The Dish

But many more men than women are happy to have sex without tongues-in-mouth. But you knew that already, didn’t you?

Blogging direct from Iraq, Wired’s Noah Schachtman reviews the latest attempt to recruit reliable local policemen in Anbar:

The goal was to get 125 watchmen today. They’ve barely hit half of that. Which is a problem. Because commanders from General David Petraeus on down have declared these these "alligators" (named for their Izod shirts, and for their roles as the scaley boots on the ground for the local police commander) as cornerstones of Iraq’s security. With a light blue shirt on, an alligator is authorized to carry a weapon — if he already has one –- and man checkpoints for the I.P.s.  With his shirt off, an alligator can go to the café, to the mosque, and listen to what potential insurgents might be saying.

The idea is for the gator to be hyperlocal, to know exactly what’s going on in his few-blocks radius.  Think of him as part informer, part rent-a-cop, part sheriff’s deputy.  And sometimes, part restaurateur…

It’s an interesting glimpse into the evolving reality in Anbar.

The publishing industry increasingly hawks the literature of the cute over the ugly. Virginia Postrel explains why.

The next few weeks are among the most important yet in the war that began on 9/11/2001. Yes, I still believe it is a war; and I still believe it cannot be ducked or wished away. We have serious and deadly enemies, constellated in a newly dangerous and amorphous entity. Mere reactive police action is not enough; but, equally, ideological grandstanding is no alternative to cold, strategic assessment, which may indeed mean a careful withdrawal from the quicksand of Iraq. Readers know where I’ve been coming from for a while, and I hope to spend considerable time in the new year (for me, it still starts in September) making sense of any and all new data we get from Iraq, especially from Petraeus and Crocker.

But a simple, initial point. War is dynamic; the arguments of six months ago may not apply very well to the next six months. Paying close attention to evolving events on the ground is key, as is grasping the immense complexity of the region we now appear to be indefinitely occupying. Equally, seeing only the current situation and failing to take in the long view can lead to fatal errors as well. In that respect, the Congress and the American people have every right to remember the criteria the administration itself laid out for judging the success of the "surge" back in January and holding them to it. Mere trust is no longer an option. Here’s what the Bushies said last January:

We have made very clear that the Iraqi government needs to meet the benchmarks it has set in order to do the things on which a broader reconciliation are required. And you all know them. They’re the oil law; they’re de-Baathification, narrowing the limitations of the de-Baathification law; they’re provincial elections to bring the Sunnis back into the political process at the local level. There is also continuing, and we would hope even accelerating the transition of security responsibility to Iraqis elsewhere in the country and in Baghdad, because if this works it will actually enable Iraqis sooner to provide security in Baghdad. And we have — would like, and the Iraqis have made clear that one of their benchmarks is to take responsibility for security in the whole country by the end of the year. (…)

They have set forward this plan. They have brought forward these benchmarks. And what the President is saying is, fine, we will judge you now less on your words and more on your performance."

If these benchmarks are now to be abandoned or downgraded as the basis on which to judge the surge, then the president needs to be candid that he has changed his criteria. There may be an argument there, but it needs to be on the table. None of the current p.r. blitz can disguise the fact that the surge has indeed failed on the terms that the president initially laid out at the beginning of the year. There has been no political progress at the center, and that was the declared goal of the new gambit. If the surge has succeeded in other ways, fine. Let’s figure out what the consequences of that might be. But no more flim-flam and distraction, please. It’s not an easy decision: to squat on the wreckage of four years of failed occupation or to extricate ourselves from it and face unknown consequences. This awful choice is a function of the commander-in-chief we’ve got. We cannot and must not delegate the decision to him.

(Photo: US ‘surge’ troops from 1-30 Infantry Battalion conduct a foot patrol along the Tigris river south of Baghdad, 03 September 2007. By David Furst/Getty.)

Blake Hounshell believes so.

He resigned on my wedding day. Really, he shouldn’t have. We are, of course, well rid of his inabilities. This George Will zinger struck me as the best:

[S]peaking of the tone-deaf, Alberto Gonzales could not even leave high office without advertising his unfitness for it. As he habitually has done, he reminded the nation that he has "lived the American Dream," which he evidently thinks is epitomized by his success in attaching himself to a politician not known for demanding quality in assistants. Gonzales then demonstrated how uncomprehending he is of essential American values. He said: "Even my worst days as attorney general have been better than my father’s best days."

Well. His father married and had eight children—nine wonderful days, days even better, one would have thought, than any of the days his son spent floundering at the Justice Department. Furthermore, Gonzales’s father had the fulfillment of a lifetime spent providing for his family. But what is any of that, Gonzales implies, compared with the satisfaction of occupying, however unsatisfactorily, a high office? This implicit disparagement of his father’s life of responsibility and self-sufficiency turns conservatism inside out. It is going to take conservatism a while to recuperate from becoming associated with such people.

Recuperation? We need a detox.

I see that NRO has been having a discussion about whether a secretly gay man who opposes gay civil rights is necessarily a hypocrite. I tend to agree that the term hypocrisy is bandied about far too easily these days. And Jonah is right, I think, to argue that it means someone who knowingly violates his own publicly professed principles in private. In that respect, Craig is not a hypocrite. When a psyche is as split and damaged as his, hypocrisy is another name for breathing. His record, moreover, indicates that he believes the right role for gay people is not the responsibilities of civil marriage, or even a publicly acknowledged gay identity, or even the decision to risk life and limb in service to country in the military. These are not values the Christianists want gay people to uphold. They believe that gay people, because we are sick, will always seek love and sex solely in public restrooms, that we should never be involved in committed relationships with one another, that we should be barred from serving our country, and stigmatized at every opportunity. And Craig has been consistent in this view, even with respect to himself.

He admitted his guilt and has lived up to the standards the GOP holds for gay people. He is not a hypocrite in this sense. Jonah looks around to find another gay man or woman who opposes marriage rights, civil unions, military service and everything else Craig opposes. Odd that he cannot find any, isn’t it? Or that his virulently anti-gay magazine cannot even find one gay writer willing to jump the anti-gay hoop for a few bucks and a think-tank gig. The current GOP, like NRO, is therefore looking for the only openly gay allies they can find: those who actually hate themselves with the consistency and instability of a Larry Craig. There are fewer and fewer of them out there. And the Christianists wonder why the next generation isn’t buying it.

My guest-bloggers said a lot. I have not much more to add, except to say that while it is possible to note (and rightly so) the hypocrisy of Craig, and while it is sensible to believe that a sitting Senator should not be putting himself in such compromising positions, the large implications of an almost laughably petty misdemeanor are revealing of problems deeper than one man’s personal tragedy. One problem is the cruelty of public discourse. Yes, Craig is a public figure, but he is also a human being, and a gay human being, and I feel for him, for the lies he has told himself and others, for the psychic pain that led him to this place, and for the obvious lack of self-control that his profoundly split identity entailed. I don’t think he even knows he’s gay. Yes, he deserves criticism for poor judgment, for trying to use his position to get out of a sticky situation, for opposing gay equality and dignity, while being gay himself. But this was a victimless incident, in which no one tried to harm anyone else; and he also needs support and help and compassion. The glee at his exposure came from both sides. It was ugly wherever it came from.

The incident should also tell the GOP something they still don’t want to face, but need to urgently.

It is that gayness is as deep a part of someone’s psychic core as can be found. It is not a sin; it’s an identity. The attempt to stigmatize, deny, suppress or criminalize this identity simply cannot work in the long run. We have to find a way to integrate gay people as humanely and as constructively into the wider society as we can. The Craig affair is a function of dis-integration. This process of integration isn’t easy, but it is essential if we are to avoid ruining more lives, destroying more families and wasting more resources. And it will not be fully possible until civil marriage offers gay people an alternative social role to that of outsider and threat. I want to live in a world where future Larry Craigs will not happen. Instead of excoriating one sad man, we should be concentrating on building that future. In Iowa, I’m glad to say, some are.

Almora, India, 8.08 am.

I had several things to write this morning about events of last week but then I read my own blog and found many of them redundant. You can usually bank on the last week of August to be relatively news-free, but Katrina changed that. And last week’s Gonzales resignation and Craig arrest news kept up the pace. So we were lucky to have one of the best blogging teams around to keep up with the dog days. I’d like to thank my guest-bloggers deeply for their often lively and relentlessly intelligent and focused posts during my time off. Please keep up with them all at their own excellent blogs: hilzoy at Obsidian Wings, Steve Clemons at the Washington Note, Jamie Kirchick at the Plank, and Greg Djerejian at the Belgravia Dispatch. If you didn’t know of them before, now you have no excuse. Thanks so much, guys.