Haters Wanna Hate, Ballers Wanna Ball

George Will, shut your stupid face:

Do we need another waist-deep wallow in the 1960s, ensconcing us cheek by jowl with Frank Rizzo and Eldridge Cleaver, Sam Yorty and Mark Rudd, Lester Maddox and Herbert Marcuse and other long-forgotten bit players in a period drama? Do we need to be reminded of that era’s gaseous juvenophilia, like Time magazine’s celebration of Americans 25 or younger as 1967’s “Man of the Year”: “This is not just a new generation, but a new kind of generation. … In the omphalocentric process of self-construction and discovery,” today’s youth “stalks love like a wary hunter, but has no time or target — not even the mellowing Communists — for hate.”

Well, this retrospective wallow does increase the public stock of harmless pleasure, as when Perlstein revisits the 1972 Democratic convention that nominated George McGovern and heard 80 nominations for vice president, including Mao Zedong and Archie Bunker. But Perlstein’s high-energy — sometimes too energetic — romp of a book also serves, inadvertently, a serious need: it corrects the cultural hypochondria to which many Americans, including Perlstein, are prone.

Nixonland is a masterpiece. You need to read every word, including/especially the punk-rock love note Rich wrote to his wife at the end, which actually brought tears to my eyes. Trust me on this one.

You Must Not Know ‘Bout Me

Judging from James Glanz’s review, Patrick Cockburn’s new book about Moqtada Sadr is a number-one must-have:

In telling this story, Cockburn argues that early descriptions of Moktada as some mix of Mafia don, opportunistic thug and renegade holy man had it wrong. No one disputes that Moktada draws much of his support from the poor and the rampantly unemployed lower classes, and that many of the young males who fill the ranks of the Mahdi Army are among the most not-nice people in Iraq. But Cockburn argues that Moktada had the chance to muster that support because he was clever enough to stay alive under Hussein and become his family’s representative to the people after the death of his father and two brothers, who were killed by Hussein in 1999.

Hussein disavowed any involvement in those murders, fearing another Shiite uprising like the one that followed his disastrous retreat from Kuwait in 1991; government officials duly attended the mourning ceremonies for Moktada’s father. Cockburn points out that far from behaving like a “firebrand cleric,” as he would later be characterized, Moktada undertook the first of the tactical retreats that would become one of his hallmarks. “He neither accused the Iraqi security forces of murdering his father and brothers, nor did he play any role in the sporadic uprisings that followed,” Cockburn writes. Moktada understood the lesson of Hemingway’s guerrilla commander in “For Whom the Bell Tolls”: in politics and warfare the most important thing is to continue to exist.

And the U.S. thinks it can outplay this guy on his own turf? Could Dick Cheney have survived Saddam Hussein’s goons? Moqtada Sadr is the new Che Guevara. Bring on the t-shirts for every sophomoric lefty college student.

PS I plead guilty to spreading a simplistic depiction of Moqtada myself. Sorry.

I Want It All

Melissa Boyle Mahle turned her CIA memoir into a movie called Secrecy. It sounds fantastic. Jeff Stein at CQ takes a glimpse.

One of its more interesting insights is how sexy secrets are.

“Secrecy is something like forbidden fruit,” former NSA official Mike Levin says, framed in harsh light, an ominous sound track playing.

“You can’t have it. It’s classified. That makes you want it more,” says Levin. “If somebody discloses that we listen to a cell phone that Osama bin Laden is using to talk to his deputy Zawahiri who’s in Peshawar, Pakistan, this fact would do damage to the national security. So it has to be kept classified.”

That’s just so through-the-uprights right-on. And it goes double for us nat-sec reporters. The first time you see a document you shouldn’t be seeing, it rivets you. It could be the stupidest piece of boneheaded analysis, but it’s extremely difficult not to treat that garbage as a gem. Our entire editorial structure — even for investigative reporters! — rewards gobbling that stuff up before Isi-nball or Sy or Pincus or Mazzetti or Linzer or whoever gets their grubby hands on it. Pretty soon the piece you write is overtaken by its subtext, which is I GOT THAT WORK AND YOU DON’T SO I’M BETTER.

And that way lies a lot of manipulation. Pretty soon a savvy administration figures out that playing off reporters’ vanity can allow it to plant a story about aluminum tubes proving an Iraqi nuclear weapons program is in an advanced stage. It’s nonsense, but all the reporter hears is it’s a secret and she has to print it in The New York Times.

All The Beating Drums, The Celebration Guns

IMMEDIATE RELEASE No. 0400-08
May 10, 2008
DoD Identifies Army Casualty

The Department of Defense announced today the death of a soldier who was supporting Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Spc. Mary J. Jaenichen, 20, of Temecula, Calif., died May 9 in Iskandariyah, Iraq, of a non-combat related injury. She was assigned to the Brigade Troops Battalion, 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 3rd Infantry Division, Fort Stewart, Ga.

The incident is under investigation.

For more information media may contact the Fort Stewart public affairs at (912) 767-2479.

(Extreme apologies for initially importing the wrong headline on this post. Stupid predictive text. Stupid me.)

Stabbed In The Back

Phil Carter saves me from the pain of Ricardo Sanchez’s memoir. Last year we saw Sanchez spit unhinged invective about how everyone who isn’t in a uniform is a sybaritic and valueless coward. Phil finds Sanchez up to his old tricks. This time, he blames the loss of South Vietnam on… his countrymen. Phil responds so well I’ll quote him at length:

Ah yes, the “stabbed in the back narrative.” … No amount of America firepower could have crushed the North Vietnamese people’s will. It’s true that we made many missteps in waging the Vietnam War, and that we might have achieved a better outcome in the short term had we backed better South Vietnamese leaders, implemented smarter counterinsurgency strategies sooner, and pursued Vietnamization earlier. But the ultimate outcome was ordained long before 1973, and probably long before American combat troops arrived in 1965. Most of the histories I’ve read suggest the die was cast sometime around when the French surrender at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. We didn’t lose the Vietnam War because of any “stab in the back.” We lost because we failed to see the strategic environment correctly, and we chose a war of a time, place and manner that we could not win.

This narrative came to mean a great deal to the cohort of American military officers who shepherded the services through the post-Vietnam years. They vowed to never again fight a war like Vietnam. These generals embraced the Weinberger-Powell doctrine prescribing when, how and why they would fight. They rejected counterinsurgency efforts and small wars, choosing instead conventional wars with defined objectives and familiar features. And they rebuilt the Army with capabilities to fight these wars, marginalizing those who thought about small wars and pushing them into the special forces, civil affairs, military police and intelligence communities. Even during the 1990s, when the Army deployed for peacekeeping operations around the world, these missions remained peripheral.

On the very next page, Sanchez criticizes the decision to send “unprepared and improperly trained soldiers” into the “guerilla warfighting conditions” of Vietnam. He appears to miss the connection, however, between his misunderstanding of the Vietnam war and the Army’s lack of preparedness for Iraq, which flowed from that deeply flawed view.

Phil has more Sanchez liveblogging here and here.

Hold Your Head Up High

I should leave the basketballblogging to Yglesias, but Orlando’s intense play, led by Howard and Turkoglu, have made me a believer. So today’s 90-89 loss was a heartbreaker, particularly after Turkoglu’s under-two-minutes stretch of threes. My dog is still moaning, and was disinterested in Celtics-Cavs. Whatever, it was a moral victory for the Magic.

In other sports news, Elijah Dukes is clearly a troubled man. But ESPN Magazine has a great profile in their current issue (can’t find it online, sorry) that gives me sympathy for someone baseball seems ready to treat as a straight-up monster. More later.

You Better Keep Your Mouth Shut, In A Rut

It’s always disconcerting to read senior defense officials sounding like the wingnutosphere, but this gem from the doc-dump about the Pentagon’s media-manipulation efforts is especially telling. In 2006 Rajiv Chandrasekaran did a TPMCafe book club in which he corrected some mistakes by Bush hack Dan Senor, who had ripped Chandrasekaran on the Post’s op-ed page. Some Pentagon flunky responded with a fusillade of whining about “Bush-bashing ultra-liberal Josh Marshall” and how “Rajiv’s liberal bias is no longer a question but a certifiable fact” and how he “cannot believe the Post allowed him to write an an openly partisan blog” and that would never happen if a reporter went on Rush and blah blah.

This fool’s name is redacted, surely for vital reasons of national security. But it’s amazing how a sense of unearned grievance keeps the engine of the Bush Pentagon purring. These guys are influential components of the most powerful military juggernaut in history and they waste each other’s time bitching about how Josh is a liberal who doesn’t like how their boss has f*ck*d the country up. This is true Nixonland stuff.

Welcome to the next four years. These people have plunged the country into two failing/failed wars and killed hundreds of thousands of people. (Also, they pulled off a housing crisis and a healthcare crisis and an environmental crisis and when an entire city drowned the administration left the black people to die.) There’s no alibi: when conservatism had its chance to govern, this is what it yielded. If I was one of them, I’d bitch about Rajiv Chandrasekaran or Jeremiah Wright or whatever was necessary to distract people from what I did when I had the chance to do it. Get ready for years and years and years of this puerile and tiresome nonsense.

If Someone Locks Me Out I Kick My Way Back In

Once upon a time Donald Rumsfeld wrote a memo (no, not that memo) that asked whether U.S. strategy was “capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us.” His solution to that good question wasn’t to change any aspect of U.S. policy toward the Middle East or South Asia or stanch any contributing factor to terrorist recruitment, but instead to… give Special Operations Command a leading role in the war. (Oh, and he added to that by making SpecOps troops into a G.I. Joe-style cartoon of their core competencies.) No one ever said the man was wise.

Rumsfeld is now a forgotten hangover. According to the Associated Press, Special Operations is trying to expunge his harebrained schemes from its institutional memory:

The military command overseeing the nation’s most elite forces has moved away from a contentious plan that gave it broad control over anti-terrorism operations in Iraq, Afghanistan and other hot spots around the globe.

The expanded authority for U.S. Special Operations Command in Tampa, Fla., was hammered through by former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld well before he resigned in November 2006. The shift caused friction among leaders at other warfighting organizations who saw it an intrusion into their geographic domains.

Navy Adm. Eric Olson, the command’s senior officer since July 2007, has steered clear of micromanaging specific missions against al-Qaida or other terrorist groups. The command’s primary focus is to ensure these plans are fused into a broader strategy for defeating extremist ideologies. That reflects Olson’s position that the troops closest to the action know best how to handle it.

It’s not often that a command asks for less responsibility. How come?

“I didn’t awfully care too much for people from somewhere else to come in and tell me what they were going to do,” Fridovich said.

Gotta Know You

The Surge’s half-sibling band, The New York Times, are offering their D.C. debut tonight at the Velvet Lounge. Come by like 10.

I Won’t Back Down

Cernig on the Sadr City ceasefire:

News reports and statements from Iraqi government members say that once again Iran played a big role in getting Maliki to back off from wiping out his main political rival, through pressure on Sadr as well as on the ISCI and Dawa parties. The deal thus consolidates Iran as the main Big Brother neighbour for Iraq’s Shiite majority and makes it’s influence there well-nigh unshakeable. Witness Maliki’s back-pedalling on U.S. claims of Iranian weaponry.

As to Sadr, winning an armed conflict with the U.S. and the Iraqi central government was never an option for him. He’s succeeded in splitting the Iraqi Army off from U.S. aid against his movement - thus neutralising the threat to his militia, as Crittenden notes, because the Iraqi Army on its own cannot defeat the Mahdi Army despite U.S. spin to the contrary. Maliki has backed off from earlier demands that the Mahi Army be dissolved and there will, it seems, be a four day ceasefire before the Iraqi Army begins to search the teeming slum for heavy weapons. Best of luck to them with that, after giving the militias so much time to hide everything.

But far more important for him is that he now keeps his political hopes alive, with elections where his movement can expect to make considerable inroads against his ISCI rivals looming. That was always the prize, and he has taken it.

Let’s Think Of The Wavering Millions Who Need Leaders But Get Gamblers Instead

Congratulations to Jenna Bush on her wedding. Like a lot of liberal jerks, my perceptions of her were frozen in Smith Point-soaked contempt. But then my friend Dana Goldstein read her book and reported back that she has a lot to offer, and offers it in a thoughtful manner.

Her father is a different story. Tonight he’ll give his daughter away in Crawford. And I hope he’ll find the decency to reflect, if silently, on the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who will never get the chance to be married or to give their daughters away or to wait nervously for their brides-to-be to finish the walk down the aisle, all because of his vanity and his hubris.

But What Did You Really Expect?

The Guantanamo detainee who detonated himself and murdered people in Mosul? He left behind a tape.

The last words of a suicide bomber in Mosul were a rallying cry for Muslims to join the fight against Americans.

His taking-off point was his experience at the military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

In two accounts — a transcript of his conversation in a jihadist chat room and a suicide message on tape — both posted on Web sites devoted to Al Qaeda after his death, the bomber, Abdallah Salih al-Ajmi, 29, described his detention as “torture” carried out by infidels. He was in Guantánamo from 2002 to 2005.

There will be those who draw the wrong lesson from this — that we need to keep the detainees imprisoned forever at GTMO, lest this happen again. Down that road madness lies. Injustice can never yield justice, and our fight against al-Qaeda is just and necessary. Everyone should recognize Guantanamo Bay is counterproductive to that fight, just like the Iraq war is. Then we’ll see who actually cares about destroying al-Qaeda and who’s engaged in juvenile posturing.

We Celebrate, And Seperate Our Milkplates From Our Meat

Outstanding reflections on Israel’s 60th birthday from Daniel Levy:

To try to understand that co-existence of modern, cosmopolitan Israel with the Israel of permanent violent occupation, it’s worth going back to that rather silly 1991 solidarity visit and those scud misiles. Ah, of course, Israel is under permanent threat from an relentless foe, or set of foes, unswervingly committed to its destruction, to a second Holocaust — or so the thinking goes — so the occupation has to be like that. The conversation normally ends there. If it continues, it’s about why embattled Israel deserves empathy, maybe a prayer, along with the unconditional support of the United States, and why it should certainly avoid making risky territorial concessions.

Thankfully, though, the conversation doesn’t end there. Israel does have enemies, bitter, even implacable ones. But Israel also has the most powerful military in the region and it’s most sophisticated military-industrial complex and R+D capacity. It is one of the world’s largest arms exporters and has an economy that is the envy of its neighbors.

The disconnect, I would argue, is that Israel has locked itself into a box of fear that is not only substantially self-generated and all-embracing, but has also become a danger in itself, preventing Israel from taking urgently needed steps. Explaining that fear is easy — remember the Holocaust, look at how Israel is targeted. But it does not alter the fact that it has become utterly unhealthy and paralyzing, and ironically a reason to actually be concerned.

Apathy by American Jewry toward Israel’s internal political psychosis — or, worse, apologies for it — is, effectively, an anti-Israel sentiment we need to confront. Happy birthday big homie.

Not What You Want

I refrained from writing anything yesterday when the London Times said we had captured al-Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu Ayyub al-Masri, because last year the same paper said he had been killed. And sure enough, the U.S. military says whoever we picked up wasn’t al-Masri, who’s real name is Abu Hamza al-Mujaher.

But for what happens if and when we do get that shmuck, check out Cernig:

The Sunni and Shiite faction-fights are now entirely independent of Al Qaeda’s influence while AQI’s activities in Mosul and beyond, based upon a cell system, will hardly be slowed by the loss of their leader. …

Its the demolition men, not the talking heads, that count. Still, it’s always nice to see one of those talking heads captured.

All The Beating Drums, The Celebration Guns

IMMEDIATE RELEASE No. 0397-08
May 09, 2008
DoD Identifies Army Casualty

The Department of Defense announced today the death of a soldier who was supporting Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Spc. Alex D. Gonzalez, 21, of Mission, Texas, died May 6 in Mosul, Iraq, of wounds suffered when his vehicle encountered small arms fire and a rocket-propelled grenade attack. He was assigned to the 43rd Combat Engineer Company, 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, Fort Hood, Texas.

For more information media may contact the Fort Hood public affairs office at (254) 287-9993; after hours (254) 291-2591.

Obey Their Self-Righteous Lies While Your Sisters And Daughters Die

You knew it all along, but just as a reminder: The Weekly Standard doesn’t care about Al Qaeda. Justin Logan:

By this logic, why don’t we airdrop a bunch of copies of Penthouse Letters into the Kabaa? After all, al Qaeda will continue recruiting whether we do it or not. Or maybe we could declare war on all of Islam. After all, al Qaeda was recruiting before we declared it.

I love it! Let the Standard keep proving that neoconservatism doesn’t care about the people who attacked the U.S. on 9/11, except as a pretext for bringing about its cherished war. The grown-ups will come around to a foreign policy that can actually destroy this jihadist malignancy, and the neos will be left to snivel and whine like the irrelevant, discredited distraction they are.

Every Man For Himself And God Against Them All

You know who knows a ton about Lebanon and Hezbollah? Abu Muqawama. Get ready for some blogging-on-the-graduate-studies-level!

Hizbollah may very well get the government to back down from their positions on both the telecommunications system and, more likely, Wafiq Shoucair. (Although the international community — and the international business community — is not going to rest easy on the accusations Hizbollah is spying on flights landing at the airport.) But the fact is, if civil war does break out, Hizbollah is going to get the blame from basically everyone but Syria, Iran, and other Shia worldwide. This is not 2006 and this is not Israel that Hizbollah is staring down. This is 2008 and these are other Lebanese — Sunni and Druze and Christian. Hizbollah can’t count on the support from anyone but a few pariah states, and though Abu Muqawama is not quick to start quoting U.S. government officials in times like these, what Zalmay Khalilzad said yesterday probably sums up what a lot of folks are feeling, that Hezbollah had “made progress in establishing a state within a state. They have not implemented agreements and resolutions with regard to disarming their militia. That in turn is encouraging other groups to rearm as well. There is a lack of progress because of their opposition in terms of the election of a president, although everyone has agreed on Mr. Suleiman.”

Hizbollah will claim that’s not a fair representation of the realities in Beirut. And Hizbollah — and the Shia — have legitimate political greivences within what passes for a political system in Lebanon. But if things continue to go to guns, they will get all the blame for the new civil war because following the last civil war, they were the only group that was allowed to keep their weapons. (Well, they and the Palestinian militants.) Is Hizbollah ready to take on the blame for this in the same way the PLO (unjustly) took all the blame for the last war?

In One More Hour I Will Be Gone

Men really shouldn’t be posting on Jezebel, should we? Safe space! Ah well, at least this time Moe isn’t there to annotate my stuff in a way that makes the commenters rip me to shreds.

Anyway, today on Crappy Hour, Megan and I take on the Lebanon pre-coup, Russia, and the connection between Guantanamo Bay and Montreal strip clubs.

Radio Radio Radio Radio Radio Radio Radio

I’ll be on Warren Olney’s To The Point radio show today — check local listings, or listen through the miracle of the internet — to talk about the Obama and McCain doctrines. Matthew Yglesias, I drink your milkshake.

Seriously, it should be fun. Bob Kagan is going to be on the show, though I think I’ll be opposite Nile Gardner from Heritage.

Sometimes I Feel This World Is An Evil Place

With Hezbollah seemingly on the verge of a coup in Lebanon, my eyes turn to my friends Chris Allbritton and Rania Abouzeid. And — thanks a lot, guys — they’re in Dubai when I need them to be in Beirut. Chris, however, has some second-hand information to pass along:

I’m greatly wishing I could get back to Beirut right now. But the airport is closed, and we’re hearing that Hezbollah is attempting to close Beirut’s port, too. In fact, from the sounds of it, Hezbollah is taking the city — at least the western part of it. This was the threat, and it seems like they’re making good on it.

At the moment, it appears the only way in is overland through Syria via Tripoli — although even that road may have been blocked. NOW Lebanon is currently reporting it’s blocked by burning tires. Not sure who is doing the northern blocking, but that’s a heavily Sunni area, so local Salafis might be attempting to block infiltration of forces from Syria. Masnaa, the other main land crossing was closed by Salafists last night. They have good reason to fear reinforcements from Syria or Iran. When I entered Lebanon on July 13, 2006 to get to the war, an Iranian man came in at the same time — I saw his passport. We exchanged glances and went our separate ways.

Friends in Hamra and nearby ‘hoods report that Hezbollah gunmen have taken the streets and are telling people to stay indoors. They’re also taking pro-government people from their homes. One friend near Sporting Club reported a Shi’ite man in her (mixed) neighborhood was taken by gunmen as he was screaming, “I’m from the Dahiyeh!”

Reports coming in right now report that RPGs are hitting Qoreitam, Saad Hariri’s home in West Beirut.

I just asked Rania if I could publish part of an email she sent me, so perhaps an update will follow.

Update: From Rania Abouzeid –

Hezbollah has basically moved into every part of Beirut. The question is, how long can it stay? Beirut is historically not a Shiite city, it’s a Sunni, Christian one. The armed Hezbollah and Amal men in the street don’t have “home bases” in the areas they have moved into.