Two of my sons ran off and joined the Navy.  They exhibited this acute rationality near the end of one of their college semesters a couple years ago.   They had survived past midterms, each done sufficiently well and were a few weeks from finals.  Our government, toying with my sons as the Coachman to Pinocchio with promises of Pleasure Island but offering the risk of death, hooked them with a choreography of career enticement and, for one of my boys, a promise of providing for the needs of his infant daughter. 

A couple years ago, the war we're conducting in Iraq was far more in view than the war we'd "already won" in Afghanistan.  Now the two are switching place.  Administrations have changed, resources are being refocused.  Americans are more aware that we've actually been at war in Afghanistan for eight years. 

I'm not a policy expert.  I'm not much focused on international affairs.  I do think about responsibility, justice, compassion and the sweep of history.  The Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan the day before Christmas, 1979.  And did poorly. The British earlier invaded twice, 1838 to 1842 and 1878 to 1880, neither time well. Genghis Khan came earlier from the north and Timur Lung from the east.  Neither conqueror truly prevailed.  Arab Muslims came earlier from the west - they at least have the enduring legacy of Islam.  Alexander the Great, cruising through Iran, ground to a three-year halt battling in Afghanistan.  That was a long time ago.

Juan and William, two of our five "bigger boys" and two of our seven sons, announced earlier that semester that they'd been contacted by a Navy recruiter, had met and thought his promises of military service pretty good.  They were each then attending the Borough of Manhattan Community College, BMCC.  They'd started a year earlier (together with Philippe, a third of our "bigger boys") at a community college Upstate, but missed home and returned.  And William's girlfriend was pregnant-he wanted to be close to his expected daughter.  My wife and I tried to convince William that he and his girlfriend were too young (in all ways) to raise a child.  Then we tried to convince him to best provide for his daughter by remaining in college Upstate, more quickly earning a degree and a better living than he could as an unskilled high school graduate. 

But William and Juan returned home to New York. 

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Some critics have faulted Rachel Shabi’s We Look Like the Enemy: The Hidden Story of Israel's Jews from Arab Lands as one-sided. Shabi neglects the animosity that existed between Jews and Muslims long before 1948, the critics say. She exaggerates how good things were for the Jews of the Orient, they moan.

But it seems that Shabi’s detractors might have missed the point.

The pivot that Shabi’s work revolves around is, perhaps, easy to miss. It is simple, a delicate foundation for hundreds of pages. Fortunately, Shabi has taken care to illuminate it in an old-fashioned thesis sentence. She writes: “This book is focused on the stifled, small-voice analysis seeking to break this stalemate formula.”  

The impasse is the sharp dichotomy of the “enemy”—the European, the West, pitted against the Oriental, the East. Adhering to this strict narrative allows Israel to depict violence against the state as an attack on the Western world; following this script, the Arab world can align the “European” country as a transplant that must be rooted out. Both sides conveniently ignore the Mizrahim, a group that has been rooted in the region for millennia, veiling the Middle Eastern face of Israel.

Just as Shabi is straightforward about the tight focus of Not the Enemy, she is also honest about her own background. From the first pages, we know that the Guardian contributor is an Iraqi Jew—albeit Israel-born and Britain-bred—and she doesn’t hide the fact that her politics lie on the left. “I visited Israel again as an adult,” she writes, “…by then I knew all about the bad Israel, the bully nation, the land thief and oppressor of Palestinians—no smiling and no mangoes in this version.”

Smiling and mangoes came earlier, during the childhood years spent in the embrace of her large Mizrahi family, exiled from the banks of Babylon to Israel—a land that proved, according to Shabi, much harsher. Long before the state of Israel was established, Mizrahi immigrants were already facing difficulties. Shabi recounts, for instance, the story of Kibbutz Kinneret. The land was initially settled in 1912 by a group of Yemeni families. When Ashkenazim arrived in 1921 and formed a kibbutz on the same property, a handful of the newcomers went to work—not at farming, but at driving the Yemenis away.

Many of the Mizrahim who migrated to Israel after 1948 were stuck in development towns—some, Shabi recounts, were literally dumped there at night. Today, development towns remain mired in trouble. They tend to be poorer and, located on the periphery, they suffer from more security threats—Shabi points to Sderot, economically and emotionally depressed by a rain of rockets from Gaza, as an extreme example.

Not only were the Mizrahim literally ghettoized, Shabi argues, they were culturally ghettoized as well. In a twist of irony, their regional accent was derided as inferior to Ashkenazi intonations. Radio stations refused to give Oriental music any airtime. Though that has changed in recent years, Mizrahi music is referred to as just that. Despite its mainstream acceptance, it bears a label that marks it as something less than Israeli.

Shabi isn’t simply making a laundry list of the historical and contemporary problems of Mizrahim. She is highlighting the ways that Mizrahim, and Israel, have been severed from their Middle Eastern roots. But the Mizrahim—a majority of whom are right-leaning today—also had a hand in the cutting. Shabi writes, “After so many years of learning to hate their own rejected features and having to hide them, the Mizrahis simply projected all that revulsion onto the neighboring Arab community—because self-loathing is hard to maintain and because, there, in the enemy was a perfect outlet for it.”

We have returned to the stalemate, the dichotomy. How to break it? Return to the rejected culture.  The Arab Jew can serve as “a bridge… an embodiment how two seemingly contrary identities can coexist in the same body, in the same space.”

Shabi herself mirrors this return, in a way. Though she seems to identify more as a British-Iraqi and despite her obvious ambivalence about her birthplace, “I go back to Israel to research this book,” she writes, “but also, I just go back there after all."

I had the opportunity to sit down and talk with Rachel about her book in Tel Aviv this summer. The following conversation, full of equally fascinating insights, is what transpired.

ZEEK: So is a memoir next?

RS: (Laughs). No. I’m an old school journalist. I hate the “I.” But when I discussed the book idea with my agent and publishers, they said, ‘OK, you’re a British journalist, but actually you’re Israeli and you have Iraqi parents – so aren’t you a part of the story?’ The “I” that does feature in the book is really the most I could handle without feeling totally self-absorbed. And I do think that my editors were right, that I needed to be present there—the tension in the book is the result of the first person narration versus the journalist.

ZEEK: Why Mizrahim and why now?

RS: This is a fault line in Israeli society that is not being picked up by international media because they’re so focused on the conflict. But as an Iraqi-Jew, I was attuned to it. When I pitched the idea, people would say, “What do you mean? Arab Jews?” There’s a big knowledge gap. The Arab Jews break a binary—they’re not located in a clear area and so they are often overlooked, because they complicate the story and interfere with people’s hard-wired assumptions about what the story is.

ZEEK: By writing this book, were you negotiating your own identity at all?

RS: I grew up with this [Iraqi] culture in my home, and this exposure caused me to understand the culture to be both rich and enriching.  But I was a migrant kid, so I didn’t want any part of it – you know, I just wanted to be British like all the other kids in monotone 1970s England. Ironically, writing a book about how Arab Jews were discriminated against here brought me back to it.

The musician Yair Dalal said that when he teaches a Mizrahi kid an Arabic song and they go home and play it, and their dad sings along and then they start to talk about the dad’s life in Iraq, it’s like this awakening.  Dalal says that at this point, the kid is back on track. And it seems like so many Mizrahim are off track, that they’ve buried their roots and discarded their home cultures because that’s what is socially received as the right thing to do, in order to be accepted and to get ahead.

ZEEK: In the UK, this is published under the title Not the Enemy. It’s a clever title that seems intended to provoke the reader into immediately questioning who the enemy is. Were you playing with this?

RS: Absolutely. Mizrahim have an awareness that they’re being received in a certain way because they look like the enemy. But what is the enemy? The Arab world? The Arab within the Jew? The oriental was made the enemy. And I’m not sure that Israel can handle this supposed “enemy” surrounding its borders, when it doesn’t even know how to deal with this “enemy” within its own country, within its own Jewish people.

ZEEK: Rather than being the enemy, do Mizrahim have the potential to be a bridge?

RS: There’s always that potential, but it’s difficult because the national script holds sway. And the national script is based on differences and perpetual enmity, not on similarities, bridges or hybrid identities. Moroccans in Sderot, in the midst of (Operation) Cast Lead—while they were getting all these nationalistic messages—were reminiscing about the days they visited with their friends in Gaza, years before the borders and the siege on the strip. Gaza City is nearer to them culturally, physically, geographically then the rest of Israel is, in some ways.

ZEEK: How does Not the Enemy contribute to the narratives of Israel and Palestine?

RS: I was trying to break the polarity… The book shows a population, once a majority, whose existence is barely acknowledged outside of Israel. I don’t think you can understand Israel’s relationship to the region, to the Middle East, unless you understand Israel’s internal relationships.

ZEEK: Was this an attempt to deconstruct Zionism?

RS: I’m not really dealing in labels, especially ones that are so loaded! But, that said, Zionism was conceived in Europe and was premised on bringing a European Jewish society to the region. Those European Jews arrive with a set of assumptions about the Middle East, that it was backwards, uncivilized and inferior to the Western world – and they interacted with the Palestinians and Mizrahim on the basis of such assumptions. But many Mizrahim feel that the Europeans didn’t have a clue about what their lived had been like in the Arab world and are still stunned by the levels of prejudice and ignorance. And these assumptions, this ignorance, was what allowed the Europeans to discriminate against them.

ZEEK: Does Israel need to heal its internal rifts first?

RS: Absolutely. Weak societies can’t make peace. And weak societies are the perfect breeding ground for the far right, for ultra-nationalism and racism – of the sort that we see flourishing in Israel today.  I don’t think Israel is capable of making peace with its neighbors until it makes peace with itself. Israel has to make itself genuinely strong, equal and accepting of other cultures before it can integrate into the region.

ZEEK: In your opinion, how aware is the Israeli public of the issues of discrimination—historical and contemporary—against Mizrahi Jews?

RS: I think Israelis want to put it behind them. When it is acknowledged, it is only acknowledged historically, not as something that continues to happen today. Israelis want to believe that they are an integrated society. But injustice happened, it continues, and it goes unacknowledged and unnoticed—it’s a head in the sand approach. I understand it, but I think Israel needs to look at its painful past to move forward.

ZEEK: In recent years, Mizrahi culture has been incorporated into the mainstream, to some extent, via pop culture. Does this represent integration or fetishization?

RS: Why is it that so much Mizrahi music is put into an ethnic ghetto – why does it even have this sub-label of “Mizrahi” music rather than just being “Israeli”? It says so much about what Israel wants its identity to be. We’ll give the Mizrahim pop culture, we’ll give them their music – which we’ll deem is cheap, populist and low quality. But high culture is left to the Europeans – classical music, quality music, that’s European. So while, yes, things have come a long way, what shape have they taken? Mizrahim are on TV, but they’re hosting cookery programs, they’re advertising the national lottery…

Things should look better by now. If the Mizrahim were truly integrated, they would make up 50% of the supreme court, rather than the tiny percent than they do. They would be presenting intelligent TV programs, reading the news, they would comprise half the Jewish population at Israeli universities…They are not reaching the same levels of professional and educational attainment as Ashkenazim do. But people want to believe that there is equality.

ZEEK: Did your views change as you were working on this book?

RS: When I started researching the book and talking with campaigners and academics I did often wonder if it was really as bad as they described. But you only have to look around you in Israel to see that it is bad. And when I went to the slums and development towns that are home to majority Mizrahi populations, I was shocked by how much people still feel like they’re discriminated against. I was shocked by how much this script still holds sway.  It’s so obviously still an issue – and the fact that it continues to be ignored and swept away just makes it worse.

We live our lives in frames that grant us an appearance that frequently is not of our own devising.  The camera lens, for instance, puts us in frames as the photographer’s eyes see us; a law or a statute frames us within its strictures, telling us whether we can walk this way wearing those shoes, or whether we are citizens or unreal. When Sophocles’ Antigone mourns for the life of her brother in defiance of statute, she is making a life that the government would rather remain unseen, seen, by her act of grieving; Plato, on the other hand, is deeply suspicious of emotion, and in The Republic, suggests that poets should be banned because if too many citizens go to the theatre and access their emotions, they might be willing to defy statute as well, and be like Antigone.

In Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable, Judith Butler argues for Antigone’s position, claiming first and foremost that grievablility is the best sign that life has been lived meaningfully in the face of the other. Butler provides a detailed overview of the apprehension of “otherness” in both philosophical and psychological discourse, from Emmanuel Levinas to Melanie Klein and DW Winnicott, where the morality and ethics of the “I” is constructed in relation to the apprehension of the other.

This move, of course, leads to a series of questions that grow organically from Butler's previous book, Precarious Life (Verso, 2004).  What does it mean to be human? What does it mean that the humanity of someone can be programmatically erased, either by action or inaction on the part of a larger social structure? Does one have to be human in order to be mourned? What, in fact, is a grievable life anyway?

As I wrote this essay, the death of Michael Jackson was all over the airwaves.  It’s difficult not to comment on this as a timely affect of the impact of the frames that Butler outlines in Frames of War.  If there is a frame through which we view the world (at least in the United States), it is television.  Today’s news is full of information and reporting on the death of Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett, and strikingly empty of reporting on the situation in Iran.  The question is whose lives are grievable here? What is the mechanism that creates this disparity in grievability, between Michael Jackson on the one hand and Iran on the other?

“…  specific lives cannot be apprehended as injured or lost if they are not first apprehended as living," Butler writes. "If certain lives do not qualify as lives or are, from the start, not conceivable as lives within certain epistemological frames, then these lives are never lived nor lost in the full sense” (emphasis mine)

In other words, in order to have a life, it must be apprehended as a living thing, but it must also adhere to some set of acceptable criteria, be a part of and exposed to “socially and politically articulated forces” that permit the body to continue to live.  It is these articulated forces that are what Butler calls frames:

"[Frames] do not unilaterally decide the conditions of appearance but their aim is nevertheless to delimit the sphere of appearance itself.  On the other hand, the problem is ontological, since the question at issue is: What is a life?"

Frames of War unpacks a set of categories that delimit and open up questions of personal and political responsibility, apprehension, recognizability, and a recognition of the other that can lead to trust in the very precarious nature of the relational.  The question is what would happen if we lived in that precarious place all the time?

There are people today in Tehran who are dying because of the recently questionable election in Iran.  No one is reporting on it, officially.  The Iranian government isn’t taking pictures, and rather like the situation in Tiananmen Square 20 years ago, the only information that’s getting out, is getting out via Twitter, a glorified text messaging system.  If you don’t use Twitter, or don’t know someone who uses it avidly and for political purposes, the chances are pretty good that you don’t know that the Iranian government is killing it's opponents.

What do those lives mean in the grand scheme of things? How are we to acknowledge them if we don’t know they exist, or who they are? What is the apparatus by which we can apprehend and recognize those lives as having value and of having been worth living if the government and all bodies around who would ordinarily frame those lives and make them real for us are falling down on their jobs? What is our responsibility to the “other” in this case, the other who cannot be seen or grieved?

If we only recognize lives through seeing them on the television screen, for instance, framed by “trustworthy” reportage, then Iran is ungrievable, but Michael Jackson is not.

In order to see the other and recognize value in the apprehension thereof, we have to be prepared to apprehend “something which is not us.” Levinas would say that it is the human ability to comprehend the morality and ethics of otherness that sets us apart from other species.  That we see the other, and apprehend in that seeing that it is at the very minimum our job not to hurt it just for being there.  In the look between two people,  a kind of ethics is born.  In order to apprehend this moral imperative, we are required to be able to recognize something like us in the other person, either because he or she has two eyes, a nose, and a mouth, or via some other mechanism. But apprehension that there is another person there is the first step.

Then we have to decide not to kill it.  “For Levinas, violence is one “temptation” that a subject may feel in the encounter with the precarious life of the other that is communicated through the face. This is why the face is at once a temptation to kill and an interdiction against killing.” So in this case, per Levinas’ construction of otherness, finding morality in the “face” would make no sense without the violent impulse.  This becomes a built-in ambivalence for Levinas, “a desire to kill, an ethical necessity not to kill.

But then, as Butler points out, we can’t recognize that the other person has value if we can’t apprehend their existence in the first place.  “What we are able to apprehend is surely facilitated by norms of recognition, but it would be a mistake to say that we are utterly limited by existing norms of recognition when we apprehend a life," she writes.  "We can apprehend, for instance, that something is not recognized by a recognition.” Thus we are put in the position of having to render something or someone “recognizable” in order for “recognition” to take place at all.  The frames, in this case those “categories, conventions, and norms that prepare or establish a subject for recognition”, make it possible for us to recognize the other as not the self.  So in this sense, for Butler, “recognizability precedes recognition.”

The point, however, is to ask how such norms operate to produce certain subjects as “recognizable” persons, and to make others decidedly more difficult to recognize. So what does it mean that we don’t know how many civilians are dead in Iraq and Afghanistan? Or that we haven’t seen the bodies (or even the caskets, except once by accident) of the dead troops coming home? How are we to grieve if the social structures governing our lives are actively conspiring to keep us from knowing the humanity of the “other” that we’re killing and/or losing? How can we value that which we have no access to because that access is being actively blocked?

Obviously,  aside from the examples of present-day Iran and Michael Jackson, there are applications for such a comprehensive understanding of what makes things grievable. The act of apprehension aids in the taking of personal responsibility thusly: human responsibility requires recognition of the other as a person first and foremost.  You can't know to be responsible if you don't see the other as human.

 

Thus, when we don’t see the bodies of our soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, when the terrorist who blows him or herself up has no name or face, when we’re told children are starving but we never see them, apprehension, recognizability, recognition, are all steps needed to get to the point of responsibility, which is what Judith Butler would claim is at least one way into the frames that keep us from recognizing the “other” as being like ourselves. “So just as norms of recognizability prepare the way for recognition," she argues, "so schemas of intelligibility condition and produce norms of recognizability.”

How then, do we take the idea of recognizing the other in ourselves, which will lead us to taking personal responsibility (a la Antigone), and bring it into the public sphere? Butler claims that, “Although it is not possible to singularize every life destroyed in war, there are surely ways to register the populations injured and destroyed without fully assimilating to the iconic function of the image.”

When we hurt, it is more difficult for us to acknowledge, apprehend, and recognize the pain of others as something equal to our own pain.  And yet that very thing may well be what it is necessary for us to do in order to level the playing field, so to speak.  If we’re all willing to live in a place of precarity, precarity can save us from our own worst selves, for “to call into question this frame by which injurability is falsely and unequally distributed is precisely to call into question one of the dominant frames sustaining the current wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, but also in the Middle East.”

Judith Butler’s argument is that some form of radical precarity can possibly lead us to a path of non-violence. Where traditional non-violence is a reactive position, what Butler is talking about is active non-violence.  A willingness to risk violence from the other by not acting violently ourselves, first.  Everyone has to, however, be willing to risk this violence simultaneously, in order for this set of non-frames to work.  Grievability is precisely that egalitarian radical notion that is outside the frame of ordinary discourse.

January 02, 2009

Amir is not his real name, although that’s what’s written on his business card:Taxi Amir. I never find out what his real name is. Amir’s a Muslim from Palestine but his mum was born in Jerusalem and eight years ago he got Israeli ID.

We’re driving back from Bethlehem. Amir’s ID allows him to cross the Palestine-Israel divide in the hills by Beit Jala and Walada. Amir moved recently to Jerusalem where he worked on the buses, cleaning, picked up Hebrew, and started driving a taxi round the city and beyond.

‘I saw I had to learn Hebrew very good and very fast,’ he says. ‘So I listened and asked questions and then I learned to read. I took anything with Hebrew on it and at first I couldn’t understand – I just looked at the words – but I learned bit by bit. Now I read a Hebrew paper every day.’

It’s not that easy for Amir, getting fares. The other day a woman of about 50 jumped into his cab and they were driving along and a couple of lights in he puts the radio on – just softly. It’s Arabic, though, the music that’s coming out.

‘Oh my God!’ says his passenger, throwing open the door. ‘You’re an Arab! Why didn’t you tell me you're an Arab?’ And she’s gone without even paying the fare.

A lot of people assume Amir’s Jewish. His Hebrew’s perfect, but it’s more than just the words you use – it’s the confident way you say them that makes the difference. We stop at a checkpoint on the road from Walada to Jerusalem. Amir winds down the window and addresses the soldier: ‘Ma hamatzav achi–what’s up brother?’ It’s pouring with rain and the soldier glances briefly at me in the back. ‘Tayeret’ says Amir – she’s a tourist. The soldier waves us through.

‘You have to speak to them first,’ Amir says. ‘Then they relax. If I’m just sitting here silent the soldiers get scared and take the whole car apart. I’ve been through here with four people in my car and they let us pass. Another time, I was alone and they opened everything – it was 20 minutes before they let me go.’

Then there was the couple in their 30s. Amir was cabbing one day in Jerusalem, downtown. His Arab cabbie mate was up ahead – there was a queue and Amir told the couple his mate was first. ‘We don’t want him, he’s an Arab,’ they said. ‘We’ll take you – we want a Jew.’

It’s not easy to tell what Amir is. There are no special identifying signs. His taxi has yellow Israeli plates, and its only adornment is an air-freshener, swinging the colours of the US flag. Amir himself is dark, semitic, but not too dark. He’s 26. His mother wants him married soon – his younger brother’s a father already, at only 23. It’s just not easy finding her – the right one. But girls like Amir, they really do.

There was this woman, only 22, who took the the cab especially for him. There was a line of cabs all calling her – Taxi! Taxi! Monit! She’s strolling along and they’re all calling to her and she ignores them, every one, until Amir. This fine-looking woman spots him, stops and saunters back, bending into the window as he winds it down.

‘How much to L–’ she says.

He tells her 50 shekels. Much too much. Wants to make sure she’s getting in for him.

‘That’s cool.’ She jumps into the front seat. And they’re just sitting there talking and she’s all, how old are you, what do you like doing, where do you go? Are you married? Do you have any kids?

After a while, she says, ‘So where are your family from? Morocco, Tunisia, Iraq?’ And he says, ‘No, I’m an Arab, they’re from Palestine.’

She just sits there, frozen, arms clamped rigid to her sides: ‘Oh my God! I would have started something with you right now. I thought you were a Jew.’

I never imagined George Bush and I would be sharing war stories. This one was more in spirit than over spirits.

See, in the summer of 2007, I made my first trip to Israel. I was there on assignment, reporting on the reconstructive impact of American Jewish money in the year following the war with Hezbollah and also spending two days along the Gaza border. Between the border with Lebanon and the Negev, the group of journalists I was with made a stop in an Arab Israeli town where the Jewish Agency of the Joint -- I can't really remember -- supported a social services center.

The project didn't interest me much, but the surrounding poverty did. So I wandered off, roaming the neighborhood before stopping to watch a young boy and two girls play in the dirt.

When they noticed me, they shouted words I didn’t understand and took a few steps toward me. One of the kids was waving at me, holding some paper in their hand. This, I thought, was my invitation to go talk with these kids about their feelings about Jews. Not sure how I was going to accomplish that in Arabic, but I walked their way nonetheless.

The paper, it turned out, was money. I guess they thought that, based on my curly hair, I would drawn to a few bucks like a mouse to cheese. I tried to brush this affront off in the most embarrassing way—by engaging the children in some dialogue—at which point the little boy, maybe 8 years old, took off his sandal and held it up like he was going to swat me.

I recalled this experience two months ago, upon hearing that President Bush had had an even closer brush with the sole of an Arab shoe.

As a refresher: Bush was in Iraq to showcase recent security gains. While Bush was speaking at a press conference in the Green Zone, al-Zaidi, a young journalist, stood up, ripped off his right shoe and chucked it at the American president; his left shoe quickly followed, as did folk hero status for al-Zaidi. But so did jail time.

Al-Zaidi's trial, for assaulting a foreign dignitary, began Thursday. His defense: That Bush just made him so angry that he was overcome with rage.

"While he was talking I was looking at all his achievements," al-Zaidi said. "More than a million killed, the destruction and humiliation of mosques, violations against Iraqi women, attacking Iraqis every day and every hour. A whole people are saddened because of his policy, and he was talking with a smile on his face. So I reacted to this feeling by throwing my shoes. … It was spontaneous."

Bush was insulted a lot during his eight years in office. But being physically likened to the dirt beneath an Iraqi's foot had to rank among the worst. And unfortunately for the former president, he can't brush the attack off like I could: on curly hair and cultural prejudices.

Melissa Seligman, author of The Day After He Left for Iraq, is guest blogging this week as one of Jewcy's Lit Klatsch bloggers. Seligman is an army wife and mother, and her book is a memoir of her husband's deployment.

My life hasn't always been like this. But whose has? I'm constantly waiting. Waiting for my husband to leave. To come home. To reconnect. Or to tell him goodbye again. It seems that from the very beginning, longing has defined our marriage.

I longed to move, drive, see the west, and capture the world. He was my counterpart, my kindred hippy spirit. We married, moved out west, and began that romantic love affair that had tickled my brain for years. Until.

"I want to go active duty," he told me one day in front of the hazy skyline of the Rockies. He had been in uniform before. Only he had a pierced tongue, in-between-duty goatees, and enough of a wild side to consider him anything but straight and narrow. "Um. Okay," I said. What was there to stop us? It would ensure a good paycheck. Lots of travel. Job security.

I knew he would most likely go to Afghanistan. 9/11 was fresh. My patriotism was high, and he has always been called to serve. So, we packed up, left the Rockies in the rearview mirror, and headed east. To a great unknown. It was exciting. And scary. And wonderful.

Until he left for nearly seven months of school. That day, I sat on a couch and watched that infamous statue being tugged and torn in Baghdad. Two wars. Shock and awe left me shocked and raw.

As my belly began to grow with a baby (surprise!), we got sent up north. All the way up north, and I began to hear constant rumors that he would leave as soon as we got there. And that he would continue to leave year after year after year.

It wasn't long. With a still-swollen belly and a screaming baby in my arms, exactly five years ago, my still-newlywed husband stood at our kitchen door on a frigid New York night, kissed her pink forehead, and begged me to understand. I thought I understood. At least, I tried.

But when that door closed in my face, reality sucker punched me in the gut. There is no graceful, easy, painless, romantic way to send your husband off to war. The emptiness left behind the fading sound of his boots is deafening.

He did come home. Reintroduced himself to his wife and child. And we merged back into the false sense of togetherness. With two raging wars, how comfortable could we possibly get? We tried. We took what time we had, and we trudged into the world of blissful family. Until.

With my belly swollen, again, I stood in a parking lot, holding our second newborn and searching for a way to say goodbye. Again. This time, Iraq beckoned. I had no way of knowing what would become of us. Of him. Of our marriage. I only knew one simplified version of our life, our struggle: I loved him.

After he left, the body count grew. The explosions intensified, and I struggled to remember that vital truth while I read of his attacks and missions. With two babies, a husband at war, and a life on hold, I wondered what future would come to pass.

Our struggle, my need to survive and retain some semblance of sanity, his mission to maintain a vital role in our family, and the pain of my daughter and our fatherless son all came together in my journal, my book, The Day After He Left for Iraq.

People ask me quite often, "How do you do it?" My answer is simple: I'm not sure I am doing it.

Melissa Seligman, author of The Day After He Left for Iraq, is guest blogging on Jewcy, and she'll be here all week.  Stay tuned.

Eli Lake, whose code name among Al Qaeda operatives is "The Jew" (I kid you not), provides further evidence that a U.S. military presence shall indeed persist in Iraq, well beyond the nominal exit date set forth in the Status of Forces Agreement:

Lt. Gen. Frank Helmick, who is in charge of training Iraq's security services and military, told The Washington Times that some of the ordered equipment would not be delivered until 2012, even though a new status of forces agreement (SOFA) requires all U.S. troops to exit the country by 2011.

Gen. Helmick said the Iraqi military had already ordered 140 M1 Abrams tanks, up to 24 Bell Assault Reconnaissance helicopters and 6 C130-J transport airplanes. The tanks will not be delivered until 2011, and the helicopters and transport planes will not arrive until the end of 2012 or possibly in 2013.

"The government of Iraq does not have to purchase that kind of equipment from the United States; they have elected to do so," Gen. Helmick said. "To me that could indicate that the Iraqis would like to have a long-term strategic relationship with the United States."

Of course, this materiel requires training and that training can only be provided by the U.S. Army and Air Force. South Korea, according to Eli's sources, is now Iraq's model for a long-term military alliance.

Someone close to the now-former president once explained to me his (the president's) most debilitating character flaw. A rather crowded field, you might think, but the answer, rooted in George W. Bush's overindulged demand for absolute loyalty, did manage to envelope all the other usual suspects like arrogance, dismissiveness, anti-intellectualism, and parochialism. This well-connected person phrased it like this: "When you decide that six or seven people have turned on you, and that they're now your mortal enemies, that's not a problem. But when you get up to a 100 million or so Americans who've become mortal enemies--that's a problem."

History will do its work in evaluating the Bush Era once the furies and recriminations have ebbed. (The late Samuel Huntington would have eloquently termed the last five years of angry opposition to this administration a "creedal passion period," now giving way to the level-headed pragmatism that is our nation's state of equilibrium.) But if vice can be transmuted into virtue, and if Bush can be said to have got anything right during his time in office, surely his defiance of the "realist" prescription for salvaging Iraq in 2006 must record as a triumph.

Recall the almost universal criticism that the "surge" elicited when it was first announced, against a then almost universally embraced Hamilton-Baker plan for quitting Iraq militarily and letting unprepared Iraqis--and other regional dictatorships--sort out a mess of our own making. Andrew Sullivan said the surge was a lost cause, something that should have been tried three years earlier, when we first invaded. Joe Klein and Frank Rich had little time for a rethink of a counterinsurgency policy wedded to an injection of more young servicemen, even though Klein was the most perceptive in analyzing the true nature of that policy. Even Christopher Hitchens, later a champion of the surge, was, as I recall, initially dour about its prospect for success, although he was and has been steadfast in defending the moral and strategic imperative of ending the regime of Saddam Hussein.

I bring all this up for two reasons. The first is that Peter Beinart took the occasion of this week's Goodbye to All That gleefulness to give credit where he rightly saw it was due, noting that since Gen. David Petraeus' brilliant war plan--really a local policing one--was implemented, the number of Iraq war dead has dropped from a staggering 3,475 to 500, and American troop fatalities have fallen to nearly a sixth of what they were. Adds Beinart: 

[I]f Iraq overall represents a massive stain on Bush's record, his decision to increase America's troop presence in late 2006 now looks like his finest hour. Given the mood in Washington and the country as a whole, it would have been far easier to do the opposite. Politically, Bush took the path of most resistance. He endured an avalanche of scorn, and now he has been vindicated. He was not only right; he was courageous.

The second reason I bring this up is amour propre--both the institutional and personal strains. Noxious little neocon that I am, I spent a few solid hours of my time trying to convince my fellow editors that the surge had a chance and should be given one. The result was a piece in Jewcy that elicited its own share of scorn and derision--though not, thankfully, from those editors--when it first appeared:

In Counterinsurgency, Petraeus describes an effective clear-hold-build mission as more akin to urban policing than battlefield combat: Think New York City’s “broken windows” anti-crime initiative. The central paradox of counterinsurgency is that it applies proportionately less force with greater numbers. The goal is to safeguard the native population from pitiless and desperate aggressors without actively hunting down and killing them. For this reason it’s known as “war at the graduate level.”

Here’s how it will work: In the “clearing” phase, Iraqis and Americans will share planning and reconnaissance responsibilities. They’ll establish surveillance routes together and then “sweep” local housing and apartment blocks searching for signs of insurgent activity. Civilians prefer to have their doors knocked on by Yanks than by fellow Iraqis, who may moonlight as sectarian partisans or death squad riffraff. Iraqi troops will serve as cultural and linguistic liaisons and learn the delicate art of questioning civilians. Peace, in other words, will have to be a polyglot phenomenon.

[...]

The lessons of Tal Afar, Petraeus’s expertise in clear-hold-build tactics, and Kagan’s proposals as to the necessary number of troops and where those troops should be focused—all of these are crucial planks of a program that has been dismissed as uninsipired and feckless rather than honestly assessed.

Still, when the president warned that the year ahead would be “bloody and violent,” he acknowledged the grim reality that the emergence of a viable post-Saddam state will require extreme forbearance on the part of the American and Iraqi peoples. And so it will.

This isn't intended as a nyah-nyah (well, maybe a little), but rather as a mild suggestion. It took Democrats too long to acknowledge the obvious success of the surge because doing so, as Beinart points out, might have compromised their candidate's chances in November. Yet this denial might also have done something far worse: encourage a hasty and irresponsible withdrawal from Iraq at a time when the war looked to be finally going our way.

The rate at which the politics of the negative can become conventional wisdom has increased exponentially since the creation of the blogosphere. Conservatives should take heed from the faults of liberal excess, or what is sometimes known as Bush Derangement Syndrome. If Nemesis should stalk future Obama policies, or look as if it's doing, don't succumb to partisan pettiness or wishful defeatism because you don't don't like the man pedding the policy. We may not be driven to other "quagmires" by the current president, much less to ones that result in the loss of American lives, but you can be sure that we will be presented with initiatives that are hotly contested and reviled in some quarters. The president's willingness to take the necessary risks to see them through will be susceptible to popular opinion.

A leader who goes against consensus because he's adopted a siege mentality or a martyrdom complex is no healthier than one who goes with consensus because he's afraid his aura will fade. Honesty and dispassionate appraisal from his constituents, and the pundits they rely on for their information, are useful checks on either executive shortcoming.

Many people were recently amused by the shoe throwing antics of journalist Muntadhar al-Zaidi. According to his brother, al-Zaidi’s actions were ’spontaneous’ and meant to ‘humiliate the tyrant’ George Bush. The New York Times reports that al-Zaidi has become a ‘hero’ in the Arab world.

In Saudi Arabia, a newspaper reported that a man had offered $10 million to buy just one of what has almost certainly become the world’s most famous pair of black dress shoes.

A daughter of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, the Libyan leader, reportedly awarded the shoe thrower, Muntader al-Zaidi, a 29-year-old journalist, a medal of courage.

[…]

In Syria, Mr. Zaidi’s picture was shown all day on state television, with Syrians calling in to share their admiration for his gesture and his bravery. In central Damascus, a huge banner hung over a street, reading, “Oh, heroic journalist, thank you so much for what you have done.”

Likewise, in some areas of Iraq, al-Zaidi is finding support:

Protestors in Sadr City, the bastion of radical anti-US cleric Moqtada al-Sadr … threw shoes at passing US military vehicles, while in the holy Shiite city of Najaf, the crowds chanted “Down with America”.

And there’s more:

Saddam Hussein’s former lawyer Khalil al-Dulaimi said he was forming a team to defend Zaidi and that around 200 lawyers, including Americans, had offered their services for free.

And more:

Venezuela’s anti-U.S. President Hugo Chavez said on Monday that an Iraqi reporter who flung his shoes at U.S. President George W. Bush was courageous.

So, al-Zaidi has found fans among anti-democratic regimes, followers of an Islamist demagogue, the lunatic Chavez, and the lawyer of Iraq’s former dictator. But, still, al-Zaidi is a progressive, right? An Iraqi David against an American Goliath, a selfless supporter of the oppressed, a man whose feelings welled up so strongly he felt he had to do something.

Maybe not.

Al-Zeidi may have also been motivated by what a colleague described as a boastful, showoff personality.

“He was very boastful, arrogant and always showing off,” said Zanko Ahmed, a Kurdish journalist who attended a journalism training course with al-Zeidi in Lebanon. “He tried to raise topics to show that nobody is as smart as he is.”

Ahmed recalled that al-Zeidi spoke glowingly of anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, whose followers organized protests Monday to demand his release.

“Regrettably, he didn’t learn anything from the course in Lebanon, where we were taught ethics of journalism and how to be detached and neutral,” Ahmed said.

Then there’s this:

Zaidi’s colleagues in Baghdad, where he had worked for three years, said he had long been planning to throw shoes at Bush if ever he got the chance.

“Muntazer detested America. He detested the US soldiers, he detested Bush,” said one on condition of anonymity.

So, it seems that al-Zaidi may in fact be a showoff who had long been planning this supposedly ’spontaneous’ protest. Al-Zaidi’s apparent support for Muqtada al-Sadr also challenges the claim that he is just representing ‘ordinary Iraqis’, and it turns out that he has another anti-American hero:

A day after the incident, al-Zeidi’s three brothers and one sister gathered in al-Zeidi’s simple, one-bedroom apartment in west Baghdad. The home was decorated with a poster of Latin American revolutionary leader Che Guevara, who is widely lionized in the Middle East.

Let’s take these one at a time. Al-Zaidi is remembered as someone who spoke ‘glowingly’ of Muqtada al-Sadr. Al-Sadr is an Islamist extremist. Of course, this isn’t something that bothers everyone on the ‘progressive Left’. Indeed, in 2006 the Socialist Workers Party and the Stop The War Coalition invited his representative to speak at the anti-war rally in London.

Al-Sadr’s militia, the Mahdi Army, is a disgusting clerical fascist outfit with a particular love for killing gay people, as Peter Tatchell reported in 2007:

The Madhi Army has been involved in the torture and execution of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Iraqis – and many other Iraqis, especially women, who do not conform to its harsh, perverse interpretation of Islam … Muqtada al-Sadr’s men have adopted a new tactic, borrowed from the Iranian secret police. They are posing as gays in online chatrooms, in order to lure gay men, arrange dates and kill them.

Al-Sadr’s backers are worth noting:

According to Asharq al-Awsat, a London-based pan-Arab newspaper, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps’ Quds Force established three military training camps in Qasr-i Shirin, ‘Ilam, and Hamid, on the Iranian side of the Iran-Iraq border to train Jaysh al-Mahdi elements. A former Quds Force official cited in Asharq al-Awsat claims the Iranians have trained between 800 and 1,200 Iraqi supporters of Muqtada in espionage and reconnoitering in addition to standard military arts. There are also reports that the Iranian embassy in Baghdad has distributed 400 international cell phones to supporters of Muqtada as well as to clerics in Sadr City and Najaf. In addition to communications and logistical support, Iran provides $80 million a month in direct aid to Muqtada’s movement. The Iranian support is controversial. According to one critic, “Behind al-Sadr’s phenomenon and money are the most extremist and anti-democratic governing bodies in Iran which seek to settle its account with the international community with the blood of the Iraqis.”

The Iranian regime is also providing a route into Iraq for extremists linked to al-Sadr. For example, there is this report, from February of this year:

The Sadrist Shi’ites in Iraq, led by Muqtada Al-Sadr, have declared a three-day mourning period for Imad Mughniya.

An Iraqi security source said that Mughniya had entered Iraq via Iran, and had trained some 500 members of the Mahdi Army, which belongs to the Sadrists.

He added that he had also trained a number of squads in planning and carrying out assassinations within Iraq.

These are the credentials of one of the men al-Zaidi is said to admire. Then there’s Che Guevara. Things don’t get any better here. Che was a man who considered Americans ‘fit only for extermination’, wanted to launch a nuclear attack on New York City, and set up forced labour camps for gay men.

So, what are we to make of all this? The picture of Muntadhar al-Zaidi that emerges is far from one of an average Iraqi man opposed to American ‘tyranny’. Instead, we find an admirer of violent religious and political extremists, and a self-publicist with ‘revolutionary’ pretensions. An ideal candidate for membership of the Socialist Workers Party, no doubt, but not a man worthy of support, no matter what we might think of George Bush.

Once again, Azarmehr of the excellent ‘For a democratic secular Iran’ blog hits the nail on the head:

What would have happened if the Arab so called journalist who threw his shoe at President Bush, as he claimed ‘for all the mothers and orphans of Iraq?’, had thrown his shoe at Saddam Hussein? For Saddam certainly made thousands of mothers mourn for their sons and thousands of Iraqis had become orphans as a result of Saddam’s massacres.

If Muntazer al-Zaidi was critical of Bush’s policies, as he had a legitimate right to, he could have posed them as questions during the press conference in a civilised manner, something he would have never dared under Saddam.

It seems very likely that this wasn’t really about Iraq and it wasn’t about Bush; instead, it was all about al-Zaidi and his desire to be seen as some kind of anti-American hero. It seems he’s got his way, as Azarmehr notes:

it shows how twisted the values of some people are when as a result of throwing his shoe, Muntazer al-Zaidi becomes a hero and a poem on an Islamist website praises him as “a hero with a lion’s heart”.

Indeed.

A big focus online at the moment is on the allegedly harsh treatment meted out on al-Zaidi immediately following the shoe throwing incident. This also needs to be put into perspective. Iraq is still a volatile country and in the current climate throwing any kind of missile at the President of the USA is unlikely to be taken lightly. If this beating happened after al-Zaidi had been taken into custody this is of course totally unacceptable, but if he sustained his injuries while being wrestled away this is not entirely without justification. For all the authorities knew, al-Zaidi could have been a suicide bomber.

We’re talking about a country in which in recent weeks terrorist murderers have killed 15 people, including civilians, in attacks aimed at an Iraqi police academy, a suicide bomber in Mosul has killed 14 and wounded 30, and a women’s rights activist has been beheaded.

Muntadhar al-Zaidi’s ‘protest’ was juvenile and irresponsible and did nothing to further the cause of democracy and stability in Iraq. What is a promising sign of improvements is the fact that a judge is investigating the alleged abuse of al-Zaidi. Under Saddam, such abuse would have been only a prelude to further torments, quite possibly extended to al-Zaidi’s family as well. This is something those who cheer on the Iraqi ‘resistance’ would do well to remember.

The Status of Forces Agreement between the U.S. and Iraq was ratified on Thanksgiving Day, and if the holiday weren't enough to drown it out of the news cycle, then the jihadist massacres in Mumbai surely were. Among those looking to certify Obama's electoral victory as a sign that our involvement in Iraq is all but over, and U.S. troops are due to return home soon, the sofa, as the agreement is colloquially known, superficially gives cause for celebration. It states that all American combat troops return to their bases by June 2009, and that all withdraw from the country by the last calendar date of 2011. So that's that, right?

Not so fast. Eli Lake at TNR reads between the lines, and echoes the conventional wisdom among both our own military establishment and Iraq's:

A good picture of the size and shape of America's future presence in Iraq can be found in a memo sent by retired General Barry McCaffrey earlier last month to the head of the social sciences department at West Point, Colonel Michael Meese. The "after action report" was written following a tour of Iraq that McCaffrey took in October, during which he met with Iraqi political and military leaders, as well as General Ray Odierno and Ambassador Ryan Crocker. McCaffrey has been a reliable weathervane of military thinking throughout the Iraq war (though his media career likely ended after The New York Times published an expose on his ties to defense contractors last week). He has also been a reliable surrogate for the thinking of Odierno and General David Petraeus, who understandably have tried to steer clear of the politics of the Iraq war.

In the report, obtained by The New Republic, McCaffrey writes, "We should assume that the Iraqi government will eventually ask us to stay beyond 2011 with a residual force of trainers, counterterrorist capabilities, logistics, and air power. (My estimate--perhaps a force of 20,000 to 40,000 troops)." This estimate of what a training and support mission would require was echoed in interviews with a State Department official and two military sources--who requested anonymity--when asked what kind of American presence they foresaw in Iraq following 2011.

McCaffrey's reasoning rests in part on his view of the Iraqi military, an institution he says has vastly improved yet still needs mentoring, equipment, and support from Americans on the ground. In his report, McCaffrey writes that Iraq's border-control service is "anemic" and that the army cannot currently conduct military operations without U.S. support and equipment. "The confidence of the Iraqi combat force is still dependant on US mentoring and backup," he writes. "Their officers are very explicit on this point--the iraqi security forces do not want the u.s. combat units to leave--yet." The capital letters are McCaffrey's.

Lest you think that a former national security reporter for the New York Sun has a bias, consider that Fred Kaplan -- whose views on the war went from liberal interventionism to the informed sophisticate's answer to Pandagon -- reported in 2006 on the physical realities of withdrawal for the Atlantic. His conclusion was that it wasn't as easy to perform as Obama and company had been making out on the stump.

As I wrote for Pajamas Media months ago, in response to Obama's out-of-date and alarmingly ad hoc campaign rhetoric on the war:

The bulk of our presence is Iraq is confined to what are known as Forward Operating Bases (FOBs), which are mostly located outside of cities and have excellent security. There are about 70 FOBs all across the country right now, and more than a dozen are giant military installations reminiscent, as Kaplan wrote, “of the West German garrisons from Cold War days,” the removal of which, needless to say, will not be easy, swift or likely given the capital investments they represent. Nor should one expect these facilities to be left unattended or manned solely by Iraqis. John McCain was quite right when he spoke of a prolonged U.S. presence in the Gulf, provided - and Obama and McCain’s liberal critics always fail to recapitulate this necessary condition - U.S. troops are not being targeted or killed. Most troops reside safely in these well-fortified FOBs, and they might continue to do so for the foreseeable future. As for the rest of the Pentagon’s materiel - tanks, trucks, armored vehicles, etc. - this will have to be evacuated slowly and under duress, with most of it traveling by ground toward Kuwait down Route Tampa, a highway favored by insurgents for its murderous potential due to its narrowness. (Evacuations by air would occur at an even more glacial pace, as the largest U.S. cargo plane can carry only one or two tanks per trip. There are 1,900 tanks in total in Iraq at present.)

The probable Obama model for withdrawal, if he ever gets around to sharing specifics, will in any event call for 30-35,000 troops, or roughly five brigades, to stay behind. In April, the candidate tellingly queried David Petraeus on the feasibility of keeping roughly this number in country if “we had the current status quo” in terms of security. Kaplan, too, cited 30,000 as the most “stripped-down” contingent required to occupy the FOBs. But even Lee Hamilton, who co-chaired the Iraq Study Group and has endorsed Obama, has scuppered the idea of setting any firm withdrawal date-it just isn’t possible, says the reputed “realist.” More notoriously, Obama’s former foreign policy adviser Samantha Power was fired not for calling Hillary Clinton a “monster” but for telling another truth, namely that any cited plan for withdrawal is a “best-case-scenario” subject to revision once Obama becomes commander-in-chief. Another way of saying this is that his current crowd-pleasing peroration of “Bring Them Home Now” is a feint.

 

Thomas Friedman wrote an entire column today, in Sunday’s New York Times about an Iraqi legislator who was prosecuted for visiting Israel in a brave one-man attempt to make a statement that hatred didn’t have to prevail in the Middle East. Friedman reported that the Iraqi Parliament attempted to strip Mithal al-Alusi of his Parliamentary immunity so that he could be prosecuted under an old law that could have given him the death penalty for such a “crime”.

And then, Friedman told us the Iraqi federal high court took the brave action of overturning the Parliament’s decision, affirming the right to freedom of travel. And 400 Iraqi intellectuals signed an open letter in an Iraqi newpaper supporting Alusi. Good for them of course. And Friedman spent the rest of the column attempting to extract some optimism from all this, indeed to argue that perhaps we can “salvage something positive” from the entire Iraqi venture. Maybe we can. I guess it depends on what you view as “optimistic” or “positive”.

Because as I was drifting off to sleep last night I heard an interview on the BBC world service radio with al-Alusi that mentioned something Friedman did not. Maybe Friedman didn’t know it. But this brave man’s two sons were murdered because of his trip. Murdered in an attempt to murder him as well. How many Iraqis are going to now take advantage of the fabulous “freedom of travel” Friedman celebrates now? Maybe he didn’t get the death penalty–yet–but his sons did.

I don’t know about you but I’m not sure I find this all that optimistic an episode. I felt sickened by hearing it especially after Mumbai. I read Friedman’s column over and over again looking for a mention of the murder of the brave man’s sons. Was he not aware of it? I hope that’s the reason, rather than that he left it out knowingly.

But shouldn’t he have known? Shouldn’t it have made a difference to his conclusion? Americans always want to believe in hope, that there’s a solution to every problem. I’m not sure any more. Combined with Mumbai it made me think that religious hatred has won. That it will never go away. That it’s just too easy to slaughter people in the name of God. That as much as the optimists might seek to find some reason for hope, there is always going to be another al-Alusi seeing his sons murdered, another Mumbai seeing 200 or more. Let’s not fool ourselves. I’m willing to listen to counter-arguments–I’d like to find a reason to be optimistic–but not arguments that leave out little facts like the murder of a brave man’s two sons.

Who messed up what today?

Various low-level underlings at Verizon have been put on leave without pay for allegedly spying on Barack Obama's personal cell phone usage. Funny, during the previous adminstration, spying on personal cell phones became law, now it's apparently taboo again.

It's that time of the decade where scientists are having the 'Let's clone a woolly mammoth!' discussion.

Mission Accomplished: 10,000 people gathered in Baghdad to protest the security pact between Iraq and the United States.

In addition to the $14 million that People paid for exclusive pictures of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie's newborn twins, the magazine also agreed that it will only provide positive coverage of the couple's lives now and in the future.

Russia's parliament approved a bill that will increase presidential terms from four years to six. I can't stress this enough: keep an eye on those devious post-commie bastards.

So like us: the Chinese automobile industry is lobbying for a bailout from Beijing.

Scholars in Poland (oxymoron?) have identified the remains of Nicholas Copernicus, which had apparently been missing.

The Indian Navy is stepping up and taking on the hordes of pirates that have been running around and plundering willy-nilly in the Indian Ocean off the coast of Somalia.

The economy of Rwanda is actually not doing terribly.

Poor Sarah Palin just can't stay out of the novelty news:

 

 

 

 

 

In the last few weeks, I’ve seen an admirable conservative newspaper fold, a favorite writer hang himself, and a presidential candidate I assumed I’d be voting for tomorrow disappoint me in ways I hadn’t anticipated. As to that dead writer…

The fact is that John McCain is a genuine hero of the only kind Vietnam now has to offer, a hero not because of what he did but because of what he suffered — voluntarily, for a Code. This gives him the moral authority both to utter lines about causes beyond self-interest and to expect us, even in this age of Spin and lawyerly cunning, to believe he means them. Literally: "moral authority," that old cliché, much like so many other clichés — "service," "honor," "duty," "patriotism" — that have become just mostly words now, slogans invoked by men in nice suits who want something from us. The John McCain we've seen, though — arguing for his doomed campaign-finance bill on the Senate floor in '98, calling his colleagues crooks to their faces on C-Span, talking openly about a bought-and-paid-for government on Charlie Rose in July '99, unpretentious and bright as hell in the Iowa debates and New Hampshire Town Hall Meetings — something about him made a lot of us feel the guy wanted something different from us, something more than votes or money, something old and maybe corny but with a weird achy pull to it like a whiff of a childhood smell or a name on the tip of your tongue, something that would make us think about what terms like "service" and "sacrifice" and "honor" might really refer to, like whether they actually stood for something, maybe.

David Foster Wallace was one of the sincerest members of his generation (which also, by nice coincidence, happens to be Barack Obama's generation), and an encomium like this should not be discounted for its slightly hedged conclusion. Being wary of a person’s honor and selflessness only means you’ve been on the planet long enough to know what to expect. Cynicism can be a snare, but pessimism is the scar on a broken heart. Still, it did once seem, long ago, as if John McCain would rather lose an election than compromise himself by stooping to the level of his opponent, whose “patrician smirk and mangled cant,” as Wallace so aptly put it, was outdone by his base insinuations as to where McCain’s dark-skinned daughter had really come from.

I don’t consider the Vietnam War a great hour for our republic, and I don’t go for flap-flapping nostrums in lieu of moral and intellectual arguments. On foreign policy, I want a president who won’t allow his pragmatism or approval rating to eclipse the necessity of calling a thug a thug and a tyrant a tyrant. On many issues such as capital punishment, gay marriage and the role of religion in the public sphere, I’m to left of the Democratic establishment. I believe the last eight years have been a period of disastrous misrule and demoralization, out of which two unambiguous goods have managed to emerge: the end of Saddam Hussein, and the gasping chance for parliamentary democracy in Iraq.

Conservatism at its best means not being a “maverick,” but taking principled stances when popular opinion is ranged against them, putting yourself in the path of history, which you know is likely to mow you down and your feckless little Stop sign. “I am a man who, reluctantly, grudgingly, step by step, is destroying himself that this country and the faith by which it lives may continue to exist.” That’s how Whittaker Chambers, a true patriot of Dostoevskian complexity, explained his choice to become a national pariah rather than allow the dangers of international Communism go unnoticed. If McCain held my attention this year, it wasn’t only because of his Chambers-like willingness to destroy himself for his country in a southeast Asian prison cell long before I was born. It was also because of his willingness to destroy his political career by advocating an unpopular military policy designed to save a country other than his own, one that had been written off as lost to Hobbesian chaos. No revisionism, in light of the squalidness of his general campaign, will alter the fact that, had the surge failed, so too would have McCain in this year’s primaries.  He was at his most presidential in risking his chance to become president. He was also at his most conservative.

It would take a Sophocles or a Shakespeare to map the degeneration of a man who had got a handle on being “post-partisan” before it was fashionable or electorally remunerative. If I had to unearth the whole offence, I would say the trouble began in South Carolina, in 2000, when McCain witnessed just how nasty the game had got to be played, and just how badly he lost by choosing not to play it that way. Christopher Hitchens is wrong to say that McCain’s late turn into a merchant of anything-goes innuendo is the result of creeping “senility.” It’s classical political resentment: in his mind, he’s still losing to George W. Bush, just as Nixon thought he was losing to John F. Kennedy—in 1972.

I’ve defended McCain where I thought he’d been unjustly or hysterically maligned, but there’s no arguing the point that his choice of a running mate has effectively squandered the public trust. What a blunder, and what a wasted opportunity. Does anyone now think the Republican “base,” whose tendency to froth and foam has led to absurd but familiar analogies to fascism, would have voted Democratic this year had it been deprived of a cultural reactionary with a socialite’s wardrobe? Rush Limbaugh would have declared for the man he calls the “Magic Negro”?  Really?  The bloc McCain needed to persuade was that of independents—his natural constituency—who would have found the combination of experience and integrity too alluring to pass up. We needed an Eisenhower with a steady hand, not a Preston Sturges of “right-wing screwball,” as Leon Wieseltier unimprovably phrased it.

Here’s another Greek misfortune of his own making: McCain’s age and questionable health would have been overshadowed by his apparent energy on the stump had his VP been less of a Halloween costume and more of an insurance policy. Instead, these concerns became the stuff of actuarial office bets, and a disturbing aura of death and decrepitude has surrounded him during his final laps around the country.

As for Barack Obama, I'm worried his supporters are too  ecstatic, and not chastened for the challenges he's about to face, which some of them, judging by conversations I've had, can't imagine to be worse than Hillary Clinton. I find his personality winning, and his intellect impressive. For good reason did Weber define charisma as one criterion of authority. I’ve recoiled in horror at the paranoid and sinister accusations leveled against Obama from the fever-swamps of blogland. Isn't it amazing how this charming young man manages to divide his time between battleground states and a cave in Waziristan?

When I hear the word “socialism,” I remember the lonely, prophetic radicals who screamed bloody murder about the Soviet Union before liberals and conservatives stopped referring warmly to Uncle Joe. Until and unless the DNC espouses the belief in the government ownership of the means of production, then the rejoinder belongs to the author of Das Kapital himself, who famously demeaned the non-revolutionary varieties of redistributionism by saying, “If that is Marxism, then I am not a Marxist.”

Actually, some of the most astute observers of this election have been Marxists, or recovering New Leftists. Sol Stern, former editor of Ramparts, has rightly assailed William Ayers as a greater immediate danger to the American education system than he ever was to the Pentagon. Paul Berman, echoing his hero Irving Howe, has reminded us that 60’s left-wing authoritarianism is no alternative to the timeless right-wing brand, and that an unrepentant mad bomber does not need or deserve a burnished reputation or friendship society. In these very pages, Phyllis Chesler has shown how Sarah Palin has brought out the worst in modern feminism, causing cracks in the glass ceiling, and crack-ups in the movement.

Tellingly, however, none of these critics has rushed to denounce Obama as the second coming of Abbie Hoffman or Franz Fanon. Why is that, do you suppose, if he’s as recondite and unreconstructed as some of my inbox material maintains?  I find the graying 68ers more reliable in their judgments of sign-posted ideology than the collective wisdom of the National Review editorial board. In fact, one prominent black detractor, Professor Adolph Reed, has made the most salient case against Obama in the Progressive, arguing that the candidate isn’t anything as glamorous as a secret radical, but rather a standard-issue opportunist who talks out of both sides of his mouth and is always looking to a cut a deal to advance his career. What more could we want from a graduate of the Daley machine of Chicago, that noble city? The Saul to consult to understand Obama’s baptism in picaresque urban realities isn’t Alinsky. It’s Bellow.

Where I have covered Obama’s policy prescriptions – namely for Iraq – I’ve found him improvisational and half-cocked. He doesn’t confuse Sunni and Shia, but as late as May 2008 he thought Iraqis would bow to the constitutional re-drafting authority of the United Nations, the body responsible for a decade of immiserating sanctions, and which has not had a presence in their country since Al Qaeda blew up its headquarters in Baghdad in 2003. He also labored under a misapprehension that Iraq’s parliament had not, as of last spring, passed laws for de-Baathification, political amnesty, and provisional elections when in fact it had passed them, and he had made the non-fulfillment of these and other “benchmarks” established by the Bush administration a major talking point of his antiwar rhetoric.

Nevertheless, Obama shows no sign of letting up on Al Qaeda where it still presents a lethal menace to civilization, and it’s unlikely—given the price he’s had to pay for even suggesting it—that he would now meet with the mullahs of Iran without preconditions. Verbal Vesuvius though his own running mate may be, Joe Biden has seen Russia by standing on its soil, not through magic binoculars; he has a proven record of doing something about genocide; and he has kept abreast of the headlines in Iraq enough to recommend a three-state solution that, however misguided in my view, has been endorsed by Peter Galbraith, a scholar and diplomat who ranks as one of the most serious American experts on Iraqi Kurdistan. Given Obama’s likely appointment of Richard Holbrooke, advocate of Kosovo independence, to a high-level position in his cabinet, there is every expectation that muscular interventionism will indeed have a fighting chance in the next four years. My friend Eli Lake, a prominent neoconservative, has written cogently that Obama’s foreign policy, judging by the people crafting it, would more resemble Ronald Reagan’s than it would Jimmy Carter’s. That means escalating dirty wars and black ops, ladies and gentlemen. Yes, we will.

Perhaps most important, given the way Americans are said to vote, Obama has demonstrated an equanimity during the financial calamity that, while not a sufficient condition for keeping the country out of a depression, is surely a necessary one.

Nothing would have pleased me more than to have been able to say that of his rival, under different circumstances.

It's difficult to put all the pieces together, and it is tempting to fall into one of several made-to-order narratives. Which might, in fact be true - but that doesn't mean that they are complete.First, the basics. American troops attacked a farmhouse 8 kilometers inside Syria, killing 7 or 8 people, one of whom was Abu Ghadiya, a senior figure in Al Qaeda in Iraq. U.S. intelligence sources have said that there was information that Abu Ghadiya was planning an attack inside Iraq, and that while women and children were present, none were injured. Syrian sources say that women and children were among the dead, killed when U.S. Special Forces opened fire on the building form outside.

This attack in Syria follows recent attacks into Pakistan that were apparently similarly based on actionable intelligence. (In other words, the Bush administration is acting rather in the manner that Barack Obama has suggested. John McCain has called Obama "naïve" and worse for saying out loud that he would consider such cross-border raids; the Bush administration appears less reticent. But that particular irony is a tangent I do not want to pursue at the moment.) Although there has been no comment from either the White House or the State Department about the most recent raid, officials quoted in several sources say that it reflects the administrations broad interpretation of Article 51 of the U.N. Charter which provides the right of individual or collective self-defense to member states. This is the same provision that Israel has repeatedly cited to justify its own military actions including its attack on Something Mysterious in Syria last September; it has also been used by Turkish troops pursuing Kurdish militants in their sanctuaries in northern Iraq. President Bush hinted at the scope of the theory in his speech to the U.N. this past month: "As sovereign states, we have an obligation to govern responsibly . . . We have an obligation to prevent our territory from being used as a sanctuary for terrorism and proliferation and human trafficking and organized crime."

It is important to note that this is not the Bush Doctrine of pre-emptive attack, it is a theory of "self-defense" that according to administration sources justifies attacks on insurgents in other nations if they threaten "the forces, allies, or interests of the United States" according to U.S. officials. The word "interest," of course, makes the scope of this theory essentially infinite.The immediate reactions from Syria and Iran were predictable: the Syrian Foreign Minister called the raid an act of "terrorist aggression" and warned darkly "if they do it again, we will defend our territories."

The Iraqi government spokesman tried to have it both ways, condemning the attack on the grounds that the Iraqi constitution prohibits the use of its territory to attack neighboring countries - a fairly clear reference to the increasingly hostile negotiations between the Bush administration and the Maliki government over the terms of an agreement to permit U.S. troops to remain in Iraq - and also called on Syria to improve border security.

There are several easy America-centered narratives.

One is that the intelligence was specific enough and the target important enough that other consequences were simply pushed aside. Another is a conspiracy theory about attempts by the White House to influence the election. And a third has Bush either taking advantage of the opportunity to act between now and January or, alternatively, ensuring that Al Qaeda and others do not assume that the U.S. is so distracted by the election its aftermath that they can act with impunity. (If you really want to get paranoid, there is also the Somalia Theory: that Bush is deliberately creating a disaster for his successor to inherit.)All perfectly plausible. But there is still an element of weirdness in the story. As recently as last month, Secretary of State Rice was saying nice things about the progress Syria was making in securing its borders, although she said that there remained much work to be done. The EU has been working to ease Syria's isolation.

The U.S., for all our complaints about them, have been sending suspected terrorists to Syria to be tortured - er, questioned - for years, and may be continuing to do so. This month Syria opened official relations with an independent Lebanon. In other words, there were several reasons to think that relations between Damascus and Washington were beginning to thaw, which I have argued repeatedly would be a very good thing, if only to give Assad some alternative to an alliance with Teheran. So the timing is a little odd.

That can be explained, perhaps, by the unpredictable fact of actionable intelligence becoming available, but then there is the weirdness of the very moderate Syrian reaction. Bluster aside, the Syrian response has been . . . to close the American School in Damascus. Despite talks of "next time we will defend our territories" there are no reports of troop movements to the Iraqi border, unlike the movement of 10,000 Syrian troops to the Lebanese border in September. There was no talk of siccing Hezbollah on Israel; there was no mention of Israel, period. What's going on in Damascus?

Here's some possibly relevant background. In February of this year, Imad Mughniyah, a senior Hezbollah official, was mysteriously assassinated in Syria; one might plausibly assume that the Syrian government was involved. In September of this year, a car bomb in Damascus near the office of security killed 17 people. Assad may be deciding he has had just about enough of Iran's mujahadeen, and Al Qaeda, too. It's worth reminding ourselves that Syria has a secular government dominated by members of a minority Allawite sect and a predominantly Sunni population. Radical Islam is not likely to sit well with Assad's Baathist regime (any more than it sat well with Saddam Hussein).

More context. Israel is about to have elections, as is the United States. In the U.S., the neoconservatives are on their way out, but John "we are all Georgians" McCain - the only person in the U.S. or Iraq who does not accept the idea of a withdrawal of U.S. forces - is not much of an improvement. In Israel, in the person of Bibi Netanyahu, the Bush-era neocon Weltgeist could be on its way back in. (This is not an idle analogy: Richard Perle and Douglas Feith worked for Netanyahu's government during the 1990s, producing the famous 1996 working paper describing a grand strategic vision that included a U.S. attack to get rid of Saddam Hussein; that kind of talk doesn't play well over here any more, but Netanyahu - who got 90% of his primary financing from outside Israel -- is still living the dream).

In 2006, during the Lebanon War, neocons in the Bush administration were urging Israel to attack Syria directly. The Olmert government dismissed the idea as crazy, but a Netanyahu government might be a danger to itself and others. (There was a very odd moment during that conflict in which an Israeli government spokesman explained a troop build-up as aimed at Syria, which caused the Syrian military to go on high alert, but that appears to have been a comedy of errors; the Israeli spokesman preferred to make a provocative and potentially destabilizing statement rather than admit that the high command had lost control over the situation.)

And never mind attacking Syria; if Israel launches a pre-emptive attack on Iran, what are Syria's choices for a course of action? The Israeli elections may present Assad with an opportunity, or a threat.There is also the likelihood that the Americans may not be in the neighborhood much longer. The Iraqi government has proposed amendments to the agreement with the U.S. that would call for all U.S. forces to be out of Iraq - regardless of conditions on the ground - no later than 2011, and include an acceleration clause that would permit total withdrawal on 12 months' notice at Iraq's request.

The U.S. has threatened to cut off all support and all operations of any kind inside Iraq on January 1 if the original draft of the agreement is not signed. But one way or another, it looks likely that the U.S. military role in Iraq will at a minimum be very greatly curtailed in the near future: even a McCain administration cannot get away with forcing a continued presence against the will of the elected government, at least not for long. At that point we would be confronted with the preposterous situation of Iraq appealing to the U.N. to impose sanctions on the U.S.

So here's a thought. Is it possible that Assad is tired of Hezbollah and Al Qaeda both, and maybe even of being tied to Iran? Is it possible that the reason Syrian reaction to the raid is so relatively muted is that they didn't really object, and may even have known about the raid in advance? This would be interesting as all get-out, if it's true. If this is true, it needs to be pursued. From the U.S. perspective nothing is more important than turning Syria away from Iran. Particularly as the Kurds in northern Iraq appear to be becoming increasingly aggressive, Syria is going to be a key player in post-U.S. arrangements.

From Israel's perspective the case is even starker. Nothing serves Israel's interests more right now than giving Syria a good reason to stop supporting Hezbollah and Hamas. It is also possible that Assad has an eye on the elections and does not want to do anything to strengthen Netanyahu and McCain, because he is hoping for administrations he can talk to. Assad is a pure pragmatist with no ties to religious extremists and serious economic needs. He is also notoriously difficult to deal with, but that's what our diplomats get paid for (sorry, guys.) High level talks without preconditions with Syria this Winter? A consummation devoutly to be wished.

The swipe of freedom: Or is it...?I remember when I got my first credit card.  Some nice people had set up a picnic table on campus, and they were giving out free t-shirts if you would merely fill out a form and apply.  I also remember that the sales girl was a sexy blonde wearing little more than the free t-shirt that came with the card.  That pretty much sealed the deal.

In a few weeks, the card arrived, and like most of your idiot undergrads, I went right over to my local CD shop and picked up about a half-dozen albums that I seemed to need at the time.  Suddenly I also had money for gas and movie tickets and a new bike.  Before I knew it, the card was maxed out...as it turns out, there were these "limits" that I was not aware of. 

But MBNA was kind enough to raise my credit limit, just in time for spring break.  Luckily I didn't have to spend actual money on those jello shots and Natural Lights and bail - I had a magic card, you see.  Even when the bills came due, I was happy to see that although I owed thousands, my buddies at MBNA were happy to accept forty or fifty a month.  What great guys!

Since I made minimum payments for years, I figure that those watered-down spring break drinks probably ended up costing me about thirty beans each.

The United States has a magic card, too.  We decided to put a whole war on it, for the first time in our history.  And to think that prior generations actually paid for such things more-or-less up front (chumps)!  So far, we have charged about a cool trillion for Iraq, and add hundreds of billions more every year.

I didn't want to pick up more hours at my job in college, but I wanted those CDs and jello shots...so I did it the easy and stupid way.  Our leaders didn't want to ask us to sacrifice anything, but they also wanted to attack Iraq....so they did it the easy and stupid way. 

Like me, they plan to make minimum payments on our debt, which is apparently the American way.  Once the interest accrues and compounds, giving the Iraqis the right to dip their fingers in purple paint and vote for their vicious local tribal leaders will cost us well over three trillion dollars.  And counting.

Keep all this in mind as the Secretary of the Treasury asks us to let him throw another $700 billion on our national magic card.

The bailout is going to cost each of us about $2300.  But really, since our grandkids are already going to be inheriting a debt of at least $50,000 each, what's a couple of grand more, really?

Nerds like me might point out that massive, unsustainable debt has historically brought great powers to their knees as efficiently as hordes of barbarians from the east.  Countries are creditors as they grow, and debtors as they decline.  But who likes nerds, really, anyway?  Can't I just shut my trap and suck down the jello shot?

Christopher Fettweis, author of Losing Hurts Twice As Bad, is guest blogging on Jewcy.  Tomorrow he'll publish his parting post.  Stay tuned. 

Dexter Filkins is the greatest war correspondent of my generation, and I would say this even if we weren't friends. We've reported together on occasion; Dexter knows better than anyone how to work your way into bad places, and work your way out again. He's also the author of a great new book, coming out imminently from Knopf, called "The Forever War."  I e-mailed him some questions about his Times story today, and here are his answers:

Jeffrey Goldberg: In a review in the Times today, Michiko Kakutani quotes Farnaz Fassihi writing in 2004: "The genie of terrorism, chaos, and mayhem has been unleashed onto this country as a result of American mistakes, and it can't be put back into a bottle."  The question is, is the genie back in the bottle?

Dexter Filkins: Yes, it is, for now. The progress here is remarkable. I came back to Iraq after being away for nearly two years, and honestly, parts of it are difficult for me to recognize. The park out in front of the house where I live--on the Tigris River--was a dead, dying, spooky place. It's now filled with people--families with children, women walking alone, even at night. That was inconceivable in 2006. The Iraqis who are out there walking in the parks were making their own judgments ­that it is safe enough for them to go out for a walk. They're voting with their feet. It's a wonderful thing to see.

Having said that, it's pretty clear that the calm is very fragile. The calm is built on a series of arrangements that are not self-sustaining; indeed, some of which, like the Sunni Awakening, are showing signs of coming apart. So the genie is back in the bottle, but I'm not sure for how long.

JG: The most astonishing detail in your article today is your description of a parade through Ramadi, which included "American marines and soldiers wearing neither helmets nor body armor, nor carrying guns." You wrote, "The festive scene became an occasion for celebration by Iraqis and Americans, who at several moments wondered aloud in the sweltering heat how things had gone from so grim to so much better, so fast." How much of this can be credited to the surge in troops and the shift in tactics last year, and how much to the notion that Iraqis simply got tired of the killing?

DF: Astonishing indeed. I haven't seen Americans soldiers walking around Iraq without helmets since the summer of 2003, when the Americans, who were popular in southern Iraq for having taken down Saddam, used to do that.

What's happened in Anbar really doesn't have anything to do with the surge and, in fact, it is one of the main reasons why the surge has worked.

In Anbar, two things happened: Al Qaeda overreached and the Americans wised up. If you will recall, the Americans came into Iraq in 2003 in a very heavy-handed way, often sweeping up large groups of young males who had nothing to do with the insurgency. In a tribal society, ­where everyone is related to everyone else, ­the Americans dug themselves a very large hole.

Al Qaeda of Mesopotamia, through sheer ruthlessness, became the dominant player in the insurgency. And while the guys from Al Qaeda were very good at killing Americans, a goal with which many Sunnis sympathized, they also wanted to kill Iraqi ­Shiites, who they consider apostates, and anyone associated with the Iraqi government. Ordinary Iraqis, it's now clear, didn't want to go along.

Sheikhing up Al QaedaAnd the sheikhs in Anbar didn't go along. So when Al Qaeda started murdering the sheikhs, the sheikhs went to the Americans. The Americans, chastened by their earlier mistakes, grabbed the opportunity. They made a deal. They crushed Al Qaeda in Anbar. The result is the calm you see today.

The Sunni Awakening, which began in Anbar, spread rapidly to other Sunni areas of Iraq, and that took enormous pressure off the Americans and the Iraqi government as the surge kicked in.

JG: One tribal leader you quote, Hamid al-Hais, puts most of the blame for the chaos of the previous years on Paul Bremer's decision to disband the army. Do you agree?

DF: I don't know. I don't think there are any one-line explanations for any of this. But it's pretty clear that decision had a lot of bad consequences.

JG: Is the average Iraqi better off today than he was under Saddam? Or, put another way, is the average Iraqi who was not directly tied to the regime better off today than he was six years ago?

DF: Today is a moment in time. The calm is just a few months old. The Iraqis have been through an extraordinarily violent and traumatic five years. Many, many people suffered horrendously under Saddam. Ask me the question again in five years.

JG: Is Iraq a democracy?

DF: I don't think so. A democracy has many things: elections, compromise between groups, an atmosphere safe enough to discuss the issues of the day, and institutions that exist outside of government that are strong enough to allow all of the above to flourish--newspapers, political groups and the like. In Iraq, most of those things are in their infancy.

JG: How do you, as an American, feel walking through Baghdad today vs. two years ago?

DF: I'll answer with two snapshots from dusk. I went running in the park in front of the New York Times house the other day as the sun was going down and I felt no threat at all. People waved, people smiled. It felt very normal.

A couple of days later I went to Sadr City, also at dusk. Sadr City is a vast slum that takes in about three million people. It's the stronghold of the Mahdi Army, the Shiite militia, and it's been the scene of heavy fighting, as recently as a few months ago. I was with some Iraqi friends. It felt perfectly normal. Then one of my Iraqi friends said to me, "What do you think would happen if you were alone?" And I said, "What?" And he and the other Iraqis laughed and said: "You'd be dead in ten seconds."

Let me just say: I left.

[Cross-posted from The Atlantic]

Commonly, the laws of war in Judaism are understood through the categories of milchemet mitzvah (commanded or holy war) and milchemet r'shut (optional war). These two categories-supplemented at times by the category of milchemet hovah (obligatory war), are helpful in outlining the acceptable and/or unacceptable practices of deploying violence on a massive scale. This is usually the first place that people turn to when trying to think about Jewish notions of just and unjust war.

I want to argue that this specific body of halachah or Jewish law is irrelevant to the contemporary discussion. To find moral insight about the justice of war in the Jewish tradition, one must turn to a less well trod part of the halachic field. A more technical and, in certain ways, legally more sophisticated halachic discussions reveals that these parts of halachah are embedded in a (by definition) particularistic and, at times, chauvinistic tradition. Yet, it is possible to extract a halachic claim from its particularist context by embracing rather than ignoring the specifics of that context.[2]

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In 1812, Napoleon Bonaparte of France, head of the largest army in the world, began the worst military campaign in history. His ill-fated and tragic invasion of Russia led to nearly two thirds of the French army getting killed. The effects of the doomed maneuver were so long-standing that France never again recovered its military potency. Senator Barack Obama recently stated that if he's elected president the US will engage in a military maneuver just as foolish.

Within Senator Obama's recent pronouncements on Iraq is an ominous and troubling prescription about the small land-locked country of Afghanistan. The proposal involves sending "at least" two additional combat brigades to support the 50,000 NATO troops already present in Afghanistan. He goes on to ask for more helicopters, more nonmilitary assistance, and more intelligence gathering.

All of this, in Senator Obama's eyes, is supposed to suggest his greater military aptitude; his attempt to show that he will finish the job -- capturing Bin Laden and defeating the Taliban -- that his Republican predecessor was unable to finish. It is also a lot of politics, because increasing troop presence in Afghanistan allows Obama to say that he supports troop withdrawal from Iraq without appearing like the "surrender monkey" that the Republican opposition will inevitably try to paint him as around election time.

Yet Senator Obama's proposal is one of the worst military ideas in recent history. Here is why:

Afghanistan is considered the "graveyard of empires." Shortly after 9/11, in his 2001 Foreign Affairs essay, Milton Bearden, the CIA station chief in Pakistan in the 1980's, stated that unless the US proceeded with caution it would end up "on the ash heap of Afghan history."

The list of emperors and nations that have tried to hold Afghanistan is long and there is not a single success story. The Soviet Union spent ten years there, with helicopter gunships and tactical nuclear weapons, and failed. The British Empire spent nearly a hundred years trying to alternatively invade and control Afghanistan and veritably failed at both. The Ottoman Empire, which considered itself the inheritor of Roman power, never bothered with Afghanistan. In fact, they were actually dealt crippling blows by invaders from Afghanistan. In the seventh century, even the heaving Arab armies that had been able to take over then world power Persia in a mere five years after the death of Muhammad were unable to take Afghanistan. For Afghanistan to become Muslim more than a hundred years later it took a local ruler from within, and even then power was not centralized in one man. In other words, Senator Obama is setting the US up for failure of world-historical proportions.

Unfortunately most American policy makers don't quite understand the difficulty associated with holding Afghanistan because they think that successful invasion is tantamount to a successful occupation. That, of course, is the same tragedy that befell everyone from the Soviets to the armies of Muhammad. Afghanistan allows itself to be invaded. It doesn't allow itself to be held. Testament of this lies in the fact that it has now been seven years since the US military entered Afghanistan and yet just the other day an American base was actually infiltrated and 9 marines were killed. It will only get worse.

The reasons that Afghanistan is impossible to hold have to do with geography. Because of its centralized and landlocked location insurgents can disappear into any number of neighboring countries and use them as a base to launch attacks on the occupier. These days the base of insurgent operation are the tribal areas of Pakistan. Even if, miraculously, the US is able to clean out the tribal areas - an operation to which no sane Pakistani politician or military dictator would agree - it would simply mean that the Taliban would move to another one of the neighboring countries. It could be Turkmenistan or Tajikistan or most likely, Uzbekistan, which is now, as the noted journalist Ahmed Rashid pointed out in his aptly titled book Descent Into Chaos, producing militants at an alarming rate.

It would perhaps behoove Senator Obama to look at some of the ways the current Afghan insurgency uses the Afghan geography to its advantage:

- Recently US and UK forces captured one stash of Taliban heroin worth nearly two billion dollars going out from an Iranian port.

- Before that, an investigation by the Independent UK discovered that the Taliban are going to the northern border to purchase weapons directly from the Russians.

- Simultaneously an investigation by the NYTimes revealed that the Taliban have taken control of the marble mines in Pakistan's tribal areas.

All this doesn't even include any mention of the vast number of foreign fighters that come to Afghanistan from across the world, using the countless entry points into the country.

Historically, issues of geography have perhaps been at forefront of any military planning with respect to Afghanistan, but with Senator Obama, they barely register.

For someone who previously disparaged the Iraq war as a "dumb war" and a "rash war" his suggestions about increasing troop presence in Afghanistan is a mistake. It is the sort of thing that led Napolean Bonaparte to destroy France.

But perhaps the only thing worse than Senator Obama's ideas are those of Senator McCain. No doubt dueling with his opponent, he recently announced that under his plan the US will commit even more troops to Afghanistan than it would under Senator Obama's plan. Such breathless scheming taking place by the leading presidential contenders will lead to disaster.

Getting bogged down in Afghanistan would be infinitely worse for the national interest than any Iraq.

• Jewish singles are more Jewishly engaged than people think (but does the word ‘engaged’ in that sentence make any other singles nervous?). Jewish single: plenty Jew-y A new report by sociologists Steven Cohen and Ari Kelman has found that unmarried Jews in their twenties and thirties are plenty involved in Jewish life, with 42% of singles saying more than half of their friends are Jewish, and 51% saying they talk to their friends about “Jewish matters.” JTA
  

• Josh Martin, an American Jew who went to help rebuild in Israel after the Lebanon war in 2006, made a second trip to help rebuild in Lebanon.  He brought along a group of Christians, Jews, and Muslims to do service projects across the country, including an art project in a Palestinian refugee camp. JTA
  

• A small library of rare and valuable Jewish books and manuscripts has been smuggled out of Iraq and into Israel. Some of the books are more than 600 years old, and had to be spirited out of Baghdad by Iraqi-born book dealer Mordechai Ben-Porat and his emissaries. Many of the books were being held in the Library of Congress in Washington DC, but they’ve all been returned to Israel.  Jewschool
  

• A Orthodox Jewish man at the center of a life support controversy died this week in Winnipeg. Samuel Golubchuk, 84, had been on life support for months, but his family did not want life support to be removed despite doctor’s recommendation to the contrary. Three doctors at Grace Hospital resigned as a result of the case, saying that keeping Golubchuk alive was akin to torture. Golubchuk’s children argues that halachically they were not allowed to do anything that might hasten their father’s death. Golubchuk died while on life support.  Chronicle Herald

• A Lebanese-born man being charged with supporting a terrorist group has asked that the Jewish judge assigned to his case recuse himself. Since Fawzi Mustapha Assi, 48, has already plead guilty to the charges, Judge Gerald E. Rosen refused the request, saying that Assi was “a little late.”  Mercury News
  

• An Israeli-Arab who lectures about the Holocaust at Palestinian refugee camps teaches that instead of denying the atrocities of World War II, Palestinians should recognize the loss of millions of Jews. If the Jewish people could survive losing 6 million, he explains, it will easily survive terrorist bombings and other attacks that kill 20-25. Instead of violent attacks, Palestinians should find other tactics.  Haaretz
  

• In Israel, an American Idol type competition is underway for the Haredi world. This one is called “Upcoming Voice,” only features men, restricts the judges from saying anything mean or embarrassing to the contestants, and is not shown on TV, since the Haredi world frowns on television. Instead, it’s distributed on CDs that members of the ultra-Orthodox world can watch on their home computers.  Haaretz

• In Tajikistan, the only synagogue is being demolished against the will of the community, to make way for the new presidential residence. Officials were going to let the Jewish community dismantle the synagogue themselves so as to maintain as much dignity for the space as possible, but when they weren’t progressing quickly enough, the Chief Engineer had the remaining wall bulldozed.  Religious Intelligence

For a couple of weeks now, liberals and anti-warriors have been freaking out about reports by Patrick Cockburn that the Bush administration was planning some secret arrangement with the Iraqi government (the latter presumably under duress) for a permanent US occupation of the country involving some 58 separate military installations and a military detachment whose members are not subject to Iraqi law. The administration's trump card, according to Cockburn, was the threat of withholding tens of billions of dollars of Iraqi assets now kept at the Federal Reserve bank in New York.

Unsurprisingly, Andrew Sullivan and Matthew Yglesias are breathing a sigh of reliefBush And Maliki: Less important than you think about today's independent reports that the Maliki government won't go for the deal. "A decision of this magnitude should not be made by an out-going administration regardless of the evolving views of the American people. Americans deserve to debate this as well as Iraqis," says Sullivan. "Leaving decisions about how U.S. forces operate in Iraq up to the next president sounds like an awfully good idea to me," says Yglesias.

Now call me a Luddite if you must, but Article II, section 2 of the US Constitution does quite clearly state that the president requires two thirds approval of the Senate to ratify a treaty. In practice, of course, presidents skirt such rules all the time, including the present. But by the same token, since whatever offer the administration makes sure the Iraqis can't refuse is not a binding treaty under the Constitution, the next administration can just rescind it at its discretion. In the meantime, in the eight months between now and inauguration day, the de facto reality of the US presence in Iraq isn't going to change substantially, regardless of formal changes in its classification. So the Bush occupation plan just isn't that important; if the US occupation of Iraq continues through the next administration, it will be because of the next president's decisions, not George Bush's.

None of this is to absolve the Bush administration of charges of imperialism. A country occupied by a foreign power in perpetuity under rules that supersede any of its laws isn't an independent sovereign state, it's a satrapy. The Bush administration just isn't very good at imperialism, and there's no need to give them credit for power they don't really have.

ADDING: The political angle, though, is obvious. If Bush can scratch out some agreement, no matter how coerced and contrary to Iraqi sovereignty, that provides (flimsy) grounds for hawks to scream "betrayal" and "backstabbing" in case the next president winds down the occupation. 

More than a year before 9/11, veteran journalist and author Ahmed Rashid, wrote a book called Taliban. It described the rampant extremism in Afghanistan and asked the US to consider an immediate nation-building intervention. That warning went ignored --- with disastrous results.

His recent book, Descent Into Chaos: The United States and the Failure of Nation Federally Administered Tribal Areas Of Pakistan: Not really administered by PakistanBuilding in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia, is informed by nearly a decade observing and evaluating US policy in south and central Asia, and finding it baffling. Bin Laden is still free; the Taliban are expanding into Pakistan and Afghanistan; despite the increasing number of terrorists with verifiable links to the Federally Administrated Tribal Areas in Pakistan, nothing is being done to address the underlying issues there; and no one is paying any attention to Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Tukmenistan and Uzbekistan, despite the fact that these countries exhibit many of the same (and some unique) characteristics that led to problems in Pakistan and Afghanistan. None of these developments, in Rashid's reckoning, was inevitable. Mishandling and misjudgment by the Bush administration has abetted and enabled various ills that make the world unsafe. American failure to comprehensively defeat terrorism is America's own fault.

According to Rashid, the Bush administration's decision to project its power in Mesopotamia, at the cost of not attending to far more urgent issues in south and central Asia, is among the greatest strategic blunders any American president has made. Shifting the theater so quickly and suddenly after the invasion of Afghanistan --- for example, US troops that liberated Qandahar from the Taliban were moved to Iraq within three months --- led the US to outsource its job of eliminating terrorism to a disingenuous dictator in Pakistan and a still inchoate Afghan democracy. Both led to disastrous results. Pakistan's General Musharraf and ISI either turned a blind eye to terrorists or tried to co-opt them to advance their own agendas, while a better than token investment in nation-building in Afghanistan --- which would have cost a pittance compared to the war in Iraq --- could have stemmed many of the wounds that festered into security crises today. Instead, the US abandoned Afghanistan, thereby allowing the Taliban to mount a powerful insurgency that will cost huge quantities of money and human life to roll back.

Such errors of grand strategy were compounded by smaller-scale but non-trivial errors. As a Pakistani citizen who traveled widely throughout central Asia, Rashid can testify first-hand to the practical consequences of America's rubbishing and violations of the Geneva Convention, the imperial language of its officials; unnecessary maligning of the religion of Islam, and the usurpation of the State Department's customary prerogatives by Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon --- which played a direct causal role in the collapse of any serious commitment to nation-building well before any US soldiers touched down in Afghanistan.

Yet Rashid did not write this book to admonish. He is genuinely disturbed by the perpetuation of terrorist power, not to mention the continuing paucity of liberty, economic opportunity, and human rights that citizens of South and Central Asia face daily. His positive proposals for American policy are extensive in range, thoroughly grounded empirically, and ought to be required reading by members of the American foreign policy community.

I'll focus on just one of his positive suggestions. Rashid traveled through FATA --- Pakistan's Federally Administrated Tribal Areas --- with a Pashtun guide. He describes the region as "terrorism central," and not only the near certain secret redoubt of not only Osama Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, but also the base of operations of numerous terrorists and terror suspects spread throughout the world, whose identities Rashid lists. He argues that there are two possible ways of dealing with the threats based in FATA. The first is dispatching a military force to defeat the militants in an outright confrontation. This option has slim odds of success; the Pakistani military already tried it and failed, and external invaders are even less likely than Musharraf's army to have the requisite tactical and political support to succeed.

The second option --- the viable one --- highlights the indispensability of Rashid's book. FATA is one of those hinterlands of the globe that suffered through the transition from ethnic tribalism and economic feudalism to a nation-state paradigm. The literacy rate there is only 17% (3% for women!), there are no economic, opportunities, no legal system apart from an arbitrary mish-mash of tribal decision-making nominally supplemented by a statutory scheme inherited from the British Raj, and no educational system apart from whatever the mullahs could provide. There have never been political parties, much less a political culture, in the region. FATA exists outside of the sphere of international law and outside of the reach of the governments Kabul and Islamabad, its only political order the spiritual thrall of extremist religious leaders and the brute force of warlords. who use intimidation to impose themselves. In other words, it is the absolutely ideal sanctuary for al Qaeda and other stateless criminals gangs --- even better, arguably, than al Qaeda's other sometime homes in Somalia, Sudan, Afghanistan, and since the American invasion, Iraq).

Clearly, therefore, an effective means of shutting down terrorism in south and central Asia is to integrate regions like FATA into the international economic community. And indeed, Rashid notes that there were proposals in recent years for a referendum in FATA which would have allowed it to either become an independent province associated with Pakistan or choose to become part of the NWFP province. Naturally, those entreaties were shunted aside by Musharraf, the man the Bush administration foolishly treated as their number one counter-terrorist.

The US could begin to address to the challenge of FATA today by reviving discussion about FATA's provincial status with the democratic parties now in power in Pakistan, who are completely befuddled by the problem of what to do with the region, and are passively allowing the tribal leaders there to extend Sharia law over secular legal opposition.

That proposal for FATA is only one of many constructive ideas in Descent Into Chaos. Rashid's long-standing relationships with the leading political figures of south and central Asia, his fluency with US policy, and his decades-long experience with the region, make the a necessary resource for anyone interested in the post 9/11 world. It should be slipped onto the essential reading lists of the foreign policy experts advising John McCain and Barack Obama.

No, we swear, he's a really good actor: Phillippe and crew in 'Stop-Loss'We missed former Jewcy editor Michael Weiss's culture posts, and not just because we all enjoy the drinking game that accompanies them. (One shot whenever Weiss mentions Kingsley Amis or calls someone a "Trotskyite," chug if he talks about his dog.) So we brought him back as our movie reviewer. Below, his look at Stop-Loss.

Ryan Phillippe’s acting ability has fallen, according to popular judgment, somewhere between Hayden Christensen's in Star Wars and Hayden Christensen's in Jumper. An unfair verdict, I would submit, since Phillippe has been more burdened by poor role choices, almost all of which have resulted from his career-making one as Sebastian Valmont in Cruel Intentions. This was the teen-cast remake of Les Liasons Dangereuse, set on the Upper East Side, and it was both better than the book and better than all cinematic adaptations prior or since. Will someone please smelt an Oscar for Best Age-Defining Plot Motive? Phillippe may not be the Olivier of the guilty pleasure, but who else can say he spent the fin de siecle destroying Reese Witherspoon’s heart in order sodomize Sarah Michelle Gellar (“You can put it anywhere”)?

Of course, cruelty and sadism have metamorphosed since the late 90’s from something private and diaristic to something intensely public and world-historical. There have not been many good, watchable films dealing with our belligerent troubles overseas, and re-reading the foregoing paragraph, it seems odd that Phillippe should star in the first.

Stop-Loss tells the story of a squad of Texas natives, led by Sgt. Brandon King (Phillippe), who have suffered a long tour of duty in Iraq. At the film’s start, we see them carousing in their barracks, recording digital footage of combat missions, and singing Toby Keith’s 9/11 payback anthem in Saddam Hussein’s hometown of Tikrit. After a devastating urban gun battle with insurgents kills one of their beloved comrades and badly maims another, this band of brothers is sent home, chastened but relieved. The trip is meant to be leave for some, the end of a long, bloody affair for others, including Brandon. Yet each soldier finds that adjusting to civilian life is nearly impossible after the hell he has lived and breathed for five years, both in Iraq and, we are told, Afghanistan before it.

Third rock from the Sunni: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, third from leftBrandon’s best friend Steve gets so drunk on his first night home that he digs a trench in his backyard, thinking he’s still deployed – but not before beating his fianée Michele (the pretty but vapid Abbie Cornish). Another friend, Tommy (played by the excellent Joseph Gordon-Levitt, now many accomplished rocks from the sun), takes alcoholism to a pathological level, and loses his wife and his epaulettes in due course. But it is Brandon, the natural and official leader of the group, who is buffeted most severely by a post-war reality because, as he soon discovers, there’s nothing “post” about it. He is the victim of the “stop-loss” policy in the Army, whereby his expired military contract is renewed at the whim of the president, here never mentioned by name.

“Not afraid, pissed off” is how Brandon voices his decision to go AWOL and hit the road with Michele, who only poses the possibility of something other than a forced fugitive partnership. The rest of the film plays out like an Uneasy Rider of post-traumatic stress, balanced virtues of patriotism and anger, honor and disloyalty, and a persistent but never quite overweening political critique. (All war movies are antiwar movies.) One horrible scene features the all-too-winsome soldier who barely escaped the Tikrit melee alive: His face reduced to sirloin, his eyes blinded by shrapnel, and his arm and leg amputated, he is like an Otto Dix painting come to life. For the five minutes or so he is on screen, any thought of “winning hearts and minds” or “democracy promotion” seems septic and inhumane.

It helps that Stop-Loss, which is distributed by MTV Films, has been directed and co-written by Kimberly Peirce, whose first and last film was Boys Don’t Cry. Hilary Swank’s gender-bent protagonist had to navigate the violent discontents of thwarted masculinity and confused identity. In a way, both themes are subtly teased out here, too: The ties of martial solidarity are depicted as alternatively strong and fragile, and each man represents two irreconcilable roles – the down-home American twentysomething and the exported killing machine. Steve, who might otherwise have been reduced to a meathead or golem, is permitted a depth of character he almost doesn’t deserve. Even the state of Texas manages to evade facile caricaturing as place not to be messed with. If anything, it is her veteran sons on whom that dubious privilege must fall.

In recognition of the fifth anniversary of the Iraq war, Slate invited the 'liberal hawks' from among its regular contributors to answer the question, "Why did we get it wrong?"

Christopher Hitchens' answer: "I didn't." The main thrust of Hitchens' defense of hisLeave Berkeley alone! support of the war is that, despite the intelligence failures before and during the war, the administration's criminal mismanagement, the degradation of the United States' moral, legal, and indeed strategic international position due to our government's embrace of torture and human rights abuses --- the international community still faced a failed dictatorship on its way to implosion, the fallout from which would have been far worse without an American presence in the country.

This case rests on the supposition that, on balance, the outcome of the actual intervention in Iraq in 2003 is better than the outcome of likely counterfactual scenarios that would have played out at a later date, under more competent leadership, and under more credible international auspices, which in turn rests on the assumption that the immediate need for intervention in 2003 outweighs the obvious (in hindsight) benefits of a delay. I'm unpersuaded. But fair enough; Hitchens' case is the best that can be made for the pro-war position at this point.

What's completely unfair, shocking, out of bounds, and offensive, is Hitchens' slandering of George Berkeley. To wit:

There is, however, one position that nobody can honestly hold but that many people try their best to hold. And that is what I call the Bishop Berkeley theory of Iraq, whereby if a country collapses and succumbs to trauma, and it's not our immediate fault or direct responsibility, then it doesn't count, and we are not involved.

Hitchens is getting at a widespread, gross simplification of Berkeley's epistemology and metaphysics. So, let's get Berkeley right. What motivates Berkeley's philosophy is a worry about the concepts of quality and substance among Locke and his contemporary empiricists. The empiricists held that substances are the imperceivable substrates that manifest primary qualities (size, shape, volume, etc.) and secondary qualities (color, taste, tactile features, etc.). Substances exist, they argued, but qualities exhaust the objects of our acquaintance. Against this picture of the world, Berkeley thought, "If all we're ever acquainted with are sensible qualities, then why bother positing the existence of substances at all? They do no explanatory work, and thus violate sound Occamist principles by unnecessarily inflating our ontology."

So he cut physical objects out of his ontology, leaving only perceptions of them and perceiving minds behind. To be is to be perceived, according to the Berkeleyan maxim. And it really works out to an elegant system. There is no mind/body problem left to worry about, because there are no bodies.

Contrary to the common understanding of him, Berkeley is not a solipsist. He does not hold that objects cease to exist the moment you turn your back on them or otherwise stop personally perceiving them. There has to be some overarching principle correlating all perceptions, not merely in order to avoid solipsism, but also the worry that if perception is reality, then there is no meaningful distinction between veridical perception and hallucination. For Berkeley, it's God who does the work of separating true perceptions from false and coordinating the true ones, and keeping the world going while we sleep. (Berkeley might not have perceived the curvature of the earth and the fact that one side of the globe is sleeping while the other's awake; still, in his system, the whole earth exists.) But there are other possible, God-free answers to that dilemma. Kant's proposal that the objective validity of veridical perceptions is guaranteed by the nature of pure reason, is one way of secularizing Berkeley. But there are others.

In any event, maybe there are some woolly-headed peaceniks who think that if we put on blinders and earplugs and refuse to look at the problems of Iraq, that they'll just go away. But pace Hitchens, Berkeley wouldn't have been one of them. To adopt the parlance of our times, Leave Berkeley alone!

She May Not Be Dressed Like a Diplomat: but she sure can negotiate some rocky terrain!First, they refuse to acknowledge Israel's existence. Then, they log on to a website that's doubly forbidden: Not only is it Israeli--it's Israeli porn. Who are these seekers of sexy skin? Oh, just a few hundred thousand (at least) Arabs in countries like Syria, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Iraq, and if you ask me, they're exhibiting some kind of newfangled Madonna and the Whore complex. "I hate Israel and will beat her down...or at least, beat off to her lovely ladies!" The fact that some of these countries even go so far as to block the Israeli ".il" domain isn't slowing these sneaky porn rats down, either. Nosireebob: They're logging on in droves to a site called Ratuv, especially now that the site has been translated into Arabic, with lots of detailed descriptions and a veritable assload of free pics.

It happened like this: After installing software that identifies where users are logging on, the managers of Ratuv discovered that a large number of their visitors were in Arab countries. They decided that a lack of diplomatic relations didn't have to equal a lack of sexual relations, so despite not being able to accept money for video downloads from these countries, manager Nir Shahar set to work making the site as hospitable as possible. With the Arabic translations and extra free pics, traffic from these countries rocketed to 100,000 hits per week. The Ratuv team is currently looking into creating and registering a similar site in Europe or America, so that they can legally accept credit card payments from countries prohibited by Israeli law. They're also eyeballing the possibility of making films in which Arab and Israeli stars come together. So to speak. Talk about a forbidden fetish.

Perhaps there is something to the old adage, "make love, not war," after all. Someday soon, the ambassadors and diplomats of the world might just have names like Dick Long and Wendy Whoppers.

Thomas Jefferson: bringing religious freedom to you, since 1786A day devoted to commemorating "the passage of Thomas Jefferson's Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom" came and went, and I had no idea it even existed. Did you? So, while Britney's potential conversion to Islam (which I posted about on Religious Freedom Day) and problems of intermarriage (which Tamar posted about on Religious Freedom Day) are of obvious interest and importance (especially Britney, duh), I feel kind of remiss in my "faith and belief" reporting duties. Religious Freedom Day: We'll be ready for you on January 16, 2009!

Meanwhile, back at the ranch: A New York Sikh man was the victim of an unprovoked attack in Queens last week. His assailant apparently called him an Arab before punching him outside of his gurdwara.

An op-ed in the Jerusalem Post asserts that by insisting on the Lubavitcher Rebbe's role as messiah, they "diminish rather than aggrandize him," and claims that what made the Rebbe so great to begin with was that, like us, he was just another mortal.

In Pakistan, two more suspects have been arrested in the assassination of former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, and violence broke out along the Pakistan/Afghanistan border yesterday in response to the Shiite holiday of Ashura.

Finally, Ashura wreaked havoc in Iraq as well, where militants used everything from bombs to gunfire to rockets in their attacks on pilgrims observing the holiday.

I’ll try not to begin my endorsement of Senator John McCain with the hero’s epic that seems to physically trail the man wherever he goes. It’s become such a commonplace that to contribute another McCain hagiography spotted with "brave," "proud," and "strong" is to mindlessly shortcut your way into dismissing the Senator’s achievements. Besides, at this point anyone unaware of John McCain’s service is beyond my reach.

So. In 2002, John McCain turned in the most successful comedic turn of any politician ever to do Saturday Night Live. Which only has to mean he wasn’t painful to watch. In fact, his “McCain Sings Streisand” sketch was damned funny and he seemed to put some genuine effort into his John Ashcroft imitation. When (portraying the Attorney General) he said, “We've got some really great stuff in the works. There's one plan that would make the Arabic language – or anything that sounds like it – illegal," McCain demonstrated at least two kinds of—yes—bravery that had disappeared amongst politicians by 2002: the bravery to wildly criticize a member of your own party, and the bravery to be perceived as politically incorrect.

Humor, confrontation, and risky allusions are the vibrant stuff of youth—are they not? Yet the sixtyish-and-under candidates blow scripted one-liners and speak of pacifying enemies, while the man who’s supposedly too old for the White House sets the “bomb Iran” question to the Beach Boys.

And I like it. Everyone in the world tells you not to sweat the small stuff and then goes off to catastrophize the minute nonsense of their lives. At this stage of his career, all that needs tastefully to be observed about John McCain’s record is that no living American is better equipped to discriminate between the small stuff and the big stuff. The Senator spots the difference effortlessly while rest of the pack won’t even acknowledge there is one. Jokes, song parodies – small stuff. War, terror, freedom, victory – big stuff.

In talking about McCain’s heroism, one doesn’t need to mention Vietnam. Simply consider Iraq. Senator McCain has the distinction on Capital Hill of being both the most energetic supporter of the Iraq War and the first, most vocal critic of the Rumsfeld strategy. He actually believed in the importance of the cause, and therefore the necessity of victory. A liberated state is not a goal to be scrapped when things go wrong; it’s a principle worthy of unwavering stamina and ingenuity. It’s easy to spew bromides about bringing the troops home, but much harder to take the risk of a new strategy. As Senator McCain has recently pointed out, while the frontrunners boast about being “agents of change,” no other candidate can rightfully claim agency in the life-saving (and nation-saving) changes brought about by the troop surge in Iraq.

In taking my cue from the Senator, I’ve expanded my list of small stuff. The McCain-Feingold finance reform, dissent on the Bush tax cuts, and certain details of immigration reform all fall under that heading. John McCain shares my idea of the big stuff and he has my vote.

 

I don’t know if it’s the so-called “holiday spirit” or what, but reading this made me all teary and ridiculous.

From officer and orphan to father and son
An American soldier's familiarity with a sick Iraqi boy grows into strong familial ties

By Carrie Antlfinger | Associated Press
December 25, 2007

MAUSTON, Wis. - Capt. Scott Southworth knew he'd face violence, political strife and blistering heat when he was deployed to one of Baghdad's most dangerous areas.

All Together Now:: Awwwwwww

But he didn't expect Ala'a Eddeen.

Ala'a was 9 years old, strong of will but weak of body -- he suffered from cerebral palsy and weighed just 55 pounds. He lived among about 20 kids with physical or mental disabilities at the Mother Teresa orphanage, under the care of nuns who preserved this small oasis in a dangerous place.

On Sept. 6, 2003, halfway through his 13-month deployment, Southworth and his military police unit paid a visit.

Ala'a spoke to the 31-year-old American in the limited English he had learned from the sisters. He recalled the bombs that struck government buildings across the Tigris River.

"Bomb-Bing! Bomb-Bing!" Ala'a said, raising and lowering his fist.

"I'm here now. You're fine," the captain said.

Over the next 10 months, the unit returned to the orphanage again and again. The soldiers would race kids in their wheelchairs, sit them in Humvees and help the sisters feed them.

To Southworth, Ala'a was like a little brother. But Ala'a -- who had longed for a soldier to rescue him -- secretly began referring to Southworth as "Baba," Arabic for "Daddy."

Then, around Christmas, a sister told Southworth that Ala'a was getting too big. He would have to move to a government-run facility within a year.

"Best-case scenario was that he would stare at a blank wall for the rest of his life," Southworth said.

To this day, he recalls the moment when he resolved that that would not happen.

"I'll adopt him," he said.

To continue reading the story that will melt your heart into a pile of warm goo, click here.

A lengthy and fascinating interview with Joshua Muravchik is in the latest edition of Democratiya. Muravchik talks about his personal journey from the socialist left to neo-conservatism and then goes on to look at Iraq and Islamist terror and the neo-con responses.

I've been contemplating socialism and the left in some of my posts here and so this passage from Muravchik was interesting:

I kept wrestling with the central mystery of socialism. How could something that desired to make things better have instead made things so much worse? Was it that socialists were bad people? From my own experience I am still convinced that most people who embraced the idea of socialism did so from a humane feeling - they wanted the world to be kinder and gentler. Yet socialism's most important results were quite the opposite. Of course, social democrats did things to humanise society when they were in government, but the overall record of socialism, when you add up both sides of the ledger, is quite appalling. 

I concluded that the central problem is asking politics to do something it can't do - to provide the 'leap' that Marx wrote about. This ambition departs entirely from the realities of human existence, which is imperfect and tragic. Life may not be nasty and brutish but it is short and it will always have its share of sadness and disappointment. Religion offers answers to both the shortness of life and the disappointments it contains - whether or not you accept the truth of any particular religion or religion per se. Politics can't do that. If you understand that, you feel a certain constraint on what you seek to achieve in politics, which at the most can offer amelioration. But the socialist thinks that through politics you can transform human life itself. Michael Harrington - a leader of mine back then whom I admired - once wrote that socialism would create 'an utterly new society in which some of the fundamental limitations of human existence have been transcended.' [5] But no political system can do that. Worse, once you say it can you have a logically sound utilitarian argument for killing some people in order to get there. If those people are standing in the way of the new, higher, happier level of human existence, well...

 

By the way, if you are not familiar with Democratiya - a free-to-read, online journal of what could loosely be called 'Eustonite Internationalists' then take a look through their latest edition - including a speech from Tony Blair - and also their archive which is full of interesting and serious material.

It's his fifth visit to Iraq and what has he found?

Baghdad, the most dangerous city in all of Iraq, is only half as violent as it was when I was there during the summer. And the fact that the capital is now the deadliest city is itself evidence of a tectonic shift on the ground.

In the spring of 2007, Ramadi was the most violent place in Iraq. But the insurgency there has been finished. The Taji area north of Baghdad, which was a catastrophe when I paid a visit in July, is now going the way of Ramadi.

I am writing these words from Fallujah, site of the most horrific battle of the entire war in November 2004, and the city thought to be the meanest in Iraq since at least the time of the British in Mesopotamia.

Almost everyone I know back home was sure I'd be shot at every day, that it's still a war zone out here. Based on the news reports - even the new, optimistic ones, could you blame them for thinking that?

But attacks against coalition forces in Fallujah are down by more than 90% since March of this year. Almost all attacks these days are single, ineffective pot shots rather than the lethal IEDs of last year.

The only word that comes to mind is "breathtaking." Though I'm sure Gen. Petraeus' war plan had nothing to do with it.  They decided to stop blowing themselves up because they wanted to see how Lions for Lambs panned out.