The Top Ten Useful Yiddish Words

Danny Finkelstein provides a guide for goyim. The following may be most pertinent to the blogosphere:

Broyges: This word is ideal to describe arguments between friends and relatives that turn into long standing rifts and feuds. Often the parties don’t talk. Lyndon Johnson and Robert Kennedy reached that state. Breugas is one of Gordon Brown’s favourite conditions.

And mine.

What Does Victory Mean?

A conservative intellectual asks:

Does victory mean toppling Saddam? Done. Does victory mean ensuring Iraq doesn’t have weapons of mass destruction? Done. Does it mean a stable and Western style democracy in Iraq? Good luck with that. Does it just mean a stable but perhaps not democratic Iraq? Good luck with that as well. Does it mean modernizing and westernizing all of the Middle East? Does it mean stamping out all vestiges of "Shari’a-observant Islam" or more crudely put, wiping out "Islamo-fascism." Most War on Terror supporters I have talked to cannot give a coherent answer.

“Insane, Irrational Panic”

This is how Bill Kristol describes the view of those who have followed this war closely for four years of drift, mishap and recklessness and concluded that some kind of withdrawal or redeployment is now our least worst option. It is based on Kristol’s judgment that, for reasons unspecified,

"the offensive is working better than expected."

Than who expected? The day after the most fatal bomb yet in Iraq? As the maximal troop surge in Baquba still saw up to 80 percent of the insurgents flee to fight another day? Kristol’s objective analysts, of course, the ones who see the true picture … are the very people – nepotistic neocons – who designed the offensive (and its p.r.) in the first place. Kristol’s assessment of Iraq now is as rigged as the WMD evidence many of us foolishly took on faith. Three words: fool me once. Kristol, of course, favors political counter-attack in Washington. We know what that will mean: an attempt to blame those who have had no influence on this war for its baleful consequences and to exonerate the egotists and liars who have perpetuated it.

Kristol’s real rationale, of course, has less to do with Iraq and much more to do with the collapsing coalition has been trying to hold together for quite a while:

Why on earth pull the plug now? Why give in to an insane, irrational panic that will destroy the Bush administration and most likely sweep the Republican party to ruin?

Ah, yes, the Republican party. The real prize, the real issue. It’s worth reiterating: The main reason to withdraw and redeploy now is because no sane observer believes that continuing to ineffectively occupy a Muslim country against the will of the Iraqi and American people is in the national interest. The surge will end next March, regardless. Whatever slivers of success it has achieved cannot work against the overwhelming fact of Iraq’s sectarian disintegration. The "country" cannot be put together again under unending U.S. occupation. And sending more young Americans to die for a sectarian war that is actually increasing the risk to the U.S. and the West as a whole is immoral and strategically foolhardy.

But it could give the neocons a new leash on life, a way to invigorate their exhausted ideological engines. That, now, is what young Americans are dying for. Increasingly, it’s all they’re dying for. Enough.

“Increasingly Effective Iraqi Troops”

That’s the line being pushed by stab-in-the-backers like Glenn Reynolds. Here’s some actual analysis of the reality:

To secure just Baghdad requires, according to the Petraeus docrtine, between 150,000 to 180,000 motivated, and loyal counterinsurgents. To secure the entire Sunni Arab population outside of Baghdad requires another group of the same size, and to secure the Shi’ite Arab population outside of Baghdad means doctrinally another 400,000 loyal counterinsurgents.

The AP explains why this isn’t exactly in the cards right now:

There also are signs of an unwillingness by Iraq’s leadership to commit forces to operations outside Baghdad. About 11,000 Iraqi soldiers were assigned to a U.S.-led offensive launched last month in and around Baqouba, on Baghdad’s northeastern rim. Only about 1,500 showed up, U.S. officials said…

But they’re "increasingly effective"!