The Dish

The reports are sketchy but I just got word that the amendment to put civil marriage equality to a referendum next year has just been defeated 151 – 45 in the Massachusetts legislature. That means marriage rights for gay couples are here to stay in America. It means a historic victory for civil rights. Stay tuned for updates.

Not an auspicious attempt at ecumenism. His list of religious allies may not have any only have one Jew on it but it includes many Christianists and others deeply hostile to gay dignity and equality.

He has none right now. It’s "in the hands of other people." More specifically:

"What I was trying to do was to look at the things, as best as you can predict it now, that are going to be there a year and a half from now. Iraq may get better; Iraq may get worse. We may be successful in Iraq; we may not be. I don’t know the answer to that. That’s in the hands of other people. But what we do know for sure is the terrorists are going to be at war with us a year, a year and a half from now."

So how does Iraq play into the broader struggle against Islamist terror? Has it helped or hurt? Where should we go from here? The country is at a vital cross-roads in this war and the GOP front-runner has no contribution to make as to what we should do. Romney and Thompson are just as vague. McCain and Paul are the only ones with the integrity and courage to speak to our moment. And that’s why they are currently the only Republican candidates worthy of any respect.

I mentioned this obvious parallel yesterday, wondering why Glenn Reynolds doesn’t favor U.S. or allied occupation or re-occupation of the place. Glenn favors indefinite U.S. occupation of Iraq to prevent a terror-state emerging in the chaos we helped unleash there. So why is he happy to allow Gaza to become a terror-state without our military intervention? Isn’t the threat to the West the same – or maybe worse? Glenn responds by asserting that my point is a "mindless snark." He says

It’s not like we invaded Iraq for these reasons, after all.

Well: no shit, Sherlock. But this leads to an obvious further question: why did we invade Iraq four years ago? A gentle reminder: We did not invade Iraq to police a sectarian civil war for ever. We did not invade Iraq to permanently prevent an al Qaeda presence there with our troops. We invaded to remove what we were told were stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons, and to pre-empt the development of nuclear weaponry, because, after 9/11, we decided not to take the risk of Sddam handing over such weapons to Qaeda or Qaeda-style terrorists. Removing a brutal tyranny and creating a space for democratic life were secondary and tertiary reasons, and were designed to defuse the logic of Islamism in the Middle East. I agreed with all three rationales. But, ahem, what are we doing there now? We discovered that the WMD issue was a chimera or a lie. We removed and had Shiite goons execute the dictator. We tried to construct a constitutional order for a non-dictatorial, national political settlement. History will judge whether the subsequent disaster was a function of a hard task screwed up or an impossible task screwed up. But right now, we have done all we wanted to originally accomplish, except, of course, anything close to a stable state. So what is the rationale for staying?

According to the Republican candidates, it is because leaving would make matters worse (even Rudy Giuliani isn’t foolish enough to repeat the democracy objective). How worse? The emergence of a failed state where al Qaeda and other Islamist mass-murderers could regroup and thrive. Well … now look at Gaza.

It was a place once occupied in order to improve Israeli security. The occupation was then designed to prevent terrorism against Israeli citizens. Then it was handed over to the same kind of ramshackle, corrupt and mafia-like political apparatus we are sponsoring in Iraq. Now, with no political settlement or over-arching road to any sort of compromise, we see a new and much more dangerous terror-apparatus emerging in the failed mini-state. We first saw Fatah get overtaken by Hamas, and now we see Hamas being rivaled by al Qaeda. We have, in other words, another mini-Iraq.

Hence my question. Why don’t the neocons support reoccupation by Israel or the U.S.? Surely, if you support occupying Iraq idefinitely to prevent a terror-state, you also have to support occupying Gaza indefinitely to prevent a terror-state. In fact, don’t you logically have to occupy an awfully large number of places to do what we are currently supposed to do? And if our existence is at stake, as Giuliani has argued, why on earth aren’t we already occupying most of the Middle East? And, more importantly, since our and the Israelis’ experience undoubtedly suggests that occupation itself sustains and generates Islamist terror, why do we want to create more terror in the short term in the Middle East?

These are the hard questions we have to ask. We are obviously still at grave risk from Islamist terror – more risk, I fear, than we faced on 9/10/2001. And yet the major tool the government has offered to counter such terror has spawned more of it, and their response is to persist in, and even intensify, the strategy we are now pursuing. There is no safe future, and withdrawal won’t provide one. I’m not crazy. I favor major redeployment in Iraq but have no illusions about the dangers it wil spawn. I just think the dangers we are already spawning by the current strategy are clearly more severe.

Maybe the neocons believe we need more guns, more troops, and more occupation for another couple of bloody, brutal decades before things will improve. Fine: so say so. Be honest about what your vision entails: a bloody, brutal, endless empire that will only improve matters only after it makes them a lot worse. Tell the truth. And then the American people can decide whether this really is a good idea.

(Photo: Mahmud Hams/AF/Getty.)

Bergen, Norway, 11.45 pm.

For an interactive gallery of Dish readers’ window views across the world, click here.

A new low: judging a candidate by the frequency with which he attends church. One Christianist even demands to know if Fred Thompson has ""Taught a Bible class, Presided at the Lord’s table, Served as a greeter, Or led singing." Hey, this is today’s GOP.

Well, your lying eyes could still be wrong, I guess. I hadn’t seen the second YouTube before I posted the reader’s email.

Romney’s spokesman seems to be suggesting he’ll maintaining the truthy standards of the Bush administration.

The rationale:

I don’t want to see another Republican President any more than the next Democrat. But I do want to see a Republican nominee who stands up for civil rights, who speaks sensibly about America’s place in the world, who insists on the rule of law and rejects the exceptionalism and emergency powers advocated by every other GOP candidate. I want to see the Republican party rally around a voice that is not encouraging them to tear apart the Constitution in fear of terrorism. I want to see a Republican nominee who will enable the American people to experience a campaign of hope and ideas, not of fear and McCarthyism.

A reader writes:

You asked:

"How did we get so much dumber in fifty years? And, yes, I am not exempting myself from this assessment. I guess we panicked, didn’t we?"

Hogwash. Pearl Harbor wasn’t cause for panic? Or the fact that the Nazis had taken over most of Europe? Or that Communism was seen as a viable alternative to liberal democracy in many parts of the world?

The difference, Andrew, is that in 1943 there were still serious ideological and strategic competitors to liberal democracy and the United States. To succeed against these enemies it required a national mobilization and the application of America’s best minds to the cause of winning the war and the Cold War that followed. Competition of this type necessarily forces a great power like the United States to be smarter and more rational when it uses military power or, in Darwinian fashion, it will be selected out of the international system.

Fascism and Communism were terrible things, but competition with these systems forced us to be better, smarter, and tougher. A side effect of our current military hegemony is that we have become something of a lazy monopolist. We demand more from our allies and give up less in return. We are free to indulge in ideological fantasies and engage in self-delusion because there is no real competitor out there to take advantage when we do so. We become arrogant because, like all monopolists, we can’t imagine our monopoly ever being taken away from us.

Mass-murder in the middle of New York City didn’t help either.