The Dish

Encouraging signs from Pakistan?

"The people of England have been led in Mesopotamia into a trap which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honour. They have been tricked into it by a steady withholding of information. The Baghdad communiques are belated, insincere, incomplete. Things have been far worse than we have been told … It is a disgrace to our imperial record, and may soon be inflamed for any ordinary cure. We are today not far from a disaster," – T.E. Lawrence, Sunday Times (London), August 2, 1920.

The British were trapped in Iraq for four more decades, attempting to create some kind of rational polity, sectarian peace and national unity in a part of the world where Arab pathologies were compounded by fathomless Muslim fanaticism. They failed, believe it or not. They failed despite the presence, at its peak, of the equivalent of almost ten times the troop level of the current, now five-year, U.S. occupation. John McCain is telling us that with a tiny fraction of the troop levels of the British per capita, and with lucrative oil profits available to the various warring parties to finance a war for ever, an independent, unified, non-despotic, pro-Western Iraq is within reach. If that is true, we are indeed on the verge of the biggest holiday from history imaginable.

(Photo: the Brits conquering Baghdad – easily – in 1917. They couldn’t get out for another forty years.)

My friend stuck to this story when no one else was really paying attention. Now Sixty Minutes moves the ball forward. And the program was simply blocked from being shown in northern Alabama.

An interesting – and ugly – incident in the senator’s past, brilliantly reconstructed by Glenn Thrush:

In 1975, a 27-year-old Hillary Rodham, acting as a court-appointed attorney, attacked the credibility of a 12-year-old girl in mounting an aggressive defense for an indigent client accused of rape in Arkansas – using her child development background to help the defendant… Rodham, records show, questioned the sixth grader’s honesty and claimed she had made false accusations in the past. She implied that the girl often fantasized and sought out "older men" like Taylor, according to a July 1975 affidavit signed "Hillary D. Rodham" in compact cursive.

Of course, she subsequently accused the victims of her own husband’s sexual harassment (and alleged rape, in one instance) of making it up as well. But, hey, the price you pay for being a lawyer, a pol, and a feminist, eh?

Obama in a funny-looking outfit. Yeah, he has an African heritage. Maybe we should just cut out the middle man and give Clinton Kristof’s piece from this Saturday (video here):

Mr. Obama’s late grandfather is said to have been the first person in the area to wear Western clothes rather than just a loincloth. For a time he converted to Christianity and adopted the family name Johnson.

Later he converted to Islam, taking four wives. Senator Obama’s father, who apparently converted to Catholicism while attending a Catholic school, was also polygamous in keeping with local custom, taking an informal Kenyan wife who preceded Mr. Obama’s mother but remained a consort, according to accounts by local people and the senator himself.

What’s Sid Blumenthal waiting for?

Who is the cooler, calmer candidate: Obama or McCain?

This video – laced with some tired leftist tropes – is nonetheless effective in reaching Hispanics, it seems to me. What has struck me most about this campaign this time is how much of it – message, imagery, music, organization – has been generated outside the actual entities of the actual campaigns themselves. At least, that has been the case with Paul and Obama. No wonder the Clintons and Romneys lagged.

By the way, here’s another YouTube classic. The seven year-olds are clearly in the Obama camp.

The most interesting op-ed of the last week, to my mind, was Reuel Marc Gerecht’s extremely sane, and not naive, argument for trying to talk to Iran’s leadership. He follows Bob Kagan in making this case. It speaks for itself. To me, it’s infuriating that the US has somehow managed to lose the global p.r. war against the fundamentalist fruitcake, Ahmadinejad. Finding a way to regain the international high-ground – even though it may not make much difference with Putin – is a necessary precursor to any toughening of the rhetoric or military and economic pressure. That’s why Obama’s position makes a lot of sense. And not just to peacenik lefties.

Sometimes, it takes courage to speak the bleeding obvious:

"I will tell you personally that I think it was probably a mistake going to Iraq."

I don’t know any sane observer who doesn’t believe that. It does not mean, however, that immediate withdrawal is the best policy. The arguments for the war and for occupying the place indefinitely are logically and strategically separate, if related, questions. It seems to me that you could have been for the war but against the surge; or even against the war and for the surge; or against both or for both. But it is also possible for people in every camp to believe that the invasion was a mistake. The question before us is whether continuing to occupy Iraq for another few decades lessens or compounds the original error. That’s an empirical question. I’m inclined to believe, as regular readers now, that it compounds the error, but I don’t think that’s self-evident; and I’ve been struggling with it in my waking moments this past week. More to come.

My old friend, Chip Kidd, unleashed: