The Dish

“I saw your discomfort with Novak’s report in the blog, and I just wanted to say that it seems to me that we have two choices. One, admit that, given the other demands placed on U.S. forces, including maintaining a well-trained and well-equipped force at the ready, we simply do not have enough resources to create a democracy in Iraq, if that is even possible.
Second, admit that we are involved in a conflict that requires significantly more resources and raise them. If 100,000 members of the National Guard will have to be mobilized on a continuous basis over the next five years, why don’t we just acknowledge the obvious and expand the Army by 100,000 men and women?
The problem is that Bush likes calling himself a wartime president, but he does not like the responsibilities that flow therefrom, chiefly framing the sacrifices and choices that citizens face. It would be so refreshing to hear a politician say, “Look, we face the choice of paying for more high definition televisions and Ben and Jerry’s, or paying for more security. My job as president is to explain to you that it is worth paying more (and I mean paying, not borrowing from the Chinese central bank) for security.” Maybe I am way out of touch, but I think that a grown-up statement like that would resonate with people.
Instead we have a festival of pork barrel spending and a virtually empty political debate.” Amen. But Bush will never do such a thing because a) it would require conceding error and b) because it would require asking the American public to sacrifice, and he has never done that.

“I’m trying to find the correct name for it … this utter absolute, asinine, idiotic stupidity of men marrying men. … I’ve never seen a man in my life I wanted to marry. And I’m gonna be blunt and plain; if one ever looks at me like that, I’m gonna kill him and tell God he died.” – televangelist Jimmy Swaggart, on his television show last week … in Louisiana. Here’s the tape (he gets riled up around the 36th minute). He then goes on about those politicians who defend gay rights and dignity: “They all ought to marry a pig, and live with it forever… And I thank God that president Bush has stated that we need a constitutional amendment that says marriage is between a man and a woman.” (Swaggart also claims he has nothing against “the poor homosexual.” He’ll just kill one if he gets a chance.) Watch this broadcast and see the forces that this president is riding toward victory on.

Greg Djerejian thinks it’s mischief-making – but he doesn’t know, and he’s honest enough to be horrified at the possibility it’s true. Some NRO readers think it’s a trial balloon. I have no idea – but what it does show is that, at least within the administration, there is some recognition of how grim our options now are. It’s funny to see the relative silence at the Weekly Standard and NRO. Jonah is honest enough to raise the issue; but the others are probably waiting for the call from the RNC to be told what to write. Meanwhile, as for the past couple of weeks, radio silence from the right. (It is telling, though, that the only piece to tackle the hard reality of what has been going on was Derbyshire’s in favor of leaving the darkies behind.)

Wretchard of the Belmont Club misreads my analogy – two 9/11s a month – and then corrects himself. That’s the blogosphere working! But the spin he manages to put on all this is, well, off the deep end. He cites a worrying report that Britain is reducing its troop levels in Iraq as a sign that everything is peachy! Maybe he hasn’t read Novak yet. Or the papers. Then he rightly says that the deaths of Iraqis are not America’s fault, no more than 9/11 was Bush’s fault. Of course that’s true in any deep, moral sense. But when you invade a country, depose its dictator, disband its army and take responsibility for its security, you are responsible for its security. I know that’s a tough word for Bush administration officials to understand: responsibility. Yes, the authorities are responsible when citizens cannot live with any measurable degree of physical security. In fact, it’s the first responsibility of any governing body. Read your Hobbes. Also read Hobbes to see what happens once confidence in order collapses, when sovereignty is in doubt, when insufficient force is deployed, and on and on and on. We either have to ramp up our forces, retake Fallujah and Ramadi, redouble our faltering efforts to rebuild the Iraqi army – or we have to withdraw and leave chaos and a new terror-state behind. Them’s the options. Bush has to tell us which before November 2. And run on his plan. But he’d rather duck and hide.

This statement is pathetic in the extreme:

Last week, amid increasing questions about the authenticity of documents used in support of a 60 MINUTES WEDNESDAY story about President Bush’s time in the Texas Air National Guard, CBS News vowed to re-examine the documents in question-and their source-vigorously. And we promised that we would let the American public know what this examination turned up, whatever the outcome.
Now, after extensive additional interviews, I no longer have the confidence in these documents that would allow us to continue vouching for them journalistically. I find we have been misled on the key question of how our source for the documents came into possession of these papers. That, combined with some of the questions that have been raised in public and in the press, leads me to a point where-if I knew then what I know now-I would not have gone ahead with the story as it was aired, and I certainly would not have used the documents in question.
But we did use the documents. We made a mistake in judgment, and for that I am sorry. It was an error that was made, however, in good faith and in the spirit of trying to carry on a CBS News tradition of investigative reporting without fear or favoritism.
Please know that nothing is more important to us than people’s trust in our ability and our commitment to report fairly and truthfully.

If the last sentence is true, then Rather and Heyward must resign. The original error was bad enough; the refusal to acknowledge it is inexplicable. And who is the source? There is no need for a reporter to keep confidential the identity of a source who provided false and fake information. That’s the next ten-ton shoe to drop on Dan’s head. It’s over, boyo. Leave now.

Can we believe Bob Novak’s prediction of a quick exit from Iraq if Bush is re-elected? This is the paragraph that had my jaw dropping:

Well-placed sources in the administration are confident Bush’s decision will be to get out. They believe that is the recommendation of his national security team and would be the recommendation of second-term officials. An informed guess might have Condoleezza Rice as secretary of state, Paul Wolfowitz as defense secretary and Stephen Hadley as national security adviser. According to my sources, all would opt for a withdrawal.

Et tu, Wolfie? Readers have been haranguing me for weeks because of my concern about what’s going on in Iraq. But if Novak is right, the administration itself has given up. What we must demand is an acknowledgment of this before November. If this is Bush’s plan, and I hope it isn’t, then we need to know now. No more spin, Mr president. Deal with reality. Publicly.

Here’s a telling quote from the best reporter in Iraq, John F. Burns:

Visiting Dr. Allawi at his sprawling residence is a short course in just how bad the situation has become for anybody associated with the American purpose in Iraq. To reach the house is to navigate a fantastical obstacle course of checkpoints, with Iraqi police cars and Humvees parked athwart a zigzag course through relays of concrete barriers. An hour or more is taken up with body searches and sniffing by dogs, while American soldiers man turreted machine guns. A boxlike infrared imaging device can detect the body heat of anybody approaching through a neighboring playground. The final security ring is manned by C.I.A.-trained guards from Iraqi Kurdistan. If Dr. Allawi were Ian Fleming’s Dr. No, no more elaborate defenses could be conceived.
This is the man who has been chosen to lead Iraq to the haven of a democratic future, but he is sealed off about as completely as he could be from ordinary Iraqis, in the virtual certainty that insurgents will kill him if they ever get a clear shot.

It’s hard to add anything to that. But here’s one point that I don’t think has been made enough. Who is ultimately responsible for the security of Iraqis? Surely the coalition. Yet, even while we try hard to train a new Iraqi army and police force, it is indisputable that we’ve failed to protect innocent Iraqis from grotesque and mounting violence. This is awful in itself – but also integral to our failure to move the political process forward fast enough. Was this unavoidable? That’s a question worth asking.

SOMETHING POSITIVE: I’m not saying this was ever going to be simple. But the reckoning is surely coming. We have to flush out at least Fallujah and Ramadi soon – or lose the ability to hold national elections in January (if we haven’t already). And the mayhem that maneuver will unleash is not one we can easily stabilize without more troops and resources or a miracle in the capabilities of the Iraqi police and military. Before too long, a draft may become a very big topic on Capitol Hill. Big increases in military spending – over and above what we are already planning – will become necessary. What I worry about is a country that re-elects a president on the basis of denial about Iraq, and then turns on him with a vengeance when things get far worse. So let’s get it all on the table now and see what we need to do. That’s in the president’s long-term interest as well as the world’s.

The media keeps describing the state constitutional amendment in Louisiana as an amendment that bans civil marriage for gays. They’re right. But it does so, so much more than that. Here’s the text:

Marriage in the state of Louisiana shall consist only of the union of one man and one woman. No official or court of the state of Louisiana shall construe this constitution or any state law to require that marriage or the legal incidents thereof be conferred upon any member of a union other than the union of one man and one woman. A legal status identical or substantially similar to that of marriage for unmarried individuals shall not be valid or recognized. No official or court of the state of Louisiana shall recognize any marriage contracted in any other jurisdiction which is not the union of one man and one woman.

This is a radical denial of any civil protections for gay couples at all – the most radical attack on an American minority since Jim Crow. Even the mildest protections for a gay couple that are integral to any meaningful bond – visitation rights in hospital, inheritance rights, the right not to testify against one another in court, and so on – will now be vulnerable to legal challenge or flat-out denied gay couples under the law. And the margin of victory is stunning: a full 80 percent want to keep gay people permanently without any protections for their relationships or any incentives to get together and settle down. It’s too depressing for words.

Oh, and Britney just got married again. Yes, it’s recognized in Louisiana. 1,049 legal protections are now automatically hers – 1,049 now barred for any committed gay couple.

THE FUTURE OF THE RIGHT: Profound shifts in political life often happen by accident, or because of the vagaries of an election campaign. This campaign may well be settled by John Kerry’s faults rather than by George W. Bush’s virtues. But the result could be a majority party bent on a radical redefinition of conservatism: the party of natural right fused with evangelical Christianity. John Coumarianos points to a new essay in the Public Interest that suggests the coming election may be a profound one. I suspect he’s right.

If you want a good laugh, go read Mark Steyn’s account of how most of Iraq is just as peaceful and, yes, “jolly” as Surrey and Sussex in my country of birth. Man, Steyn can be funny. But he can be such a partisan hack as well:

Do you remember that moment of Fallujah-like depravity in Ulster a few years ago? Two soldiers were yanked from a cab in the wrong part of town and torn apart by a Republican mob. A terrible, shaming episode in the wretched annals of Northern Irish nationalists. But in the rest of the United Kingdom – in Bristol, in Coventry, Newcastle, Aberdeen – life went on, very pleasantly. That’s the way it is in Iraq. In two-thirds of the country, municipal government has been rebuilt, business is good, restaurants are open, life is as jolly as it has been in living memory.

So what if Iraqis are dealing with two 9/11s a month? Our Blessed Leader, who is responsible for the security of Iraqis, never makes mistakes, does he? And the last thing pro-war journalists should ever do is raise questions.