McCain: “The War Will Be Over Soon”

He’s walking back his hundred years comment, as he surely must. But it’s a remarkable sentence:

“And by the way, that reminds me of this hundred year thing.  I was asked in a town hall meeting back in Florida, how long would we have a presence in Iraq?  My friends, the war will be over soon, the war for all intents and purposes although the insurgency will go on for years and years and years, but it will be handled by the Iraqis, not by us, and then we decide what kind of security arrangement we want to have with the Iraqis  … "

Now what does this mean?  How do you separate "the war" from the occupation and the insurgency?  I think you could make an argument that we won the war four years ago but lost the occupation. But war is politics by other means. What does McCain mean by the end of the war, then? Does he mean the vanquishing of al Qaeda in Iraq, an entity that was not in Iraq in any great numbers before we invaded? Does he mean the pacification of the country – a task that is clearly beyond anyone. Does he mean Shiite control of the south? But that’s already a fact. I don’t know what he means, except that he understands that if he runs on waging this war in Iraq for his entire term, he won’t get elected.

My friends, if you’ll pardon the expression, I think the GOP nominee may have just declared victory. Which means the battle will now be over how to spin the exit. Funny how quickly that "war" ended, isn’t it?

Fareed On Obama

He helps explain his attraction to the candidate. It springs from Zakaria’s own background as an American who came from somewhere else:

Africa to India and China are getting richer, stronger and prouder. For America to thrive, we will have to develop a much deeper, richer, more intuitive understanding of them and their peoples. There are many ways to attain this, but certainly being able to feel it in your bones is one powerful way. Trust me on this. As a Ph.D. in international relations, I know what I’m talking about.

Obama is the same. The deepest question in this election is how America interacts with the world. If you care about this country, you will care about America’s isolation, awful p.r., stressed military and growing debt under Bush-Cheney. Sometimes it helps to see things a little from the outside.

Freeheld

It won an Oscar last night for best documentary short. It’s about a married couple fighting to allow a New Jersey cop’s pension to go to her wife after her impending death from cancer. But gay couples are deemed beneath respect and equality and support by social conservatives; and so it was a struggle. I really wish the social right was actually pro-family, don’t you? Btu even when it comes to public servants and cops, it is somehow more important to punish a couple’s commitment to each other than to celebrate it.

Blast From The Iraq Past

"The Shi’ah problem is probably the most formidable in this country. We were discussing it last night at an extremely interesting dinner party in my house…  ‘Abdul Majid said "What are you going to do if the chief mujtahid, whose voice is the voice of God, issues a fatwah that no Shi’ah is to sit in the Legislative Assembly … or when a law is being debated, suppose the mujtahid cuts in with a fatwah that it’s against canon law and must be rejected, irrespective of other considerations?" Imagine the Pope excercising real temporal authority in Italy and obstructing the Govt at every turn, and you have the position.

The remedy is, over time, that which has been found in Italy. Pope and mujtahid end by being regarded merely as silly old men; but we haven’t reached that stage here yet. But if you’re going to have anything like really representative institutions – always remember that the Turks hadn’t; there wasn’t a single Shi’ah deputy – you would have a majority of Shi’ahs. For that reason as ‘Abdul Majid wisely said, you can never have 3 completely autonomous provinces. Sunni Mosul must be retained as a part of the Mesopotamian state in order to adjust the balance. But to my mind it’s one of the main arguments for giving Mesopotamia responsible govt. We as outsiders can’t differentiate between Sunni and Shi’ah, but leave it to them and they’ll get over the difficulty by some kind of hanky panky, just as the Turks did, and for the present it’s the only way of getting over it.

I don’t for a moment doubt that the final authority must be in the hands of the Sunnis, in spite of their numerical inferiority; otherwise you will have a mujtahid-run, theocratic state, which is the very devil," – Gertrude Bell,  October 3, 1920.