The Dish

It’s the best account yet of the assisted suicide at Sixty Minutes. (Dobbs and GRimadli also reported.) I’m still struck by how better the Washngton Post’s coverage is of this story than the NYT’s. The NYT clearly doesn’t want this story to play out; their old media instincts are still in force; their commentary has been lazy and lame. Stunning quote: when the White House didn’t immediately question the veracity of the documents after a few hours, 60 Minutes exec, Josh Howard, who didn’t know the source before the piece went on the air, confessed, “we completely abandoned the process of authenticating the documents.” I repeat: Rather must go. He’s fast becoming the Richard Nixon of the media.

Tim Rutten piles on. We now all but know that Rather knew that Burkett was his source. To have known Burkett’s obvious bias and not to have listened to the document experts and still not to acknowledge error when the docs turn out to be fakes is, in Rutten’s words, inexplicable. Well, not quite. Here’s an explanation: Rather is arrogant, out of touch and biased beyond belief. He thinks he’s running a political campaign, when he is supposed to be a journalist. He’s a dead man walking. When will someone have the decency to pull the plug?

“It’s great to return to New Haven. My car was followed all the way from the airport by a long line of police cars with slowly rotating lights. It was just like being an undergraduate again.” – a joke removed from Bush’s 2001 Yale commencement speech, according to Kitty Kelley, as reported by Slate.

“The most glaring oversight of the neoconservatives and other backers of the war in Iraq was not the number of boots on the ground that would be required to secure the country, but rather that the Sunnis have little motivation to support Iraqi democracy. The Sunnis see themselves as the heirs of the Ottoman Empire, and in the collective Sunni mind they have been presiding over the territory that would become Iraq for almost a millenium. Whether this is an accurate interpretation of history is beside the point. What matters is what they actually believe. Add to the mix a noxious, incipient radical Islamism and one has the recipe for years of, if not permanent rejectionism. The Sunni are unlikely to accept Shiite rule of any kind, including hardline Islamist Shiite rule. And the fact that the Sunnis have virtually no oil under their little piece of heaven makes partition an unrealistic possibility as well. As we’ve all been hearing, coalition forces are likely to attempt to break the stranglehold of insurgent control in Al Anbar province after the November election, but what makes anyone think that a Chechen-like bombing and siege of these towns and cities (with near genocidal rates of killing) will do anything but further alienate the Sunni populace?”

EMAIL OF THE DAY II: “Are you a military expert? I think you must be, as you have concluded that the way to fewer casualties is to increase the number of troops, that the way to fewer terrorist attacks is to increase construction investment, that more is less when it comes to the fighting.
I don’t play armchair general. I don’t know about such things and leave it to the experts. We have seen over and over again that those military experts in charge have NOT called for more. They have managed to keep the casualties to historic lows during the liberation of an entire nation the size of California. Moreover, the soldier’s eye view accounts we get, few as those that make it through the filtration process, almost invariably say journos are presenting an hysterical image of defeat that is at variance with their own observations. But the more the terrorists strike the more hysterical the western journalists screams become.
Maybe the answer is LESS. Less hysteria, less cries of defeat, less of the Greek chorus that hails every terrorist action, less … journalism. Or at least this kind of terrorist-amplifying journalism that covers every terrorist action as a great blow to the cause while pretending that the solution is a giant five-year-old child’s stamping foot accompanied by the word “More!” The other childish response, of course, is “No more!” (or Moore!) Either throw more of everything at it like a magical panacea, or pick up the marbles and go home. These are the positions of people who are doomed to watch from the sidelines and can’t stand the sight of blood. They are not responsible, knowledgable or particularly helpful observations.” If you want to read “less journalism” about Iraq, go check out the Weekly Standard and the National Review. They will barely mention the current situation at all, unless as a way to attack Kerry.

Dishing on Cheney; hailing the blogs (and the 527s). And Fox.

Several people have told me to look at this site – but its biases are so blatant and so hostile to the liberation, I’m not going there. Here’s an FT story that contains some interesting info:

From April 5 to September 12, slightly over five months, 3,186 Iraqi civilians, men, women and children, died as a result of either terrorist incidents or in clashes involving US-led multinational forces.
Baghdad has proved most bloody with 942 deaths. Some 674 died in Anbar province, home to Falluja and Ramadi, and then Najaf with 528, according to a neatly maintained file in the operations room.

So the murders are by no means confined to Anbar province – but are mainly in the capital. You can see why in this heart-wrenching story from the NYT today. I don’t have data on the rate of these murders or killings or accidents. But extrapolate the death rate to a country as big as the U.S. and you’ll get 35,000 civilian deaths in five months or so: two 9/11s a month. Does anyone think that that level of fear, anarchy and insecurity is conducive to a transition to democracy? I should reiterate. Some would use these stats to denigrate the war effort as a whole. That is not my point. My point is to offer some kind of criticism to help make this liberation work. I never believed it would be easy. But it seems to me that the lack of security in that poor country is making our goals all but impossible. How do we beef up that security? That’s the question.

HANSON ON IRAQ: VDH’s latest essay is a really good one; and I couldn’t be more in agreement about the necessity of hanging in there and turning Iraq around. But even VDH concedes that there is “increasing chaos in the country,” and says:

It is true that parts of Iraq are unsafe and that terrorists are flowing into the country; but there is no doubt that the removal of Saddam Hussein is bringing matters to a head. Islamic fascists are now fighting openly and losing battles, and are increasingly desperate as they realize the democratization process slowly grinds ahead leaving them and what they have to offer by the wayside. Iran, Syria, Lebanon, and others must send aid to the terrorists and stealthy warriors into Iraq, for the battle is not just for Baghdad but for their futures as well. The world’s attention is turning to Syria’s occupation of Lebanon and Iran’s nukes, a new scrutiny predicated on American initiatives and persistence, and easily evaporated by a withdrawal from Iraq. So by taking the fight to the heart of darkness in Saddam’s realm, we have opened the climactic phase of the war, and thereupon can either win or lose far more than Iraq.

Sure. But do we have the means to accomplish what we have engaged upon? Do we have enough troops? Have we botched the critical political element? Why do polls show overwhelming hostility to American forces among Iraqis? Isn’t Bush ignoring Iran? Why have we not sealed the borders? Why have we been unable to disburse even a tiny fraction of the money apportioned to reconstruction? These are the critical questions; and it’s telling that Hanson doesn’t address them. Neither does the president. My guess is that we are soon going to have to make a huge new investment of manpower and money to wrench Iraq away from a looming civil war or chaos. We will have to do this because we didn’t do it a year and a half ago. It angers me that it has taken this administration over a year to find that out.

Another classy tactic from Bush’s GOP:

Campaign mail with a return address of the Republican National Committee warns West Virginia voters that the Bible will be prohibited and men will marry men if liberals win in November. The literature shows a Bible with the word “BANNED” across it and a photo of a man, on his knees, placing a ring on the hand of another man with the word “ALLOWED.” The mailing tells West Virginians to “vote Republican to protect our families” and defeat the “liberal agenda.”

Ban bibles? We’ve heard this kind of bile from the far right before, but the incorporation of it into official GOP propaganda is new to me. Ed Gillespie, the GOP chairman, won’t disown it. Let’s put this as plain as I can: telling people that a small minority are trying to persecute Christians, attack their families and ban bibles is an old tactic. I’ll just leave it at that.

Rick James went very gently into that good night. Vicodin, valium, cocaine, meth, and five other drugs. And that isn’t what killed him!

Peaktalk weighs in – on the side of worry. My own view is that we’re risking long-term destabilization in Iraq for Bush’s re-election prospects. But I have no way of proving that; and I guess it just shows that I have lost confidence in this administration to a) tell the truth about Iraq and b) win this war. They’re going to have Allawi here next week to tout progress. Will that help him at home? Or is it all for Bush? And what if Baghdad blows up while he’s over here? Meanwhile, I haven’t tracked down solid numbers for civilian casualties over the past six months in Iraq. Anyone out there who can help?

But not if we keep up our current half-assed, under-funded war on terror. Mark Helprin explains why here. Money quote:

To coerce and punish governments that support terrorism, until they eradicate it wherever they exercise authority. To open for operations any territory in which the terrorist enemy functions. To build and sustain the appropriate forces and then some as a margin of safety, so as to accomplish the foregoing and to deter the continuing development of terrorism. To mount on the same scale as the military effort, and with the same probity, the necessary civil defense. To reject the temptation to configure the defensive capabilities of the United States solely to the War on Terrorism, as this will simultaneously stimulate China’s military development and insure that we are unprepared for it. These should be our aims in this war.
They are neither modest, nor without risk, nor certain to succeed-by their very nature they cannot be. But they are a model of discipline and restraint when compared to the infinitely open-ended notion of changing the nature of the Middle East, changing the nature of the Arabs, changing the nature of Islam, and changing the nature of man. No army can do that. No army ever could.

I don’t agree with all of this, but it’s stimulating nonetheless.