The Dish

Here’s Dean Barnett’s attempt to respond to TNR’s accounting of the Scott Thomas Beauchamp stories. Here’s Malkin’s round-up. Factually, the critics have the point that the incident of mocking an injured woman occurred in Kuwait, not Iraq. And, unless more facts emerge, that’s it. For this, Beauchamp is described by Barnett as a "fabulist" and a "proven liar" and has even had his status as a soldier dismissed. The skull episode is borne out by other witnesses. The dog-baiting is completely credible. Here’s a YouTube of some soldiers tormenting a wounded dog. Here’s another of soldiers taunting thirsty Iraqi kids with water bottles. The incidents are gross, but in a war-zone, they’re hardly something to be shocked, shocked at. Am I now slandering every soldier by linking to them? Of course not. Is TNR slandering every soldier because one soldier writes up some ugly episodes that are also self-criticism? Please. No one doubts that most of the troops are doing an amazing job in near-impossible conditions. Describing some bad apples and occasional crudeness – especially when you are criticizing yourself as well – is utterly banal.

Barnett calls the TNR statement "maddening". If you’re wedded to the belief that the stories were fabricated, then it must be. It’s no fun to have accused a writer and his editors of wilfull malfeasance only to discover you have no real basis for it, except your own insecurities and hatreds. If, on the other hand, you’re concerned to find the full truth about Iraq – and TNR has published countless stories on every angle and supported the initial invasion – the stories are one trivial but worthwhile aspect of the complex reality of war. In the context of TNR’s coverage of the entire conflict, they’re completely legitimate.

I truly have no explanation why the rightwing blogosphere has managed to largely ignore and deny actual claims and cases of torture and abuse by US soldiers but have gone batshit over some trivial, unshocking, verified soldier stories by a man who, unlike Barnett and Malkin, is actually serving his country. But this is my best shot: Their president and their Congress and their movement have lost a war, wounded America’s moral standing in the world and caused tens of thousands of deaths and a greater risk of terrorism across the globe.

After four and a half years of this nightmare, who are you going to blame but The New Republic?

Russian paratroopers celebrate Paratroopers Day at Gorky Park in Moscow, 2 August 2007. By Maxim Marmur/AFP/Getty.

It’s a minor blog spat, but in some ways revealing about the deeper issues involved in deciding whether to intervene in foreign countries. The subject is Ethiopia and Somalia. Were we right to support a foreign government’s attempt to thwart a Qaeda-backed regime in a neighboring state? Jamie Kirchick thinks so:

I think Ethiopia was entirely justified in ousting an Al-Qaeda affiliated, Islamofascist junta which had overthrown the legitimate government of a neighbor state and was using that state’s territory to launch terrorist attacks against it. And I think the United States was justified in aiding attempts to hunt down and kill the men responsible for murdering 225 people, many of them American civil servants.

Put like that, who could disagree? Unless blowback is so endemic and dangerous that the results vitiate the good intentions. Chotiner:

I don’t think it’s okay for terrorist groups to depose internationally-recognized governments etc. and not expect any sort of armed reprisal. But this is leaps and bounds away from saying that armed reprisal is the right or proper course of action (from my minimal knowledge, I’d say that in all three cases I have cited, "armed reprisal" failed badly). This was always the bothersome aspect of various pro-war arguments in 2003. Yes, Saddam is bad. Yes, he should pay. Yes, international law should be upheld. Yes, yes, yes. But do we really want to invade and occupy a hostile Middle-Eastern country? Some things in life aren’t easy, and have no good answers. And I worry sometimes that arguments like Jamie’s spend all their energy focusing on "justifications" while losing sight of ends.

Yglesias agrees. I’ve slowly moved away from Jamie’s position toward Matt’s. The reason is simply the empirical evidence of the results of intervention, Iraq being obviously the prime example. What Americans want are the benefits of empire, without the work of empire. If you can’t do the work, you shouldn’t start. That’s why I think non-interventionism will become a consensus in Washington in the not-to-distant future. Experience doth make cowards of us all.

A reader catches a Freudian slip from the McCain blogger conference call:

Is this correct?

UPDATE I (2:46 p.m.): The senator clarified his thoughts on Iraq a bit later in the call…"What Petraeus is going to say is not that we can start to withdraw," Mr. McCain said.

Its only August 2nd…how does McCain know what Petraeus is going to say come September? Has the Congressional testimony already been typed by Karl Rove’s staff and delivered to McCain? Does Petraeus have his copy, yet? Will he be allowed to edit it?

I have no idea. But I suspect Petraeus has been told what to say. He takes orders. That’s his job.

"Democrats are showing us with their every word and grimace that what is good news for our country, what is good news for the war against Islamic terror, what is god news for our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, and what is good news for the cause of peace – real peace – and stability in the Middle East is bad news, really bad news, for Democrats. Many of these people with that "D" after their names would gladly sacrifice any semblance of victory in Iraq and against the scourge of Islamic fascism if it would mean maintaining and strengthening their hold on power in Washington.. and willing the presidency.

Has there ever before been a time in America where a major political party would virtually pray for our defeat in a war so that they could demonize the leader of the opposition and turn that defeat into victory for them at the polls? Well, you’re seeing just that right now," – Neal Boortz, fresh from a meeting with the Decider.

Some Christianist mud-slinging.

Read TNR’s accounting. It is as I predicted: honorable and, except for one small inaccuracy, it checks out. All the aspects aggressively challenged by the usual propaganda organs have been verified and corroborated. The military is now conducting its own investigation. Given the record of such formal investigations, I’m not as confident in the Pentagon as I am in TNR. Can we now expect apologies from the people who smeared and maligned the magazine and its soldier-reporter? I doubt it. The attackers are not the kind to acknowledge their own errors.

The Guardian’s Sean Smith brings you video and photography that you don’t often see in the American mainstream media. What we are subjecting these soldiers to – the risk, the climate, and the inability to recuperate in any way – is beyond belief.

Yesterday was almost the Platonic idea of a summer day. The heat had depth and the light had a white glow about it. There’s no cold edge to the air any more, even out here in the often-chilly Cape. We spent the second afternoon in the tidal pools at the end of the peninsula. Dan Savage, his husband and son are staying for the week – alongside countless other gay families here for Family Week. So it was floatie time in the currents. No one in the Savage family has been here before so I had the privilege of introducing them. The nine-year-old’s grin belied his occasional nine-year-old diffidence.

Some people ask me why I don’t travel elsewhere for a summer break. I’ve been coming to the same place for almost two decades. For the past decade, I’ve come here in June and not left till September if I can possibly help it. It’s by no means all vacation. The blog and the column don’t write themselves. In some ways, I seem to work harder here. But it is a break, a change of pace and atmosphere from the Washington bubble. I spent my first full summer here just after I was diagnosed with HIV. It seemed a good place to learn how to die. But it helped teach me how to live, which, you eventually realize, amounts to the same thing.

It isn’t just the gay subtext, although it’s great to have vibrant little patches of counter-culture and post-gay culture vying with each other on a strip of sand. It isn’t just that I lucked out in buying a little beach condo when I could afford one. It’s the larger place itself, the mixture of elements that make up a minimalist, sublime, pure expression of nature and nature’s God. There are really only three elements to the landscape out here: dune and water and air. When you get past the town into the pristine Province Lands National Seashore (thanks, JFK!), there are no dating landmarks, no cars to place you in any decade, no architecture to pinion you to any specific time. Yes, the landscape has changed drastically over the centuries. It isn’t what the Pilgrims first saw. But it is largely as it was at the tip as when Thoreau rhapsodized about it. It is a place where you can leave all America behind.

But time in this timeless place is also acutely present. It’s present because of the enormous, expansive, insistent tides. I live on water, which means the view changes all the time. Every day shifts with the lunar rhythms. My backyard is both an ocean and a desert, depending on the time of day. And it is almost any color you can imagine. That’s what so much light and water will do. In the tidal pools, the timelessness of the scene is intersected with the always-shifting timeliness of the water coming in and out, traveling vast distances of very shallow coastal marshes and dunes, to transform a dusty beach into a blue and green watery expanse in mere hours. There is never any still, even when the air won’t move. That’s why it’s where I’ve asked my ashes to go one day. I want them dispersed into the nothingness on the horizon, to become specks of matter that will experience a pure summer day eternally. They will be there in the rough winter storms; but they will wait for the perfect summer afternoon.

Until then, it is as close as I’ll get to heaven on earth. And one of those places is enough for me.