The Dish

A runner-up: Smaralind in Iceland. And another. And another.

"We can categorically state that we have not released man-eating badgers into the area," – a British military spokesman in Iraq. Bummer.

A reader writes:

That the psychology behind why the WMD propaganda was so obvious and so enraging to liberals, and so opaque to conservatives, has been one of the more interesting elements of the past 6 years (for me). Orwell wrote:

"The energy that actually shapes the world springs from emotions — racial pride, leader-worship, religious belief, love of war — which liberal intellectuals mechanically write off as anachronisms, and which they have usually destroyed so completely in themselves as to have lost all power of action … He [H.G. Wells] was, and still is, quite incapable of understanding that nationalism, religious bigotry and feudal loyalty are far more powerful forces than what he himself would describe as sanity."

Orwell nailed the dynamics boiling under the surface of the current political environment.  Liberals are instinctively opposed to racial pride, nationalism, religious bigotry, and leader-worship–and we saw it in spades with George Bush and Bushism. Umberto Eco’s "Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt" were on parade and it set our hair on fire.

Have you considered why you were blind to this?

I think I have. I trusted a president after a national catastrophe in a time of war. I had become completely inured to the evidence of Saddam’s WMDs, and mindful of our under-estimating his WMD potential in 1990. I assumed that no president would launch a war without sufficient troops to keep the peace therefater. I was unaware we had effectively withdrawn from the Geneva Conventions. I was deeply suspicious of the motives of those who opposed the president, many of whom, I suspected, would have opposed him under any circumstance.

I love this country and was deeply angry at what had been done to her.

Was I or am I a nascent fascist? No more than any of us are, I hope. Do I feel racial pride? Nah. I do feel pride in the West, though. Religious faith? Check. Leader worship? Nah. Trust and misplaced hope are not the same as worship, but I do confess to lionizing Bush after 9/11 arguably because I desperately wanted to believe we had a president who could rise to the occasion. And the September 20 speech was remarkable. Love of war? I hope not. But I was less respectful of the benefits of a poisonous peace than I should have been in retrospect.

The key, I think, and Orwell is a model in this, is not to lose those passions that make us human, but to subject them to constant scrutiny and to evaluate the facts as best one can as they emerge. This is neither bloodless liberalism nor authoritarian conservatism. It’s an attempt at balance.

He’s arguing he didn’t decide to go to war; Saddam did. He’s saying he agrees with his Republican critics. He’s blaming the generals for all the combat decisions that have made this war a failure. His blaming Tommy Franks specifically for the troop levels was particularly piquant. So he gave him a Medal of Freedom anyway? Worse, the president conflated every single radical element in the Middle East into one amorphous anti-American entity. It appears that he sees Shiite militias, Hezbollah, al Qaeda, Hamas and the Sunni insurgents as indistinguishable. He has even said baldly that the people bombing and murdering in Iraq are the same people who attacked us on 9/11. The Shiite militias? The Baathist dead-enders? Is he serious? He seems to be still operating under the premise that the fundamental dynamic is one between democracy and radicalism. At some very broad and general level, that’s not wrong. But in terms of forming policy, it’s close to useless. Actually, it’s worse than useless. We have a president who seems unable to understand the critical dynamics of the war he is allegedly waging. Is he capable of understanding the complexity? Does he really think we need another lecture on the evil of al Qaeda? Does he really think that’s what we’re arguing about at this point?

Here’s the bottom line for me:

"I don’t think Congress should be running the war; it should be funding the troops."

The inverse, of course, is that Congress can also defund the troops. But apparently that’s not an option. Bush’s position is that Congress can make one decision – to go to war – and then their role is to pay for it indefinitely, regardless. He’ll listen, but he won’t hear. He’s the decider.

I don’t know whether this performance is going to persuade anyone. It seems to me that the report only offers one real sign of success: that the Iraqi government came up with its pledged troops for Baghdad. That’s it. It also seems to me, alas, that when the president speaks spontaneously about the war, he reveals vast amounts of ignorance, denial and deception, self and otherwise. The patronizing soundbites stick in the craw at this point. His formulation that we do not know whether the war can succeed but that it nonetheless must succeed is about as disorienting a leadership call as I have heard. The rank condescension toward the American people is also staggering. Look, Mr President, most Americans aren’t as dim as you seem to be. Maybe it’s time you realized that.

He’s just out of his depth, I’m afraid. And others are sinking – and dying – as a consequence.

(Photo: Tim Sloan/Getty.)

He calls the Libby commutation a "fair and balanced decision."

The president just used the terms "Republics and Democrats." Republics? Is that a parallel to the derogatory term "Democrat"? Maybe he’s now as pissed off by one party as by the other. I’ll review the presser as soon as it’s over. Stay tuned. So far, terribly unimpressive.

Readers are largely in agreement with my suggestion that, whatever else we do in Iraq, we should make sure we do not lose a free Kurdistan:

Yes. Please hammer on this. No matter what anyone concludes about the viability of the surge in southern Iraq, troop withdrawal dates and the war in general, abandoning Iraqi Kurdistan should be flat-out taken off the table by all sides. Unlike the rest of Iraq, the Kurds like us, are grateful for our help and want us to stay. They are precisely the sort of ally that we desperately need in the region, and moreover we owe it to them, in light of our abandonment at the end of the first gulf war. Michael Totten’s interview with a Peshmerga colonel is an excellent example.

Both Democrats and Republicans need to be reminded of this. Republicans especially need to realize by refusing to compromise on the war for long enough, when they inevitably lose the political argument, they risk ending up with a total withdrawal that abandons one of our only real allies in the muslim world. A deal now that leaves us committed to defending Kurdistan allows them to at least save face by having one success story to point to.

A reader writes:

In saying merely that the GOP has shown a contempt for gay voters, you are being far too fair. The more accurate statement is that the GOP has built its base on a political ideology that demonizes gays. And also feminists. And scientists. And anyone who doesn’t hold traditional Jewish or Christian views. That IS the culture war. When that old-fashioned God and gay hatred are used to define one side, that puts a lot of us on the other. And what are the rest of us to do, in our political efforts in a two-party system? Treat equally the party that demonizes us and the party that welcomes us?

Even if the latter party is a disorganized opposition party with historical obligations to a wide variety of special interest groups, even if one might prefer some of the specific planks of the first party, it’s hard to overlook that demonization. That counts for a lot in politics. And should. Gays, scientists, and atheists have been told by the GOP that they ARE the enemy. In practical politics, a group’s demonization by one of the two major political parties may look quite a bit like its "merger" with the other. It’s important, nonetheless, to understand the root cause of that shift.

Despite some accusations, I never intended the following post defending Fred Thompson’s right to a sex life to in any way suggest he’s gay (which strikes me as preposterous). Here’s the full post:

Outside the extremist, activist base, regular GOP voters turn out to be relatively tolerant when it comes to sexual minorities and private sex lives. They’re not well represented by their party leaders, as far as policy is concerned. This is good news for Fred Thompson. The man has had a colorful and wide-ranging sex life, as I’m sure we will soon find out.

Wonkette inferred some gay rumor, and then the blogosphere ran with it. Please. All I meant was that Thompson, as a single man, had had a lot of dates with a lot of women, something that strikes me – and a lot of Republicans as well – as completely fine. I have never heard a single gay rumor about Thompson and never intended to be interpreted as spreading one.

David Ignatius airs one:

Defense Secretary Robert Gates appears to recognize what’s necessary, politically and strategically. He is said to favor an announcement by September that the United States will withdraw some troops from Iraq before year-end as a sign that it is committed to a "post-surge" redeployment. The opportunity for a modest drawdown will arise this fall, when two battalions, several thousand troops at most, are scheduled to rotate out of Iraq. One of those is a Marine battalion in Anbar province, where the administration has been touting U.S. success. A good way to underline the gains in Anbar would be to reduce U.S. troop levels there.

Another chance for compromise is the United Nations authorization for the U.S. troop presence in Iraq, which must be renewed this year. Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki wants a plan to reduce the number of American troops in his country as much as any member of Congress does. Here’s the real opportunity for "timelines" on withdrawal — ones jointly negotiated by U.S. and Iraqi diplomats rather than imposed by Congress. In a perverse sense, that’s the greatest gift America can bestow on the Iraqi government — to engineer the joint "liberation" of Iraq from U.S. occupation, but "slowly, slowly," as the Arabs like to say.

Some thing like this will happen next year regardless. I’m not sure pulling out of areas where we have had success makes a lot of sense, though. In many ways, it seems smarter to stay in those areas where we have been able to gain traction with local power-brokers against insurgents or, in Sunni areas, pesky Qaeda-ites. But these are pragmatic decisions that will accompany withdrawal, and those decisions should be made with maximum input from commanders on the ground. The key direction is withdrawal. Making a clear declaration that we are out if there seems to me vital to shift the dynamic in Iraq to get the political decisions their dependency is impeding.

I think our withdrawal should facilitate soft partition, devolved local "government" of various sectarian forms, and tactical alliances between local leaders and US troops, combined with carefully vetted training of Iraqi troops. But I see no real prospect of reconstructing a unitary nation-state in the foreseeable future. If the process of withdrawal is clear and irreversible, then much can surely be done creatively with the process.