The Dish

"Victory is a wonderful thing, and they have brought Iraq and its allies victory," – Hugh Hewitt, today.

"There’s nobody in uniform who is doing victory dances in the end zone. Success in Iraq is not akin … to flipping on a light switch. Rather it emerges slowly and fitfully with reverses as well as advances. There will inevitably still be tough days and perhaps tough weeks ahead, but fewer of them over time, inshallah," – General David Petraeus, earlier this month.

The goal of the surge – according to Hugh Hewitt and George W. Bush – was to create a breathing space for the various factions in Iraq to forge a national agreement and end the sectarian divide. The Pentagon just issued its own report on these criteria, saying that there have been "minimal advances in the delivery of essential services to the people of Iraq, mainly due to sectarian bias in targeting and execution of remedial programs." More worryingly:

The American military has recruited about 69,000 mostly Sunni volunteers to help secure Iraq. The United States would like the Iraqi government to institutionalize the arrangement by hiring many of the volunteers as policemen or soldiers. But the Pentagon report said that such efforts are “moving slowly” because of “fears by the Maliki government that those forces may return to violence or form new militias.”

The drop in violence has been considerable and is a fantastic achievement by the U.S. but it’s worth reminding ourselves that this "victory" still means 600 civilian deaths a month. That’s roughly two 9/11s a month, when adjusting for population size – but more terrifying because more random. It reduces violence to the levels of 2005 – a period when almost every observer saw the war as a catastrophe. There has been no oil law, no provincial agreement, no deal on Kirkuk, and Baghdad is a myriad different Berlins in the Cold War.

Anyone who can all this precarious situation "victory" rules himself out as a serious commentator. He’s a propagandist. And he does no service to the troops or the American people by lying to them for cheap and temporary partisan gain. Maybe I should reiterate what I wrote here, or ask readers to show how I’m wrong:

Let’s be clear: we have lost this war. We have lost because the initial, central goals of the invasion have all failed: we have not secured WMDS from terrorists because those WMDs did not exist. We have not stymied Islamist terror – at best we have finally stymied some of the terror we helped create. We have not constructed a democratic model for the Middle East – we have instead destroyed a totalitarian government and a phony country, only to create a permanently unstable, fractious, chaotic failed state, where the mere avoidance of genocide is a cause for celebration. We have, moreover, helped solder a new truth in the Arab mind: that democracy means chaos, anarchy, mass-murder, national disintegration and sectarian warfare. And we have also empowered the Iranian regime and made a wider Sunni-Shiite regional war more likely than it was in 2003. Apart from that, Mr Bush, how did you enjoy your presidency?

Ambers sees signs that it’s real:

There are two metrics, one of which we don’t have available: their hard count of confirmed caucus goers. The other is crowds.

Not only has Edwards been greeted by unusually large crowds for him, he is outdrawing Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton head-to-head. In Des Moines Monday, Edwards drew 400 to Hillary Clinton’s 200; in Mason City on Saturday night, Edwards drew 600 to Obama’s roughly 300.

The campaign tracks undecided caucus goers through nightly rounds of phone banking: the Edwards folks claim they’re hearing more about their campaign’s unique holiday card than they are about HRC’s Des Moines Register endorsement. (Note: HRC and Edwards’s universes don’t overlap too much, so it’s not that surprising.)

Still — at almost every event in recent days, Edwards has gotten standing ovations. At the end.

I’ve been to dozens of Edwards events since the beginning of the cycle, and I’ve seen such enthusiasm for him only a few times.

I have no idea what impact the Drudge-National Enquirer kerfuffle will have on this, if anything. I can’t imagine it can just evaporate. Certainly not if Mickey has anything to do with it.

Getting warmer, aren’t we? Money quote:

One former senior intelligence official with direct knowledge of the matter said there had been “vigorous sentiment” among some top White House officials to destroy the tapes. The former official did not specify which White House officials took this position, but he said that some believed in 2005 that any disclosure of the tapes could have been particularly damaging after revelations a year earlier of abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

"Vigorous sentiment." Can anyone seriously doubt we are talking about David Addington here, one of the chief architects of the torture program, a believer that the president is above the law with respect to his commander-in-chief powers, and Cheney’s eyes and ears in the federal bureaucracy? As Marty Lederman notes, the line from the White House so far has been that many advised against the destruction of the tapes; but somehow this advice wasn’t taken. And when the tapes were destroyed, no one seemed to give a damn. Funny that, isn’t it?

And Abu Ghraib is the give-away. Videos and photographs bring home the reality of the torture regime much more vividly than mere words – as well as being a far graver p.r. wound in the Muslim world. This time, there could not even be a farcical attempt to blame elaborate text-book torture and abuse techniques on free-lance reservists who were easily framed. All this torture – hundreds and hundreds of hours of Gestapo-style hypothermia, stress positions, waterboarding, sleep deprivation – was meticulously approved from the very top. They knew they were risking illegality and obstruction of justice in this act of institutional vandalism. But if they didn’t destroy the tapes, they were risking direct evidence of war crimes. Not a hard call, is it? And you would have to have had blinders and ear-muffs on for the past six years to believe Bush didn’t know about it.

A reader writes:

Your post reminds me of what Yoda said to Luke in The Empire Strikes Back.

Luke: "Is the dark side Dark Side stronger?"

Yoda: "No, no, no. Quicker, easier, more seductive."

Cheney used the phrase "the dark side" approvingly almost immediately after 9/11. We are living with the darkness he embraced.

Announcing the Jihadist version of the YouTube debates.

They have a different kind of spine than men do. More flexible. But you knew that already.

One of the benefits of this campaign has been to remind all of us what a shameless opportunist the former president is:

Clinton was 42 in 1988, four years younger than Obama is now. Already one of the nation’s longest serving governors, Clinton accomplished little between 1988 and 1992 that added to his depth of experience — other than winning a fifth term as Arkansas governor while promising not to seek the presidency before his term expired.

He ran against one of the most experienced incumbent president of the century: a two-term veep, former head of the CIA and incumbent president who presided masterfully over the end of the Cold War. And he says Obama is no match for a former First Lady? If Democrats buy this transparent b.s., they’ll deserve the candidate they nominate.

No, not a last minute tactic from the floundering Clinton campaign. A genuine alternative to eating yogurt:

What if, instead of re-constitituing healthy gut flora one species at a time, you could simply take the entire fecal contents from a healthy person and use it to re-colonize your own gut–in other words, undergo a fecal transplant? Yes, it’s like probiotics on steroids: getting an infusion of someone else’s gut flora in order to re-establish a healthy gut ecology of your own, and squeeze out some potentially harmful organisms along the way. A recent story discusses this treatment for patients suffering Clostridium difficile infections in Scotland, but it’s actually not brand-new, and has already surfaced in the peer-reviewed literature.

 I kid you not.

"The goal is to encourage students to be creative in an era when funding for the arts has been slashed to the bone. “We’re like a finger in the dyke,” says Paula Owen, president of the Southwest School, about the program," – San Antonio Express-News, November 23.