The Dish

It’s inevitable. Across the world, after the hideous pictures of prisoner abuse in Abu Ghraib, headlines will announce that the U.S. is as bad, if not worse than Saddam. Finally, the far left will concede the evil of Saddam, but only so they can declare the U.S. worse. Here’s the Sydney Morning Herald’s version. They have one single quote to justify their headline: “US abuse worse than Saddam’s, say inmates.” Here’s the quote:

Mr Shweiri said that while jailed by Saddam’s regime he was electrocuted, beaten and suspended from the ceiling with his hands tied behind his back. “But that’s better than the humiliation of being stripped naked,” he said. “Shoot me here,” he added, pointing between his eyes, “but don’t do this to us.”

Who’s Shweiri? “Mr Shweiri, 30, is a diehard fighter in the Mehdi Army, the anti-US militia of a Shiite Muslim imam.” I want the morons and perverts who did this to be punished to the most severe extent possible because of the evil of what they did and the damage they have done to what is a noble and important cause. But even then, the equation with Saddam is grotesque and wrong. Please send in examples of the anti-war media peddling this notion. They need to be exposed.

My tribute to Pat Tillman.

Here’s what part of me also believes about Fallujah, the part that still hopes for success:

Like so many others, you seem to assume that the military commanders in Iraq are impossibly stupid, or else meek pawns that the White House just moves around on the board. I doubt either is the case. Why are you so anxious for the Marines to rush into Fallujah and kill people? The situation on the ground is obviously complex and simply using our overwhelming force has never been our prime tactic in Iraq. If it had been, we would have leveled the place from the start.
You can certainly make the case that the PR around the current events hasn’t been handled well. Fortunately, the Bush White House seems far more interested in long-term results than PR wins and we should be thankful that they are. More than likely, the situation in Fallujah is very complex and we here in the US, getting our information from prejudiced and imperfect sources simply can’t pass judgment until we see how it turns out.
Most of the things that went wrong in Vietnam went wrong because decisions were made in Washington that didn’t take into account the realities on the ground. Presidents and journalists prosecuted the war rather than the commanders who knew what they were doing. I suggest we let the people over there do their work and not second-guess them until we see the results of their efforts.

Sure. But that doesn’t mean we should not raise worries and concerns.

You cannot find Ted Rall’s typically disgusting cartoon about Pat Tillman on the MSNBC/Slate page it was once found on. Here’s what the page now displays and the previous cartoons don’t show it now either. Did someone pull it? Long ago, I said I could see no reason why any serious newspaper or magazine or website would want to publish Rall’s poison. I stand by that view. But I’m particularly struck by how someone like Tillman would offend Rall so much. Tillman was a true patriot, a quiet hero, an American to his core: of course Rall had to smear him. Tillman represents all that the far left hates about America, and fears might be true.

All I can honestly say is that I have no clue what is going on in Fallujah, the critical battle of the war in Iraq. The obvious interpretation is that the Bush White House, under political pressure at home, has decided to all-but surrender the city to the enemy. That has certainly been the message sent to (and received by) the wider terrorist world. The Marine asault we were promised has failed to materialize. Various truces were negotiated and violated by the enemy many times. Then we responded by appointing a Saddamite Baathist in charge of eradicating the terrorist elements in the city, alongside the Marines. The only problem is that the Baathist general doesn’t believe there are any foreign fighters in Fallujah. From the Washington Post:

In Fallujah, Jassim Mohammed Saleh, the former Iraqi major general entrusted by the Marines with forming a new security force in the violence-wracked city, said in an interview with the Reuters news service that “there are no foreign fighters in Fallujah.” He also insisted that onetime members of former president Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party should be allowed to return to the government and the army, saying they were “capable of administering the country in times of crisis.”

This is the man the Bush administration is now entrusting the war on terror with. Or is it? Joint Chiefs Chairman, Richard Myers, says the mini-me Saddam is not the new commander in Fallujah:

Myers, who appeared on three Sunday morning news shows, cautioned that neither of the generals had been approved by the Pentagon. “They have not been vetted. They have not been placed in command. They are not in charge,” Myers said on “Fox News Sunday.” Myers said the leadership of the Fallujah Brigade also would have to be approved by the U.S. occupation authority in Baghdad and Iraq’s interim Defense Ministry. The decision to form the Fallujah Brigade and put Saleh in charge was made from “the bottom up,” the senior official said. “Now we have to have a policy to catch up with what is happening on the ground.”

I think the obvious answer to the question as to what is happening in Fallujah is that the White House doesn’t have a clue. In a critical battle, we have made sure that the enemy understands we can have overwhelming military power and not be willing to use it; we have appointed a new commander who hasn’t even been vetted; and people on the ground are making up policy that has far-reaching political and military implications, while the White House has to adjust. The only word for this is incompetence and chaos.

BLINKING?: If you want a more optimistic view of what is going on, check out the Belmont Club blog. They believe that an Iraqi force for the pacification of Fallujah was always part of the plan; and that what appears to be genuine weakness, vacillation and indecision on the part of the U.S. is in reality good tactics. I hope thyey’re right. And I guess history will judge. I also know that it’s easy to sit here in D.C. and pontificate while, on the ground, political compromises and military messes are inevitable. But last week seems to me to have reached a point where even hopeful, pro-war, Bush supporters like me have to acknowledge the epic mishandling of the post-war occupation. The U.S. is beginning to look both cruel and (a much bigger problem) weak. The huge propaganda victory handed to the enemy by the celebrations in Fallujah by Islamo-fascists shouldn’t have happened. Nor should the disgusting pictures of prisoner abuse and humiliation simply exist in a military as professional and ethical as that of the U.S. The misconduct is unforgivable, and shows simply a lack of control of the situation. The complete disarray in Fallujah – the inability of anyone from Bremer up even to expain what’s happening, let alone tell us what they’re doing about it – is a further sign of drift. It is no longer unreasonable to surmise that the administration is preparing to hand over power to any U.N.-blessed Shiite or Baathist general it can find, while indicating to the wider terrorist enemy that we will buckle under to pressure. At a critical moment when Fallujah should have been the occasion for a critical wiping out of the terrorist and insurgent infrastructure, we seem to have blinked. The consequences for our future credibility, for the lives of coalition servicemembers, for the lives of Western civilians, could not be graver.

I answer Norman Geras’s fun questions here.

ON TILLMAN: An obituary of sorts – from yours truly. Or at least a way of stopping for a second to acknowledge a real man.

EMAIL OF THE DAY: “Thanks for that piece on Pat Tillman, I was hoping you would write something. I keep thinking about how he used to climb up that light tower at Sun Devil Stadium just to be by himself and think. I imagine he was assessing his life and figuring out what was the most worthy way to spend it. So much value is placed on living a long life, it is easy to lose sight of the underlying assumption that the reason we hope to live long is so we have more time to live worthily. What it means to live worthily is sometimes hard to tell. People have lots of opinions about what you are supposed to be doing with your life, but when the end of the line comes, you’re the one who has to lie there alone on your deathbed and reflect upon the choices you made when all is said and done. If only that reflection were done earlier in life instead of later. I think Tillman was one of the few who had that question sized up long time ago.

There is this really great short story in The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury called “Kaleidoscope.” A rocket ship carrying a dozen or so astronauts explodes, scattering the crew members into outer space. They are flying apart at thousands of miles an hour in their spacesuits, fully conscious and able to communicate with one another, but individually they are alone and being hurled to their own deaths. As one man named Hollis careens toward the earth’s atmosphere he listens to other people’s final reflections, both happy and embittered, and he realizes he has never really lived but always played it safe, always envied people who had the guts to enjoy life and take chances, and he realizes for the first time that he has nursed a secret resentment against them. Yet nothing–not resentment nor cowardice nor regret–could do anything for him now:

“It was gone. When life is over it is like a flicker of bright film, an instant on the screen, all of its prejudices and passions condensed and illumined for an instant on space, and before you could cry out, ‘There was a happy day, there a bad one, there an evil face, there a good one,’ the film burned to a cinder, the screen went dark. From this outer edge of his life, looking back, there was only one remorse, and that was only that he wished to go on living. Did all dying people feel this way, as if they had never lived? Did life seem that short, indeed, over and done before you took a breath? Did it seem this abrupt and impossible to everyone, or only to himself, here, now, with a few hours left to him for thought and deliberation?”

So in Hollis’ final desperate moments he realizes that there isn’t anything good he can do to make up for the lost years because now he is all alone. The realization has come too late and there is no one around that he can do good to. But then he thinks: “Tomorrow night I’ll hit Earth’s atmosphere. I’ll burn and be scattered in ashes all over the continental lands. I’ll be put to use. Just a little bit, but ashes are ashes and they’ll add to the land.” This gives him some comfort. Then he thinks: “I wonder if anyone will see me?”

Meanwhile on earth: “The small boy on the country road looked up and screamed. ‘Look, Mom, look, a falling star!’ The blazing white star fell down the sky of dusk in Illinois. ‘Make a wish,’ said his mother. ‘Make a wish . . .'”

There’s something really quite beautiful about a New York Times article about a self-described liar, David Brock, setting up a, er, blog, to combat, er, media bias. Brock’s argument is that the mainstream media, including the New York Times, is skewed to the right. So why, one wonders, did the New York Times barely mention the emergence of hundreds of similar websites over the last few years that popped up to counter what they believed was liberal bias in the mainstream media? Could it be that the early blogosphere – which didn’t require $2 million grants to get in business – was too conservative to be acknowledged in the Times? Even when those blogs played a small but important role in the exposure of the distortions and lies once run as news by Howell Raines’ New York Times? No liberal media bias, is there?

“His nose preceding him by a quarter of an hour, the hero of Cyrano de Bergerac is a reminder that there were once things plastic surgery couldn’t do. Today it can turn Michael Jackson into his own sister…Men who can’t wow a woman with the fearful symmetry of their faces will always have to talk for victory. Cyrano will go on showing them how, in a coruscating tragicomical pastiche that almost no amount of miscalculation can make dull. It must be said, however, that the new production at the National Theatre might have been designed to prove otherwise. A critic, in my view, should always report the reaction of the audience before he delivers his own opinion. Well, the first-night audience clapped dutifully at the end, and there were cheers for Cyrano himself, as incarnated by the film star Stephen Rea. But the Germans have a phrase that fits: der Beifall war endenwollend. The applause wanted to be over.” – Clive James, on a roll in the Times Literary Supplement.

THE NON-EVENT: Jeffrey Rosen explains why Massachusetts civil marriages for gays, due May 17, will be a massive anti-climax.

CUBA OR TERROR? Tim Perry sees some screwed-up priorities in the federal government’s financial oversight.

We’re experiencing another bout of trans-Atlantic dissonance on Iraq. The only story in Europe and the Middle East right now are the images of some U.S. soldiers humiliating and mock-torturing some Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison. The images are indeed revolting, appalling, and shameful. They are being used and will be used as further propaganda fodder to make democracy fail in Iraq and to neuter America’s moral credibility. But that in no way excuses them. The people involved need to be punished as severely as military justice demands. We need to figure out just how exceptional these cases of cruelty are. And we have to acknowledge the huge propaganda blow the fight against terror has just received in world opinion. Instead, the U.S. media is barely on the case.

EMAIL OF THE DAY: “‘But this Falluja reversal is mystifying, to say the least.’ Actually, this change in tactics may turn out to a very effective, yea brilliant, move on our part.
1. Putting an “Iraqi face” on this operation will likely do a number of things, not the least of which is creating internal divisions within insurgent ranks. It’s one thing to “make jihad against American infidels” and quite another to start killing fellow Iraqis who are ostensibly trying to bring some semblance of order and peace.
2. What is more, as we are apparently already seeing in Najaf with Al-Sadr’s militia, the foreign jihadis are rapidly wearing out their welcome. The Sunnis don’t much like the Americans but they undoubtedly hate the jihadis even more.
3. The jihadis may offer “72 Virgins and Paradise” but that’s not going to put food on the table or buy new clothes for the kids. Fallujans may be Sunnis but they’re not idiots: They know “Uncle Sugar” has deep pockets and they’d like a piece of the same action that the Shiites and Kurds are getting.
4. Buying people off, as we’re apparently doing now, has a long (if not totally honorable) history in the Middle East. We did it in Afghanistan and it has largely worked so why not try it in Iraq too?”

HEADLINE OF THE WEEK: “Suicide Bombing A Cry For Help, Vengeance Against The Infidel” – from the Onion.

In Massachusetts, some employers are preparing to get rid of “domestic partnership” benefits for gay couples. Once gays are eligible for real civil marriage, they will have no more need for marriage-lite options (and such marriage-lite options need not be extended to straights). If that isn’t a truly conservative development, I don’t know what is.