The Dish

Chaplin was the pioneer with Hitler, or course. But here’s a Jack Benny classic from 1942. "Heil myself" indeed.

Ian Buruma tries to understand how a form of conservatism could become so enamored of warfare and revolution:

The most articulate analysis of the obsession with power and violence was actually written by Podhoretz himself, in 1963, in his famous essay "My Negro Problem—and Ours." Despite what the title might suggest, it is actually an argument against racism and in favor of miscegenation. When Podhoretz grew up in Brooklyn, the common assumption was that Jews were rich and Negroes were persecuted. This was not how things looked to Podhoretz on the playground of his local public school, where poor Jewish boys like him were regularly being beaten up by Negroes: "There is a fight, they win, and we retreat, half whimpering, half with bravado. My first experience of cowardice." Negroes, he goes on, "made one feel inadequate. But most important of all, they were tough, beautifully, enviably tough, not giving a damn for anyone or anything…. This is what I envied and feared in the Negro…." And then there were the effete snobs, "the writers and intellectuals and artists who romanticize the Negroes, and pander to them," and "all the white liberals who permit the Negroes to blackmail them into adopting a double standard of moral judgment…."

The key to Podhoretz’s politics seems to me to lie right there: the longing for power, for toughness, for the Shtarker who doesn’t give a damn about anyone or anything, and hatred of the contemptible, cowardly liberals with their pandering ways and their double standards. Since Podhoretz, himself a bookish man, can never be a Shtarker, his government must fill that role, and not give a damn about anyone or anything. And not only the US government, but Israel too.

I guess that’s one theory for why so many leading intellectuals, almost all with an acute and justified sense of the evils of totalitarianism, could have signed on to torture techniques once the trademark of police states and dictators. How the descendants of victims of the Holocaust could find themselves defending and supporting text book Nazi interrogation methods still astounds me. I still cannot understand their moral compass on this. But maybe an intoxication with brute force helps explain it.

If Drudge is right and the general and the ambassador are going to give Fox News’ Brit Hume an exclusive hour-long sit-down, then it seems to me they forfeit any pretense of neutrality. They really need either to stick to the Congressional testimony, or appear on more outlets than a purely Republican network. It’s extremely important for the integrity of the US military – and the credibility of Petraeus – that it remain above partisanship and even the appearance of partisanship. Here’s hoping Drudge is wrong. They couldn’t be that stupid, could they?

Beijing, China, 2.15 pm.

David Ignatius has the most provocative column I’ve read today. Ignatius has long been a sane skeptic of the long-term possibilities of the surge, for all the usual reasons. And you’d think he’d be claiming vindication. The surge’s fundamental goal – national political reunification – has failed rather dramatically. On those grounds – the grounds the president himself set last January – the case for withdrawal is stronger than ever, it seems to me. But the case against withdrawal on exactly those grounds is also strong – that we will create a regional implosion, genocide and even worse chaos than the last four years have unleashed. (I’d bite that bullet anyway, if I had to, because the idea of committing over 100,000 troops to an endless occupation that is recruiting Jihadists and getting nowhere may well be worse than trying to leverage regional meltdown for our own advantage. Yes, I’m not sure that a wider Sunni-Shiite war, however unpredictable, is against the West’s interests.) But Ignatius notices the other major shift, and one that predated the surge but has been tactically aided by it. That is the Anbar Sunni Arab move against al Qaeda. This is indeed a big deal, because finding Arab Muslims willing to fight back against the Qaeda nutjobs is the key to winning the longer war. What David is saying is that the Democrats can indeed champion a version of this strategy. It would be honestly summarized thus: give up on a national Iraq solution; continue to acquiesce in ethnic cleansing and de facto partition; support each entity as long as they foreswear warring on one another; and draw down troops but keep enough to help the Sunnis keep al Qaeda on the run, and Kurdistan intact. This isn’t far from the arguments of Peter Galbraith or Joe Biden. If the Dems can reframe the debate in this fashion, and seek to lead on Iraq in this positive light, they can do a service for the country.

I can certainly see the logic of, say, a five-year commitment for those limited purposes:

facilitating local stability and partition, leveraging Sunni hostility to al Qaeda, while releasing more troops for desperately needed priorities elsewhere.

The Obama Democrats have, it seems to me, been right about this war up till now. But changing dynamics can mean changing emphases and tactics. Saying "yes" to the right things now does not mean approving or legitimizing Bush’s negligence and idiocy thus far. It means being responsible enough to save the country and the world from the worst consequences of his folly. Let’s just say I think this is an argument worth exploring and debating further. David is thinking hard, pursuing the intimations of the current crisis. The Democrats and sane Republicans need to be thinking along the same lines. Americans know they haven’t won; but they don’t want an ignominious defeat either. Defining victory down is the only responsible way forward. It should take precedence over point-scoring.

Marc Ambinder has come across an internal campaign memo. He’s running on the surge.

Yeah, I know. No one beats Cartman.

A reader reminds me of Dorothy Parker:

I like to have a martini,
Two at the very most.
After three I’m under the table,
After four I’m under my host.

James Thurber put it best, perhaps, as another reader recalls:

"One martini is all right. Two are too many, and three are not enough."

A reader writes:

I don’t know if you award points for prescience on your blog, but in view of some of your recent links I thought I would re-send this message from January, when the surge was first being debated.

Here’s his January 11 email:

The surge is 6 to 12 months.  In 6 to 12 months the partition of Baghdad will be complete.  At that point the sectarian strife will be reduced. The administration points this as a success, and then…

Well actually I don’t know what they plan after that. I doubt they do either.

Still winging it, I think. Nowhere near as smart as Dish readers, are they?

A nun is praying in the Grace Chapel on September 08, 2007 in Mariazell, Austria. Pope Benedict visits Austria for three days until Sunday. The Apostolic journey is his first visit to Austria since his nomination as Pope. By Carsten Koall/Getty Images.