The Dish

Greg Djerejian has a very helpful analysis of Tony Cordesman’s expert assessment of the situation in Iraq. Here’s Cordesman:

There is a real opportunity that did not exist at the start of the year. What is critical to understand, however, is that while the surge strategy has had value in some areas, much of this progress has not [been] the function of the surge strategy, US planning, or action by the Maliki government. In fact, the "new" strategy President Bush announced in January 2007 has failed in many aspects of its original plan… Without the unplanned uprising by the Sunni tribes, the US simply did not have enough forces to carry out the present level of operations if it had had to rely solely on the real-world capability of the official Iraqi Security forces.

And will the Sunni uprising endure? Only if the Maliki government extends an olive branch. And that’s unlikely:

The almost universal criticism of Maliki’s office during a recent trip to Iraq showed that it is seen as too closely tied to the sectarian cleansing effort in Baghdad and south Baghdad, as involved in freeing JAM and Shiite detainees, as refusing to work with the Sunni tribes out of fear they will gain power and as refusing to bring Sunni fighters into local security forces and the police for the same reason.

So we have one small stroke of luck – which looks like collapsing within a few months, absent a major shift in the Baghdad government, which is teetering on total collapse. Greg concludes:

Look, what this Administration, and its allies, simply can’t wrap their heads around is that the war is, for all intensive purposes, already lost, and we must now focus like a laser on containing the damage via region-wide crisis management and diplomacy. 

I fear he’s right. But read them both.

It was before the 2006 election day. But Bush decided against a November surprise.

"Colonel Sean MacFarland, commander of the First Armored Division’s First Brigade Combat Team (1-1 AD) says that Sinjar "feels like Paris in 1944." Parents and children line the streets when U.S. patrols pass by, while Yezidi clerics pray for the welfare of U.S. forces. More even than Paris, in fact, Sinjar feels like Iraq as Dick Cheney predicted it would be…" – Lawrence Kaplan, TNR, October 2006.

"In scenes reminiscent of an earthquake zone, bodies lay in the street covered in blankets amid the shattered ruins of clay-built houses. The buildings, mostly one-storey structures, had been completely razed. "This is a catastrophe that cannot be described in words," said the governor of Nineveh province, Duraid Kashmoula, adding that more than 200 people were killed and 300 wounded.

He said he believed the toll could rise as many were believed buried beneath the rubble that bulldozers were trying to shift. Many people were listed as missing. Kashmoula declared the area a disaster zone and asked for central government help. When he toured the scene he was besieged by people pleading for help in finding loved ones. "The scale of the destruction is unimaginable," said another visitor to the scene, a regional government official…

In the aftermath of the blast, authorities imposed a total curfew in the Sinjar area, which is close to the Syrian border." – Daily Mirror, yesterday.

(Hat tip: Ben Wasserstein.)

"Of course, winning the War on Terror – whether in Iraq, Afghanistan, Boston, New York or wherever — is vitally important. I’m not warning my conservative friends off the idea of furthering the cause of global freedom; but we need to acknowledge that the public is simply not with us on the Iraq War and growing more distrustful of us by the day on the broader conflict against radical Islamism. If we are going to insist that national security is one of our two signature issues, we ought to, at the very least, have credibility on it… When it comes to our issues matrix in the present political environment, I have to be the bearer of bad news to my rightwing friends: The party of torture and immigration restriction is not a majority party and doesn’t have much of a future," – Patrick Hines, former McCain adviser.

It’s a bad, bad place and we have to keep attacking it until they like us. Or something like that. Actually, the Foreign Affairs piece seemed mainly boilerplate to me. The conflation of all our many enemies in the Middle East into one homogeneous whole called Islamist terror strikes me as unintelligent and not very helpful in advancing our interests in the region. Worse: If the choice is between the tiniest risk of terror and your civil liberties, be assured your civil liberties will be extinguished. Henley is less charitable:

Rudy Giuliani hired a ghostwriter to produce the requisite manifesto, "Don’t Say You Weren’t Warned," for Foreign Affairs magazine. It’s full of lies, oversimplifications and vagueness, but makes up for all that by being very, very tedious. Because the genre requires him to name-check every part of the world – perhaps to assure the alleged author that it exists, perhaps to reassure the FA reader that the alleged author has heard of the world – you get whole sections of "I see India out there tonight. Keep rocking, India! And lemme give a shoutout to my peeps in Germany!" Those passages read like the fellow who addresses the Mount Pleasant, PA Oddfellows’ Hall every year on "The State of the World Today."

The rest of it reads like the fellow who addresses the Mount Pleasant, PA Oddfellows’ Hall every year on "The State of the World Today" after being maddened by bees.

Read it for yourself. Matt has a comment here and another here. Another blogger finds the analysis very 9/12. I was and remain a great admirer of Rudy Giuliani’s transformation of New York City. I’m glad he’s not a Christianist. He’s inclusive and largely right about healthcare policy. I like his low tax emphasis. But if you want a continuation of Cheney foreign policy, with less finesse, you know whom to vote for. We’ve seen its limits very very clearly. It’s silly to pretend it has worked, when it has clearly made us less secure. More salient: I think the Constitution has only a 50-50 chance if another terror-strike attacks and Giuliani is president. Above everything else, that matters.

Junk science and psychology in a children’s book.

A reader writes:

Sad as it is to see Tony Wilson dying, the article you link to shows the NHS appears to have been right in denying him Sutent.

The story is dated July 11, 2007 and Tony Wilson is quoted as believing "his condition has improved" and "the drug has stopped the cancer in its tracks." Furthermore, his friends had donated enough money to provide him a five-month supply of the drug. Tony Wilson died on August 10, 2007 which means he did not last even a month although he had access to the drug. [Update: Wilson died of a heart attack unrelated to his cancer.]

Every healthcare system, public or private, must choose which care to provide and the cost versus efficacy arguments must be weighed carefully. It is always bad to base public policy on a single anecdote and we certainly should not be denying people Sutent solely because someone taking it died within the month.  It is telling, however, that you used this story to bash the NHS for being conservative with other people’s money – rather than bash the drug company for refusing to sell its product at a price the customer is willing to pay.

Terror suspects must be denied all hope and face undefined torture – because it’s the best way to get information from them. That’s the actual public defense of the Bush administration’s detention policies in the war on Islamist terrorism. Marty Lederman explains that the administration does not defend detention without charges because the suspects detained may be dangerous. It defends such detention because only if suspects know that they have no hope of due process, legal counsel or a day in court, will they cough up important intelligence. Money quote from Vice Admiral Lowell Jacoby, Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency:

Anything that threatens the perceived dependency and trust between the subject and interrogator directly threatens the value of interrogation as an intelligence-gathering tool. Even seemingly minor interruptions can have profound psychological impacts on the delicate subject-interrogator relationship. Any insertion of counsel into the subject-interrogator relationship, for example — even if only for a limited duration or for a specific purpose — can undo months of work and may permanently shut down the interrogation process. Therefore, it is critical to minimize external influences on the interrogation process.

By "external influences," he means the rule of law, the Geneva Conventions, the US Treaty obligations, and the Constitution. Marty goes on:

The Solicitor General even placed the Jacoby Declaration in the Appendix in the Padilla/Hamdi cases, and cited it liberally in support of its argument to the Court that the Administration should be entitled to detain persons not only for purposes of incapacitation, but also for purposes of long-term interrogations.

That is why, just as the Jacoby Declaration is the single most revealing document released by the government in the conflict against al Qaeda, so, too, the single most important sentence in any of the Supreme Court’s decisions in the al Qaeda cases was a stark rejection of the government’s rationale — indeed, a remarkable rebuke to the Jacoby Declaration — in Justice O’Connor’s controlling opinion in Hamdi. After explaining at length that the laws of war and the Authorization for Use of Military Force permit detention for purposes of incapacitating combatants, Justice O’Connor wrote (542 U.S. at 521):

"Certainly, we agree that indefinite detention for the purpose of interrogation is not authorized."

No citation offered, because none should be needed. "Certainly."

Alas, certainty that we still live in a republic governed by the law is no longer possible.

An insight into Giuliani’s mindset.

This is now what’s coming out of the front-runner’s campaign:

"It sounds like Karl Rove is writing Senator Obama’s talking points."

I’m sure Karl Rove will have plenty of his own talking points next year, if Hillary is the nominee. Clinton’s current negative rating is 43 percent. Obama’s is 22.