The Dish

Mike Crowley rounds up some reaction from top Obama officials, including the defense secretary:

Asked by John McCain whether July 2011 amounts to an "an arbitrary date" to begin a transition, Gates replied that the national security team concluded "that we would be in a position, particularly in uncontested areas, where we would be able to begin that transition." Note the emphasis: particularly in uncontested areas. Yes, one would certainly hope that America can withdraw from areas the Taliban aren't even contesting within eighteen months. But there won't be many American troops in those places to begin with. People hoping that this war will come to a swift end beginning in the summer of 2011 would do well to understand that now, or risk severe disappointment down the road.

Steve Coll worries:

[A]n honest accounting of the decision to name the 2011 date should acknowledge that the specific date will certainly encourage some in the Pakistan Army to persist in their belief that the U.S. is headed to the exits in Afghanistan and that they, therefore, should persist in their hedging strategies toward the Taliban, to protect their interests in the aftermath of a U.S. withdrawal.

 Von at Obsidian Wings puts the date to begin withdrawing troops in context:

A lot of Republicans support Obama's plan, but are pushing back against his deadline for withdrawal in 2011.  I understand the argument against the deadline, but I think these Republicans miss the bigger picture.  There is no popular support for an open-ended commitment, either in the US or abroad. Without a deadline, there is no surge and no chance to convince allies to aid us. Obama's surge does not exist without a deadline.

Accused Nazi criminal John Demjanjuk arrives at the court room on November 30, 2009 in Munich, Germany. 89 year old Demjanjuk is charged with 27,900 counts of accessory to murder for his part in the gassing of prisoners taken to Sobibor concentration camp. The trial is likely to be the last major Holocaust trial. By Miguel Villagran/Getty Images.

A reader writes:

What I find most troubling about the Stupak Amendment debate is the way that the Catholic hierarchy has elevated matters of fiscal and tax POLICY to a matter of morality.  I can’t be a Catholic in good standing if I have a legitimate public policy disagreement about the allocation of public dollars in a state supported health insurance system?  If I believe public dollars can co-exist side-by-side with private dollars in an insurance pool that offers abortion insurance coverage, with public dollars covering everything BUT abortions, I am not welcome at the communion rail?  Come on!  Really?!?

As a matter of public policy, where does this end?

Is state sponsored sewer and gas hook-up (public dollars) for abortion clinics now a matter of morality?  How about the building a maintenance of access roads (often paid for with Federal dollars) to abortion clinics?  How about regulating the business practices of clinics that accept Medicaid (public dollars) but also accept insurance plans (private dollars) that cover abortions?

This cheapens the legitimate moral discussion about abortion in my opinion.  No longer are we debating fundamental questions about life and the role of the state in the regulation/restriction/prohibition of the practice.  Now the debate has devolved to one of abortion’s proximity to other things.

Frum asks Charles Johnson to come back:

He offers 10 reasons, but they all boil down to the same one: His outrage at the bad characters found in right-wing media and blogosphere. And yes, there’s no shortage of bad characters. No shortage on the left-hand side either. Or the middle, for that matter. But why surrender to them? Why let them get away with their claim to define your movement? Why not stand up to them? That was Rudyard Kipling’s advice to those who felt as Johnson now feels:

If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ‘em up with worn-out tools;

These are days for stooping and building. So here’s my own hastily jotted counter-list of the reasons to keep right.

It’s the American right that will sustain the war in Afghanistan, the right that will fight the administration’s overspending, the right that will resist paying for the spending in ways that cramp the future growth of the American economy.

It’s the right that champions competition in education, and it is the right that will prevent the undoing of welfare reform. It’s the right that pushes for color-blind laws, and against the abuse of the legal system for attorney gain.

It’s the right that resists, sometimes blindly but still rightly, overbearing attempts by government to direct the economy. It’s the right that sounds the alarm when government neglects public security.

It’s the right that anchors American society against fads and social experiments, the right that favors immigration policies in the national interest, the right that better respects the freedom of ordinary people to live their own lives and make their own choices.

If only David were right. It is Obama who is sustaining the war in Afghanistan as the right neglected it. It’s the right that did not fight overspending this year but voted against any stimulus at all, after spending and borrowing the US into oblivion for eight years. David is right about education, although again Obama is no stock left-liberal there either. He’s right about tort reform, although Obama was open to it in the health reform bill. But I simply cannot see how you can reconcile a right interested in public security when it presided over 9/11 and Katrina in the last eight years. Fads and social experiments? Like feeding tube insanity as in the Schiavo case? Trying to ban any evolution on legal recognition of gay families by amending the fricking federal constitution? Jumping into an invasion of Iraq with no plan for occupation? Leaving people the freedom to live their own lives – while embracing the drug war and supporting anti-sodomy laws, as David once did?

I totally respect David’s attempt to fight back within the existing institutions. But saving conservatism means acknowledging that these institutions no longer represent a conservatism recognizable as anything more than fundamentalist, populist, militarist nationalism. You cannot reform that until you have recognized it.

"In countries with a history of authoritarianism, it is not uncommon for the practiced agitators who presided over a crisis to hold sway long after they appear to exit power…Even after a crisis subsides, much of the population remains in panic mode and supports the bare-knuckled approach of the previous government. America is similarly afflicted. Dick Cheney wields such clout that even after his term ended he gave the order and previously classified information on "enhanced interrogation" was made public… Crisis-rocked Third World countries eventually move on, setting up truth commissions and holding trials. But the United States remains very much in the grip of a 9/11 emergency mentality," – Ximena Ortiz, The American Conservative.

Apocalyptic New York doesn't seem so bad to "Rhapsody in Blue":

That time-line the GOP hawksters are decrying: it seems to have jolted Afghanistan's leadership into less complacency.

One weird contradiction in current conservative thought. Isn't an open-ended commitment of arms and money and troops to a weak foreign country a dangerous form of dependency-generating welfare?

If we can have welfare reform domestically, why can we not have it internationally? 

Eric Pape notes the irony between the perceived threat of radical Islam within Switzerland and the post-referendum threat from foreign radicals:

[T]he minaret referendum invites unprecedented security threats, both within the alpine nation and to its many humanitarian workers in remote outposts. (Swiss Red Cross workers in Central Asia, northern and eastern Africa, and the Middle East can’t be happy about the target that their compatriots have just painted on them.) As the Swiss Minister of Foreign Affairs Micheline Calmy-Rey warned during the campaign, a ban on minarets risked making her country into “a target for Islamic terrorism.”

Yet:

Switzerland has just four—yes, four—minarets at the moment. (There are—or were—plans to build about ten more.) Sharia law seems particularly unlikely given that barely 10 percent of Switzerland’s estimated 400,000 Muslims actively practice their faith in a country of nearly 8 million people. And most Swiss Muslims have migrated from nations with particularly strong secular traditions (Turkey, Albania, and the former Yugoslavia), leaving many of them about as likely to be extremists as are non-practicing cultural Jews in the US.

Shanghai, China, 6.30 am