The Dish

I’m not sure what this tells us, but across the Atlantic, there’s also a big difference between the money being raised by the two major parties:

The huge disparity in finances between the Conservatives and Labour is laid bare with the publication of their accounts for 2006 yesterday by the Electoral Commission.

The Conservatives disclose donations running at four times the rate to Labour since David Cameron became leader, their first surplus since 2001, and a big increase in staffing at Tory headquarters.

Are all the "out" parties thriving during this war? Or is this just a coincidence?

"One of us was appointed commandant of the Marine Corps by President Ronald Reagan; the other served as a lawyer in the Reagan White House and has vigorously defended the constitutionality of warrantless National Security Agency wiretaps, presidential signing statements and many other controversial aspects of the war on terrorism. But we cannot in good conscience defend a decision that we believe has compromised our national honor and that may well promote the commission of war crimes by Americans and place at risk the welfare of captured American military forces for generations to come …

To date in the war on terrorism, including the victims of the Sept. 11 attacks and all U.S. military personnel killed in action in Afghanistan and Iraq, America’s losses total about 2 percent of the forces we lost in World War II and less than 7 percent of those killed in Vietnam. Yet we did not find it necessary to compromise our honor or abandon our commitment to the rule of law to defeat Nazi Germany or imperial Japan, or to resist communist aggression in Indochina. On the contrary, in Vietnam — where we both proudly served twice — America voluntarily extended the protections of the full Geneva Convention on prisoners of war to Viet Cong guerrillas who, like al-Qaeda, did not even arguably qualify for such protections," – Retired Gen. P.X. Kelley and Robert F. Turner, WaPo today.

I’ve just been noting the hysteria around the New Republic’s Baghdad Diarist in the blogosphere. Jeez. Malkin’s head is about to explode for the fourth time today. So far, I have to agree with Matt:

Well, now here he is — his real name is Scott Thomas Beauchamp, he’s a soldier, and as best I can tell nobody has yet brought forward any serious reason to doubt his story. Needless to say, rather than spend some time reflecting on the fact-free zone the conservative press is trying to create, Jonah Goldberg is attacking Beauchamp while Mark Steyn argues that Jonah isn’t attacking him viciously enough. That’s just crazy. All these people need to stop. They need to take a deep breath. They need to apologize to the people at TNR who’ve wasted huge amounts of time dealing with their nonsense. And they need to think a bit about the epistemic situation they’re creating where information about Iraq that they don’t want to hear — even when published in a pro-war publication — can just be immediately dismissed as fraudulent even though the misconduct it described was far, far less severe than all sorts of other well-document misconduct in Iraq.

Nothing has been disproved so far as I can tell. And the incident that seems to have created the fooferaw has actually been confirmed. Hewitt is unable to find a single factual inaccuracy and seems dismayed that a soldier might want to write about his own experiences in wartime. But why the hell not? And what does it matter if he has an agenda and an ambition to become a Writer? I can’t see the crime here – unless he fabricated something and we don’t know that. So why the craziness?

Partly, I think, new media hatred of TNR. Partly that Thomas is obviously a liberal Democrat who’s also a soldier. But mainly, it seems to me, the conservative blogosphere has taken such an almighty empirical beating this last year that they have an overwhelming psychic need to lash out at those still clinging to sanity on the war. This Scott Thomas story is a godsend for these people, a beautiful distraction from the reality they refuse to face.

It combines all the usual Weimar themes out there: treasonous MSM journalists, treasonous soldiers, stories of atrocities that undermine morale (regardless of whether they’re true or not), and blanket ideological denial. We have to understand that some people still do not believe that the U.S. is torturing or has tortured detainees, still do not believe that torture or murder or rape occurred at Abu Ghraib, still believe that everyone at Gitmo is a dangerous terrorist captured by US forces, and still believe we’re winning in Iraq. If you believe all this and face the mountains of evidence against you, you have to act ever more decisively and emphatically to refute any evidence that might undermine this worldview.

Look: I don’t know the roots of everything Scott Thomas Beauchamp has written. If there are aspects to his first-person accounts that do not pan out, we need to know. But so far, there’s no evidence of anything wrong. So far, the hysteria says far more about the hysterics than about TNR.

He’s not the deferent Democrat of the past, swinging back at Clinton with gusto. Ambers has the goods. This quote about meeting the leaders of enemy regimes struck me as an effective one both with the Democratic base and the Bush-phobic center:

"The notion that I was somehow going to be inviting them over for tea next week without having initial envoys meet is ridiculous. But the general principle is one that I think Senator Clinton is wrong on, and that is if we are laying out preconditions that prevent us from speaking frankly to these folks, then we are continuing with Bush-Cheney policies."

If this is a change election, then Obama is presenting himself as the most authentic kind of change. And he’s right.

The encouraging developments in those parts of Iraq not on the sectarian faultline – Kurdistan, some Sunni areas, like Anbar, a handful of Shiite population centers – are important to absorb. Even the Observer in London (the Guardian’s sister-paper) has taken note. But it’s equally important to realize what they tangibly mean. They mean that in mainly homogeneous regions, serious counter-insurgency tactics can work in creating more peaceful expectations and thereby peaceful communities. (Think what might have been done if we’d had this in place in 2003.) Along the sectarian faultlines, however, where ethnic cleansing is taking place at a quiet but brisk rate, the chances for more peace are far more limited. The chance of leveraging oases of stability into a national settlement is an even remoter likelihood. With no real central government, and force levels nowhere near enough to saturate the country as a whole, even a plan of hanging in there till 2009 as we currently are is really a hope rather than a plan. Fred Kaplan has a useful analysis of the new Pentagon strategy in Slate. Again, our limited man-power and the lack of a central government are the key problems:

Ever since late last year, when President Bush ordered the "surge" and hired Gen. Petraeus to create a counterinsurgency strategy, the plan has involved securing the capital and the provinces simultaneously.

The problem—a familiar one—is that we don’t have enough troops to do this all at once. No one who has seriously analyzed the problem ever believed that a "surge" of 20,000 to 30,000 U.S. combat troops would be sufficient. It was assumed from the outset that at least two or three times that many would have to come from the Iraqi army (whose soldiers, furthermore, would have to take the lead in many operations) and the Iraqi police (who would need to maintain order once the troops seized new territory).

Yet Iraqi forces have not materialized in anything like the necessary numbers. Many army units are infiltrated with sectarian militiamen. Many, if not most, police units are thoroughly corrupted.

This leaves us with the following options:

If the United States pulls out, Iraq’s sectarian warfare would probably intensify. If the United States stays in and the surge continues, Iraqi violence might be contained, but 700 to 1,000 more American soldiers will probably die each year—and there will be only a one in 10 chance that the strategy will succeed (by rather minimal standards of success)…

The president is prepared to gamble with these odds. What does he have to lose? But how about the rest of us? The question in front of us is whether the United States is prepared to bear the brunt of indefinitely occupying a failed Middle Eastern state, and sacrifice thousands more of its young, in order to salvage the face of a second-term incompetent and his corrupt machine.

(Photo: Sabah Arar/AFP/Getty.)

A different tack:

I’m probably in a different category than most of the folks writing in; I took to the streets protesting the Iraq war half-a-dozen times at least, until it became obvious to me that we were going to war, whether 10,000 of my fellow dirty hippies and I liked it or not. But I didn’t give up; I continued to write lett ers to my senators. I walked the freezing streets of Dubuque, IA for Howard Dean the weekend before the caucus, and I drove to Wisconsin to canvass for Kerry (more from desperation than enthusiasm) in November. I kept trying to make a difference. Although I am only one, I had always believed that I could make a difference to this country.

Not anymore.

Max Blumenthal in hog-heaven: with a video-cam at the conference Christians United for Israel’s annual Washington-Israel Summit. The Lieberman pitch is my favorite, especially the valentine to Santorum. The conference attendees do indeed help explain how Bush still has a solid base.

Jessica the Hippo: