The Dish

This isn’t getting any prettier, is it? But it’s always been obvious that, during Vietnam, George W. Bush benefited from the soft affirmative action of pedigreed privilege. The CBS-recovered forms are pretty devastating in this repsect, I’d say. Money quote:

Another memo refers to a phone call from the lieutenant in which he and his commander “discussed options of how Bush can get out of coming to drill from now through November.” And that due to other commitments “he may not have time.”
On August 1, 1972, Col. Killian grounded Lt. Bush for failure to perform to U.S. Air Force/Texas Air National Guard standards and for failure to take his annual physical as ordered.
A year after Lt. Bush’s suspension from flying, Killian was asked to write another assessment.
Killian’s memo, titled ‘CYA’ reads he is being pressured by higher-ups to give the young pilot a favorable yearly evaluation; to, in effect, sugarcoat his review. He refuses, saying, “I’m having trouble running interference and doing my job.”

You’ve got that and the guy who pulled the strings to get Bush in the Guard saying he’s now ashamed of what he did. Now: I hate this kind of sleaze. But the Bush campaign’s attack on Kerry’s military service makes it all sadly legit. Is there a real, substantive response to this (and I don’t mean sliming Barnes as a Democrat)? Are the forms forgeries? Is Barnes lying? I’d be more than happy to read (or run) a cogent, factual rebuttal.

QUOTE OF THE DAY I: “Obviously not all Muslims are terrorists but, regrettably, the majority of the terrorists in the world are Muslims. The kidnappers of the students in Ossetia are Muslims. The kidnappers and killers of the Nepalese workers and cooks are also Muslims. Those who rape and murder in Darfour are Muslims, and their victims are Muslims as well. Those who blew up the residential complexes in Riyadh and Al-Khobar are Muslims. Those who kidnapped the two French journalists are Muslims. The two [women] who blew up the two planes [over Russia] a week ago are Muslims. Bin Laden is a Muslim and Al-Houthi [the head of a terrorist group in Yemen] is a Muslim. The majority of those who carried out suicide operations against buses, schools, houses, and buildings around the world in the last ten years are also Muslims. “What a terrible record. Does this not say something about us, about our society and our culture?
If we put all of these pictures together in one day, we will see that these pictures are difficult, embarrassing, and humiliating for us. However, instead of avoiding them and justifying them it is incumbent upon us first of all to recognize their authenticity rather than to compose eloquent articles and speeches proclaiming our innocence…
Islam has suffered an injustice at the hands of the new Muslims… We will only be able to clear our reputation once we have admitted the clear and shameful fact that most of the terrorist acts in the world today are carried out by Muslims. We have to realize that we cannot correct the condition of our youth who carry out these disgraceful operations until we have treated the minds of our sheikhs who have turned themselves into pulpit revolutionaries who send the children of others to fight while they send their own children to European schools.” – Abd Al-Rahman Al-Rashed, former editor of the London daily Al-Sharq Al-Awsat.

QUOTE OF THE DAY II: “No one that I know of, to include the most pessimistic experts, predicted a full-scale insurgency would break out within a couple of months of the overthrow of the old regime … the current situation may be sustained for a very long time.” – Steven Metz, a guerrilla warfare expert at the Army War College. It is becoming harder and harder to ignore the grim news from Iraq. I take absolutely no pleasure in facing up to what the war has become in Iraq. But the bottom line is: we’re not winning. And the gap between the president’s rhetoric – which could have been crafted a year ago – and the reality on the ground keeps growing. One thing I’ve noticed from the pro-Bush blogs and pundits. None of them mentions what’s actually happening in Iraq now. They daren’t. If Kerry is at all smart, he will.

I mentioned it yesterday. Read it for yourself here. While you’re at it, this Larry Diamond piece in Foreign Affairs is sobering as well.

FAREED CALLS IT: My old friend and fellow-conservative, Fareed Zakaria, has been writing up a storm lately. He too is unwilling simply to overlook the growing crisis in Iraq, or the burden that president Bush’s legacy of disarray is placing on the war against terror. Money quote:

Bush is right to note that after World War II, because “generations of Americans held firm in the cause of liberty, we live in a better and safer world.” But in those years the United States adopted a series of wise, generous policies and a conciliatory style that made it much loved in the countries we were trying to help. Spreading democracy requires allies, particularly among the targets of one’s affection.
The picture could not be more different today. Bush does not seem aware that the intense hostility toward him in every country in the world (save Israel) has made it very difficult for the United States to be the agent of freedom. In every Arab country that I have been to in the last two years, the liberals, reformers and businessmen say, “Please don’t support us. American support today is the kiss of death.”

I’m past making excuses for this – because I want us to win the war against terrorism. Less than five percent of the reconstruction funds pledged by the Congress has actually been spent in Iraq. The follow-through is close to non-existent. And unforgivable.

BESLAN THOUGHTS: I cannot do better than David Brooks in his revulsion at the inhumanity and depravity of the Jihadists. But the Chechnya situation strikes me as one in which the necessary distinction between terrorists’ methods and the injustices that sometimes fuel them is not as iron-clad as, say, in our war against al Qaeda or against Saddam. The truth is: Putin has treated Chechnya barbarically, and his brutal suppression of legitimate demands for autonomy is partially responsible for the chaos in that region and the violence across Russia. We should therefore not give in to the easy notion that Putin and we are on the same side in this war. Putin is trying to destroy self-government in Chechnya in favor of Russian imperialism. We are trying to liberate Afghanistan and Iraq from unspeakable tyranny. There is a difference here.

Check out the discrepancies between the results in Newsweek’s regular poll and its online version. Yes, you have to answer the questions to find out. Memo to self: NEVER trust online polls. (Hat tip: Volokh).

“You have to watch TV. It’s great! Every New Year’s I make a vow to watch more TV.” – Ann Coulter. Says it all, doesn’t it?

That’s part of the extremely depressing message from the latest CSIS report on the liberation. Reconstruction is pitiful; the Shi’a and Sunni insurgencies remain intact; there is growing restlessness in the north. I don’t think CSIS has an ax to grind; and their report is chock-full of data and interviews and on-the-ground reporting. It seems to me that the question of how we turn things around should be the most important question of the campaign. And yet it’s barely mentioned.

“You know when they give you the menu, I’m always struggling, what do you want?” – John Kerry. Does Karl Rove give him his ad-libs?

No conflict there, I guess. Naah.

MALKIN’S RESPONSE: In fairness, I should also direct readers to Michelle Malkin’s response to her critics.

Zogby doesn’t diminish Bush’s campaign achievement but puts his lead at 2 percent.

NO BUSH ENDORSEMENT: From Log Cabin Republicans. I’m impressed by the lop-sided vote against Bush, as well as their care to insist that they do not reject all his policies – just the discriminatory ones. They did what they had to do, in my opinion. But it’s terribly sad, nonetheless.

In his latest adjustment, John Kerry is now becoming a more straight-forward opponent of the Iraq war; and his statement Monday that he wants to bring all the troops home in four years is as close to Howard Dean as he’s been since, well, December. The president’s tilting at Kerry for his Dean-like rhetoric is not as effective, it seems to me, as criticizing Kerry’s declaration of advance withdrawal to terrorists. Look, Kerry deserves some benefit of the doubt with respect to his general support of the War on Terror, and decision not to cut and run immediately in Iraq. But there’s no chance that other countries can or will make up the gap in armed forces in Iraq, and the signal of weakness Kerry’s deadline sends to the Islamists, Baathists and Shiite separatists could make our possible failure in Iraq a self-fulfilling prophecy. I guess the sane criticism of the Iraq war – undermined by bad intelligence, crippled by incompetence, but still worth winning – is too nuanced a position for a challenger to make. But the alternative only adds to a sense that Kerry cannot be trusted to keep our nerve in Iraq. Or anywhere else for that matter. (And please stop the emails assuming I’ll endorse Kerry. The Senator’s recent dreadful performance and pathetic equivocations on the war only further convince me that Bush truly is the luckiest man alive.)

REALITY: Meanwhile, the somewhat surreal description of the world assumed by the Bush camp keeps getting tarnished by, well, the facts. The deficit is a serious problem, and will only get a lot worse in a second Bush term, and far, far worse thereafter. We are ceding territory in Iraq in several major regions. 1,000 military deaths is arguably a price a nation has to pay for a necessary war. But Americans will get far less tolerant of the losses if they perceive that the war isn’t being won, or if they do not see a credible way forward. The problem with Bush’s convention strategy is that it portrayed a world in which everything was going splendidly. But if events intervene and prove that not to be the case, won’t Bush seem dangerously complacent and out of touch? In some ways, Bush has made himself more vulnerable to terrorist attacks in Iraq. By declaring that his war-leadership is an undiluted triumph, some hideous massacre or series of attacks on soldiers in Iraq could undermine public confidence in his leadership more than if he’d been more candid about the risks involved and the difficulties we face. We found out that Kerry’s superb convention wasn’t quite as accomplished in retrospect. We may find the same with Bush’s.

ZELL’S LIES: More substantiation of the deceptions parlayed by Senator Miller.

OUR BLESSED LEADER: Here’s Michael Novak, putting some purplish touches to Republican prose in National Review:

Let me close by mentioning one other perception I took away from my exciting four days of stirring speeches from truly distinguished leaders: Among all of them, the greatest of all and the most reliable, focused, disciplined, plain-speaking, and trustworthy was our president. He stood with some great ones, but his moral stature rose at least a shoulder’s height above all the others. He stood the steadiest of all.

No, that wasn’t a recent quote from an obscure North Korean sports stadium. Readers are invited to send in suck-uppery of either Kerry or Bush in this ra-ra campaign.

THE BOOK ON MALKIN: Some interesting and devastating scholarly critiques of Michelle Malkin’s new book defending the internment of the Japanese in World War II can be read here and here.

I’m writing this in a Starbucks in Dearborn, Michigan, (love will find a way), after a trip to LA and back to Ptown tomorrow, before NYC and then back to DC. Blogging may be a little erratic. It was fun in LA. Hanging with Bill Maher, in so far as I can remember anything from after the show, is never boring. I met Frank Gehry on the flight over as well. He overheard my talking to my London editor about my column and chimed in with an anti-Bush comment. Amazing how being pro ar anti-Bush is now a significant cultural and psychological marker in the country. My own mixed feelings are pretty rare these days. Gehry sure didn’t seem to have any.

BUSH AND THE WAR: Perhaps the most impressive achievement of the Republican convention and the Bush campaign is to present the president as a war-leader in the abstract. The most celebrated images were from the wreckage of 9/11 when Bush spoke the only truly inspired off-the-cuff remarks of his presidency. The actual concrete details of his war-leadership – the fall of Kabul, the blitzkrieg to Baghdad, the aborted siege of Fallujah – were absent. So too the protracted negotiations at the U.N. or any images of Bush with foreign leaders, or the decision to advance the war by days to get Saddam (more bad intelligence) or even the speech that launched the Iraq war. What I think the Republicans have realized is that the war on terror is far more popular and winning an issue for Bush if it is stripped of its actual events, and setbacks and triumphs and difficulties. That’s why the convention rhetoric approached propaganda – focusing not on what has happened, but on the virtues of a strong war-leader. The dynamics of both wars – of instant military success, followed by damaging and difficult follow-through – were deliberately obscured. This is good politics; but it strikes me as risky war-management. People need leaders who level with them about failures and difficulties in wartime – not gauzy North Korean-style biopics about the invincibility of the Great Leader. But then this war, vital as it is, has been exploited by the Bushies for political purposes since it began. How else to explain the “Mission Accomplished” photo-op or the bare-knuckled 2002 Congressional campaign? Some on the left would have politicized this war under any circumstances. But others might have rallied to a war that was conducted with less hardball domestic politics. In this, Bush is, of course, the opposite of Churchill, who brought in opposition leaders to play key roles in his war-cabinet. I know that’s not the American tradition, but a little less politics might have gone a long way. And made the middle-ground voter a little more sympathetic to the narrative that the Republicans are now so effectively deploying.

DIVIDE, DIVIDE: One other thing has troubled me, after mulling the NYC convention for a few days. It struck me that John Kerry at his convention did something politically shrewd but also historically significant. He took a reluctant Democratic base and emphatically backed the war on terror. Yes, he did not relinquish criticism of the war in Iraq, nor of the way in which the Bush administration had made the case for war. But it was not a left-wing convention, and it signaled a welcome shift among Democrats to a more war-oriented approach. The Republicans essentially responded by throwing back this concession in John Kerry’s face. They refused to take “yes, but” for an answer, and dredged up the divisions of the Vietnam War as a means to further polarize the electorate. Again, this might be good politics, but it is surely bad for the country. I believe in this war, which is also why I believe it is important to get as many Democrats to support it. But the Republicans have all but declared that this is a Republican war – and can only be conducted by a Republican president. I think they will live to regret this almost as much as the country will. And I fear the animosity and division that are already part of the cultural fabric (by no means all fomented by the president) could get worse in the coming years – to the glee of our enemies. In wartime, unity matters. When a campaign deliberately tries to maximize polarization to its advantage, it simultaneously undermines the war. Winning this war is more important than building a new Republican majority. But somehow I don’t think that’s how Karl Rove sees it.

OLD EUROPE ON THE BRINK: Will Hutton rightly observes the slide toward steep decline in France and Germany. But he’s wrong about Europe as a whole. Britain, unshackled by Thatcher from socialist economics, is as vibrant as it’s ever been in the past fifty years – culturally and economically. Hutton, of course, frets that this coud mean the end of the EU as a viable institution. Man, I hope so.