glad to see that morale has not been crushed by recent events. But it’s worth noting that Sadr is still free, that his power has increased and that many of his followers are still at large, armed and ready. The agreement in Samara is tenuous at best. Baghdad is slipping out of control. We have to thread an increasingly tiny needle in the next few months, while retaking Fallujah with an inevitably huge loss of innocent human life. It’s a brutal scenario – but one we have no choice but to confront.

KERRY FIGHTING BACK: Jake Tapper notices that the new “gloves-off” Kerry has been emerging at regular intervals since the beginning of the year.

Here’s John Kerry’s newest attempt to get a handle on the Iraq debate. It’s a big improvement. Money quote:

The administration told us we’d be greeted as liberators.- They were wrong.
They told us not to worry about looting or the sorry state of Iraq’s infrastructure.- They were wrong.
They told us we had enough troops to provide security and stability, defeat the insurgents, guard the borders and secure the arms depots.- They were wrong.
They told us we could rely on exiles like Ahmed Chalabi to build political legitimacy.- They were wrong.
They told us we would quickly restore an Iraqi civil service to run the country and a police force and army to secure it.- They were wrong.
In Iraq, this administration has consistently over-promised and under-performed.- This policy has been plagued by a lack of planning, an absence of candor, arrogance and outright incompetence.- And the President has held no one accountable, including himself.
In fact, the only officials who lost their jobs over Iraq were the ones who told the truth.

Ouch. I agree with everything but the first statement. We were greeted as liberators. Then we blew it.

I’ll be on Anderson Cooper’s CNN show tonight on Rathergate between 7 and 8pm EST.