Net Benefits

"I weep for you," the Walrus said:
"I deeply sympathize."
With sobs and tears he sorted out
Those of the largest size,
Holding his pocket-handkerchief
Before his streaming eyes.



We will avert our eyes from Megan McArdle's post on birth control, since it is merely a defense of pharmaceutical companies which have been accused of blood libel--that they are more concerned about profit than innovation. Professions of Faith are dull, especially when they are dedicated to the health care industry.

And we will ignore the twitter frenzy McArdle set off by musing about a quote on twitter mistakenly attributed to Martin Luther King. Hundreds of commenters have either mistakenly attacked McArdle or have informed her about the history of the misquote. All McArdle wanted to do was point out (incorrectly) that someone else--someone not Megan McArdle--might very well be a liar and she, for one, can't possibly imagine what drives some people to lie because she, Megan McArdle, is most certainly not a liar, no matter what they say on the internet.

Instead, let's look at McArdle's opinion of the execution of Osama Bin Laden. Since she was a war-blogger during the run-up to our invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan, surely she is rejoicing that the US finally achieved her goal. She fought for invasion, voted for Bush twice, laughed at the idea of police assaulting anti-war protesters she believed would become violent, and repeatedly told her audience of her horror and anger after the events of 9/11. Surely she was able to feel something when she finally got what she wanted?

They say that revenge is a dish that's best served cold. We've been waiting a long time for this particular dish to cool, and now that I've eaten it, I'm surprised to find that it's pretty tasteless and unsatisfying.

Evidently not.

McArdle doesn't feel the emotions she expected to feel because her support of Republican war-mongering wasn't just about her fear of bin Laden, it was also about her need to identify with the winners. She is conservative, conservatives controlled the government, so everything Bush did was smart, a sign of strength, a winning move. McArdle belonged to the team of the top dogs, the guys with the guns who were not afraid to use them, and the last thing she wanted to do was question whether or not Daddy could make everything all better.

Then--From September 13, 2002:

I'm beginning to think that someone in the White House is very, very smart.

One hopes it's the president of course, though I've heard strong minority voices for Condi Rice, Rumsfeld, and Cheney. Whoever it is, I think they've confirmed my belief that the Administration has managed this crisis like a virtuoso.

I never took very seriously the complaints that Bush was flailing, because my years of watching politics have convinced me that there is some sort of natural law decreeing that every administration policy will provoke an equal number of equally vehement voices for, and against it. Especially in a war, when the demands of national security mean that the people running the war have a lot more information than the people trying to tell them how to run it. That's not to say that their decisions are necessarily right. But it means that I am unmoved by complaints that "I don't understand where he's going with all this". Thank God. A military strategy where everyone and their brother in law can chart the moves in advance is not one that I find reassuring.

The first time I suspected Bush was smarter than he looks (well, actually, it was the second time. But I can't remember what the first one was) was when he announced the formation of the Department of Homeland Security. It seemed to me that rather than displaying panic, it was a master stroke, politically speaking. He didn't say anything until the Democrats had enough rope to hang themselves -- and then he pulled the trigger. They were left without anything to say.

This looks similar to me. The Clinton team would have been out there, aggressively putting over the spin. The Bush administration was silent until everyone had decided that the complaint they were going to hang their hopes on was the abominable unilateral bent of the US. They let everyone talk themselves out and then they delivered this.

The UN performance was brilliant in so many ways. First of all, even before the speech, the obvious push for invasion forced Europe to stop pushing to ease the sanctions and let Saddaam build whatever weapons he wants as long as he buys French equipment and pays the Russians what he owes them. It brought us to a position of strength in negotiation. Whether or not you want the US to invade, it's pretty clear that the credible threat of invasion is the only thing making Saddaam offer to submit to inspections, or making Europe actually argue for uncompromising inspections. Second of all, now that it is clear that the US is going, it is fairly clear to me that Europe is indeed going to jump on the bandwagon so that their governments don't end up looking totally irrelevant. And third of all, most brilliantly, it was a "Put up or shut up" to the multilateralists.

Saddaam is in violation of about a hundred UN resolutions. And not fluffy resolutions either. Resolutions about things like stockpiling ABC weapons.

The UN can endorse the US invasion, and lose an opportunity to aggrandize its power and appease the small countries who would like to see the US brought low.

Or it can fail to endorse the invasion, and admit that its resolutions have no force. Should this occur, I don't think it's alarmist to say that we could look for the US to pull out of the UN in the not so distant future, the UN having proved itself not only anti-American, but irrelevent to boot.

I think they're going to endorse the invasion. I think they will make Saddaam an offer he can't accept -- really, truly, disarm (in which case I think Saddaam knows he would be dead in six months) or the US gets the green light. And then I think they will -- reluctantly, painfully, resentfully -- give lip service to the American cause.

Flailing? I think the Bush administration has more discipline than we've seen in the White House for a long time.

And who could argue with that logic, especially in retrospect? Sure, she got everything wrong but no doubt it felt great to tell herself that her liberal friends were all wrong and she was right, so there.

Now:

I knew a fair number of people who died on 9/11. I don't want to overdramatize that--few of them were people I knew at all well, and none of them were really close. It's just that I grew up in New York and I did a lot of consulting work in the towers. So naturally, I knew some of the people who died. The loss of so many lives at once was still a tragedy so terrible that I had a hard time grasping the extent of it. I could see them so clearly in my mind--the people, the buildings, the terrible salad stand in the concourse--that it was hard to actually believe they were gone. The mental images seemed much more vivid and believable than the smoking rubble at ground zero--even though I was by then working next to that smoking rubble, doing administrative tasks for one of the disaster recovery companies. The rubble was too surreal, too much like a disaster movie.

For months I would walk around the site trying to grasp the enormity of what had happened. I was waiting for that movie moment when it all comes crashing over you, and you are overwhelmed by the sudden awareness of everything that has been lost. It never happened. The site grew to look less like a disaster area, and more like a construction site. I got wrapped up in the day-to-day problems of the slurry wall and the new PATH tunnel. Eventually, I accepted that the death of so many people is too big to be comprehended, or even effectively mourned.

A great many people were able to mourn those death, as well as the deaths of our soldiers and the many thousands of Iraqis we killed. Like many people, McArdle sought something outside of herself after 9/11 that she was missing within--a sense of purpose, a feeling of belonging, a catharsis that would ease inner turmoil.

I was, however, filled with a terrible rage. I wanted Zacarias Moussaoui to get the electric chair, even though I'm against the death penalty.

She's against the death penalty except when she want to put someone to death. Just like she's against war deaths except when she wants to go to war.

I wanted vengeance, justice, and an end to terrorism. I think I wanted them in that order. I would have been exulted if Osama Bin Laden had been shot by American troops.

Ten years later, I feel none of the righteous joy that I expected. It mostly just fills me with grief for all the deaths between then and now that should never have happened.

See, here's the thing. You don't get to tell us how the deaths of so many people fill you with grief when you wanted to go to war, when you knew those death would certainly occur, and most especially of all when you wrote a post declaring the number of corpses that were piling up wasn't nearly as big as everyone said it was. It's rather difficult to believe in that grief when it was clear that going to war was a bloodless exercise for McArdle, a theoretical choice, in which the value of human life was not a major consideration.

Then: From April 2, 2003:

Something that a lot of people have trouble grasping is that you have to trade off one type of error for another; there is no perfect balance. And in the case of war, although most of us have an emotional conviction that of course one is better -- pro-war people who feel that any mistakes are worth it if it increases our security, anti-war people who feel that pre-emptive war is of course always wrong -- there's no logical necessity to prefer one over the other.

[yap yap yap]

We will not correctly judge the need for every conflict -- only history can do that, and only that over long years. But we should recognize that we are making a tradeoff. Coming away from the all-positive (imperialist occupation of the entire world) and all-negative (isolationist or pacifist) extremes, there is going to be some tradeoff. If we try to strike early, before things become very dangerous, we will invade some countries where it is unnecessary or counterproductive. If we wait until the threat is more certain, we will have fewer conflicts, but they will be bigger and more destructive.

I understand that this isn't the only consideration in discussing the war; I'll no doubt get angry emails saying I'm missing the point entirely. But I do think it's an important framework in which to think about it, although not the only one. Because by looking at it this way we can recognize that people who disagree with us are making tradeoffs between a set of imperfect choices. And that we're all just guessing about whether this will be a net benefit or negative in the long run. I'm guessing, you're guessing, and so's the guy you hate at work with the simplistic arguments. We're all guessing. If we recognize that, maybe we don't need to pound each other to death as if there were some certain and blindingly obvious outcome that the other person is willfully ignoring.

"A net benefit in the long run." Yeah, we can see the grief flowing like water.

Now:

I'm glad we've taken a terrorist out of circulation, of course. But maybe because I'm older, and mortality seems all too depressingly real, I find it hard to celebrate anyone's death--no, not even Bin Laden's. The families of the victims deserved some satisfaction, of course, and a certainly hope they got it. But these days, all of humanity seems so fragile to me, the universes of our minds so easily destroyed. No matter how much Team Death deserves to win, I find it hard to cheer when the Grim Reaper does his victory dance in the end zone.

It's like reading Stephanie Meyers--just painful.

I would feel more celebratory if this, like Hitler's death, meant the end of a long and bloody war. But what has it ended? The people who died on 9/11 are still exactly as dead; they have lost 3,520 days that should have been lived, and tomorrow, they will lose day 3,521. And it's hard to assess the deterrent effect of tracking someone down and killing them ten years after they attack you: did we make an example, or a martyr?

Don't get me wrong: I do not think killing Bin Laden was morally or even tactically wrong. I just think it's profoundly unsatisfying. We won't recover any of the things that he took from us, or even the things we took from ourselves, like the ability to travel around the country without being treated like a potential terrorist. Destroying Osama did not unmake him, which is what I really wanted. He may be dead, but we're still living with him.

You mean there's no way to undo what has been done, bring the dead back to life, bring back the juvenile illusion of safety and superiority? And thousands of people had to die for this realization to hit?

When Megan McArdle wanted to support drug and health insurance companies, she told us that some people might die now but thousands will be saved in her imaginary future. Her ideology said so; governments can't do anything right, governments are coercive, and government regulation of health insurance would kill millions of people. She did the same thing with war, deciding that liberal warnings were wrong and conservative urgings were right because she believes conservatives are strong and therefore right and liberals are weak and therefore wrong, a very Randian assessment. McArdle might think that she feels grief for the people who have died since we invaded Iraq but when it counted she dismissed the deaths that would occur. There is nothing more dangerous than someone who is willing to sacrifice others to get what she wants.

However since McArdle has decided to share her feelings with the world, perhaps she should personally tell the children of the dead that while she grieves for them she feels strangely empty now that she's had her revenge. They'll appreciate that, as they try to pick up the pieces of their lives.

Assessing Failure--It's Their Fault

Megan McArdle shouldn't have all the fun. Let's see how Matthew Yglesias, one of our elite prognosticating pundits, assesses failure--namely, his failure to realize that invading a foreign country for no reason might not be a good idea.

In response to my post on Howard Dean’s wise February 2003 speech about Iraq a few correspondents have asked me to revisit my own war thinking in 2002. I’m not a huge fan of this kind of exercise because I think it shades into excuse-making, but in retrospect you can think of four strands of argumentation:

It will only be excuse-making if Yglesias makes excuses. But on to the explaining.

1. Erroneous views of foreign policy in general: At the time, I adhered to the school of thought (popular at the time) which held that one major problem in the world was that the US government was unduly constrained in the use of force abroad by domestic politics. More forceful intervention in Haiti, Rwanda, Bosnia, and Kosovo had all been called for. This led to a general predisposition in favor of military adventurism.

I'm sorry, what? We don't have enough military adventures abroad? We don't meddle in other countries enough? Wasn't the blow-back from, for one, setting up the Shah in Iran a hint that unforeseen consequences seem to accompany such decisions? Yglesias went to The Dalton School and Harvard. Didn't he read enough history to understand that we bomb people for our own selfish political reasons, not because we are Mike The Friendly Irish Cop to the world? What's the use of going to Harvard if you learn nothing except American Exceptionalism?

2. Elite signaling: When Hillary Clinton, Tom Daschle, Dick Gephardt, John Kerry, Joe Biden, John Edwards, etc. told me they thought invading Iraq was a good idea I took them very seriously. I knew that Carl Levin & Nancy Pelosi were on the other side, but the bulk of the leading Democratic voices on national security and foreign policy issues were in favor of the war. So was Tony Blair. These were credible people whose views I took seriously.

If they had told you to quit and help the poor, would you have taken that seriously too? Some elites did say that Saddam's nuclear ambitions were contained. Why did you not believe them, or Pelosi or Levin? Of course, this is an indication of authoritarianism either way. Brought up to think of himself as a decider, not a follower, he still believes what he is told by his elite, while telling himself he's making an educated decision. It's their fault, because under authoritarianism, the followers are not responsible for their own decisions--that responsibility is abdicated to the elite, absolving the follower of any responsibility. (Remember, it's possible to be both an elite and an elite follower.)

3. Misreading the politics: It seemed to me that the political consequences to George W Bush of invading Iraq to disrupt a nuclear weapons program and then discovering that there was no such program would be disastrous. Presidents do have access to secret intelligence, and it seemed nutty to me to suggest that the administration would be engaged in a massive, easily-debunked-after-the fact lie. Similarly, I didn’t take all the democracy-talk very seriously but the “better than Saddam” humanitarian standard is a low bar and I figured Bush wouldn’t be doing this unless he said some reasonable plan for extricating our forces and stabilizing the situation.

Why? It's not like Bush was competent. Anyone who followed his career or read a book about him knew better. In Texas we watched him play solitaire in the Governor's mansion for five years. We knew, although like Yglesias, so many people were thrilled at the idea of the Republicans coming back to power, people of dignity and responsibility and ethics that they didn't care. Why, they can't possibly be stupid or venal! They're just like me!

Funny how that worked out. Unless you're Iraqi, of course, in which case it's less funny and more deadly and tragic.

4. Kenneth Pollack: The formal case for war that I found compelling was Kenneth Pollack’s “The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq.” I discuss this book in some detail in my own book, but to make a long story short its argumentative structure is badly flawed. Roughly speaking he says “if we invade Iraq and a pony shows up, that will be better than the alternatives, therefore invading Iraq is better than trying to muddle through.” Which is great, except we’re missing the pony! This problem is what Robert Farley’s Jedi Principle is about.

You went to fucking Harvard. How can you not recognize a badly flawed argument? Just like McArdle, he assumes that people like him are the ones who deserve to make the decisions, are always right, and will make the right--that is, smart and moral--decision. Pollack was CIA. He went into the decision already convinced or ready to convince others that it was invasion or nuclear fallout. He waved away facts that contradicted his argument. One-sided arguments are the favorite method of the propagandist. Or don't they teach that at Harvard?

So that’s that. You can, however, always get more psychological.

Try to stop me.

I was 21 years old and kind of a jerk. Being for the war was a way to simultaneously be a free-thinking dissident in the context of a college campus and also be on the side of the country’s power elite.

The Savvy Tribe. The one that's so much more elite that it's better than conservatives or liberals because it's so educated and piercingly analytical.

My observation is that this kind of fake-dissident posture is one that always has a lot of appeal to people.

Why, Yglesias? Have you ever asked that question? Everyone wants to feel superior to others. The more inferior we feel, the more we insist that we are superior. And when you are told your whole life that you are superior, any doubts must be quelled at all costs or You Don't Belong to the rich, famous, powerful, glorious, wonderful elite.

The point is that this wasn’t really a series of erroneous judgments about Iraq, it was a series of erroneous judgments about how to think about the world and who deserves to be taken seriously and under which circumstances.

And what was that error? This entire exercise is useless unless he understands why he chose to support the elite--a certain elite, the ones who exercised their power over others, who invaded countries, who murdered people. Not the elites who wanted peace. If he doesn't understand why he identifies so much with the powerful, he will continue to make knee-jerk decisions which support the elite over those they harm. Which he has, far too often.

Anyways, one thing that’s always puzzled me is why other war supporters were so slow to turn against it.

You don't understand it because you don't do the painful work of self-evaluation and rejection of outside sources of self-esteem. You can't see that they all desperately wanted to be right, to be part of the tribe, to be on the winning side. Even now they can't admit that they were had by liars and murderers. That their elite are anything but. That everything they've built their lives and careers on it is a lie, a self-serving, self-flattering, self-enriching lie.

As I intimated in this morning post, notwithstanding any of the above considerations it was clear to me that something was badly amiss as soon as Bush/Blair/Aznar pulled the plug on the inspections process. By a couple of months later, it seemed pretty clear that there was no scary WMD program and also that there was no real plan for what to do. But it seems to have taken all the way until 2005-2006 for “this was a mistake” to become a conventional view even though no really important new information became available during the interim.

Dumbass.

All those people we killed or sent running for their lives. And we got away with it. We have very little problem living with what we've done. It's not our fault--it's theirs--whoever they is.

On to Iran!

No Birth Control For You

Shorter Ross Douthat: I tried to have some sort of intercourse about Iraq but the Left was like a chunky Reese Witherspoon, masticating on Colin Powell's UN presentation and spilling its breasts out of its protests. I wanted to surge into Iraq but the Left wanted a premature withdrawal. If we withdraw, Iraq will swell into violence and give birth to a Middle Eastern abomination, one that even the Left can't abort.

K-Lo Goes To Confession

X All Tied Up

K-Lo: Bless me Father for I have sinned. It's been two days since my last confession. But before I confess I have a question to ask. Father, I'm confused. Is it immoral to torture your enemies, like the Nazis did?

Father: Yes, of course, Kathryn Jean.

K-Lo: But were the Nazis really so bad? Nazis are always bad in the movies but Jonah says that Hitler wasn't really so bad and he liked puppies and kittens.

Father: Of course they were; they committed many, many atrocities while trying to wage world war.

K-Lo: But the pope was a Nazi so that means they were good.

Father: He was forced to join the Hitler Youth, Kathryn Jean, it's not the same thing.

K-Lo: But Jonah said that if you call yourself socialist you are socialist. So if you call yourself a Nazi doesn't that mean you are a Nazi?

Father: (firmly) No, Kathryn Jean, it doesn't. Didn't you study WWII in history?

K-Lo: I took history at Catholic U. but we never made it to the Enlightenment I'm asking because Mark Theissen said that if a country needs to kill people it is ethical to kill and torture them. You know, the just war theory. It's okay to torture the Iraqis because Saddam attacked us first and leaving him in power would be worse than invading. Mark said if you torture someone for a good reason it's not only okay, but it's moral and ethical.

Father: That's not exactly--look, Kathryn Jean, the pope frowned very heavily on our invasion of Iraq. He said it was a threat to humanity.

K-Lo: (coldly) What?

Father: He said---.

K-Lo: You take that back!

Father: Kathryn Jean, those are the pope's words.

K-Lo: The pope loves George Bush! And the war!

Father: No, Kathryn Jean. The late pope and the present pope are and were against the war for moral reasons. Only God may take a life.

K-Lo: Father, this is horrible.

Father: Kathryn Jean, I know you are against abortion because it is the taking of life. Surely you are against the death of other innocents as well?

K-Lo: No, no, not that, Father. It's---well, I might have done something wrong.

Father: I'm sure that whatever it is, you meant well. What did you do?

K-Lo: Father I just wanted to to help!

Father: Help whom?

K-Lo: See, there was a woman going into an abortion place that I was picketing....

Father: And...?

K-Lo: She works there, killing little babies, Father. She's a bad, evil woman. So I just asked her to come over to the car.

Father: To...?

K-Lo: Talk to me about her work.

Father: Then...?

K-Lo: I hit her with a blackjack and put her in the basement.

Father: Where...?

K-Lo: I kind of tied her to a board and poured bottled water on her face.

Father: And...?

K-Lo: Made her promise to never go to that horrible place again.

Father: (hopefully) Then you let her go?

K-Lo: Ah, no. If I released her she'd just kill again.

Father: Where is she now?

K-Lo: I tied her to a chair and left her in the basement. But it's okay, I gave her a soda with a straw and put my "Bibleman" tape on the tv for her to watch.

Father: Kathryn Jean, you go home right now and release that woman. The judge is going to be very angry with you.

K-Lo: Father, do we have to tell him? I promise I won't do it again. He'll have to forgive me if I confess, right?

Father: God forgives, Kathryn Jean. The justice system doesn't. You'd better call your lawyer.

K-Lo: (Sigh) Oh, well. Maybe the policemen will be single and he'll admire my morals and ethics and ask me to marry him and have his children for the greater glory of God.

Father: Or it's God's plan for you to make helping the helpless your life's work, Kathryn Jean. Perhaps being childless is God's plan for you after all. As well as a way of protecting children.

K-Lo: I just want to obey somebody, Father. I don't really care who. It's so hard to figure out the right thing to do.

Father: Very true, Kathryn Jean. Sometimes we just have to do what we think is right and hope for the best.

K-Lo: We have to think? I thought we just have to obey. Nobody told me we have to think, too.

Father: Suddenly everything has become perfectly clear.

A Few Links

The Health and Medical History of Dick Cheney. Did you know he travels with a hazmat suit at all times and he's allergic to pomegranate juice? He's kept alive by the most comprehensive, expensive medical care I can imagine and his pact with Satan, yet a simple bottle of juice could kill him dead. Fascinating.

The stupidest man on earth explains why Bush had to invade Iraq.

A lot of poor commentary has framed the Iraq war as a conflict of "choice"
rather than of "necessity." In fact, President George W. Bush chose to remove
Saddam Hussein from power because he concluded that doing so was
necessary.
...
As a participant in the confidential, top-level administration meetings
about Iraq, it was clear to me at the time that, had there been a realistic
alternative to war to counter the threat from Saddam, Mr. Bush would have chosen
it.

Next up: Bush decides he must bomb Iran because the traitorous Democrats who just want to be whiny losers won't do it themselves. It's not because he wants to, it's because he must---for your own good.

Jonah Goldberg, the famous conservative intellectual and scholar and Pulitzer nominee, has a post up at the Corner about global warming. It's thoughtful and careful enough to reprint in its entirety.

qoH vuvbe' SuS* [Jonah Goldberg]
News from the UK: "Research: Wind power pricier, emits more CO2 than thought."
I particularly like the bit about how wind energy output can sometimes be less than zero.

* Translated from the Klingon: "The wind does not respect a fool."

No indeed, Jonah. No indeed.

The First Law of Thermodynamics

From Juan Cole:

A city council member
in Mada'in (Salman Pak) abruptly opened fire on Americans who had been in a
meeting with him. He killed 2 US troops and wounded 4 other Americans. He had
been in India recently because Sunni-Shiite tensions made it too difficult for
him in Mada'in. He had only been back one week as councilman. Although there is
speculation that he was unstable, my own suspicion is that the continued US
military occupation was just too hard for him to take. India has an
anti-colonial atmosphere, after all.

If you take everything away from a man, leave him with nothing left to lose, watch out. Whether he was unstable or driven unstable, his actions were a consequence of his situation. Expect more...consequences.

All we need to do is put Democrats in office...

Just in case you thought electing a Democratic Congress (or president) will change anything:

In the U.S. now, thanks to the Democratic Congress, we'll have a new law
based on the premise that the President has the power to order private actors to
break the law, and when he issues such an order, the private actors will be
protected from liability of any kind on the ground that the Leader told them to
do it -- the very theory that the Nuremberg Trial rejected.

The leaders of a country are not your friends. They want power, to use it to get everything else they want. They do not want to help you. They do not want you to prosper and be free. They want you to pay your taxes, die when ordered to, and bend over whenever they want something else. If they betray you it's not because they "have to." It's because they want to.

People who want power over the entire world (the US, its military and money that is) are dangerous. No matter what their reason is, good or bad, they are dangerous. But since we feel the need to follow the leader, remember one thing; it's us versus them. They are the enemy, and they will have to be forced to do the right thing, every single time. The purpose of political involvement is to watch the powerful, not find a candidate that makes us feel good. The only person who can make you feel good is you.

By the way, the Democratic Congress also just funded the war they were elected to end.

Kristol Goes To Lunch

William Kristol chastises Barak Obama for not calling the youth of America to fight in his personal penis-extender war. The response is so obvious that it's not necessary to state it.

Say, I wonder if McCain encourages men and women to sign up for war?

The most important weapons in the U.S. arsenal are the men and women of
American armed forces. John McCain believes we must enlarge the size of our
armed forces to meet new challenges to our security. For too long, we have asked
too much of too few - with the result that many service personnel are on their
second, third and even fourth tours of duty in Afghanistan and Iraq. There can
be no higher defense priority than the proper compensation, training, and
equipping of our troops.

Good for you. So, where's the call for service? I'd better look again.

John McCain thinks it is especially important to increase the size of the Army
and Marine Corps to defend against the threats we face today.

Yes, yes, yes. And his call for people to join the military?

John McCain believes it is essential to be honest with the American people about
the opportunities and risks that lie ahead. The American people deserve the
truth from their leaders. They deserve a candid assessment of the progress made
in the last year, of the serious difficulties that remain, and of the grave
consequences of a reckless and irresponsible withdrawal. Many Americans have
given their lives so that America does not suffer the worst consequences of
failure in Iraq. Doing the right thing in the heat of a political campaign is
not always easy. But it is necessary.

Honesty is lovely. Now, the call to arms? Oh, this must be it.

Support a cause that is greater than your own self interest.

Yes! I'll click here.

If you take an active part in giving back with these organizations, please
submit a report of your activities so you can be rewarded through the McCain
Online Action Center.

Woops, that's just an excuse to get an e-mail address. I"ll keep looking. "Suggested causes"? No, that's charities, not military. I'm so confused.

Ah, Think Progress has the answer. McCain changed his web page. "The new page does not call for more troops and makes no mention of the “critical prerequisite” of disarming Sunni and Shiite militias. "

Hypocrisy is the neo-cons' favorite sin, and Kristol's shit-eating grin is getting really old.

"We're Winning"

The soldier on NRO's famous "We're Winning" cover has been killed. Its author, Rich Lowry, says it is "very sad news."

I don't think soldiers would like to have their deaths politicized, so that is all I will say.

Retired general Ricardo Sanchez has pulled a Feif. He's written a book explaining how it really wasn't his fault after all and everything would have been fine if it weren't for those meanies who didn't listen to him.

From June 14, 2003 to July 1, 2004, the period immediately following major
combat during Operation Iraqi Freedom, I was the commander of coalition forces,
responsible for all military activity in the Iraq theater of war. I was there
when Saddam Hussein was captured. I was there when the prisoner abuse scandal at
Abu Ghraib occurred. And I was there when low-­level enemy resistance
expanded into a massive insurgency that eventually led to full-­scale civil
war.

Yes, you were in charge during those debacles, weren't you?

The sad saga of Abu Ghraib encapsulates the essence of America's failure in
Iraq. Abu Ghraib also represents America's initial abandonment of its commitment
to human rights and the Geneva Conventions—and an eventual return to reason. In
2004, I refused to sweep Abu Ghraib under the carpet. I still refuse to do
so.

Jesus. America didn't sign orders, you did.

In Plutarch's Moralia, Dareios, the father of Xerxes, said that during
battle, he became more levelheaded. I know the feeling.

Go to hell.

The Torture

You've already read dday, right? Okay, this is what I have to say.

Morris believes that the scandal...gave us someone to blame.

"The Iraq war," said Morris, "was essentially a war of sexual humiliation."

These are perhaps two different issue, indirectly related. We didn't need someone to blame because we just decided it didn't really happen. We grabbed at the excuses offered and accepted them eagerly because we can't accept that we are causing others such pain. Most of us deny our own pain, and therefore deny others' pain also, an inevitable side effect. It's pretty much all or nothing when it comes to emotions.

The sexual humiliation comes from our need to reinforce our identity, via imposition of sexual roles. Power is a by-product of gender and therefore to make us feel powerless is also to make some of us feel sexually inadequate.

We learn these roles, our identity, our acceptance of emotions, from our parents in the first years of our lives. It all begins with the family, and affects the entire world.

The Bush Administration is very gradually doing the same thing in the US that it is doing in Iraq. They replace civil servants with obedient partisans, deny basic government services to disrupt daily life, destroy the economy to replace it with one more favorable to themselves, run farcical elections, replace media with propaganda, pit ethnic, racial and social groups against each other to spread discord, and install unreasoning and overwhelming fear in every heart.

And they're doing it for the same reason.

Control.

Guiliani Renames New York to New Amsterdam

New York mayor and Republican presidental candidate Rudi Guiliani announced today that he is changing the name of New York state and New York City to New Amsterdam and New Amsterdam City.

"The British traitors don't deserve to have the city that hosted 9/11 named after one of their crappy cities," Guiliani said. "After an anonymous government offical said that they were "performing poorly," I knew it was time to show those limey bastards who's the boss here. From now on New York is New Amsterdam, to honor the brave Dutch who know the way to fight jihad--by drawing cartoons."

The White House official who spoke to the Associated Press on the condition his--or her--identity would not be revealed, said "Britain would always be 'the cornerstone' of US policy towards Europe but there was "a lot of unhappiness" about how British forces had performed in Basra and an acceptance that Mr Brown would pull the remaining 4,500 troops out of Iraq next year....Operationally, British forces have performed poorly in Basra," said the official. "Maybe it's best that they leave."

U.S. officials said the British withdrawal demonstrated the success of the recent surge in the number of troops fighting in Iraq. "But Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said his forces "are prepared to take over security of Basra within two months and we will." Reaction on the street was less positive. Dau'd Abdul-Hadi, a street vendor near a Basra market, said, "We are thrilled to hear of the success of the coalition forces here. I would love to celebrate with my family, but unfortunately I am the only one left. Long live the Coalition!"