Heather Mac Donald talks to Razib at GNXP about atheism, conservatism and the reaction to her much-talked-about American Conservative symposium contribution.  My comments on the Mac Donald article, the ensuing online brouhaha and other Mac Donald defenses of “skeptical” conservatism are here, here, here, here, here and here.  There’s a lot in the interview that deserves some response, but I am pressed for time today and cannot go into the interesting and annoying bits just now.  Read the whole thing, and I’ll be back next week with my take.

Update: Okay, one quick note before I get ready to go to the symphony.  Ms. Mac Donald cites, with understandable frustration, the glib invocation of American religiosity as a reason for our superiority over Europe on the one hand and the daft claim by Mr. Bush that freedom is God’s gift to humanity on the other.  The first is the sort of trite thing that professional pundits write because they know it will play well with the crowd and can be set aside here.  On the second point, she is quite right to find this sort of rhetoric not only worrisome but actually opposed to Biblical truth.  That is an important part of what I was trying to argue in my TAC article on this very topic.  How Mr. Bush’s strange and unorthodox notions of some sort of divinely mandated revolution indict all Christianity or all religion continues to elude me.  In my view, Mr. Bush’s God-talk is the thin gruel offered to religious conservatives by people steeped in a very different, fairly unholy secular ideology.  If we count the invasion of Iraq against traditional Christianity, let’s say, or take it as some proof against the existence of God, we may as well endorse atheism on the grounds that Robespierre, too, believed in a Supreme Being and he also did terrible and despicable things. That strikes me as rather silly.

There are many good reasons to write off the specific anti-Mormon critiques of Jacob Weisberg and Damon Linker: they both appear motivated by an undue hostility to religion in political life, they seem to view strong religious conviction itself as inherently threatening to liberal democracy, they either ignore or skate over the Mormons’ historical record in their arguments and they frame their arguments in such a way that it is inescapable that anyone who genuinely believes in any kind of revelation or miracle should be viewed with scorn and suspicion, as it is only to the degree that religious people have tempered, watered down or abandoned their older religious commitments that they have become capable of receiving the full respect of these secular liberals in the political arena.  However, not a one of these good reasons appears in the less-judgemental-than-thou article by one Timothy Rutten, who takes offense at the very idea that Weisberg and Linker would put Romney’s religion under scrutiny for any reason.  It is all so very private and personal!  He writes:

Religious belief is a matter of conscience and if there is no privacy of conscience there is no separation of church and state, a principle both Slate and the New Republic claim to defend. Do the editors of those journals really want to take us back to the 1960s, when as many as one American in four said they never would vote for a Catholic or a Jew for president?

Not likely.

What both journals are doing is playing with social fire for the sake of narrow partisan advantage, hoping to knock a potentially attractive conservative candidate out of the running in much the same way that some Republican commentators desperately attempted to prod some Catholic bishop somewhere into denying Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry communion because he’s pro-choice.

That effort didn’t succeed and this one probably won’t either because an instinctively tolerant American people understands the difference between legitimate journalistic inquiry and an inquisition.

As near as I can tell, this means that in Mr. Rutten’s world we cannot refer back to any kind of religion for its tradition of philosophical and ethical reflection, cannot speak about our religion in any public forum and certainly cannot inform our political views with truths our received religious teachings tell us are of ultimate and eternal significance.  To do any of these things is to violate a “separation of church and state” imagined here not simply as a lack of a federal institutional support in favour of or against any particular creed, but as a hermetically sealed bubble affecting our entire public and political life.  If religion does not remain strictly private, the mythical “separation” will have been overthrown.  Rutten’s suggestion would not simply push religion out of the public square entirely, but would insist that it stay indoors and go pray in its closet.  The broad-minded, accommodating rule of an “instinctively tolerant” people can endure nothing more burdensome that each person tending to his own garden of conscience!  For Mr. Rutten, anything more ambitious than that probably must set us on a path to sectarian massacre.

Mr. Rutten asks rather foolishly whether Slate and TNR want to return us to the 1960s when a quarter of the population said they would never vote for a Catholic or Jew for President.  I think it is probably fair to say that they obviously don’t want any such thing, and neither does anyone else.  (Query: Is this prejudice actually a thing of the past?  Has this percentage actually declined in the last forty years, or do we simply think that it has because very few are willing to admit to anti-Catholic or anti-Jewish prejudices today?)  Linker and Weisberg might not point this out, since they both claim is their purpose not to engage in any real religious prejudice, but instead of that one quarter of the American people being against a Mormon candidate for President there is something closer to one-half at 43%.  We don’t need to “go back” to the 1960s to find broad opposition to a candidate because of his religion.  This opposition exists here and now, and it isn’t going anywhere just because the Tim Ruttens of the world don’t want to hear about it.  The 43% of Americans are the people who have already decided, as of late last year, that they would never consider voting for a Mormon presidential candidate.  Perhaps Mr. Rutten would say that it is precisely this kind of attitude that Slate and TNR shouldn’t be encouraging, and that the greater breadth of anti-Mormonism makes talking about it all the more explosive.  Would Mr. Rutten say that we should avoid talking about something because it is potentially controversial and likely to promote social conflict?  Is that really the best liberals (such as I assume Mr. Rutten is) can manage? 

When such a large percentage of the population takes such a strong stand against Mormon presidential candidates as such, it seems to me fairly plain that it is the legitimate business of journalists and pundits to discuss and debate the merits of opposition to Mormon candidates.  The specific arguments Linker and Weisberg advanced were unfortunate and largely misguided in the way they made their criticisms.  No doubt they would find my theological objections to what I consider the falsehoods and absurdities of Mormonism to be equally misguided or beside the point, but that is part of the ongoing debate.  To their credit, Mormon scholars and intellectuals have been only too happy to engage in the debate, and they are doing their religion a world of good by facing up to the challenge rather than running and hiding or crying, “Bigot!” each time someone simply starts asking questions.  It is Mormons’ squeamish would-be defenders on the center-left who cannot stand the sight of an inquiry into anyone’s religion who are hurting Mormons’ chances for being understood more than anyone else. 

Most everyone participating so far assumes that it is legitimate to debate and discuss these things.  Among those who find this discussion distasteful are such luminaries as David Gergen and now Mr. Rutten.  Christian conservatives who believe that Christianity has an important and necessary role to play in the life of the nation have a great stake in ensuring that a combination of liberals and Romney supporters do not succeed in taking Romney’s religion off the table of legitimate discussion.  It cheapens our discourse and weakens our political process to declare such things off limits.  If Americans are, in fact, “instinctively tolerant” (which may be true within reason, but is not absolutely the case), there really is no reason for anyone to run away from this debate in disgust.  

For their part, Mormons have nothing to fear from the arguments of Linker and Weisberg: these are either so far-fetched or militantly hostile to revealed religion in general that they immediately turn off a huge swath of the public.  I am sharply critical of Mormonism’s theological claims and Mormon pretensions to being Christian, but I find their critiques to be poor and unconvincing in the extreme.  Indeed, in terms of content, the reaction to both pieces has been almost uniformly negative.  The only reason anyone has spoken in defense of either of them is when a few, such as Mr. Rutten, insist that even talking about Mormonism in this way is taboo and wrong. 

Similarly, Americans have nothing to fear from Mormons if their concern has been over Linkeresque suspicions of Salt Lake City issuing decrees for the entire country through the White House.  It is precisely this kind of fear and fundamental misunderstanding of the role of religious authority in the modern world that is absurd and laughable.  The things that aren’t absurd are the legitimate questions raised about what a candidate believes.  To my mind, the real argument about Mormonism and Romney’s candidacy is really over whether Christian voters are willing to accept someone whose religion they do not accept and with which they cannot really identify.  This has virtually nothing to do with Gov. Romney’s “fitness” for office, which his much more conventional flaws as an opportunistic politician already throw into doubt, or whether Mormons are “fit” to serve in public office (they are and they do serve all over the country) and almost everything to do with whether the majority of Americans that believes that this is a Christian country (however they mean that) is prepared to elect as President someone whose religion a great many Christians regard as non-Christian. 

Whether we like it or not (I am not a big fan of the idea), the President effectively represents all of the United States and, as the conventional view would have it, personally serves as a symbol of the country and the American people.  Those whom we elect to this office must be someone with whom we can identify to some significant degree.  Viewed this way, a member of an even smaller religious minority in America, such as an Orthodox Christian or an Armenian Christian, might meet with the same opposition and suspicion because of the unfamiliarity or perceived strangeness of the customs and culture of that minority.   This anxiety about someone’s background be less important at the level of statewide office, where what the office represents is possibly less meaningful to many people.  This is why I suspect that rejoinders about the Mormonism of Harry Reid and Orrin Hatch being irrelevant to voters (in states with sizeable Mormon populations) will fall on deaf ears–these are just individual Senators, will be the reply, not the President.  More than anything else, it is the cult of the Presidency that creates such high barriers to entry for members from marginal or minority groups: the nationalist obsession with the executive as the symbol of the nation makes it that much harder to imagine having someone from a perceived strange or unfamiliar group hold this office.  The imperial cult-like mythology woven around the Presidency–which is, in its way, kookier than any religious group’s beliefs–requires that the President to some extent embody the nation.      

There is a deeper problem with Mr. Rutten’s objections to Linker and Weisberg, and it is this: there is a weird, creeping assumption that many Westerners share that strong religious belief, up to and including strong opposition to another person’s creed, precludes the possibility of social peace and a well-ordered polity.  If men believe something strongly, they must ultimately want to oppress or kill someone.  But if a huge number of Americans expresses a strong preference against ever voting for a Mormon presidential candidate, their refusal and their preference do not imply that they lack toleration for Mormons.  What it means is that they cannot, in good conscience, lend their support to people who believe things that are radically different from their own beliefs.  That is not oppression, nor is it even a harmful kind of prejudice.  It is representation, and it is how candidates elected through mass elections are chosen. 

People who believe in the virtues of pluralism and multiculturalism (I am not one of them) should be among the first to jump into the fray about this basic question that their own commitments require them to address.  In an increasingly religiously diverse country, in which several of the minority religions are growing fairly quickly and where there is a larger number of atheists and agnostics, those who think that a candidate’s religion (or lack of it) should never be held against him by voters have to come up with an argument far more powerful than, “It’s a private affair!”  In democratic politics, for good and ill, people vote for the candidates with whom they identify, and religion has been and probably always will be a factor in national politics so long as Americans remain a predominantly religious people.  Whether most of the Christian majority will ever be willing to accept as President someone from a non-Christian religion remains an open question (at present, signs point to no as far as Islam and Mormonism are concerned), but it is one that cannot be wished away or shoved back into the closet.  Mr. Rutten’s horror at the idea of discussing these things shows that he does not really believe that Americans are “instinctively tolerant,” but must be kept from discussing at any length questions about this or that religion so that “social fire” is not unleashed upon the country.  This does a disservice to the very minority religions whose interests (and rights!) liberals claim to want to protect, since it is precisely by shouting down questions and discussion that negative preconceptions about a religion are reinforced.  It will be by hiding behind the (non-existent) wall of separation that Mormons will do more harm to the reputation of their religion than anyone else, because any refusal to defend their religion with public argument–a refusal that Mr. Rutten is trying to encourage with his attempt to shame liberals into being quiet about the entire thing–will confirm the worst impressions of Mormonism as something strange, unfamiliar and cultish.

But Iraq is also at this point in time of very high stakes to this nation.  This is a time for a national desire and a national imperative not to fail in Iraq. We’ve faced crucible tests as a country before, and we’ve come through them when we have come through them together. ~Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice

Republicans in Congress, who do not want to be quoted, tell me the State Department under Secretary Condoleezza Rice is a mess. That comes at a time when the U.S. global position is precarious. While attention focuses on Iraq, American diplomacy is being tested worldwide — in Afghanistan, Iran, Israel, Korea and Sudan. The judgment by thoughtful Republicans is that Rice has failed to manage that endeavor. ~Robert Novak

Novak’s column does a good job explaining the recent game of musical chairs with Negroponte moving from his post as DNI to be the nominee for Deputy Secretary of State (a demotion for most people, but for someone trained in the Foreign Service it is the big-time) and Ret. Adm. McConnell becoming nominee for DNI.  Interestingly, Bolton wanted the deputy job, but Rice kicked him over to the U.N.  As everyone knows, his nomination was dying a lingering death before he threw in the towel.  It would appear that Secretary Rice has been just as ineffective at running State as she was in running the NSC.  Perhaps appointing her to run State was actually a cunning, calculated attempt by Mr. Bush to finally sabotage wreck the hated Foggy Bottom from the inside.  More likely, it is another example of the triumph of Mr. Bush’s preference for cronies and yes-men (and women) in positions of authority over those who actually know what they’re doing.  All that’s missing from this picture is the quote, “Condi, you’re doing a heckuva job!” 

Now I would never have guessed that Secretary Rice might not be up to the job at State.  After all, she dresses so fashionably.  Yes, she may have been the worst National Security Advisor since the position was created, and she may have bungledher way through the war in Lebanon with no hints that she had a clue what was going on, and she may have helped foment the so-called “Generals’ Rebellion” of last spring through some uniquely ill-chosen words about the military, but we all knew that she was a “student of history” and we knew that she was from Birmingham, and that had to mean something.  Goodness knows she talked about Birmingham enough in her first few years in office: if the neocons always think the state of foreign affairs is like it was in 1938 in Munich, Condi seemed to think every foreign crisis could be likened to 1963 in Birmingham.  Would it be mean-spirited to note the absurdity of Republican complaints about the cult of victimhood when everything their leaders and spokesmen say about foreign policy is one, long, drawn-out psychodrama of traumatised victims or their proxies constantly reliving past horrors and imagining that these events are recurring in the present?

Brownback can take some comfort from the AP/Ipsos numbers that show his anti-“surge” position matches the views of a majority of white evangelicals and also a majority of self-described conservatives, but he can’t be terribly excited by what most of the polls are saying about the level of support for the “surge” in the GOP.  Gallup shows clearly that two-thirds of Republicans support the “surge,” and the ABC/Post poll reports that 73% of Republicans support Mr. Bush’s proposal.  (Far more intriguing from an antiwar perspective is the part in the Post article that tells us that a slight majority–53%–would favour cutting funding for any additional troops.)  If Sam Brownback wants to be the Republican nominee, it probably will not do to go against a decision that two out of every three Republicans support.  Indeed, the knives are already out for Brownback on account of his “perfidy.”

Update: Rasmussen has a little bit brighter news for Brownback.  According to its poll, only 53% of Republicans support Mr. Bush’s plan.

Second Update: Jim Antle comments on Brownback and Scheiber’s take on the Kansan’s opposition to the “surge.”

Rep. Ron Paul has filed to form a presidential exploratory committee.  Finally, a candidate worth supporting!

A number of Republican senators expressed deep reservations about the president’s proposals Wednesday.

“I want real evidence that a potential surge in troops will do more good than harm and will not exacerbate the existing violence in Iraq,” said Sen. George V. Voinovich (R-Ohio), who was invited to the White House to discuss the plan. “I am skeptical.”

Other GOP dissenters include Sens. Olympia J. Snowe and Susan Collins of Maine, Norm Coleman of Minnesota, Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, Gordon H. Smith of Oregon and Sam Brownback of Kansas, a presidential candidate who once staunchly supported Bush’s foreign policy. ~The Los Angeles Times

Notice a certain overlap between the critics of the “surge” and another list of Republican Senators?  After all, which Republican Senate seats are up in 2008?  Well, to name a few, there’s Smith’s in Oregon, Coleman’s in Minnesota, Hagel’s in Nebraska and also Collins’ seat in Maine.  Hagel may be retiring and might embark on a presidential run, but if he doesn’t he will be up for re-election.  Only Voinovich is speaking against the “surge” without having to face an election in ’08, but he is also from a state that just went for the Democrats in a big way in their statewide races.  In other words, most of these dissenters against the “surge” are Republicans coming from blue states, and they know which way the wind is blowing back home.  Hagel has been a long-standing critic of the handling of the war (though we should never forget that he voted for the authorisation resolution just like almost all of the other Republicans in the Senate), so his criticism is probably one of the least driven by electoral concerns. 

I hate to give him credit for much of anything, but Brownback actually stands out among all of these as the most credible as a principled opponent of the move, if only because going against the “surge” (and thus inevitably being portrayed by all of his rivals for the nomination as weak or lacking in support for the war) doesn’t help him at all as a presidential candidate right now.  But it may help him later.  Even though he may think that the 21,500 soldiers would be better used in the Congo or on some other such wild-eyed mission, he has the virtue of being right on this particular question.  When the “surge” fails, as it likely will, he will be in a good position to claim some vindication as one of the few Republicans to oppose the move publicly.  As Ross Douthat notes, he is the only declared GOP candidate for ’08 who has taken this position.  That is worth noting.  However, 2008 GOP primary voters will not be the ones who will want to hear about how he was right to be against the failed “surge.”  What they will take away from this and from his generally unfortunate humanitarian foreign policy antics is that he is not a serious contender, and the conservative media will make sure that Brownback’s name is mud with conservatives because of what they will call his “defeatism.”

Update: Noam Scheiber (via Ross) notes that most self-styled conservatives and most white evangelicals oppose an increase of troops in Iraq (which isn’t really that remarkable when 70% of all Americans oppose this–evangelicals and conservatives are still more likely to support the move than the average American).  He sees Brownback’s move as a way to distinguish himself from the GOP pack and build up support among core constituencies.  This makes a certain amount of sense, except that exactly the kinds of people who don’t want to send more troops to Iraq also don’t want to send them to the Sudan.  Deployments to Sudan and the like are examples of the kind of interventionist do-gooding Brownback prefers.  Brownback’s “let’s do right by the Congo” view of foreign policy priorities will make him something of a joke in the primaries precisely among those voters who are most likely to agree with his position on increased troop levels in Iraq.  Taken together with his embarrassingly pro-immigration views, which will surely alienate him from these same people even more, it will be hard for him to sell his foreign policy views as something other than re-heated liberal internationalism with some Christian icing on top (which is just as unappetising and Wilsonian as it sounds). 

Second Update: Andrew Sullivan views Brownback’s opposition as a “a stunning sign of how the GOP might become a significant opponent of a surge in Iraq…”  But the dissent of an unconventional Republican such as Brownback is a sign of no such thing.  Not only has the conservative commentariat lined up virtually foursquare behind Mr. Bush’s proposal, but no other leading GOP figure has dissented against the idea (unless we are calling Chuck Hagel a “leading GOP figure” now).  The minority leaders in both chambers have mumbled their words of obeisance, and all declared presidential candidates except for Brownback are for it.  Brownback’s position is interesting and also happens to be right, but it is not a harbinger of a GOP backlash.  Wrong again, Sullivan.

Third Update: A commenter responds to Scheiber’s post with the most surreal statement about Sam Brownback I think I have ever read:

No surprises here, none whatsoever. This is little more than creeping Buchananism. Add a little MikeyMoore/Kevin Phillips-style populism and you have the makings of a 21c middle American red-brown movement. Or maybe pink-tan.

Yeah, those sure are the phrases that come to mind when I think of Sam Brownback (“creeping Buchananism” and “red-brown movement”).  Aren’t these the first things that come to your mind? 

By the way, if Brownback really is into “creeping Buchananism” he might want to let the Buchananites in on the secret.  Otherwise they might get the wrong idea from his “save Darfur” and open borders views!

Fourth Update: Look out, theocons!  Quin Hillyer at the Spectator certainly noticed Brownba…sorry, that’s The Perfidious Brownback’s position on the “surge” and he isn’t just annoyed–he’s blood-spitting mad!  What makes him really angry is that Brownback released his statement before Mr. Bush gave his speech–oh, the treachery!  The mainstream conservative demonisation of Brownback the Opportunist/Defeatist has begun with these words:

Sam Brownback did a VERY obnoxious thing today, one which raises serious doubts about his fitness for the presidency. It shows that he does not appreciate the role of commander in chief, and does not appreciate the special responsibility that senators have — especially senators of the president’s own party — not to undercut the commander in chief in time of war.

Mitt Romney is not going to be president. He’s not going to even be the Republican nominee.

It all boils down to — may we use a French word? — finesse. Finesse is defined as “skillful, subtle handling of a situation; tactful, diplomatic maneuvering.” The former Massachusetts governor does not have it.

Exhibit A was his televised cash-athon, in which he quickly scooped up $6.5 million in checks and pledges. The objective was to ripple his awesome fund-raising muscles before John McCain, Sam Brownback and any others who would dare compete.

Money is important in American politics, but the war-chest weigh-in is best held in private. Lucre’s role in campaigns is a sore point with voters, who fancy that elections can’t be bought. The sage politician will raise the dough in discreet settings. Romney does not get this, thinking more of the impression he’s making on the political establishment than on the folk of Iowa and New Hampshire.

The last candidate to so overtly pin his campaign millions on his jacket was Phil Gramm. The former Texas senator, who raised stunning sums in anticipation of the 1996 presidential primaries, remarked out loud that “the most reliable friend you can have in American politics … is ready money.” Gramm finished a weak fifth in the Iowa caucuses and dropped out before the New Hampshire primary. ~Froma Harrop

So in addition to his Massachusetts and Mormon woes, he can also boast a lack of subtlety.  Get those Romney ’08 buttons while they’re hot–they will become rare collectors’ items soon enough.

For the President, a real strategic change would be to quit the game, set up his own poker table, and stack the deck to ensure a return on his money.

 

What would that look like? The first step would be to redefine U.S. interests and war aims. Of the President’s three initial aims – destroy Saddam’s WMD, overthrow him, and establish an Iraqi liberal democracy – two are accomplished (the first, we now know, happened even before the invasion). 

Write off the democracy goal as a draw, declare a tactical victory, and withdraw in good order. Of course a terrible mess will be left, but more troops and money can only make it worse, not better. The new strategic aim must be regional stability, not democracy in Iraq. [bold mine-DL] The United States alone cannot achieve it. It will need help. And other countries will not help while we are bogged down in Iraq. They enjoy our pain. ~Lt. Gen. William Odom (Ret.)

Yes, friends, stability–that dreaded s-word.  The dreaded s-word that many an interventionist assured was the problem with the Near East to be solved by their ham-fisted invasion and a round of democratisation.  It is the very same s-word throughout the Near East that the exact same crowd of interventionists fears will be threatened if we leave Iraq.  Indeed, they are using the fear of instability–a fear they never used to possess–to browbeat war critics into meek silence and collaboration with the perpetuation of their dreadful war.  For the most part, war critics in any position of responsibility or influence have gotten the message and have largely been toeing the line that “precipitous withdrawal” would be catastrophic.  This jingo browbeating is rather like an arsonist setting fire to a school and then clucking his tongue and blaming the people who tried unsuccessfully to stop him for “letting” the school burn down.  “Why did you let the raging fire consume that school?  Obviously, you have no sense of morality!  Think of the suffering children!”     

One is tempted to smack these people when they say things like, “But Jordan might be destabilised!”  Oh, really?  Might it?  Since when did jingoes care a whit for the stability of Jordan or any other friendly state in that region?  Of course, the contradictions between the warmongers then and now are not really the issue, though they should remind us to never, ever listen to anything they have to say about foreign policy. 

Containing the damage from the inevitable nightmare of post-withdrawal Iraq should be our top priority.  Limiting the fallout from this horrible war is what we should be attempting to do, rather than chasing an ever-receding promise of stabilising and securing a government that is itself the source of roughly half of Iraq’s misery today.  That is why withdrawal from Iraq is the most responsible option available, because it is only withdrawal that gives us the flexibility, freedom of action and resources to shore up the allies in the Gulf whose security the interventionists have irresonsibly, rather unforgiveably endangered with their foolish scheme.  The break-up of Iraq, whatever form it takes, is not something that can be prevented any longer.  If Washington can prevent the break-up of Iraq from drawing in most of Iraq’s neighbours (Iran’s involvement in the score-settling inside Iraq is a fait accompli and is now essentially unavoidable), that will be a success of sorts.  Saving Iraq has long since ceased to be something that the government can achieve without adopting methods and mobilising resources in ways that the American people will not support.  The people are not going to accept a draft for what remains a war of choice that they did not really desire and they will not countenance ethnic cleansing or forced relocation committed in their name.  Their patience with Mr. Bush has been all but exhausted.  The people already desire fewer Americans to be in Iraq and ultimately want us out in fairly short order.  Given these very real political constraints at home, the goal must be to extricate ourselves from the mess in Iraq as quickly as possible and to begin erecting barriers to contain the force of the explosion when Iraq descends into full civil war. 

There will be three major problems after we leave Iraq: 1) handling the inevitable refugee crisis, as refugees from the civil war flood into Jordan, Syria and Kurdistan/Turkey; 2) preventing Kurdish independence and/or Turkish intervention; 3) preventing the overthrow of the Hashemites in Jordan.  We will also be faced with the effective creation of an Iranian client-state in Mesopotamia.  Shoring up the Gulf monarchies and combating the danger of Shia terrorism and/or separatism in the Gulf will have to take priority over any senseless course of confrontation with Iran.             

I should also note that Gen. Odom here makes a vital distinction that too many amateurs and pundits have been missing: whatever Mr. Bush has proposed this week, it is not a “new strategy.”  The frequency with which the word strategy has been used by all and sundry to describe adaptations that have been entirely tactical has become wearisome.  Every limited adaptation in tactics made so far has been done with the same goals in mind.  The “surge” is aimed at the same goals the government has been pursuing since at least late 2003: according to the standard boilerplate, if you take the government’s public claim to be a true statement of its goal, the goal is a stable, united Iraq under a “democratic” government that will prevent Iraq from becoming a terrorist haven, which is to be accomplished by joint U.S.-Iraqi military operations.  In its essentials, this is the exact same thing Mr. Bush yesterday said that we are trying to achieve.  The strategy, such as it is, has not changed to any noticeable degree.  He has fiddled with some of the details, and, as usual, come up with an unsatisfactory answer, but what if the goal itself is impossible or the means provided are insufficient?  Indeed, the strategy is quite mad to the extent that it is not possible to realise it.  In any case, when the commentariat and more than a few people in government cannot even speak the language, is it any wonder that no one has any “solutions” that are even remotely credible?

To explain the distinction, I call Thomas Ricks’ Fiasco (p. 127) as witness:

In fact, strategy has a very different and quite simple meaning that flows from just one short set of questions: Who are we and what are we ultimately trying to do here?  How will we do it, and what resources and means will we employ in doing it?  The four answers give rise to one’s strategy.  Ideally, one’s tactics will follow from them–that is, this is who we are, this is the outcome we wish to achieve, this is how we aim to do it, and this is what we will use to do it.  But addressing the questions well can be surprisingly difficult, and if the answers are incorrect or incomplete, or the goals listed not reachable [bold mine-DL], then the consequences can be disastrous.

One hears much complaining these days that Iraq has yet to be pacified even after almost four years of U.S. military engagement. To those who offer such complaints I remind them of this: The United States has been around for 230 years and it hasn’t been pacified yet, either. ~“Jack Dunphy”

I don’t quite know what motivates people to use the deaths of police officers as some sort of springboard for cheap pro-war rhetoric.  Viewed one way, it cheapens the deaths of these officers and makes them into props for the War Party; viewed another way, it belittles the risks our soldiers face by making their tours seem no more dangerous than the average cop’s beat in southern California.  As I see it, it manages to disrespect both kinds of service while also making the most absurd kind of comparison of serious, but isolated, criminal incidents and the violence of a war zone. 

But, wait, now that Officer “Dunphy” has put it this way, I guess we can all just shut up and stop worrying about the war.  Besides, how could we have forgotten all of the IEDs placed along the PCH and the mines planted by MS-13 underneath Rodeo?   This must be why they call Sunset Boulevard “the most dangerous road on earth.”  Thank goodness we have Officer “Dunphy” to give us some perspective.  Otherwise we might start saying ludicrous and appalling things for narrow political purposes. 

He notes a news report that states that there were 16,692 criminal homicides in the U.S. in 2006.  That’s out of a population of 300 million people.  Iraq suffered approximately that many civilian dead in four months last year, and they have a population less than one-tenth the size of ours.  If we wanted to do a straight-up comparison between murders in the U.S. and violent deaths in Iraq–which so many war supporters seem to think is a smart and advantageous thing for them to do–that would mean that Iraq is suffering from a homicide rate that is roughly 36 times as great as our own (i.e., the equivalent of America having just over 600,000 murders per year).  However bad crime may be in some parts of this country, it is twisted in the extreme to pretend that what happens here and what goes on Iraq are actually comparable.