The Most Free People on Earth

A record 7 million people--one in every 32 U.S. adults--were behind bars, on probation or on parole by the end of last year, a Justice Department report released yesterday shows.

How many actually in jail or prison?

Of those, 2.2 million were in prison or jail, an increase of 2.7 percent over the previous year, according to the report.

What else can you say?

From 1995 to 2003, inmates incarcerated in federal prisons for drug offenses have accounted for 49 percent of total prison population growth.

Victor Davis Hanson's Do the Right Thing

Without endorsing the pre-9/11-changed-everything status quo, and with a healthy appreciation for the fact that pre-Iraq America conducted a much bloodier foreign policy than the mainstream consensus would have you believe, what is absolutely remarkable about this article by Victor/Victoria Hanson is that he lays out as the new "majority position" what I can only call a remarkably sensible, practicable, and affordable set of foreign policy prerogatives for the United States, touching on everything from the dangerous mislabeling of the "War on Terror" and "Islamofascism" to Iran-hysteria to unecessary encroachments on civil liberties.

Then he presents his "minority brief" which is an acid-laced lollipop of total, balls-out, padded-room hysteria:

In an age of globalization and miniaturized weapons of mass destruction, it is even more difficult to convince Western publics that they may well face peril from state-sponsored terrorists every bit as great as what the Wehrmacht, Imperial Japan, or the Red Army once posed.

This, of course, represents Vic's own "views on the matter." One of these days someone is going to slip a nano-nuke into one of Glenn Reynold's micro-servos and ka-plowie! Our dreams of a shining future of non-secular post-humanism shall vanish like a sandcastle in the surf.

Vous les Démocrats, vous êtes trahis !

Hope is itself a species of happiness, and, perhaps, the chief happiness which this world affords: but, like all other pleasures immoderately enjoyed, the excesses of hope must be expiated by pain; and expectations improperly indulged must end in disappointment.

-Doc Johnson-

During the muted chattering of the midterm elections, which the Narcissi of the netroots mistook for a great national huurly-burly, I found myself increasingly convinced of the old Michael Savagite conviction that liberalism, at least the variety practiced by American Democrats, really is a mental disorder. Even as they chortled mordantly over the various social conservative or anti-immigration constituencies forever promised the sun, moon, and stars by the mandarins of the Establishment GOP only to be kicked coldly to the curb when the apparatus of policy came creaking to attention, they themselves waited totally unaware for an even more predictable and far more dire switcheroo, which was the hasty beatback from "Withdraw!" to "Responsibility!" on the issue of the war. The lowlights:

WASHINGTON, Nov. 30 — In the cacophony of competing plans about how to deal with Iraq, one reality now appears clear: despite the Democrats’ victory this month in an election viewed as a referendum on the war, the idea of a rapid American troop withdrawal is fast receding as a viable option.

The Joint Chiefs of Staff are signaling that too rapid an American pullout would open the way to all-out civil war. The bipartisan Iraq Study Group has shied away from recommending explicit timelines in favor of a vaguely timed pullback. The report that the panel will deliver to President Bush next week would, at a minimum, leave a force of 70,000 or more troops in the country for a long time to come, to train the Iraqis and to insure against collapse of a desperately weak central government.

Even the Democrats, with an eye toward 2008, have dropped talk of a race for the exits, in favor of a brisk stroll. But that may be the only solace for Mr. Bush as he returns from a messy encounter with Iraq’s prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki.

But of course:

Mr. Bush declared that Iraqis need not fear that he is looking for “some kind of graceful exit out of Iraq.”

And:

But more recently, the president has, if anything, seemed to harden his position again. In Hanoi, Vietnam, nearly two weeks ago, he suggested that he would regard the recommendations from the Baker-Hamilton group as no more than a voice among many. In Riga, Latvia, two days ago he all but pounded the lectern as he declared, “There’s one thing I’m not going to do: I’m not going to pull the troops off the battlefield before the mission is complete.”

As for the book club over at the retirement village:

The [Iraq Study] group never seriously considered the position that Representative John P. Murtha, the Pennsylvania Democrat who is a leading voice on national security issues, took more than a year ago, that withdrawal should begin immediately. The group did debate timetables, especially after a proposal, backed by influential Democratic members of the commission, that a robust diplomatic strategy and better training of Iraqis be matched up with a clear schedule for withdrawal. But explicit mention of such a schedule was dropped.

What about our old friends?

In statements on Thursday, Democrats from former President Bill Clinton to Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, the incoming chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, seemed to agree that hard timelines could invite trouble. Nonetheless, some areas of potential conflict with Mr. Bush seem clear.

Elsewhere, our Dems are cautiously awaiting the official announcement of the plan.

Others in Washington cautiously welcomed the emerging report. "I think that the Baker report is . . . going to change the debate in this country," Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) told CNN.

Sen. Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.), speaking on MSNBC's "Hardball," said that "I suspect there may be a growing bipartisan support in this country for what Jim Baker, Lee Hamilton, the other members of that commission have put together."

Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.), the incoming chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, offered a careful assessment: "It's a welcome change in course, although it's not as specific, or it's not as pointed, or it's not as clear as I would like."

There you have it. The debate will change by way of bipartisan support for a welcome, but non-specific, un-pointed, and unclear "change of course."

And did we mention:

The panel included a significant caveat for the 2008 goal for troop withdrawals by recommending that commanders should plan to pull out combat units by then unless "unexpected developments" make them decide that such a move would be unwise, the sources said.

So to the modifiers of the prior paragraph, we might add one further caveat, as the saying goes: that for all intents and purposes, the "change of course" is a fake.

2008, for those keeping track, is the target date for the beginning of the drawdown process, which, even presuming that those old "unexpected developments" stay safely in the bag, leaves all of 2007 for the United States to continue screwing the pooch to within a centimeter of its poor canine life in Iraq. The Democrats, meanwhile, who have been lamenting the "partisan" rancor of Washington and the needlessly "divisive" politics of the Bush administration, now see fit to establish a happier July Monarchy, titled a "bipartisan foreign policy consensus," personified by the Sewing Circle for Agèd Eminences, symbolized by a burning Baghdad, and full of noble paternalisms about how "we" must not abandon "the Iraqis" to the terrible fate we've already guaranteed them. Of the Democrats now nearly ascendent, I can only say what Balzac said, that "when reason is exhausted, only sentiment remains," or even more pretinently, regarding the truly inexhaustible capacity of the Liberals of Netrootsia to pardon any venality so long as it's not committed by a Republican:

The ill-natured get credit for the evil they refrain from.

Aww, but baby, it feels so much better without a rubber.

George Fucking Will

So Jim Webb, the new Senator-elect from the Virginia Lodge of the War Party, went up to Washington and meets the dauphin, who used the occasion for some of his patented, trademarked, new-and-improved Texarkana barbeque bonhomie, which backfired, predictably, since Peoples' Deputy Webb didn't give the petit prince the answer he was a-lookin' for--presumably two thumbs up and a snap on the ass with a wet towel. George Will, the Jem of American punditry, purses his pretty lips and whistles with disdain. You won't be surprised to learn that she stoops to conquer.

Like Greg Sargent, who surveys the scene at that last link, I'm bemused by Will's conclusion:

[Webb] already has become what Washington did not need another of, a subtraction from the city's civility and clear speaking.

From a writerly standpoint, I question a man who will go on and on about another fellow's assault on the Queen's English, or whatever, only to conclude with such a lemon. The clause before the comma is desperately awkward, the comma should surely be a colon, and I can't recall ever having encountered "a subtraction" before. For a man all uppity about the un-literal use of "literally" by his linguistic quarry, it's downright odd. He could have written, "Washington didn't need another unmannered jerkoff who just wants to fuck with our tea and petits fours," or the WaPo style-manual version thereof. I literally can't think of a reason why he didn't.

In any case, even as one foot catches in the odd construction, the other is snared by the very idea of Washingtonian "civility and clear speaking." I gather that Will is saying these quantities (qualities?) are in short supply and that Jim Webb is further depleteing the store, but after six years of treason-mongering from the only man in the world who actually wants to be a yokel and makes the sorts of avocational efforts in that direction (cf. "clearing brush," etc.) that saner presidents have reserved for philately or anti-semitism, is now really the time for complaints? The man in the big chair mocks death row inmates, so a father's testy reply about his presumably endangered son hardly threatens to bring down some vast edifice of fellow-feeling and empathy. The Fourth Earl of Chesterfield once wrote to his son: "People will no more advance their civility to a bear than their money to a bankrupt." When dealing with the dauphin, that rule seems particularly apropos.

On a more personal note, I've always found that cries for civility come principally from people defending the indefensible from accurate criticism. I recall in the halcyon days of youth, "constitutional scholar" Stephen Carter came to speak at my college's speaker series on civility in the public square. By chance I sat next to the college's very fat and much-loved Con Law professor, who not two minutes into the lecture leaned slightly toward his companion on the other side and said in a stagey sotto voce obviously meant to be overheard, "Jesus fucking Christ, what the fuck is he talking about?" To you, George Will, defender of the indefensible, I mutter the same.

Culture Wednesday: Marty Peretz Edition (They Will All Be the Marty Peretz Edition)

"I am one of those," thunders Marty Peretz, "who believes that Tom Wolfe is among the most penetrating and understandably literate social observers and social commentators of the age." He means "literary," but I suppose it's also true that we should understand a writer to be literate, even if that writer is the penetrating Tom Wolfe. And speaking of penetrating, here is the opening exceprt from Wolfe's Margaret Meadian harumph through the jungles of Duke:

Every time the men's-room door opened, the amped-up onslaught of Swarm, the band banging out the concert in the theater overhead, came crashing in, ricocheting off all the mirrors and ceramic surfaces until it seemed twice as loud. But then an air hinge would close the door, and Swarm would vanish, and you could once again hear students drunk on youth and beer being funny or at least loud as they stood before the urinals.

Two of them were finding it amusing to move their hands back nad forth in front of the electic eyes to make the urinals keep flushing. One exclained to the other, "Whattaya mean, a slut? She told me she's been re-virginated!" They both broke up over that.

"She actually said that? Re-virginated?"

"Yeah! Re-virginated or born-again virgin, something like that!"

"Maybe she thinks that's what morning-after bills do!" They both broke up again. They had reached that stage in a college boy's evening at which all comments seem more devastatingly funny if shouted.

Urinals kept flushing, boys kept disintegrating over one another's wit, and somewhere in the long row of toilet cubicles somebody was vomiting. Then the door would open and Swarm would come crashing in again.

It's a list of literary (not, note, literate) infelicities. No one says that very loud music is "amped-up." You'd just say that it's very loud. There's an idiomatic expression that an excitible or excited person is "amped up," as in "keyed up," but that's not what Wolfe is talking about.

There's the mysterious "air hinge," by which Wolfe presumably means a "door closer," probably a manual door closer, which is an arm attached to a hydraulic (oil, not air, brother) cylinder that slows the closing action of the door.

There's the odd idea that the "amped-up onslaught" is entirely cut off--it "vanishes"--by the opening and closing of a bathroom door. Is it a soundproof bathroom? Is there no bass?

There are the "students drunk on youth and beer." A better writer would cut the cliché and just say "drunk." We're at college so we can assume the culprit is beer. Unless you were Tom Wolfe, you wouldn't begin to satirize, say, an Upper East Side cocktail binge with "socialites drunk on middle age and wine."

There's the misattribution of "being funny or at least loud" to youth, even though Wolfe, surely, has seen any number of middle-aged salarymen booming over the bar with what they believe to be great good humor and devestating comic timing. There is, at very least, the example of Martin Peretz.

There's the basic misobservation. To paraphrase Slim Pickens as Major Kong, I've been to a lot of airports, some highway rest stops, and a train station, and never once have I encountered a motion-sensor toilet that works with such consistency you can keep it flushing merely by waving your hand past the electronic eye.

There's the roaring-forties "broke up" for "laughed."

There's the profusion of unnecessary exclamation points in dialogue that we already understand to be shouted.

There's the needless repetition for emphasis. The students are "being funny or at least loud," and we already know that they're "drunk on youth and beer," so why tell us only a few lines later that "they had reached that stage in a college boy's evening at which all comments seem more devestatingly funny if shouted." Is it once again necessary to get that modifying "college" in there? And isn't mistaking loud for funny a relatively universal condition of the human drunk?

There's the goofy figure of speech: "boys kept disintegrating over one another's wit." It's an obvious play to make "broke up" more menaingful as a metaphor, but it only muddies it. Breaking up, disintegrating--are they drunk, or is our author on acid?

It proceeds apace from there to a drunken fight scene, a governor screwing a student, and seventeen thousand pages of seven-hundred-year-old Tom Wolfe attempting to inhabit a world whose essential idiom is as alien to him as Iraq to a writer for the National Review. It is quite possibly the worst book ever written about college life in America, made doubly bad by the sociological pretensions of its author, who casts types more broadly than the black-guy/white-guy geniuses who invented the buddy-cop movie. His prose seems composed of a vast selection of pseudojournalistic solecisms selected almost at random. His dialogue makes Dan Brown sound like Graham Greene. His capacity to craft black characters deserves the full satirical treatment by Ishmael Reed. He is quite possibly the worst novelist in America, and yes, I am including Plum Sykes in that judgment.

Some will argue that The Bonfire of the Vanities is better. Those people are wrong. Some will say that it's true Wolfe never made much of a novelist, but The Right Stuff was good reporting. They too, are wrong. Wolfe is a writer with no sense of discernment, who believes that through accretion of detail and clever modifiers alone his work will achieve a Balzacian scope and a Tolstoyan vision (or vice versa, if you prefer). He's the sort of guy who takes every photograph in panorama, just in case. When he does manage to focus, it's never on the right thing. He's the kind of guy who says, "There are really only two kinds of men in the world," and believes it.

Marty Peretz compares Wolfe and his rather lame Times Magazine bit on real estate to Mencken, ye gods! Perhaps if Mencken had been forcibly bred with his old, hairy nemesis Jennings Bryan to produce a verbose populist with a minor command of European languages (le tout New York . . . oooo!). If these are the guardians of our culture, I tell you, it's a good thing our collegians eschew culture entirely (merci, M. Wolfe) and stick to weak lager.

The Cakewalk Is a Dance

Pat Lang:

Anyone who listened to the president's speech in Riga today knows that this is all nonsense. He has no intention to change his policy in Iraq. His policy has been and continues to be the creation of an essentially Western country in Iraq governed on a unitary basis by an administration elected on the basis of one person, one vote. He expects that "victory" there and in his other areas of activity, Lebanon, Syria, etc. will result in a wave of revolutionary change across the Islamic World which will "drain the swamp" in which the "extremists" grow. He was taught this vision by neocon "dervishes" who are still pursuing the memory of Europe transformed by the French Revolution. The French Revolution renewed in the Muslim World remains the goal. We are already seeing the result of the "freedom agenda" in Iraq. There, Liberty has become license to kill and give over to rapine all those who "threaten" the ability of one's own group to maximize its position.

Bush is "having you on," folks, "having you on..."

Remember: every time you hear a scared conservative or compliant liberal talk about a "solution" in Iraq: there is no solution in Iraq. To speak of solutions is to credit the wholly incorrect idea that some portion of the original project, whatever that was, may yet be salvaged; that through hard thinkin' and good managin' and send-more-troopsin', the United States may yet build a house of cards sturdy enough to survive the slow, tentative removal of our not-so-stabilizing hand, which will stand on its own for long enough in our relative, partial absence to let us claim with less obvious medacity that it is the Iraqis' fault entirely when it collapses in on itself once again.

But for the dauphin, even all that is a step too far toward malign "pessimism."

The journey is long and my feet is tired, lawd. Gimme cool sweet water and shade fo ma head.

In Latvia, the dauphin said:

Our journey from national independence to equal injustice included the enslavement of millions, and a four-year civil war.

In Washington, the President's National Security Advisor gives him the shoulda-coulda-woulda routine, full of things that the Iraqi Prime Minister ought to do to please his sponsors, whom NSA Stephen Hadley imagines to be us, poor guy, when in fact Maliki's real sponsors have suspended their cooperation with the government to punish Maliki for meeting with the dauphin.

All is not well.

Over coffee this morning, I snagged a hard copy of the Times and read Tom Friedman's lament, "Ten months or ten years." From that title you may divine its entire content: either we pack up and get out, or we stick around and, as La Moustache elsewhere suggested, "reoccupy" the place, which, with the ten year timeline, sounds an awful lot like the strategy we used in The Asian Land War that Must Not Be Named.

Luckily, it ain't our fault! It's their fault. But what, precisely? Army Col. Bacevich (Ret.) offers a clue:

"It's their fault, and by implication not ours, is clearly a theme that's in the air," said retired Army Col. Andrew J. Bacevich, a Vietnam veteran and longtime skeptic of the war in Iraq. It reminds him, he said, of the sour last days of the Vietnam War, when "there was a tendency to blame everything on the 'gooks' -- meaning our South Vietnamese allies who had disappointed us."

There you have it. The United States is the rich relative that gives awful Christmas gifts and gets pissy when it discovers they were returned.

Let's pause and recall an instructive bit of dialogue from an old favorite:

COLONEL: Whose side are you on, son?
PRIVATE JOKER: Our side, sir.
COLONEL: Don't you love your country?
JOKER: Yes, sir.
COLONEL: Then how about getting with the program? Why don't you jump on the team and come on in for the big win?
JOKER: Yes, sir.
COLONEL: Son, all I've ever asked of my marines is that they obey my orders as they would the word of God. We are here to help the Vietnamese, because inside every gook there is an American trying to get out. It's a hardball world, son. We've gotta keep our heads until this peace craze blows over.

We slowly learned that inside every gook there is not an American trying to get out.

Return to that first quotation. Poor President Malaprop picks the right historical scenario, even if he somehow express it in the inverse, but he manages with his nigh-miraculous capacity to take the wrong lesson from everything to take the wrong lesson. The long American history from independence (and before, to be picky) through civil war and industrial revolution to present day is idiosyncratic, as are all national histories. The President may detect some longing for freedom in every heart and soul, a misbegotten Miss Cleo reading the tea leaves and entrails of the universal human esprit de la liberté, but the true, hard facts of past and present alike indicate that even if freedom and liberty exist in some Kantian realm of indivisible trueness, their life and practice on this rocky little globe of ours are highly contingent on social and economic conditions. Bush takes American history to mean we must only tough it out, mumble some pseudo-Gettysburgian oratories, await a native Martin Luther King, Jr., and in a couple hundred years The Troops™ can return to us and Sami al-Walton can start building souks out of cinderblock along every camel-path in the Middle East.

As a belief it's worrisome enough, but we should fret all the more feverishly because as far as anyone can tell, it's utterly unshakeable. There has been much talk of Bush's descent into late-Nixonian full-force denial, but the truth is that Nixon entered office with more than a few tenuous connections to reality quite intact, and managed to operate as a slimey but largely sane human being for most of his tenure. The dauphin, meanwhile, ascended his throne with a mind as untroubled and untethered as a soap bubble on a gentle spring breeze. Through the semi-permeable membrane of his awareness a variety of courtiers managed to slip a great library of insupportable convictions and counterfactual certainties, none of which can slip back out. It may be true that a great mind can hold several beliefs simultaneously, but the mind of our current king is a flea market run by crows: a jumble of junk never to be sold or unloaded, each new piece piled precariously on the rusting wreckage of the old. He is incapable of abandoning a notion, even if a dozen thoroughly contradictory fellow-notions take up residence on the same mental block.

He is the most dangerous man in the world--more so because he's also the most laughably absurd.

An Excellent Voice for TV and Radio!

Yes, it's true. That's what the quiz, via everyone but most especially Jim, tells me:

What American accent do you have? Your Result: The Midland "You have a Midland accent" is just another way of saying "you don't have an accent." You probably are from the Midland (Pennsylvania, southern Ohio, southern Indiana, southern Illinois, and Missouri) but then for all we know you could be from Florida or Charleston or one of those big southern cities like Atlanta or Dallas. You have a good voice for TV and radio.
Boston
The West
North Central
Philadelphia
The Northeast
The Inland North
The South
What American accent do you have? Take More Quizzes

It should be mentioned, though, that I'm a diehard believer in the ahnt pronunciation of aunt, and that I supposedly speak French with a mild Alsatian accent.

The New Republicans

To those who doubt that The New Republic has jumped the shark, let me put it to you this way: The Fonz is on the motorcycle. There is no need to read the content number of what Spencer Ackerman calls The Giagantic Self-Parody Issue of TNR. The table of contents is enough:

TRB: To the Brink by Peter Beinart: A final gamble for securing Iraq.

Save Whomever We Can by George Packer

Send More Troops by Robert Kagan

Admit It's Over by Richard A. Clarke

Bring the Troops Home by David Rieff

Divide Iraq by Peter W. Galbraith

Keep It Whole by Reza Aslan

Force Everyone to the Table by Anne-Marie Slaughter

Ally with the Sunnis by Josef Joffe

Crush the Sunnis by James Kurth

Try Anything by Leon Wieseltier

Ignore James Baker by Martin Peretz

Deal With the Sunnis by Larry Diamond

Talk, Talk, Talk by Michael Walzer

Bribe the Insurgents by Niall Ferguson

WASHINGTON DIARIST: The Troops and Us by Lawrence F. Kaplan

What Mark Twain said of Fenimore Cooper is true of this list:

A work of art? It has no invention; it has no order, system, sequence, or result; it has no lifelikeness, no thrill, no stir, no seeming of reality; its characters are confusedly drawn, and by their acts and words they prove that they are not the sort of people the author claims that they are; its humor is pathetic; its pathos is funny; its conversations are -- oh! indescribable; its love-scenes odious; its English a crime against the language.

Counting these out, what is left is Art. I think we must all admit that.

Maybe "Art" ought to be replaced with "Thought."

Anyway, it's all quite miserable, and I encourage you to read as much as your refusal to pay TNR subscription fees allows. No convention goes unrevered as wisdom, no piety goes unchatechismed, no cliché goes unclicked, no howl unhowled, no yowl unyowled, no plea unplead, no dream undreamt. There is more realism in a community dinner-theater revival of Man of La Mancha than in the whole of TNR's double-issue spiritual confab about Iraq. Leon Weiseltier, who was invented by Thomas Pynchon as a parody of Leopold Bloom and then sprang miraculously to life during a Ouija session in which Marty Peretz communed with the spirit of Theodor Hertzl, writes one thousand words detailing why he believes we should "quit," before concluding that he is "unable to conclude that we should quit." This Carollian it-was-all-just-a-dream ending typifies the dominant mode of thought at TNR these days: take the facts out for a healthy spin before returning to make a totally counterfactual conclusion that bears no relationship to the preceding reportage.

The stupidest and bloodiest New Republican by far is James Kurth, and Ackerman dishes more skillfully on that point than I am able, so go read him. He nonetheless makes a point that I'd like to glide past before landing. He notes that Jimbo proposes the division of Iraq into a Kurdish state that miraculously won't antagonize Turkey and a Shiite state that miraculously won't do much of anything, one gathers, other than smoke the houkah, eat honeyed pastries, and write lyric poetry in rhythmic Arabic to be recited over dark coffee and delicate mint tea. The Sunni, meanwhile, must be left stateless. Literally. Ackerman:

So, understand this: the thing to do is to ensure the Sunnis have nothing. The U.S. should basically become a janjaweed force of sectarian elimination. On top of that, the U.S. is fighting a broader ideological struggle to convince a billion fucking Sunnis around the world that it has no beef with them, fundamentally.

Spencer is being facetious, but even so gives too much credit to the oft-repeated but sourceless, evidenceless, and meaningless contention that we are fighting something called "a broader ideological struggle." And I suppose that it is true that we are fighting such a struggle, only we're fighting it in the same sense that my beloved Steelers are, at 4-7, "defending their Superbowl title." Common phrasing isn't necessarily accurate in other words.

Admittedly, there's a moldy quality to the phrase "ideological struggle" that smells to me of college-campus Karl Marx, so part of my objection to the prase is stylistic. Aside from that, it seems to me that it's a gross overestimation to assume that the contradictory grab-bag of emotions, ideas, and allegiences possessed by most people from Pittsburgh to Palau ever do or will coalesce into something as tangible (presumably) as an ideology. Ideologies are the playthings of a very small ruling elite in this world, and the rest of us suffer mostly from forced inclusion in this or that bloc. The idea that Americans, for example, are possessed of some sort of ideological attachment to freedom and liberty and representative democracy is disproven every time some security mom tells an opinion pollster that she'd gladly trade a little freedom for a lot of safety, not to mention with every successive ballot initiative in which the principles of representation are subverted by ungovernable orders to prevent fags from marrying or to keep dirty Mexicans from using hospitals for free. The idea that your man-on-the-street Indonesian and Algerian Sunni Muslims are not merely coreligionists in a vague sort of a way, but also share some particular ideological committment to . . . something. Well, you'll pardon my disbelief.

Even though the shared global distaste for America originates in policies of our government, it's a mistake to believe it's ideological. It's practical, rather. People around the world do not object to Wilsoniansism, but to its practical repurcussions. This is something that American decision-makers refuse to understand. It is also the impulse that leads so many nominal antiwar opponents to suggest that we might fix a few things on the way out of Iraq--as if we had the capacity!--in order to, you know, demonstrate our transcendent goodness and prove that however misguided and mismanaged and botched our war there, we remain, as always, good guys. We aren't good guys, however, and we haven't got the right to stick around until we've mitigated our moral culpability, as if such a thing is possible. Iraqis don't give a damn about our gold stars or demerits on the cosmic karmic scales. They just want us gone. Will they continue to fuck things up in our absence? Sure. But it is a total and unconscionable fantasy to believe that staying will ameilorate such eventuality.

So with due respect, let's put to rest this talk of an ideological struggle for Sunni "hearts and minds." We haven't got an ideology for them to buy into anymore than they--and "they" are very heterogeneous, remember--have one to abandon. Our struggle amounts to a basic PR campaign to convince them that we are not murderous, imperialist, oil-addicted, Christianizing buffoons, and that therefore our buildings do not merit bombs or hijacked airliners, thank you very much. The most straightforward way to exporting such a conviction would be to stop acting like murderous, imperialist, oil-addicted Christianizing buffoons. You will not find such talk in TNR, though. That magazine seems content to live out its ever-shortening life as the strange journal where Jewish writers reapply all the calumnies ever applied to their own tribe to the tribes of others. Ironic, yes, but not necessarily funny.

A Neoconservative Tells the Truth!

In an interview, [Reuel Marc] Gerecht said the goal of consensus among 10 Republicans and Democrats means that there will be no dramatic recommendations. In an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal, he wrote: "Its recommendations will probably be the least helpful of all the blue-ribbon commissions in Washington since World War II because it cannot escape from an unavoidable reality: We either declare defeat and withdraw completely tout de suite, or we surge troops into Baghdad and fight."

-WaPo

Since none of the "blue-ribbon commissions in Washington since World War II" have even gotten near enough the gravity well of helpfulness to bend minutely toward it, calling the Iraq Study Group the "least helpful" is faint praise indeed. Say what you will about the Warren Commission: at least the subject of its failed autopsy was already dead and the country already bumping along under Kennedy's succeeding madman. Not so the case today. The coroners clearly confuse themselves with surgeons, and here we have them massaging the exposed heart of our Iraqi misadventure while the native orderlies carry off one organ at a time.

The ISG, as our national Coffee Klatch tells us every evening and twice on Sundays, is both bipartisan and centrist, words which sometimes mean the same thing in the Media mind and sometimes do not. Either way, we're frequently assured that no sansculottes were admitted to the boardroom, and that radical opinions on either side were forcefully excluded. As Gore Vidal liked to remind us, the root of "radical" is . . . root. The National Commission that Will Save Us All is snipping the heads from dandelions and leaving the roots intact.

At the root of it all, in any event, is the more simple truth that there are but two options for the United States in Iraq: stay or leave. All the thoughtful commentary that says "by withdrawal we don't mean immediate withdrawal" or "by 'stay the course' we don't mean remain there indefinitely and forever" is worth precisely nothing. Either you believe that some positive benefit will accrue from the maintenance of an American military presence--one soldier or one million--in that country or you do not. Those who advocate for "victory" or "success"--the dauphin, his "realists," and the army of discredited-but-not neoconservatives among them--understand and openly admit that the look of success is now the return of Iraq to relative stability and territorial integrity with a inevitably and necessarily repressive central government operating a military capable of suppressing ethnic, sectarian, and ideological violence in the country's capital and provinces. Success, in other words, would be to return Iraq to precisely the state that first meritted our invasion. It's the success of a hamster that's learned to operate its wheel.

On the other hand, there are too many opponents of the war now advocating something euphemized as "phased withdrawal," by which they mean that US forces can't simply book for the borders, but must apply bandages wherever possible so as to reduce the moral culpability for the further decline of Iraq to the status of sub-Saharan mortocracy. I have no sympathy for this view. The only consideration for the pace of withdrawal should be logistical necessity, by which I mean leaving as fast as possible without leaving large numbers of Americans marooned in hostile territory. With the ahem-antiwar Democrats promising at least $70 billion in additional military spending from the 110th Congress, we can even afford to leave behind some unarmored hummers and such for the so-called insurgents to hurl against each other.

No such thing will happen of course. Atrios is correct that "the endless cycle of Friedmans cannot be broken." So long as the bipartisan, national consensus remains mired in the notion that through some wise plan the fool can save the errand from himself, "another six months" and variations on the theme will stay the national tune. The Post article injects some unintentional comedy:

All the experts wanted to make sure Baker, who is still closely connected to the Bush family, was in the room when they spoke. Several noted his telltale body language, which could dismiss a comment with as little as a raised eyebrow.

"We were all reading his face. If someone was expounding on something, Baker would get a distant look. He made clear he was not willing to go down that road," said an expert who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the final report has not been released. "He doesn't tolerate fools."

The emphasis, needless to say, is mine. Its lack in the original is what you'd call telling.