The Dish

Is it me or is the beginning of the end of the Bush-Cheney nightmare beginning to focus minds across the spectrum on more pragmatic, realistic and less partisan approaches? I hope so. A McCain-Obama race could help us a lot. Here’s a round-up of various views of what the current flare-up may portend or require:

Phillip Carter:

It’s difficult to see how this ends well. This is some of the nastiest intra-sectarian fighting we’ve seen in Iraq. Second, it looks pretty clear that Maliki is using the Iraqi security forces to consolidate his own power and eliminate his rivals. Third, I can only imagine the trepidation being felt by Sunni leaders who are watching this and wondering whether they’re next on Maliki’s hit list. For now, the heavy fighting remains limited to Basra, although skirmishes have erupted throughout the country. If this clash in Basra lasts longer than a week, that’s going to be really bad for the Maliki government. If the heavy fighting spreads, that’s going to be even worse.

Alex Knapp:

The fact of the matter is that this armed struggle for power is, in part, a result of the bizarre nature of Iraqi elections, which do more to promote political parties, rather than individual candidates, which makes the dominance of one party over another nationwide a priority, as opposed to a system where candidates from parties compete head to head.

While similar systems to work in more stable parliamentary systems, it’s a less satisfactory solution in Iraq, where “political party” is pretty much a synonym for “armed militia”, and “winning elections” comprises “killing people who vote for the other party.”

Spencer Ackerman:

Withdrawing without any political strategy, as the British did from Basra, leads to a vacuum like the one we’re seeing now. Sadr rushes in. The Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq rushes in. The Fadhila party maneuvers between the two. Forces ostensibly loyal to the government, pinioned between all sides, find ways to accommodate the existing power on the streets. In other words: chaos. So to avoid chaos — and I recognize this is banal and generic — you can’t just pull up stakes.

 

Some sort of political accommodation has to occur alongside a strategy of extrication. There will be some good suggestions coming out of various think tanks and government offices over the next several months that put flesh to bone here. But the broader point is this: if we decide we’re just going to order the post-surge forces out of Iraq in X number of months/years, and nothing accompanies that decision on the political-diplomatic end, then yeah, Basra probably will be a prologue. But if we spend the time between now and then — say, a new Democratic president’s Inaugural — working on some Undefined Diplomatic Strategy, then we have our best shot — and it’s not a sure shot; I’ll be the first to admit — at extracting ourselves with a minimum of chaos.

(Photo: Iraqi supporters of Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr carry his picture on March 27, 2008 during a protest in the Sadr city Shiite district in Baghdad, Iraq. Thousands of Sadr’s supporters demonstrated in the Sadr city against a crackdown on militiamen loyal to Sadr in Basra and Baghdad by Iraqi government forces. By Wathiq Khuzaie/Getty Images.)

Anthony Cordesman, national security analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, offers his take on the violent power struggles now unfolding in Iraq:

Much of the current coverage of the fighting in the south assumes that Muqtada al-Sadr and the Sadr militia are the "spoilers," or bad guys, and that the government forces are the legitimate side and bringing order. This can be a dangerous oversimplification.

From the science as science-fiction department:

Call them Pavlov’s fish: Scientists are testing a plan to train fish to catch themselves by swimming into a net when they hear a tone that signals feeding time.

If it works, the system could eventually allow black sea bass to be released into the open ocean, where they would grow to market size, then swim into an underwater cage to be harvested when they hear the signal.

Now if only someone could find a way to do that with voters. Oh, wait! Karl Rove already did.

Why we should not dismiss the McCain candidacy:

"The United States cannot lead by virtue of its power alone. We must be strong politically, economically and militarily. But we must also lead by attracting others to our cause, by demonstrating once again the virtues of freedom and democracy, by defending the rules of international civilized society and by creating the new international institutions necessary."

I am waiting to see how the candidates respond to shifting and currently impenetrable events in Iraq. There are no good options. To my mind, the criterion must be who can most prudently and effectively get us out of there as swiftly as possible. But that will not be easy, whoever is president. And we will owe any of them patience and support if they accord the American people candor for the first time and offer the world an acknowledgment that the darkest days of Bush-Cheney are over.

(Photo: Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) gives an address to the Los Angeles World Affairs Council March 26, 2008 in Los Angeles, California. McCain spoke on U.S. foreign policy at the breakfast event hosted by the Los Angeles World Affairs Council. By David McNew/Getty Images.)

Perhaps the loudest voice in the Wright controversy has belonged to Fox News’s Sean Hannity. No one in the media has been more insistent that a politician’s choice of pastor is relevant to the campaign; and I cannot think of anyone more outraged by Wright and more determined that this should be a defining issue in discussing the candidacy of Obama. It seems to me worth pointing out therefore that Hannity himself had a candidate in this race not so long ago, and even headlined a fundraiser for him. That candidate was Rudy Giuliani.

It also happens that Giuliani has long been more attached to a pastor than even Obama is to Wright. Monsignor Alan Placa married Giuliani to his second wife, Donna Hanover, and is actually employed by Giuliani Associates. Placa has been credibly accused of serial molestation of teenage boys, was in charge of handling molestation accusations in Long Island in the heyday of the church’s cover-up of child abuse and was eventually suspended by the church from priestly duties for those reasons. The credible charges were made after the statute of limitations had passed and so no legal recourse was possible. But here’s the Associated Press last year:

"There’s ample evidence showing that Placa consistently protected predators, shrewdly deceived victims, and covered up horrific clergy sex crimes," said a statement from David Clohessy, national director of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests.

Last year, theocon Deal Hudson reported that:

The grand jury report includes excerpts from a letter in which Placa brags about his ability to settle multi-million dollar clergy abuse claims for "$20,000 to $100,000."… The suspension of Placa’s priestly duties has now reached the five-year point, far beyond the norm in such cases.

Here was Giuliani’s response when challenged about his continuing association:

"I know the man; I know who he is, so I support him. We give some of the worst people in our society the presumption of innocence and benefit of the doubt. And, of course, I’m going to give that to one of my closest friends."

How many hours did Sean Hannity dedicate to this story of his own candidate’s long-running association with and knowing employment of a priest who was an accused child molester?

This blogger reports one moment last December on Hannity’s radio talk show relevant to this issue. When a caller said she could not support Giuliani for president:

Hannity went ballistic, carrying on about how he’s the best on crime, talked about his handling of 9/11, etc. The caller interrupted him and told him that she could never vote for Giuliani because he has an alleged child molester on his staff.

Again Hannity exploded, telling her that he knew the priest was innocent.

In this campaign, as Ron Paul and Barack Obama have shown, exposing associations with unseemly words by close associates is on the table. But if those are the standards, is it not fair to ask Sean Hannity about his non-coverage of Rudy Giuliani’s long association with Monsignor Placa? Are dubious pastors only relevant when they are black and guilty of some ugly rhetoric? But not if they are white and credibly accused of molesting children?

There are signs that the Clintons can’t sell all the tickets to their Elton John concert. I’m still flummoxed why so many gay men, like Elton John, still support the Clintons. They should listen to David Geffen and David Mixner who have learned the hard way how the Clintons really think of gay issues.

Buzz, buzz, buzz. Marc considers the pairing:

I think the best way to look at an Obama-Bloomberg ticket is by noticing their complimentary traits. Obama isn’t much of an administrator or a details guy by his own admission, while Bloomberg is so concerned about Your Health and Welfare that he studies intently the ins and outs of congestion pricing and trans-fats. He’s a prime minister-type — although he brings an outsider’s sense of efficiency to the bureaucracy. Let Obama be the vision guy; Bloomberg could be the brass-tacts administrator.

The other argument coming out of Basra:

To the extent that the strategic goal of the Surge was to create space for political reconciliation, Basra’s descent into fighting is perhaps more evidence that this goal hasn’t been reached. At the same time, however, Surge advocates will be able to credibly make the argument, as I heard Fred Kagan make on NPR the other night, that what’s happening in Basra in fact validates the Surge strategy by showing what happens after a precipitous withdrawal of Western forces.

The Surge didn’t happen in Basra, after all, it happened in the Sunni triangle. In Basra, by contrast, British forces pulled out and left things in the hands of the Iraqis. If what is happening in Basra at the moment were happening in Baghdad, that would be much more damning stuff for advocates of the Surge. Instead, this descent into civil war is happening where our British allies pursued a strategy that is the complete opposite of the Surge.

Samantha begins to fight back.

Via Jason Pye, libertarian conservatives, alienated by McCain and queasy about Obama’s liberalism, may have a candidate this fall. Here’s the audio of the radio interview:

“There’s been a tremendous expressed to me both directly and indirectly on the Internet. I take that support very seriously, and I think it also reflects a great deal of dissatisfaction with the current candidates and the current two-party system. So it is something, to be honest with you, that I’m looking very seriously at.” Barr said a Libertarian candidacy would essentially be an extension of the Ron Paul campaign. “Ron Paul tapped into a great deal of that dissatisfaction and that awareness. Unfortunately, working through the Republican party structure, it became impossible for him to really move forward with his movement. But we have to have ….a rallying point out there to harness that energy, that freedom in this election cycle,” Barr said.

On Iraq:

“What we’ve fallen into in recent years — not just since 9/11, but particularly since 9/11 — is this notion that, in order to protect ourselves, we have to preemptively go into and — in the case of Iraq — occupy another sovereign nation,” Barr said. “Simply saying, ‘Gee, it’s better to fight over in this other nation and destroy another nation, so we’re not potentially attacked here, is the height of arrogance.”

As for the Bush administration’s refusal to define waterboarding as torture, Barr referred to the practice as “sophistry of the worst and rankest order.”