A few brief items, and then to work.
The question before us is, Does The New York Times have any dignity at all? Since early January, The Times has employed William Kristol as a weekly columnist. Kristol is a right-winger so extreme that he teeters on the divide at which respectable politics gives way to the delusional domain inhabited by characters such as Norman Podhoretz, Lyndon LaRouche, and Noam Chomsky.
What always amazes me about Kristol and his fellow right-wing fantasists is that they consider themselves the hard-headed realists. Kristol was one of the most simplistic cheerleaders for the Iraq war, assuring us of an easy victory because all Iraqis really wanted to be just like Americans. He's now the champion of a quick strike against Iran. He believes that national, single-payer health care would be a disaster for Americans, regardless of the actual health care stats of Canada, the Scandinavian countries, and even Britain. No matter how wrong he has been proved, no matter how glaring his ignorance of the facts, Kristol will always match Bush in his serene conviction of his own practical wisdom, reality be damned.
But Kristol's self-satisfied wrongheadedness is not why I object to The Times naming him a columnist. The Times is indeed the "newspaper of record," and it takes seriously, as it should, its obligation to provide balanced commentary on public affairs. At present it only has one relatively tepid right-winger, David Brooks, on its Op-Ed page. If it wants to bring in a dogmatic raver, fine, although such people are already over-represented in American public discourse, contrary to the myth of the "liberal media." And on the positive side, Kristol is far more charming than mere bullies like Limbaugh and Hannity, able to articulate his ideas with good cheer and to laugh at himself, a very attractive quality. He seems like quite a nice guy until you hear what he is saying.
What really bothers me about Kristol's appointment is that he has gone out of his way to insult The Times in the past:
Mr. Kristol, 55, has been a fierce critic of The Times. In 2006, he said that the government should consider prosecuting The Times for disclosing a secret government program to track international banking transactions.... In a 2003 column on the turmoil within The Times that led to the downfall of the top two editors, he wrote that it was not "a first-rate newspaper of record," adding, "The Times is irredeemable."That's what The Times said about him in its own announcement of Kristol's appointment. It's as if The Times is proud of how it rolled over for the hardcore right, of how intent it is on appeasing conservatives, who nevertheless continue to shriek that it is a partisan hard-left paper. (Note to Times editors: paying off blackmailers is never a good idea.) Why in the world would this great newspaper want to give a platform to a man who has more or less accused it of treason? Please: Some self-respect in the case of Kristol would be appreciated. I am glad that the paper's public editor, at least, had some doubts.
Kristol's appointment has a one-year trial term. Let's hope that the results of the 2008 elections are so painful for conservatives that Kristol will retreat to some Washington reactionary think tank funded by Richard Mellon Scaife, at which he will labor feverishly over manifestos to present to the next right-wing president. At least then we won't have to be embarrassed for The Times.
* * *
One of the best of many fine remarks in Sam Harris' book The End Of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason (W.W. Norton, 2004) is this one: "...in our opposition to the worldview of Islam, we confront a civilization with an arrested history. It is as though a portal in time has opened, and fourteenth-century hordes are pouring into our world. Unfortunately, they are now armed with twenty-first-century weapons."
I thought about this when I heard an announcement the other day that Iran has now tested a new rocket that can be used to launch satellites (and, of course, weapons). As the rocket lifted off, the controllers and technicians shouted "Allahu Akhbar!"
* * *
In a way, I was delighted to read the year's most unsurprising headline: "Raúl Castro Named Cuba's New President." Nothing could more clearly show the despotic nature of the Cuban regime, which has now emulated the North Koreans in setting up a Communist dynasty. It's been very disheartening to see the aged dictator Fidel defended, even in a minimal way, by various left-wing commentators who are not hardcore communist fringers, and whom I'd therefore expect to know better. I've seen a lot of the "He may not have been a perfect democrat, but..." line.
Let's be very clear. Fidel is not an "imperfect democrat," whatever that means (and anyway, by definition, there are no other kinds; democracy's imperfect, and intolerance for imperfection is a hallmark of the totalitarian mind.) He's a brutal, bloody-minded dictator who has clung to power for power's sake for almost fifty years, indulging in the monarch's privilege of inflicting five-hour speeches on his subjects, untroubled by meaningful elections or any legal institutions of true opposition. Criticism of Fidel in Cuba will land you in jail, and often get you tortured. It is infuriating to hear people who nominally believe in democracy and human rights equivocating about this man, who once ordered his brother Raúl, historically the revolution's hitman, to personally execute one of his, Raúl's, best friends, Cuban General Arnaldo Ochoa. Raúl complied - I guess you can't love a person more than La Revolucion.
This Raúl is now Cuba's president. He's understood abroad as a "pragmatist," and in his year as acting president he has been busying himself with things like making the nation's public transport system run more efficiently, and with making the daily lives of Cubans marginally less miserable, in a strictly material sense of course. Anyone who is impressed with that has no understanding of what it means to live as a free person in an open society. And, worse, has betrayed the humanity we hold in common with the Cuban people.
El Jefe and his demonic brother can't die soon enough.
* * *
We now know that John McCain will be the Republican candidate for President in 2008. We can expect him to campaign heavily on support for the Iraq war, and for continuation of Bush's "surge" (I will refer to it in quotes throughout, since it's a silly term that seems to have been invented simply to avoid use of a more disturbing word, "escalation.") I happen to agree with McCain that we can't just pull our troops out now. I think that would be a terrible betrayal of the Iraqi people, in spite of the fact that a significant minority of them have been acting like utter idiots in not seizing the possibilities for liberation that we presented them with in 2003. But their idiotic behavior is something that American policy could have and should have predicted, given that Iraq had no history of democracy, no viable political institutions, and a culture of paranoia and fear resulting from Saddam's thirty years of terror, during which he systematically destroyed Iraqi civil society and the minds of Iraq's inhabitants. We should not be surprised that Iraqis fail to understand the potential of democracy, in which no group or party may get everything it wants but, through bargaining, has at least a hope of getting everything it needs. It makes sense that, instead of taking to the rule of law, Iraqis identify with tribe or sect for protection, and try to use the power of the tribe or sect to grab as much as they can from other tribes or sects, knowing that these others will do exactly the same to them.
Bush's failure to foresee this very foreseeable reaction to what was (among other things) a liberation, and his deeply ignorant reliance on the fairy tale that "the human heart desires the same good things, everywhere on Earth," confers on him and on the American people certain obligations towards the people of Iraq. One of these is not to abandon them to the most savage and atavistic impulses of their countrymen; and, in so doing, hand al-Qaeda a very important victory (yes, I know we're not fighting against bin Laden in Iraq, but he would nonetheless claim a US withdrawal as a triumph for Islam.) I believe that, no matter what they say now, both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama do understand this reality. We are going to be in Iraq for a while yet, no matter who wins the presidency.
But there remains the problem of how we can work effectively in Iraq. It's hard to tell if McCain is honestly deluded when he says the "surge" is working, or if he really knows better. His reputation for "straight talk" notwithstanding, McCain is a man who can shade the truth when it suits him. This is the guy who could stroll through Baghdad's central Shorja market and pronounce it completely secure as a result of the "surge" - and not, say, secure because the military had done a security sweep before his group of touring politicians even arrived, and because they were protected by a hundred armored vehicles, and because there were checkpoints keeping ordinary Iraqis out of the area, and snipers on the rooftops, and attack helicopters hovering overhead, and because McCain and his colleagues were wearing body armor? Iraqis and journalists stationed in Baghdad were rather incredulous that McCain could say that his experience was in any way typical. You don't put on body armor for an ordinary market stroll, and if you're wearing body armor, that makes your stroll extraordinary.
But whether McCain is blind or disingenuous misses the larger point about Bush's "surge." Despite the rather tiresome outrage expressed by many right-wing bloggers that the "mainstream media" isn't covering Iraq now because the "surge" is working - well, it isn't working.
Let me pause here and note that I say this without the slightest trace of satisfaction. I despise Bush as much as anyone alive, but it is no paradox that I hope very much that he succeeds in the goals that he has publicly announced for Iraq.
That's why it is so disheartening for me to write that the "surge" is not working. A definition of "working," to most people, means that a strategy is fulfilling the goals that were stated for it. What were the stated goals of the "surge"? To bring enough security to Iraq so that the elected government could function. In this atmosphere of increased security, to create a breathing space for political reconciliation between Shi'a and Sunni; to solidify the idea of Iraq as a confederate state by passing a law for the regional sharing of oil revenues, and one that would bring former low- and mid-level Ba'athist officials back into politics; to train Iraqi troops in defending their own country; to train Iraqi police in the rule of law and humane treatment of prisoners (our lost credibility in this regard, after Abu Ghraib, is just one of the many ways in which our torture policies - and they were policies, not the actions of a few rogue operators - have damaged our vital interests); and to generally create the conditions under which American and allied troops can pull out and leave Iraq a relatively stable, relatively decent place for Iraqis to run.
From a strictly security point of view, the "surge" has indeed brought some measure of security to certain areas of Baghdad. It would be surprising if adding twenty thousand troops did not do this. Part of the reason for this is that many Baghdad neighborhoods have already been so thoroughly "ethnically cleansed" that there aren't any more Sunni in the Shi'a neighborhoods, or Shi'a in the Sunni neighborhoods, to terrorize, and the terrorists have already gotten all their houses and businesses, so there isn't so much to fight about anymore.
The right-wingers have been saying that Anbar province, which a year ago was a stronghold of al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia, is today one of the greatest successes of the "surge." There, the tribal Sunni sheiks got fed up on their own with the brutality of the fanatical foreign fighters who were recruiting at gunpoint, and killing any Iraqis who didn't go along with their vision of a repressive Islamic caliphate. With some subtle and intelligent American diplomacy and plenty of American guns, the sheiks and their people rose up against the miscalculated Islamist brutality, and pretty much drove al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia out of Anbar. That's a great and wonderful thing, and I don't underestimate the benefits that flow from it. However, in the context of the Bush administration and a lot of American know-nothings trumpeting this as a victory for the policy of the "surge," and as a victory in the larger war on terror, there are a few things to be said about it:
1. Contrary to the sureties of the know-nothings, al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia is not the same outfit that attacked us on September 11, not politically, not militarily, not financially, not in its leadership. It's a franchise that uses the name of Osama bin Laden's organization but is not controlled by it. Although it may suit bin Laden and Zawahiri to take credit for the actions of this group - they don't have much else going for them at the moment - al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia does not take orders from them and doesn't really consult with them. Getting rid of this Iraqi splinter group is a local accomplishment that doesn't figure much in our conflict with the larger world of Islamic militarism.
2. The Sunni sheiks are not our friends. They see us, at best, as the enemy of their enemy. They are not fighting al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia because they have a vision of Iraq as a united, democratic, rule-of-law country. Nor because they have a principled opposition to terrorism. They're doing it because they were pushed too far, and they pushed back. And because they need to be strong so that they can fight what they see as their more lasting enemy: the ethnic Shi'a government in Baghdad. We've just given them a lot of weapons. I am not optimistic that, in the long run, this strategy will contribute to a stable, democratic Iraq.
The price of the sheiks' and militias' co-operation, in Baghdad and in the provinces, has been de facto recognition of their control of neighborhoods, ministries, workplaces, towns - the institutions on the scale of life as Iraqis live it. Integration of the Shi'a and Sunni militias into the army and police is going poorly; their loyalties continue to lie with tribe, sect, and sheik, not with the government, and the discovery of sectarian torture chambers continues apace. The health ministry continues, even after the arrest of several powerful officials, to be a fiefdom of Moktada al-Sadr's Mehdi army. The ministry has opened government hospitals to Shi'a death squads that kill Sunni fighters as well as innocent civilians in their beds. The Sunnis learned long ago that a Baghdad hospital was one of the most dangerous places for them to be. Two high-ranking Health Ministry officials who were in the thick of this terrorism, and who were arrested near the beginning of the surge, have now been freed by an Iraqi court after intense witness intimidation. So much for the ability of the "surge" to help build strong and independent Iraqi institutions.
And in the provinces, the government's writ hardly extends at all. It can barely even deliver school supplies. The price of a downturn in violence has been the complete sidelining of federal authorities, just at a time when a demonstration of national reach and effort in doing things like restoring the electricity grid would be most helpful. The sectarian and tribal militias have rushed in to supply local needs. This is the exact opposite of what the surge was supposed to accomplish.
In the Iraqi parliament, progress on a law governing the regional distribution of national oil revenues remains stalled (although there is an ad-hoc distribution formula in the recent budget bill), and a recently-passed law governing the political rehabilitation and integration of former low- and mid-level Ba'athist officials - hailed with much enthusiasm by the know-nothing pundits of the blogosphere - has created a huge mess.
The Iraqi army isn't close to being a force that can intervene successfully in sectarian conflict; it's a sectarian Shi'a institution, thanks in large part to Paul Bremer's inexplicable decision to dissolve the army left over from Saddam.
The southern city of Basra has been run by competing Shi'a mafias in government since the collapse of British power there, with the police enthusiastically participating in political and tribal killings. It's a perfect example of mob democracy, and a portent of where Shi'a chauvinism and gangersterism might yet lead the rest of Iraq.
So what do we do now, if we can't leave and if the "surge" isn't working? That's a tough question. It's worth remembering that we might not be in this position if our Commander-in-Chief didn't have a twelve-year-old's view of the world; if he had listened to what responsible adults at State and in the officer corps had been telling him about the nature of Iraqi society and power before the invasion. But no, since everyone in the world is basically the same and everyone wants to live like Americans, we could count on a democratic Iraq magically flourishing once Saddam and his sons were taken out. Hence there was no need for a large occupation force, no worries about security and policing issues, no planning for the hard work of rebuilding civil society in a ravaged country. Donald Rumsfeld could be indulged in his experiment of a small, lean, highly mobile attack force, and we could conquer Iraq and maintain order with about one fifth of the troops that went to war with Saddam (but did not take or hold Baghdad) in 1991. We'd set up a compliant (but perfectly democratic) government, and be out in two weeks.
But while that can all be legitimately blamed on Bush, we are where we are. It is true that the "surge" has reduced violence, an important means to the end of a stable Iraq. We may just have to stay there for a while until an effective political society can evolve; I think Fareed Zakaria has pretty much the right idea here. But let's stop fooling ourselves. Let's stop calling it a "surge," as if it's temporary. And let's recognize that we have to drastically step up recruiting, to take the pressure off our troops who have been kept in Iraq long past their contracts through the unilateral renegotiation called "stop loss." Let's acknowledge that we're in Iraq for the long haul, and that, partly because of the dishonesty and incompetence that brought us there, we can't ask that much help from the rest of the world - at least not until we start seeing some really positive results, not just the effects of treating the symptoms.
John McCain, as he campaigns for the presidency, will continue to tell us that the "surge" is a brilliant success, just as he reprimanded Mitt Romney in an early Republican debate, telling him that the 'surge' isn't apparently working, "it is working!" I wonder whether the media will have the insight and the courage to question him in detail on this; and whether the Democratic nominee, Hillary or Barack, will be prepared to take him on in a thoughtful and well-informed manner. The election could hinge on it.