Myths About Iraq

Baqubaremainsafpgetty

For some, the war is over, victory has been achieved, and the only task now is to elect a new Decider to conduct a victory parade. Sadly, this seems to me to be verging on clinical denial. There is no question that General Petraeus, for the first time, has instituted a competent, if ad hoc occupation, by doing pragmatic deals in local areas and regions, constructing massive walls in Baghdad to keep warring sects apart, effectively bribing other areas with new investments and providing sufficient troops in some places to maintain a lull in the massive bloodletting that the US invasion unleashed. But in the next few months, the troop levels will be reduced, or the US military will be broken. They key to sustaining a national peace in Iraq is some level of sectarian integration in the police and army, some reconciliation between national Sunni and Shiite political parties, some resolution of the remaining trouble spots in the north, such as Kirkuk, and some kind of political leadership able to reach across the bloody divide. It is very hard to see any of these things happening.

A salutary read today is Juan Cole’s latest. I’ve learned to discount some of Cole’s gloom, but his current analysis is factually crammed with data and news that suggest what we are experiencing right now is not peace but a lull. Much of the evidence suggests a deepening of the sectarian divide, not a lessening, despite some local cooperation:

UN polling among Iraqi refugees in Syria suggests that 78% are from Baghdad and that nearly a million refugees relocated to Syria from Iraq in 2007 alone. This data suggests that over 700,000 residents of Baghdad have fled this city of 6 million during the US ‘surge,’ or more than 10 percent of the capital’s population. Among the primary effects of the ‘surge’ has been to turn Baghdad into an overwhelmingly Shiite city and to displace hundreds of thousands of Iraqis from the capital.

Violence has indeed gone down dramatically since the peak of the hot civil war but it has not disappeared:

In the past 6 weeks, there have been an average of 600 attacks a month, or 20 a day, which has held steady since the beginning of November. About 600 civilians are being killed in direct political violence per month, but that number excludes deaths of soldiers and police.

I don’t believe Iraq will be a minor issue in the coming election. It certainly shouldn’t be. The burden of proof needs now to be overwhelmingly on those arguing against a swift withdrawal. Governing an ungovernable failed state for the indefinite future, when the U.S. is already facing the $32 trillion of extra debt president Bush has saddled us with in a scant seven years, is a luxury we cannot afford. Most Americans know this – most conservatives know this. The question is simply how vast and continuing will be the cost of denial.

(Photo: Iraqi soldiers look at human remains in al-Hedid, 10 kms away from the restive city of Baquba, 45 kms northeast of Baghdad, 26 December 2007. Iraqi forces found 17 unidentified bodies allegedly killed by al-Qaeda fighters. AFP/Getty Images.)

Best Of The Dish 2007: Always

Sunhatches

First posted August 2, 2007:

Yesterday was almost the Platonic idea of a summer day. The heat had depth and the light had a white glow about it. There’s no cold edge to the air any more, even out here in the often-chilly Cape. We spent the second afternoon in the tidal pools at the end of the peninsula. Dan Savage, his husband and son are staying for the week – alongside countless other gay families here for Family Week. So it was floatie time in the currents. No one in the Savage family has been here before so I had the privilege of introducing them. The nine-year-old’s grin belied his occasional nine-year-old diffidence.

Some people ask me why I don’t travel elsewhere for a summer break. I’ve been coming to the same place for almost two decades. For the past decade, I’ve come here in June and not left till September if I can possibly help it. It’s by no means all vacation. The blog and the column don’t write themselves. In some ways, I seem to work harder here. But it is a break, a change of pace and atmosphere from the Washington bubble. I spent my first full summer here just after I was diagnosed with HIV. It seemed a good place to learn how to die. But it helped teach me how to live, which, you eventually realize, amounts to the same thing.

It isn’t just the gay subtext, although it’s great to have vibrant little patches of counter-culture and post-gay culture vying with each other on a strip of sand. It isn’t just that I lucked out in buying a little beach condo when I could afford one. It’s the larger place itself, the mixture of elements that make up a minimalist, sublime, pure expression of nature and nature’s God. There are really only three elements to the landscape out here: dune and water and air. When you get past the town into the pristine Province Lands National Seashore (thanks, JFK!), there are no dating landmarks, no cars to place you in any decade, no architecture to pinion you to any specific time. Yes, the landscape has changed drastically over the centuries. It isn’t what the Pilgrims first saw. But it is largely as it was at the tip as when Thoreau rhapsodized about it. It is a place where you can leave all America behind.

But time in this timeless place is also acutely present. It’s present because of the enormous, expansive, insistent tides. I live on water, which means the view changes all the time. Every day shifts with the lunar rhythms. My backyard is both an ocean and a desert, depending on the time of day. And it is almost any color you can imagine. That’s what so much light and water will do. In the tidal pools, the timelessness of the scene is intersected with the always-shifting timeliness of the water coming in and out, traveling vast distances of very shallow coastal marshes and dunes, to transform a dusty beach into a blue and green watery expanse in mere hours. There is never any still, even when the air won’t move. That’s why it’s where I’ve asked my ashes to go one day. I want them dispersed into the nothingness on the horizon, to become specks of matter that will experience a pure summer day eternally. They will be there in the rough winter storms; but they will wait for the perfect summer afternoon.

Until then, it is as close as I’ll get to heaven on earth. And one of those places is enough for me.

The Morality Of Potheads

Stonersergeisupinskyafpgetty

Heh:

Beyond the caricature of libertarians as, what, amyl-nitrate-huffing poofters (not that there’s anything wrong with that–there we go again!), I just don’t get the idea that what sometimes gets called the pursuit of happiness is in any way controversial. And if it is for conservatives, then it’s a good thing they seem to be in the shitter politically.

Amen. But I’d make a slightly different point. Dinesh seems to conflate morality with certain anti-pleasure codes, largely to do with sex and/or drugs. And so he places libertarianism in an immoral or amoral camp. But toleration is itself a moral virtue. And leaving others alone in a free society can and often does go hand in hand with quite strict personal morality in your own life. Some of that morality can be along the lines D’Souza admires: no sex outside heterosexual marriage and no drinking or smoking. There are plenty of libertarians in that camp. But others see morality as being more about how one deals with other human beings: the virtues of compassion, patience, civility, kindness, courage, honesty, toleration, humility and so on. This is the deeper and wider moral agenda that encompasses many, many libertarians. It seems to me that a focus on morality that is obsessed primarily with issues of personal pleasure or sex is a warped and misleading one. I’m not saying that morality is not a part of those areas of human life. I am saying that morality is far, far broader and deeper than that.

Merry Christmas. Enjoy your day – however you want to.

(Photo: Sergei Supinsky/Getty.)