In case there is anything interesting that we haven’t blogged about lately.
What Do You Mean “We,” White Man?
As much as one should respect Andrew Sullivan’s near-obsession with rooting out the inner errors that led him and his movement so wrong on Bush, signs indicate that he has a few more posts to go.
We all trusted them to be honest with us, suckers that we were, because we didn’t think that after a tragedy like 9/11, the president would scam us.
Actually no, many of us never trusted the Bush administration to deliver the facts straight. There was nothing reflexive about my skepticism, it was simply a common sense response to character traits that a serious observer could have picked up since before Cheney picked Cheney as a running mate. “We,” meaning now the people who got the Iraq debate right on the first try, had very practical a priori reasons to view the government’s case with skepticism.
But really, the story is worse than that. One hardly needed a jaundiced eye to doubt the government’s chicken little picture of a towering, evil Saddam who fired glowing red anthrax beams from his eyes and blew mushroom clouds out of his ass. A reasonable viewing of the government’s case found it sketchy, constantly shifting, based heavily on hearsay and too often (mobile labs, aluminum tubes, yellowcake, terror drones) refutable with information available to any moderately intelligent citizen. It would please me immensely if late bloomers like Sullivan could experience the entire pre-Iraq media circus a second time just to get a sense of how ludicrously unconvincing the entire experience was.
God knows this post would have been satisfying if I just knocked down another instance of the annoying “everybody got it wrong” argument. I have had my patriotism and allegiance slandered often enough that I probably won’t ever tire of reminding the hysterical war brigades, even reformed ones, of who walked out of that debate with credibility intact. All that is fine, but Sullivan perfectly illustrates what I think is a far more important point.
Think about it this way. Sullivan doesn’t just exemplify the reasonable face of modern conservatism. He wrote the book on it. Significantly, his conservatism winnows out the culture war noise and narrows conservatism to its putative core: private enterprise, skepticism of freely expanding government power and government solutions, and a reluctance to solve global problems by sending American kids with guns. But when you go back to Sullivan’s own description of what happened in 2002 – “we trusted them to be honest with us,” certainly describing nearly every war-hungry Bush supporter in those years – none of that attitude is evident at all.
What happened? Either the Andrew Sullivan who wrote the book on skeptical conservatism was created entirely fresh some time between 2003 and today, or else it only took one terrorist attack for him (and, clearly, everybody else in modern conservatism) to abandon the principles that define their movement. If Bush had not proved himself a criminally incompetent nincompoop I have little doubt that most of these “conservatives,” Sullivan included, would still feel just as unquestionably trusting towards a strong benevolent government (think of it as a big, tough “brother” keeping away the mean schoolyard kids) as they did on September 12.
I find it unlikely that Andrew Sullivan had one of those character-redefining born-again experiences in the last few years, mostly because I consider those to be vanishingly rare in grown adults. Rather, Sullivan’s extremely valuable introspection helps to underline the obvious point that like nearly all modern “conservatives,” his conservative principles were not all that deeply held. All it took was a single terrorist attack for American conservatives to not just suspend their principles but negate them almost entirely, enthusiastically supporting reckless military adventurism and wildly expansive government violations of privacy and private lives. Some have argued that if you scratch a conservative you’ll find a libertarian. Well, 9/11 scratched conservatives and revealed something else entirely.
For many like Sullivan the scratch has healed, one would hope in a deeper sense as well as superficially. The only real test will come the next time a terrorist succeeds in attacking American soil. But for others represented by Malkin, Hewitt and (too often) Glenn Reynolds, the wound remains open, raw and ugly. For them I suppose one can say that conservatism has gone entirely and that something else, a tribalistic authoritarianism that lies somewhere down that slippery slope to fascism*, has taken its place.
(*) Tarrists want to kill us.
Two More Empty Gestures
Add Sens. Judd Gregg and Lamar Alexander to the list of Republicans who have soured on Iraq but refuse to do anything about it.
On Friday, Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee told the paper, “It should be clear to the president that there needs to be a new strategy. Our policy in Iraq is drifting;” and “Sen. Judd Gregg of New Hampshire, who helped lead the charge earlier this year against Democratic efforts to oppose Bush’s troop buildup, said: ‘We don’t seem to be making a lot of progress.'”
[…] “None of these GOP lawmakers has embraced Democratic legislation to compel a troop withdrawal,” the paper notes. “But nearly five years after congressional Republicans overwhelmingly answered Bush’s call for military action against Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, some are doing what was once unthinkable: challenging a wartime president from their own party.”
Profiles in courage all.
Rudy Has Firefighters And McCain has Immigration Activists. Who Does Mitt Have?
Answer: Dogs Against Romney.
If some grumpy-looking Vietnam vets can sink the Kerry campaign, I shudder to think what puppies can do to the Mittster.
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Faith-based Belligerence
Really. We should trust everything our military leaders tell us about Iran:
The U.S. command in Baghdad this week ballyhooed the killing of a key al Qaeda leader but later admitted that the military had declared him dead a year ago.
A military spokesman acknowledged the mistake after it was called to his attention by The Examiner. He said public affairs officers will be more careful in announcing significant kills.
The incident shows the eagerness of the command to show progress in dismantling al Qaeda at a time when Democrats and some Republicans are pressing President Bush to withdraw troops from Iraq. Army Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander, has declared al Qaeda enemy No. 1 in Iraq.
Brig. Gen. Kevin Bergner began his Monday news conference with a list of top insurgents either killed or captured in recent operations. He said they had been eliminated “in the past few weeks” and were “recent results.”
Yes. That is the same Brig. Gen. Bergner that Holy Joe mentioned earlier.
The Pottery Barn Army
Contrary to my post below, maybe Republicans won’t sign on to Democratic proposals because they know that whether they do or don’t the troops are coming out of Iraq. This (via Sullivan) from Joe Klein, who I trust about as far as I can punt him, both explains a lot and jibes with what military-connected readers have been telling me.
There is another clock, not often mentioned, that sits in the Pentagon. It is the Broken Army clock, the service timeline for an exhausted force. Petraeus and his staff were deeply concerned when rumors of another tour extension, from the current 15 months for soldiers, spread in mid-June. “It would be a last resort,” Secretary of Defense Robert Gates told reporters — but troop morale is so iffy that Petraeus quietly urged his commanders to “get the word out” to their soldiers that the extension rumors were false.
According to the Broken Army clock, troop levels will begin to wane in March 2008, no matter what Congress decides in September; the current 20 brigade combat teams will be reduced to 15 by August 2008. There is growing speculation in the military that Bush will try to pre-empt the Petraeus testimony by announcing a gradual drawdown from 20 to 15 combat brigades later this summer. “As if that isn’t going to happen anyway,” a senior officer told me. “But it may give us some political breathing space” — that is, it may subvert the Democrats’ calls for a more rapid withdrawal — “if the President makes a big deal of announcing we’re drawing down.”
Digesting this information is almost unspeakably painful. Essentially, the narrative argues that Bush broke the army and killed god knows how many American kids because his ego couldn’t handle the blow of capitulating to the Democrats’ position. All things considered I would prefer to think that the president really believed that his “surge” might work, meaning that he was either unwilling or unable to listen to the commanders telling him that he doesn’t have the force to ride it out. The alternative is just awful.
Bang The War Drums Slowly
Joe Lieberman has an Op-ed in the Opinion Journal advocating for war with Iran:
Our objective here is deterrence. The fanatical regime in Tehran has concluded that it can use proxies to strike at us and our friends in Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon and Palestine without fear of retaliation. It is time to restore that fear, and to inject greater doubt into the decision-making of Iranian leaders about the risks they are now running.
I hope the new revelations about Iran’s behavior will also temper the enthusiasm of some of those in Congress who are advocating the immediate withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq. Iran’s purpose in sponsoring attacks on American soldiers, after all, is clear: It hopes to push the U.S. out of Iraq and Afghanistan, so that its proxies can then dominate these states. Tehran knows that an American retreat under fire would send an unmistakable message throughout the region that Iran is on the rise and America is on the run. That would be a disaster for the region and the U.S.
The threat posed by Iran to our soldiers’ lives, our security as a nation and our allies in the Middle East is a truth that cannot be wished or waved away. It must be confronted head-on. The regime in Iran is betting that our political disunity in Washington will constrain us in responding to its attacks. For the sake of our nation’s security, we must unite and prove them wrong.
I don’t know what tickles me more- the fact that Lieberman’s agitation is based solely on the words of one individual, or the fact that the right wing is already swallowing this up and gearing up the rhetoric. Captain Ed busts out the old tried and true gibberish:
In truth, the Iranians have been at war with us since 1979, a fact that Jimmy Carter ignored for 444 days and almost every President since did for the entirety of their terms. Now the Senate wants to take up the ISG’s recommendations and pass them into law, based on the notion that we can negotiate for good terms with a nation that has done nothing but attack our interests for a generation. It moves American denial from the absurd to an art form — and Lieberman seems to be the only statesman in Washington pointing out the obvious.
Got it? We have been at war with Iran for three decades, we just didn’t know it or were not MAN ENOUGH TO ADMIT IT. Fortunately, we have brave men of the blogosphere to push us towards war. This whole bullshit about us being at war with Iran is little more than a PR push towards war, and you should not be fooled.