James Taranto says he isn’t in the tank for Giuliani—ha! I don’t care if he is. I was interested, however, to read some of Giuliani’s recent remarks, which he quotes:

I get very, very frustrated when I . . . hear certain Americans talk about how difficult the problems we face are, how overwhelming they are, what a dangerous era we live in. I think we’ve lost perspective. We’ve always had difficult problems, we’ve always had great challenges, and we’ve always lived in danger.

Do we think our parents and our grandparents and our great grandparents didn’t live in danger and didn’t have difficult problems? Do we think the Second World War was less difficult that our struggle with Islamic terrorism? Do we think that the Great Depression was a less difficult economic struggle for people to face than the struggles we’re facing now? Have we entirely lost perspective of the great challenges America has faced in the past and has been able to overcome and overcome brilliantly? I think sometimes we have lost that perspective.

Do you know what leadership is all about? Leadership is all about restoring that perspective that this country is truly an exceptional country that has great things that it is going to accomplish in the future that will be as great and maybe even greater than the ones we’ve accomplished in the past. If we can’t do that, shame on us.

Well, yeah. I couldn’t have said it better myself. Also, I’ve been known to say that the candidate who offers America a pleasing vision of itself as a can-do nation is going to win the next election.

Hitchens dares to hope that the trickle of better news coming out of Iraq is good news:

To have savaged and discredited al-Qaida in an open fight and to have taken down a fascist Baath Party, which betrayed its pseudosecularism by forging an alliance with al-Qaida, is to have scored an impressive victory on any terms. However, the price of this achievement was often the indulgence of some excessive conduct on the part of the Shiite parties and militias. The next stage must be the reining-in of the Sadrists and the discouragement of Iranian support for such groups. Again, one hardly dares to hope, but there are some promising signs. The Maliki government is not using undue haste or sectarian demagogy in the case of Sultan Hashim Ahmed al-Tai, Saddam Hussein’s former defense minister, sentenced to death but not yet executed. Many Sunni Kurds and Arabs, either opposed to the death penalty on principle or opposed in this case, seem for now to have prevailed. And “the cabinet,” according to the Nov. 18 New York Times, “has sent legislation to the Parliament softening the de-Baathification law that had prevented former Baathists’ working in government jobs.” I wonder how many people, reading that ordinary sentence about “the cabinet” and “the Parliament,” as reported also in independent Iraqi media, have any idea what it means when compared with the insane proceedings of the totalitarian abattoir state that was Iraq until 2003.

Stop wondering, Hitchens. You know exactly how few people reading that ordinary sentence have any idea what it means. Stop wondering and keep on keepin’ on.

What’s this the L.A. Times is reporting? cooperation between Sunnis and Shia in Iraq?

Despite persistent sectarian tensions in the Iraqi government, war-weary Sunnis and Shiites are joining hands at the local level to protect their communities from militants on both sides, U.S. military officials say.

In the last two months, a U.S.-backed policing movement called Concerned Citizens, launched last year in Sunni-dominated Anbar province under the banner of the Awakening movement, has spread rapidly into the mixed Iraqi heartland.

Of the nearly 70,000 Iraqi men in the Awakening movement, started by Sunni Muslim sheiks who turned their followers against Al Qaeda in Iraq, there are now more in Baghdad and its environs than anywhere else, and a growing number of those are Shiite Muslims.

Commanders in the field think they have tapped into a genuine public expression of reconciliation that has outpaced the elected government’s progress on mending the sectarian rift.

Of course if you’ve been reading Engram’s blog, you know that there was never, strictly speaking, a civil war in Iraq—it was way more complicated, and way less complicated—than that.

Norman Podheretz takes time out of his 24/7 job counseling that the U.S. bomb Iran to answer a charge brought by Andrew Sullivan and now spread further by The Economist:

Linking to the Economist post, Sullivan accuses me of intellectual dishonesty for failing to admit that I have made an “error” in relying on a “bogus quotation” to bolster my argument that if Iran were to acquire nuclear weapons, it would not be deterred from using them by the fear of retaliation.

I do not usually bother responding to Sullivan’s frequent attacks on me, which are fueled by the same shrill hysteria that, as has often been pointed out, deforms most of what he “dishes” out on a daily basis. But in this case I have decided to respond because, by linking to a sober source like the Economist, he may for a change seem credible.

The Economist concludes its piece by challenging Amir Taheri to produce “the original source for this quote.”

In response to a query from me, Mr. Taheri has now met that challenge.

Sullivan responds by casting doubt on Taheri:

Taheri, whose reliability has come under suspicion before, says the remark was purged or censored or removed in subsequent editions of the book. I have no independent way of confirming any of this. Taheri, it should be noted, was the source of the story that Iran had recently required that Jews wear yellow stars in public, a story that was subsequently debunked.

Well, I hate to say it, but The Economist ’s counter-translator, Shaul Bakhash of George Mason University, also seems compromised—not at all an disinterested party. He’s the husband of the Iranian American scholar Haleh Esfandiari, who was detained in Iran this past year and, under great international pressure, released. I wouldn’t be surprised if Iranian agents haven’t put tremendous pressure on both Esfandiari and Bakhash to toe the line.

His comments in The Economist certainly sound different than these impassioned words, published in May 2007:

Once Haleh was arrested, however, silence was no longer an option. It is preposterous that she is accused of conspiring to overthrow the Iranian government by organizing conferences and encouraging dialogue between Iranians and Americans. The Wilson Center issued a fact sheet; Lee Hamilton, its president and director, held a news conference; and I began to speak openly about Haleh’s frightening predicament.

The extraordinary media attention, as well as the support for Haleh from presidential candidates and political leaders, from scholars and academic associations, from the students at Princeton University who she taught to love the Persian language, from women’s groups, human rights organizations and people everywhere have astonished and gratified her family and friends.

It is easy to feel powerless in the face of a state’s overweening power — especially a state that arrests, incarcerates and accuses its citizens at will. But the events of the last few weeks — the universal condemnation Iran has earned by imprisoning Haleh and others — have taught me that people also have power when they condemn injustice and stand up for wronged individuals. Is the Iranian government listening?

Americans are too naive about Iran, and about the Middle East. It’s time to get with the program.

Not for the first time, Matthew Yglesias throws out a typical insouciant comment on his Atlantic Online blog. Also not for the first time, he gets his ass chewed out by a commenter:

We invaded Iraq “for no real reason”? This has to be the stupidest remark printed in The Atlantic in 150 years. Yglesias should stop posting until he’s at least able to pass a Jr. High current events quiz.

Besides murdering God knows how many Iraqis with routine police-state methods, Iraq killed about a million people and created a world recession by invading Iran, using wmd’s liberally (including to help kill about 250,000 Kurds), rocketing supertankers, etc in the process.

Hardly pausing for breath afterwards, Iraq then invaded, raped, and annexed Kuwait, a charter member of the UN and a US ally, killing about 300,000 of its citizens and dragging us into a war, firing missiles into Israel and Saudi Arabia, and torching the oilfields for good measure.

Given this history, and the fact that we discovered a nuclear program mere months away from producing a viable weapon, strict terms on this and other matters were included in the ceasefire agreement. It was comprehensively violated by Iraq, as were the subsequent 16 Chapter VII UNSC Resolutions. Further efforts to control Iraq’s behavior made us complicit in the murder of hundreds of thousands of Shi’ia who rose up at our behest, the near-total destruction of the Marsh Arabs and the ecosystem that had sheltered them for millenia, and the deaths of perhaps a million of the most vulnerable Iraqis by means of sanctions. By 2003, we had an army of nearly half a million perched on the edge of the Arabian desert with summer coming, and Iraq still, according to Hans Blix, in blatant material breech of its obligations, leaving us with the choice of keeping our word about “serious consequences”, or surrender. This amounts to “no real reason”?

You must be out of your mind.

Posted by Robert Powell | November 19, 2007 3:37 PM

The Sun’s Eli Lake is content merely to question Mr. Yglesias’s logic:

Matt,

How can this be? Everyone knows the neocons pressured the CIA and lied to the American public to start a needless war for Israel. Everyone knows that the State Department and the CIA knew, just knew, that Iraq was no threat whatsoever. I mean the only explanation is that Holbrooke must have been a neocon. But if he’s a neocon, well what was he doing in the Clinton administration that was paying so much attention to the real threats to America? Maybe you and Matthew Duss could explain all this to.

Eli

Posted by Eli Lake | November 19, 2007 3:36 PM

Don’t expect any fireworks, or any additional expenditure of brain cells from Mr Yglesias. He never answers such inconvenient questions—especially one that would acknowledge the case against Saddam that Democrats were making during Clinton’s regime, long before 9/11.

These questions expose Yglesias’s blind partisanship, the incoherence of his political arguments, and his intellectual dishonesty. Mostly, though, they expose his peace-at-any-price foreign policy instinct.

That instinct is going to be tested again and again in the coming years. The dangers beyond the water’s edge are real. We want a secretary of state, not to mention a president, who gets that.

One of Andrew Sullivan’s readers exposes the limits of even the best reporting. Here’s what the reader wrote to Sullivan:

The New Yorker report you cited is so bad it is scary. If this is what you are reading to figure out what is going then you need a better source. This article is riddled with incorrect facts and easements. It doesn’t just get things sorta wrong, it gets them 180 degrees wrong.

Unfortunately I can’t go through every part of the article, because much of what I would say is classified. I’ll just comment on the part you quoted from a Sheikh Zaidan. Sheikh Zaidan is not a “prominent Sunni tribal leader” at all. Actually, he is a nobody with no tribal power or constituency who probably isn’t even a Sheikh and who is likely still involved with the insurgency. The insurgency has been beaten so bad in Anbar that he is forced to cool his rhetoric. Of course they didn’t make us “crawl on our stomachs”. What happened was, we were killing insurgents like it was cool and the insurgents were killing Iraqis like it was cool. The tribes realized they were getting wiped out at both ends.

For what it’s worth: I believe that the New Yorker’s Jon Lee Anderson got and told the best story he could get, and could tell. But his understanding of the terrain and the larger context—his template, if you will—cannot compete with what is known by readers like Sullivan’s, who are on the ground.

It’s not that one storyteller is right and the other is wrong. Without Anderson’s template, it’s impossible for us to get a handle on a situation that for New Yorker readers is completely alien. Without the corrections to Anderson’s template offered by Sullivan’s reader, we cannot go deeper into the reality of facts on the ground.

The real problem isn’t whom to believe, however. The real problem is that people just aren’t that into finding out the truth about Iraq. They’re into political warfare at home.