The Dish

Do Barack Obama’s views on the ongoing genocide in Darfur, American withdrawal from Iraq, and humanitarian intervention in general comprise a presidential doctrine along the lines those espoused by every president since Harry Truman? That’s what I propose in today’s Providence Journal.

Not to tag-team with Steve and turn this guest-blogging stint into a Pollack/O’Hanlon extravaganza, but one quick note regarding their longer trip report on Iraq. The word "Iran" is mentioned exactly once, thus:

"There are other new tactics associated with the surge as well. As one case in point, we are now controlling more access points into Baghdad from the southeast. Doing so complicates Iran’s ability to supply al-Qa’ida as well as Shi’i militia forces with sophisticated deadly weaponry such as explosively formed penetrator devices." [my emphasis]

We’ve been told via Odierno/Gordon that Iran is getting EFPs to rogue JAM and such, but has it been conclusively established that Iran is also supplying EFPs to al-Qaeda? I hadn’t heard this, and am rather taken aback by how breezily Pollack and O’Hanlon assume it as a factual given here. Where’s the beef?

(I address this and related topics here, in case you want to weigh in via comments).

Just a quick note to say hi and that it’s great to be guest-blogging at Andrew’s place while he gets hitched, especially alongside some of my favorite bloggers like the estimable Hilzoy of ObWi and Steve of The Washington Note (not to mention Jamie, whose work I look forward to acquainting myself with better shortly). For those of you not familiar with Belgravia Dispatch, it’s a blog I maintain, mostly to scratch a foreign policy itch. I work in the private sector, and am not a journalist, academic, foreign policy ‘practitioner’ etc., so it’s a way to wade into the foreign policy debates whenever I can find the time to do so. By way of additional background, and in a previous life, I worked in the former Yugoslavia in the mid-90’s for the International Rescue Committee, a wonderful humanitarian organization (support them if minded to donate to a great charitable concern!).

My time in the Balkans left me quite despondent about the lack of will in the international community to lift the arms embargo imposed on Sarajevo and use NATO to strike at Bosnian Serb targets terrorizing the Bosniaks via genocidal actions. The fall of Srebrenica, in particular (a supposed U.N. “safe haven”) left me shaken with little faith in international organizations. You could say I became deeply cynical, angry even, at the West’s inability and impotence to do anything (pre-Dayton, at least) about the deliberate, mass slaughter of thousands on the cusp of the 21st Century, the largest war crime in Europe since the Holocaust.

This simply by way of brief background for those unfamiliar with my trajectory from someone who occasionally found common ground with the neo-cons (who were on the ‘right’ side of the Bosnian conflagration, arguing that Sarajevo merited having the arms embargo lifted, and that NATO strikes on Bosnian Serb gunners were urgently needed–keeping in mind, however, and with the benefit of hindsight, that none of the parties to the conflict were necessarily angels), to someone today who sees the neo-cons much more in the Chait/Sullivan vein, pretty much as increasingly thuggish radicals whose continued appetite to expand the war in Iraq to new theaters like Iran and Syria I find breathtakingly irresponsible.

So call me mostly a realist type, one mugged by the grim reality of the unfolding disaster in Iraq, albeit still with residual, hybrid liberal hawk/neo-Reaganite stripes. (An ‘ethical realist’ of the Lieven/Hussman persuasion? A Fukuyama-like ‘realistic Wilsonian’? Who knows, and such attempts at categorization, not least in their navel-gazing self-obsession, are quite tiresome, don’t you think?). Anyway, see you again shortly, when I hope to turn to more topical issues, perhaps including Obama vs. Clinton’s foreign policy, Joe Lieberman’s latest outrage, and other aspects of the passing scene…

Oh, one last thing. Andrew in his ‘Off To the Chapel’ post mentioned about our merry band of guest-bloggers: "(t)hey don’t agree on everything, especially foreign policy". Frankly, I’m not so sure. Can’t speak for Steve, Hilzoy or Jamie, but I suspect we’re not too far apart. In terms of the impending election, I’d sum up my basic view this way, and I hope to detail why shortly: I wish Hagel were in the race, but given he’s not, my heart is with Obama, but my head cautions not dismissing Hillary (Clinton, not Bok!). And it’s critical to keep Rudy far, far away from the Oval Office, if you know what I mean…

I just came across this blog of an American military guy that the Pentagon has not yet shut down called "Army of Dude."

Here are some choice entries:

Stupid Shit of The Deployment Awards!

Working with 1920s – A Sunni insurgent group we’ve been battling for months, responsible for the death of my friend and numerous attacks, agreed to fight Al Qaeda alongside us. Since then, they’ve grown into a much more organized, lethal force. They use this organization to steal cars and intimidate and torture the local population, or anyone they accuse of being linked to Al Qaeda. The Gestapo of the 21st century, sanctioned by the United States Army.

The Surge – The beefing up of ground forces in Iraq at the beginning of the year, started by the 82nd Airborne. Unit deployments were moved up several months to maintain a higher level of boots on the ground to quell the Baghdad situation. What most don’t realize is the amount of actual fighting troops in a brigade, something in the area of 2,000 soldiers in a brigade of 5,000 depending on what unit it is. So for every 2,000 fighters, there are 3,000 pencil pushers sucking up resources in every brigade that was surged. A logistical nightmare that, surprise, failed miserably. The increase of troops in Baghdad pushed the insurgents to rural areas (like Diyala), hence our move here in March. The surge was nothing more than a thorn in the side of nomadic fighters having to move thirty five miles while the generals watched Baghdad with stubborn eyes.

I Can Taste It

This occupation, this money pit, this smorgasbord of superfluous aggression is getting more hopeless and dismal by the second. It’s maddening to think that more than a year’s worth of blood, sweat and tears will lead to little more than a pat on the back and a hideously redundant speech from someone who did none of the bleeding, sweating or crying.

Despite being in a meaningless situation, my life has never had this much meaning. I watch the backs of my friends and they do the same for me. I’ve killed to protect them, and they’ve killed to protect me. For friends and family, being deployed is like being pregnant or surviving a car wreck; everyone is nice to you all of a sudden. People I don’t even know send me kind words and packages from all over. They came out of the woodwork knowing my plight and shared with me heartfelt hope and luck.

The fact that you’re reading this now, dear reader, is a testament to that. Would you have cared about what I thought, felt or did two years ago? This position I’m in, shared by less than one percent of the U.S. population, has given me the distinct privilege of sharing my experiences and ruminations of this war, observations undiluted by perpetually delirious officials like General Petreaus and mainstream media sirens. I have felt every extreme of the human condition, physically, morally and emotionally. I’ve never laughed so hard, cried so long or felt more ashamed of myself in all of my life. In a matter of weeks it’ll be over, and I’ll have just the memories of enduring 130 degree heat, and poker games lasting well into the night.

I’ll look back on the hysterical laughter during fifteen hour Baghdad clears, the terror of being pinned down by machine gun fire, the sight of a Stryker on its side and the unfolding of a body bag under the flames of a nearby school, unzipped tenderly to fit the body of Chevy as RPGs screamed overhead. Soon this place will all be in the past.

The Enemy of My Enemy of My Enemy of My Enemy…

Fourteen months into this deployment and things are taking a turn for the surreal. Throughout Mosul and Baghdad, we were fighting what could best described as an insurgent cocktail: parts of Islamic State of Iraq, Al Sadr’s Mahdi Army, 1920 Revolution Brigade and simple, pissed off farmers. Shia and Sunni. Organized militias and rag tags. All they had in common was a shared goal: a total withdraw of occupational forces.

This seems like a blogger in the field that The New Republic should have hired — or at least added to its team.

For some unfathomable reason, the Wall Street Journal has run columns by Ted Nugent on several occasions. Why they would want to give the author of songs like "Wang Dang Sweet Poontang*" a platform to complain about hippies and their "cowardly, irresponsible lifestyle of random sex" is a mystery. But then, there’s a lot about the Journal’s opinion page that I don’t quite understand.

I’ll be interested to see whether they continue to publish him after his rant at a concert a few days ago. He was walking up and down the stage holding two machine guns, and he said:

"I was in Chicago last week, I said, "Hey Obama, you might want to suck on one of these, you punk!" Obama, he’s a piece of sh*t and I told him to suck on my machine gun! Let’s hear it for them. I was in New York and I said, "Hey Hillary, you might want to ride one of these into the sunset, you worthless bitch. And since I’m in California, how about Barbara Boxer? She might want to suck on my machine gun!  Hey, Dianne Feinstein, ride one of these, you worthless whore!""

Here’s the YouTube video (not safe for work; not safe for anyone who minds gratuitous hatred offered to wild applause):

It’s not as though the Journal had no way of knowing about Nugent’s hatefulness before now: his last column on their opinion page ran last July, over a year after he said, about Iraq: "Our failure has been not to Nagasaki them." But perhaps telling four sitting Senators, two of whom are running for President, to suck on his machine guns will transcend even their limits.

Come on, Wall Street Journal opinion page: surprise me.

***

* Song title: H/t Mark Kleiman.

Best wishes to Andrew on his marriage, and thanks for the chance to guest blog, especially with other bloggers I admire so much. This is cross-posted to Obsidian Wings, my home blog.

Max Blumenthal, son of Sid, sits down with the Forward to discuss the work that has made him relatively famous with the left-wing blogosphere: crashing crazy right-wing events and making the participants look dumb. It’s not so hard to do, and this type of gotcha "journalism" is lazy and cuts both ways. A writer for National Review could just as easily attend an anti-war rally and find some wingnuts to lampoon. Come to think of it, it’s been done.

Portraying himself as a truth-telling hero for capturing the wignuttery of Christian Zionists, this part of the interview is particularly laughable:

That’s partly why I produced it, to break out of the liberal intellectual bubble that I’ve been working in and that audience that I’ve been writing for. And I think I’ve really broken through.

Because as we all know The Nation and The Huffington Post are bastions of objectivity and politically diverse readerships.

On this subject, it’s well worth going back and re-reading Andrew’s review of Blumenthal père’s hagiography of the Clintons. An excerpt:

It has the tone and manner and piety of one of those "Lives of the Saints" books most Catholic school kids were once forced to read at some point or other. It’s not a memoir, or a history. It’s a Gospel. Its facts are assembled, as the facts in the Gospels were assembled, for one purpose only: to affirm the faith, to rally the flock, to spread the further glory of the Church.

Mike O’Hanlon is under siege from many corners.  He’s a smart, prolific guy — and I wish he had not co-written the oped that got George Bush to finally read the New York Times.

But he and his co-author Ken Pollack have written a piece that has empowered those who believe in devoting more lives and treasure for a flawed and illegitimate war and occupation — and they’ve set themselves up for this onslaught. 

I still don’t understand how O’Hanlon could have co-written with James Steinberg one of the very first major articles calling for US troop withdrawals from Iraq and then have written "A War We Might Just Win."

I recently communicated with Steinberg and then encouraged The Nation’s Ari Berman to follow up, and as Berman makes clear, Steinberg has not changed his views even a nanometer.

I’ve also recently learned that Mike O’Hanlon is under contract with the US government’s propaganda network, Alhurra.  I’m not quite sure what I think about that yet — but it’s something that ought to be in the open.

(Many thanks to Andrew for the guest-blogging perch this week along with blogger-stars Hillary Bok, James Kirchick, and Gregory Djerejian.  Here’s a short piece I wrote recently about Andrew’s Monday nuptials with the pleasantly startling Aaron Tone.  You can catch my regular political and foreign policy commentary at The Washington Note.)

Did you know that Mike Huckabee’s FairTax–a national retail tax that would replace the current federal income tax–was devised by Scientologists? Bruce Bartlett, erstwhile blogger on this site, explains why that’s not the only reason one should be skeptical about it.

First off, many thanks to Andrew for letting Hilary, Greg, Steve and me post on his blog this week. I’m honored to be included amongst such an impressive cast of writers. I’ve been reading Andrew’s blog  since I was in high school and its surreal to be posting on his site. I work for The New Republic (where you should read the best political blog, The Plank) and write a column for The Washington Blade. Hopefully, we will be able to keep your attention while Andrew delivers his matrimonial vows and takes a much-deserved honeymoon.

While we’re discussing such good tidings, what to make of the prospects for murdering Robert Mugabe? That’s what the British human rights activist Peter Tatchell thinks ought to be done. Tatchell has suffered beatings from Mugabe’s bodyguards on multiple occasions for attempting to perform "citizens’ arrests" on the Hooligan of Harare. Now, he says, the murder of Mugabe may be justified:

The prospects for democratic, peaceful change seem to be closed, in the same way as in Nazi-occupied Europe," he says. "In all normal circumstances, I’m against violence. All violence. But in the extreme situation of a dictatorship where tens of thousands, if not millions, of lives are at stake, there may be a moral and ethical case for the people of Zimbabwe to kill Mugabe."

Tatchell’s right that the Zimbabwean people "may" have a "moral and ethical case" to kill Mugabe. But given how long Mugabe has been ruining his own country and how loyal the military is to him, this will not happen anytime soon. Last month, I weighed the pros and cons of foreign intervention to remove Mugabe, which a Zimbabwean Catholic archbishop recommended.

P.S.: As an umpteenth example of the United Nation’s utter fecklessness, the world body has decided that the millions of Zimbabweans who have fled to neighboring South Africa over the past several years are not entitled to refugee status, and thus won’t receive any of the U.N.’s enormous largesse. Apparently because only a limited number have applied for political asylum (a limited number due to the fear of being caught and deported to a land where they will starve and/or be tortured) these poor people will continue to languish in penury, ignored by the international community. Meanwhile, the grandchildren of Palestinians who fled during Israel’s 1948 War of Independence have a unique status–conferred upon them by the U.N.–among the world’s refugees.

Remind me, again, why the U.N. matters?

Well, a garden, actually, but the same idea. I’ll be back after Labor Day, and a brief honeymoon. Once again, I’ve been more than lucky to persuade four of my favorite bloggers to fill in for me. They are Hilary Bok, aka Hilzoy of Obsidian Wings; Jamie Kirchick of TNR; my friend Steve Clemons of the Washington Note; and Greg Djerejian of Belgravia Dispatch. They don’t agree on everything, especially foreign policy, which should make for some fun. In the new year – by which I mean September (yes, I’m still a grad student in my soul) – we’ll launch the Best Movie Line Ever poll. In the meantime, wish me luck. I’ll see you on the other side of matrimony. And be nice to our guests.