I got a rumor in my inbox this morning about how today’s Roger Cohen column was good and indeed it is: he argues that people should knock off the campaign against al-Jazeera’s English-language broadcast service and that this is a perspective people ought to hear.

That all seems quite right to me. I would add that there’s a pressing need, in my view, for someone to put up the money to start an outfit that would provide English-language translations of important stories in the Arabic press. Something like MEMRI but without the crazy political agenda.

In the midst of an argument with Ian Buruma, liberal hawk extraordinaire Paul Berman tries to convince us that he actually called Iraq correctly, and has merely been magnanimous in not pointing that out:

I approved on principle the overthrow of Saddam. I never did approve of Bush’s way of going about it. In the run-up to the war, I became, on practical grounds, ever more fearful that, in his blindness to liberal principles, Bush was leading us over a cliff. [...] It is true and it is a matter of satisfaction to me that, in the years since then, I have not made a career of saying “I told you so.”

Here’s what Berman was actually writing in February 2003:

In my own judgment, Fischer and his fellow thinkers in Europe and even in the United States are making a mistake in failing to press for a harder line against Iraq—a harder line that might bring about Saddam’s collapse more or less peacefully or, if need be, not peacefully. It should be obvious that, in the Arab world, fascist and Nazi-like movements—political tendencies that call for random mass murder in the name of paranoid and apocalyptic ideas—have gotten completely out of hand. In the last 20 years, Baathist and Islamist movements—the two branches of what ought to be regarded as Muslim fascism—have killed millions of people and might well kill many more, and not just in the Muslim countries, as we have reason to know. A war against Muslim fascism ought to be seen as a continuation of the long struggle against Nazism and fascism in Europe—a continuation of the same decent and necessary cause that people like Fischer have always wanted to support, even if they have not always known how to do so in a sensible way.

He was worried about Bush’s failure to embrace liberalism, but it wasn’t a worry that this meant the war would go badly, it was a worry that Bush wasn’t being as rhetorically persuasive as he should have been:

Maybe Fischer is not convinced because the Bush administration has presented a series of side arguments about weapons, U.N. resolutions, and dark terrorist conspiracies and has failed to present the main argument, which is the single huge argument that has always sustained the Western alliance. This argument is the one about totalitarianism. It is the argument that says: The totalitarians are dangerous to themselves and to us, and we had better fight them. Fight wisely, of course, which the New Left notoriously managed not to do long ago, but fight. Why can’t Bush make that argument? I won’t speculate. But he could change. He gave up drinking long ago. Let him give up his arrogance, small-mindedness, and aversion to large and idealistic ideas today. It might help.

And here he was in January 2004 when many people still thought the war was going well:

What was the reason for the war in Iraq? Sept. 11 was the reason. At least to my mind it was. Sept. 11 showed that totalitarianism in its modern Muslim version was not going to stop at slaughtering millions of Muslims, and hundreds of Israelis, and attacking the Indian government, and blowing up American embassies. The totalitarian manias were rising, and the United States itself was now in danger. A lot of people wanted to respond, as any mayor would do, by rounding up a single Bad Guy, Osama.

But Sept. 11 did not come from a single Bad Guy—it was a product of the larger totalitarian wave, and the only proper response was to comprehend the size and depth of that larger wave, and find ways to begin rolling it back, militarily and otherwise—mostly otherwise. To roll it back for our own sake, and everyone else’s sake, Muslims’ especially. Iraq, with its somewhat antique variation of the Muslim totalitarian idea, was merely a place to begin, after Afghanistan, with its more modern variation.

In short, Berman was wrong. The reason he hasn’t made a career of telling us “I told you so” is that, in this instance at least, he didn’t tell us so. But now he’s trying to tell us that he did tell us so. But all he told us was that had Bush employed more Berman-style rhetoric then maybe more of Berman’s friends would, like Berman, have wrongly deciding that an invasion of Iraq was a good idea.

It looks like the Bush/Petraeus plan to compensate for the failure of the surge to accomplish its goal by aiming instead for “bottom-up reconciliation” is running into the wee hurdle that “bottom-up reconciliation” isn’t a kind of reconciliation at all and the Shiite-dominated government doesn’t want to incorporate American-trained anti-government Sunni insurgents into its security forces.

What a surprise! There’s a reason, after all, why national reconciliation was postulated as the surge’s goal — absent reconciliation, there’s nothing useful we can do. Unfortunately, when the surge failed to accomplish its purpose, instead of abandoning the strategy we abandoned the goal in favor of this nonsensical one.

For a bit more on the subject of everyone’s favorite Pakistani opposition leader and her formidable record of corruption, it’s worth taking a look back at this old Slate article on Pakistan written the week after 9/11 by James Gibney, now an editor here at The Atlantic. Back then he wrote:

While Pakistani political parties backed by extreme fundamentalists don’t command wide support, they have built ties to Pakistan’s military and intelligence services—an ironic byproduct of a political coalition forged in 1993 by that ex-darling of the West, Harvard-trained kleptocrat and former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto.

Obviously, Bhutto’s corrupt past and the problems with her administration aren’t a reason not to support Pakistani democracy. They are, however, a very good reason not to make the concept of “democracy in Pakistan” identical in our heads to the political fortunes of the woman who happens to be the West’s favorite Pakistani politician. That kind of approach hasn’t served us well with regard to Ukraine or Georgia, and didn’t serve us well in the 1990s with regard to Russia. We should understand that something like a Musharraf-Bhutto power-sharing agreement of the sort we were trying to broker before the current crisis broke out isn’t a close substitute for actual democracy.

That’s something to keep in mind when you read that two major Pakistani opposition parties say they won’t agree to participate in elections held under emergency rule, while Bhutto’s party remains uncertain. Obviously, the issue of what sort of arrangements are or aren’t acceptable is something on which sensible people are going to want to defer to actual Pakistanis. But that, in turn, requires a recognition that there are multiple opposition groups in Pakistan and multiple opposition leaders, each with their own agendas. Westerners are entitled to like Bhutto more than the others if we like, but it’s important not to let the fact that she went to college in the states totally obscure the existence of other Pakistani factions.

David Ignatius reports from Jerusalem:

Efraim Halevy, the former head of the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad, titled his memoirs “Man in the Shadows.” But now that he’s out in the sunlight, the 72-year-old retired spy chief has some surprisingly contrarian things to say about Iran and Syria. The gist of his message is that rather than constantly ratcheting up the rhetoric of confrontation, the United States and Israel should be looking for ways to establish a creative dialogue with these adversaries.

This is quite right, and it’s very sad that we’ve reached a point where it’s regarded as incredibly “contrarian” to note that drifting to war without undertaking a good-faith effort at a diplomatic settlement would be a bad idea.

Eric Schmitt and Ginger Thompson bring us “Broken Supply Channel Sent Weapons for Iraq Astray” which sounds pretty dull. The story, though, is not:

By all accounts, the businessman, Kassim al-Saffar, a veteran of the Iran-Iraq war, did well at distributing the Pentagon-supplied weapons from the Baghdad Police Academy armory he managed for a military contractor. But, co-workers say, he also turned the armory into his own private arms bazaar with the seeming approval of some American officials and executives, selling AK-47 assault rifles, Glock pistols and heavy machine guns to anyone with cash in hand — Iraqi militias, South African security guards and even American contractors.

“This was the craziest thing in the world,” said John Tisdale, a retired Air Force master sergeant who managed an adjacent warehouse. “They were taking weapons away by the truckload.”

It seems to me that when you’re trying to establish security in a foreign country that making sure your own people aren’t complicit in supply weapons to the enemy ought ought to be a pretty high priority.