December 7, 2004
TRYING TO UNWOBBLE HIMSELF:
Bright Side (Andrew Sullivan, 12.07.04, New Republic)
[I]n the past few weeks, the case for despair has unmistakably weakened a notch.Take the little-heralded breakthrough the week before Thanksgiving, when Iraq's major Western creditors agreed to forgive 80 percent of Iraq's debt. Yes, that includes those prickly states in "Old Europe," like France and Germany. Imagine if a president-elect Kerry had announced such a breakthrough. It would have made headlines across the globe. But Bush consigliere James Baker pulled it off--and who wants to celebrate him?
And there was an even less-noticed development this past month: the relative silence across Iraq after the devastating coalition assault on Falluja. The military campaign led to the deaths of thousands, including civilians caught in the crossfire, and left much of the city in rubble. It included the awful imagery of a scared U.S. Marine blowing a wounded Iraqi's head off, a scene replayed endlessly on Arab television. Did the rest of Iraq rise up in protest, as happened in the spring during a similar aborted attack on Falluja? Not even close. The Kurds and the Shia understand that their interest today lies in a successful election. They're not unhappy to see Sunni and Baathist rebels get pummeled by American arms. In that, you see the beginning of the new Iraqi reality: a place where 80 percent of the country wants the democratic transition to succeed.
The coalition has learned a critical tactic in neo-imperial governance: divide and rule. From the Romans to the Brits, it has long been a useful strategy. By working with the grain of Iraqi ethnic tension, specifically the pent-up hostility of Kurds and Shia toward the Sunnis, who for decades ran the country, the United States has been able to gain leverage against the largely Sunni insurgency. So as Sunni Falluja was pummeled, the Shia were quiet and Kurdish troops actually took part in the operation. Yes, it's a potentially dangerous ploy. Pushing the division too far could lead to civil war. But there's some good news here as well: In a recent poll of 2,210 Iraqis, a full two-thirds of those surveyed said the prospect of a civil war was "not realistic."
Then came the real prize: a desperate and angry tape from Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, fugitive leader of what he now calls Al Qaeda in Iraq, lashing out at Muslim clerics for not supporting the jihad. "You have let us down in the darkest circumstances and handed us over to the enemy," Zarqawi vented. "You have stopped supporting the holy warriors. Hundreds of thousands of the nation's sons are being slaughtered at the hands of the infidels because of your silence." Those are not confident words.
It may well be that greater numbers of trained Iraqi soldiers and police, relentless military pressure on the insurgents, and the prospect of a real election have begun to turn the tide on terrorism in Iraq.
Let's all pretend that his change of heart has to do with what's going on there rather than what happened here on November 2nd. Posted by Orrin Judd at December 7, 2004 6:07 PM
It's just that his opposition to Conservatives goes flaccid after an election.
Posted by: Son Numba One at December 7, 2004 6:42 PMI can't believe he's just learned to read and that's the reason he suddenly sees the successes in Iraq.
Look for him to declare it a hopeless cause tomorrow.
Posted by: NKR at December 7, 2004 6:52 PMI am really disappointed in Andrew. What a hypocrite. I used to read his blog daily but it's been months now since I gave it up.
Posted by: Kay in CA at December 7, 2004 7:05 PMHis readership's up, yah? And he's making his living from his blog now, right? Seems pretty straightforward to me.
Posted by: joe shropshire at December 7, 2004 7:26 PMFlip flop flop flop flip flip flop flip flop flip flop flop flop flip flop flip...
You get the idea.
Posted by: Casey Abell at December 7, 2004 8:22 PMPerhaps now that his sleep apnea is being treated Andrew will be less mercurial. But only perhaps. I have a sneaking suspicion that when Bush shows he is serious about the FMA Andrew will once again declare Iraq a disaster.
Posted by: Dan at December 7, 2004 9:58 PMTo Andrew's credit -- or at least to his consistancy -- he was mirroring a few of the folks over at the NRO blog back in 02-03 in complaining about Bush's failure to veto any spending measures, so there were a few ideological complaints before he went completely off the charts about DOMA. Aside from the election, the 11-for-11 score that the hetrosexual marriage resolutions racked up over the past few months may also have given Sullivan a moment's pause about the short-term chances of his favorite issue.
It's easy to slam Utah as a bunch of bigoted religous yahoos when they do that, and think it doesn't apply to the feelings of the rest of the country, but less so when it passes by a wide margin in Ohio or Missouri. Were the politicians in many of the Blue States to allow similar votes on defining marriage, Andrew would probably be even more depressed after those results were tabulated.
Posted by: John at December 7, 2004 10:14 PMWell, he does have to pay those back property taxes on the house in Providence, so it's time to get a new set of chumps ready to cough up in his next "pledge drive."
Posted by: Raoul Ortega at December 7, 2004 11:46 PMSince it really is good news, I like to think he is actually happy.
Posted by: andy at December 8, 2004 1:35 AMSullivan has lost all credibility with me. As I blogged before the election, Sullivan did more than get a little nervous about the situation in Iraq, he sold out:
That Sullivan can agree with all of the reasons that George Bush gave for leading us to war against Saddam, and then disparage him as incompetent and arrogant for not prosecuting that war flawlessly shows that he does not have the courage to defend his own decision to support the war. He wants credit for making the right choice to back the war, but wants to lay all blame for the embarassing setbacks at the feet of the president. He is a squeamish moralist who is unwilling to stand up for a difficult but morally justified decision when that decision leads to unforeseen results. We will never fight a flawless war and will never have the luxury of fielding an army composed only of saints. The decision to go to war will always set in motion events that will act to the detriment of the very goals we are trying to acheive. No amount of planning or supervision by the Commander in Chief or his subordinates will ever make such setbacks avoidable.
Posted by: Robert Duquette at December 8, 2004 5:20 AMAndrew who? Never heard of the guy.
Posted by: Greg Hlatky at December 8, 2004 7:05 AMRe: Andrew Sullivan
Andrew and I go way back. I admired him when he was the boy editor of the TNR and marveled at his courage in telling the truth while in the center of the leftwing propaganda machine, and was among the first to discover his blog.
For a long time last spring I tried to excuse his 180 as a temporary aberration, but after a couple of months, his blog was excised from my daily reads not because of the views, but because he no longer made sense.
Perhaps the enormous amounts of medications he takes have clouded his ability to think clearly or maybe, like many of us, he has returned to his roots. To the place he feels comfortable, the place where they have to take him in. In other words to his figurative home - the arms of his loony left buddies.
Posted by: erp at December 8, 2004 7:23 AMHe began his slip into incoherence with his rabid defense of homosexual priests during the Church scandals. Bush's remarks on the FMA completely undid the guy, this summer he was going days without blogging anything cogent. I'd hate to think it's AIDS dementia. Hopefully, it's just p*nis politics posing as a viable political position. Hope he comes back to the Church.
Posted by: JimGooding at December 8, 2004 9:57 AMAndrew wants to sound serious and wise, but he is driven by the emotion of the moment more than he would admit. Not uncommon, but when you write as much as he does, it can be annoying.
Of course, he rarely faces the inconsistencies. Most people don't. In this way, he is almost the perfect Kerry supporter: practically reveling in the 'nuance'. But he is too smart for that to last.
Posted by: jim hamlen at December 8, 2004 10:01 AMSullivan is far more fixated on the trees than on the forest. He worries about crap like FMA or our over-exuberance in Abu Gharib, while failing to comprehend the importance of fighting terror where the terrorists live, not where we do.
Posted by: Bart at December 8, 2004 12:44 PM