Unsent letters: Dear Jonathan Rauch

Dear Jonathan Rauch:

The whole point of recognizing political tactics like the use of the "stab in the back" narrative is to discredit their use, to take away their power. Not to acknowledge how clever they are at fooling people and concluding that we must give the other side what they want now.

Best,

When I knew Iraq was hopeless

Mark Kleiman, in a post noting that Phil Carter has become persona non grata to the remaining pro-war true believers, writes

The first time I knew that all was, almost certainly, lost in Iraq was when Phil told me, during his mid-tour leave, that he and his comrades had received no Arabic-language training stateside on their way to Iraq. But he told me not to mention that fact in this space because he didn't want to put out a discouraging message about a mission to whose success he was still committed. His talk to a packed audience at UCLA Law School, which proudly claims him as an alumnus, was much more up-beat than his private conversation back then.

I can provide a date for the point I knew that the situation in Iraq was completely hopeless: January 28, 2004. On that day, I posted at my previous blog-home, Signifying Nothing, about the White House hiring a 24-year-old with no financial experience to rebuild the Baghdad stock exchange.

I'm not claiming to be particularly prescient, but nothing about this whole fiasco, except Abu Ghraib, has particularly surprised me since then.

Grammar Pedantry

One of my biggest grammatical pet peeves is incorrect formation of the present perfect tense. For example, here's a quote from an AP story on a speech given by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates:

"Failure in Iraq would unleash sectarian strife and extremism and would be felt first in the Middle East, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Wednesday."

Since this is not a direct quote, it's not clear whether the grammatical error is due to the AP writer, or to Secretary Gates. But the error is a serious one; the present perfect tense is formed in English by using the auxiliary verb "have" or "has", not "would". The sentence should been written thus:

"Failure in Iraq has unleashed sectarian strife and extremism and has been felt first in the Middle East, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Wednesday."

The AP and Secretary Gates's speechwriter should take note of this for future speeches regarding conditions in Iraq.

Cynicism or Delusion?

Paul Krugman asks the question of the day (via Mark Thoma):

The only real question about the planned “surge” in Iraq — which is better described as a Vietnam-style escalation — is whether its proponents are cynical or delusional.

Opinions differ:

Senator Joseph Biden ... thinks they’re cynical. He recently told The Washington Post that administration officials are simply running out the clock, so that the next president will be “the guy landing helicopters inside the Green Zone, taking people off the roof.”

Daniel Kahneman, who won the Nobel Memorial Prize ... for his research on irrationality in decision-making, thinks they’re delusional. Mr. Kahneman and Jonathan Renshon recently argued in Foreign Policy magazine that the administration’s unwillingness to face reality in Iraq reflects a basic human aversion to cutting one’s losses — the same instinct that makes gamblers stay at the table, hoping to break even.

I'm sure it's a mixture of the two. Warmongering pundits like William Kristol are surely delusional. And surely there are some in the administration who are merely cynical, perhaps including the President himself.

The danger is that the newly elected Democratic Congress falls prey to a different form of cynicism: they've already won one election because of an unpopular war, and it's got to be very tempting to put up only token resistance to the President's crazy scheme, let him have the "surge" he claims to want, and coast to another victory in 2008 when the plan inevitably fails. It's especially tempting since the most dangerous Republican presidential candidate in 2008, Senator McCain, is a surge proponent.

Is McCain delusional? Or is he a different sort of cynic, hoping that the Democrats refuse to go along with the President's scheme, so that he can run on the Dolchstosslegende?