Whatever else may be true, you can almost certainly at least be thankful that George W. Bush hasn’t tried to liberate your country.

I think Kevin Drum is misconstruing the force of the point Lawrence O’Donnel is making here. Kevin’s right to say it doesn’t make sense to say that only veterans are allowed to have opinions about questions of war and peace (democracy and all that) or that only veterans are allowed to favor military deployments (since most people aren’t veterans, this would just mean the military could never be deployed), but I don’t think that’s what’s at issue here. There are two different sound points in the chickenhawk neighborhood.

One is just that it’s a way of calling bullshit on people’s insistence that doing this or that is vitally necessary to the security of the country and the world. If you say “The war in Iraq is going downhill, but it’s not hopeless yet and it’s vitally important for America to succeed — failure is not an option” I think it’s fair to ask in response why you’re not putting any skin in the game. Are you volunteering? Encouraging your son, daughter, or little brother to volunteer? The interns working in your office? The college students you might be invited to address on this or that topic? If you’re not doing any of those things — if you don’t think you could look a 20 year-old kid you care about in the eyes and tell him with a straight face that it’s vitally important for the world that he sign up to fight — that seems like a good indication that you don’t really believe the things you claim to believe. As with any hypocrisy gambit, the reverse might be true — you might just lack the courage of your convictions rather than lacking conviction — but it seems likely to me that you’re probably just fronting convictions you haven’t really thought-through.

The other thing is just the annoying rhetoric of strength, courage, and toughness. Actually punching some dude who hassles you on the street is genuinely tougher and braver (though possibly also dumber) than trying to back down and de-escalate the situation. Advocating that someone else punch some dude who hassles you on the street is not. It’s just an opinion. Maybe a right one, maybe a wrong one, but no braver, tougher, stronger, or more courageous than giving the reverse advice. Similarly, volunteering to fight “Islamofascism” in Iraq requires significantly more toughness than does writing blog posts about how troops should be withdrawn. But blogging about how more troops should be sent to fight “Islamofascism” in Iraq isn’t a tougher, braver thing to do than is blogging the reverse.

Who could have guessed that Joe Lieberman would wind up hiring conservative Republican and hard-core warmonger Marshall Wittman to be his new spokesperson? I look forward to Wittman’s and Lieberman’s efforts to demonstrate their interest in humanitarianism by trying to get other people to risk their lives in an effort to kill lots of Iranian people.

UPDATE: Mark Schmitt notes the possibility of a McCain/Lieberman combo third party run peddling the line “We were each rejected by the ideological extremists in our parties, therefore we represent the true forgotten center of American politics.” And, as Mark says, they’ll be in the “center” if by “center” you mean “on the far, far right on national security issues.”

UPDATE II: Ed Kilgore comments: “The Moose became a passionate advocate for Lieberman’s primary and general-election campaigns in no small part because he sincerely believes both parties are in danger of abandoning the political center, and quite frankly because he is happiest free of either party’s yoke.” Seriously, though. In what way does Joe Lieberman represent the center? In McCain’s case it’s clear that he’s the furthest right Republican on defense and use of force issues. And as best I can tell, Lieberman holds . . . the same views. Which, I mean, is fine — I have extreme views on some issues, too, but just because mainstream Republicans and mainstream Democrats both reject something doesn’t make it centrist; it could just be fringey and foolish.

Pierre Gemayal assassinated in Lebanon. Members of the anti-Syrian bloc currently controlling the opposition blame Syria. Syria and members of the opposition deny involvement, claiming it was a provocation designed to destabilize Lebanon. One hopes this doesn’t prefigure a return to civil war conditions.

New column from me:

“Just recently we have had the Lebanese revolution, the Egyptian announcement about electoral changes, the Iraqi elections, the Afghan elections,” wrote Charles Krauthammer in the spring of 2005. “Kuwait has just extended suffrage to women, and Syria has announced, however disingenuously, that they are moving toward legalizing political parties, purging the ruling Baath Party, sponsoring free municipal elections in 2007, and formally endorsing a market economy.” He concluded: “What we have seen in the last six months has been simply astonishing — well, astonishing to the critics.” . . .

“There is a pathology, a historical pathology,” explained New Republic editor in chief Martin Peretz, “that [Bush] has attacked with unprecedented vigor and with unprecedented success.” That pathology was “the political culture of the Middle East, which the president may actually have changed.”

And, indeed, things have changed. As Sabrina Tavernise reported in Monday’s New York Times about the centerpiece of the U.S.-orchestrated Mid-East transformation, “after months of apparently random sectarian violence the pattern has become one of attack and counterattack, with Sunni militants staging what commanders call ‘spectacular’ strikes and Shiite militias retaliating with abductions and murders of Sunnis.”

Welcome to the long, dark Arab winter.

So there.

The government of Israel has, obviously, been controlling a large parcel of land it conquered from Jordan for several decades now — the West Bank — land that is presumed to be the future location of an independent state of Palestine. At the same time, Israel has been building settlements on that land — freestanding small- or medium-sized towns as well as what amount to suburbs of Jerusalem, populated by Jews who, unlike their Muslim or Christian Arab neighbors, are citizens of Israel with rights, etc. But in addition to parcels of land being controlled by governments — in this case, first the United Kingdom, then Jordan, now Israel — they are owned by individuals. So where did the settlers get the land? The Israeli government has always claimed it’s been legitimately obtained through purchase. According to this new study by Peace Now it isn’t true.

They obtained files leaked from the 2004 database of the Civil Administration, in charge of non-military aspects of West Bank administration, and concluded that fully 39 percent of settlement land area is privately owned by Palestinians. Or, perhaps, “was owned” since, obviously, it’s been taken from them. See further coverage by Steve Erlanger in The New York Times and Yair Sheleg in Haaretz. I, for one, look forward to the explanation of how Erlanger, Sheleg, their editors, the Peace Now Settlement Watch team, and the dudes in the Israeli government who leaked this to them are all anti-semites.

Via Kevin Drum, new polling from the Project on International Policy Attitudes indicates that Iraqis would overwhelmingly like to see the United States leave Iraq on a definite schedule within a reasonably short time frame. The full report is here. “Seven out of ten Iraqis overall—including both the Shia majority (74%) and the Sunni minority (91%)—say they want the United States to leave within a year.” In Baghdad, the center of our current military efforts and the place where fears of an upsurge in violence were the US to leave are most realistic (Baghdad residents share this concern), support for departure is, if anything, somewhat stronger with 80 percent of the Baghdad Shia saying they’d like to see us leave.

As Kevin notes, one can debate whether this is really the correct policy judgment on the part of Iraqis. Perhaps in some sense things would be better if they simply welcomed their foreign overlords.

That said, as he also points out, it really doesn’t matter. Whatever it might be possible for US forces to achieve in principle, we’re not going to be able to do anything useful in the face of this kind of overwhelming opposition to our very presence. People won’t cooperate with our troops meaningfully or be interested in American views on what kind of steps the Iraqi government should or should not be taking. Most of all, you certainly can’t build a democracy with an unpopular occupying army staying in a foreign country in the face of hostile public attitudes. Insofar as the Iraqi government does cooperate with our forces and does take our suggestions, it’s only going to find itself discredited by association with us. The situation is untenable, and we need to leave. What’s more, we need to start planning to leave as soon as possible so we can figure out a plan that’s orderly and reasonably safe, rather than finding ourselves needing to do it in a panic 30 months from now.

Leon Wieseltier on Iraq with some emphasis added:

We cannot quit on moral grounds, because we have an obligation to assist the secular democracy-builders in Iraq, the heroes in the wreckage, whose cause is not yet lost, and we have an obligation to protect the Kurds. And we cannot quit on strategic grounds, because of the gains to Iran and to the terrorist international. So what should we do? Briefly, anything and everything. An increase in troop deployments for the mastery of Baghdad, upon which a great deal depends (if order is not established, nothing good will be established); reform of the Iraqi military, or of what passes for the Iraqi military; redeployment to less provocative locations; a federal arrangement of the Iraqi state; an international conference (but about Iraq, not Palestine); an attempt to flip Syria to our side, which is not beyond the diplomatic imagination; anything and everything. If we leave, or if we stay the bleeding course, things will get even worse.

This is all a pony hunt as far as I’m concerned so on some level, whatever. That said, suppose Bush were to go pony hunting at a regional conference wherein Syria agrees to “flip . . . to our side” and various other actors agree to do ponyish things but they say that in order to sell it to their publics and in order to prove American bona fides they need us to, say, get the IDF out of Gaza. That’s off the table? Iraq is so important and leaving so bad that we should do anything — anything — to salvage some scrap of dignity their, but Israel is totally off the table for discussion in any respect. Total US backing for whatever Israel is just beyond all possible trading off? As I say, hypothetical pony hunt outcomes aren’t my top concern, but the general principle here seems obviously pernicious.

Aryeh Neier, formerly of Human Rights Watch and currently of the Open Society Institute, had a great article in The New York Review of Books a couple of issues ago about the Lobby That Shall Not Be Named’s scandalous campaign against Human Rights Watch and its executive director, Kenneth Roth, in the wake of the Lebanon War. Having issues reports condemning crimes committed by Hezbollah as well as ones critical of Israeli conduct, the group got the following treatment:

Read more

Good times; the return of the Iran debate. People should listen to Ray Takeyh rather than, say, Joshua Muravchik. Interestingly, Muravchik is willing to follow neoconservatism’s war is always the answer approach to some outside-the-box conclusions:

After the Bolshevik takeover of Russia in 1917, a single member of Britain’s Cabinet, Winston Churchill, appealed for robust military intervention to crush the new regime. His colleagues weighed the costs — the loss of soldiers, international derision, revenge by Lenin — and rejected the idea.

Apparently, this was a bad idea on the part of the British government. And, no doubt, Soviet Communism proved to be a very bad thing indeed. On the other hand, the western powers actually did intervene, sending troops into Russia and giving aid to the White forces in the Russian Civil War. It didn’t work out. To be sure, they could have tried intervening even more forcefully (the neocon method of saving all failed military ventures) but I don’t see any real reason to think this could have worked out. Assemble a huge army (in the immediate aftermath of world war one, mind you) to march on Moscow and then . . . what? Install a puppet regime? And occupy the country — a big country — for how long, exactly? And, needless to say, it’s not as if efforts to conquer Russia have some kind of brilliant historical track record.

I have absolutely no idea what the people advocating for “one last push” in Iraq, with an influence of however many additional troops can be temporarily “surged” into Baghdad are thinking. One last push for what? A higher troop concentration in some particular area might get whatever disfavored elements are around to lie low or head elsewhere for a while, but it’s not as if we’re going to have the mapower to go house-by-house through Iraq and scrub the country of weapons. The various armed factions in Iraq are far too embedded, socially and politically, in the fabric of Iraqi society. This just seems like a desperation pundit play to avoid admitting that the “left” position — we should leave Iraq — is, in fact, the correct one.

I’m in Philadelphia today, which is why I haven’t been blogging. The President is on a trip to:

But Mr. Bush is not staying overnight in the world’s most populous Muslim nation, which Washington has portrayed as a critical test in the struggle to promote moderate, democratic Islamic states. The Secret Service said it was too dangerous, so he will spend the night in Hawaii.

This sort of thing is hardly dispositive, but you can’t take it as a good sign when the president’s policies are so hated in the Muslim world that he regards it as unsafe to stay overnight in Muslim countries.

Before reaching his hilariously predictable conclusion — the thing to do in Iraq is make sure the Palestinians remain subjected to foreign military occupation for as long as possible — New Republic editor-in-chief Martin Peretz offers up this striking aperçu:

Give George W. Bush his due. He took down the Taliban. And he also took down the savage Caesar. These are achievements. What he did not grasp–and what, for that matter, Baker and those for whom he speaks also do not grasp–is the sheer and relentless butchery of which both Sunni and Shia are capable. The fiendish barbarism of decapitated heads and mutilated bodies is now a reflex of the warriors and nothing exceptional, a commonplace. Even the bare rudiments of civilization will not soon come back to the banks of the Tigris and the Euphrates.

The bare rudiments of civilization, eh? No al-Qaeda recruiting videos — or, for that matter, written language — to worry about then. As one wit whose name I’ll withhold to protect the innocent observed, the civil war shouldn’t get too out of hand since the participants won’t have any wheels. Just two sides trying to slug it out with rocks and so forth. Eventually, either Sunni or Shiite will figure out how to crack the stones so as to reveal sharp edges and they’ll have an upper hand against their stick-tossing adversaries. Fortunately, in civilized parts of the world there’s no history of ethnically motivated killing and mutilation so we can all rest secure in our easy sense of innate moral superiority to the towel heads.