Warming up in the left hand corner...

I was opposed to this war--the excessively military approach, the lack of political strategy, and above all the narrow focus on Iraq, when it was and is a regional war--but the terror masters have totally failed to drive us out, to radicalize the Iraqi population, to provoke civil war or to take control of any meaningful territory. If anyone had said, at the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom, that within less than three years there would be a good constitution, a high degree of democratic participation, and barely more than two thousand American deaths, he would have been called a visionary at best. But there we are. Of course we can win.

It seems difficult to win when a victory which has not been defined. We have routed Saddam, overthrown the regime, but we seem nowhere even remotely close to establishing the democracy that Bush calls for. You dont really think that is a doal achieveable in the span of 2-3 or even 5-10 years, do you?

Further, Michael. It seems what we have done is to empower and arm the Shia who are in turn greatly influenced by the Iranian Mullahs. This it would seem pretty much guarantees ongoing war, if not full out civil war, with the Sunnis who perceive themselves as being on the sort end of a New Iraq. That hardly seems "worth it."

it all depends. i don't think we can win a defensive war in Iraq, because that gives all the initiative to the terrorists. They will decide when, where and how to attack us and the Iraqis. But I do think that if we do what the president seems to want--support democratic revolutionaries in Iran, Syria, Lebanon and Saudi Arabia--then yes, we can win, and relatively quickly. The great failure of strategic vision so far is our reluctance to engage (politically rather than militarily) on a regional scale.

Oh goodness! I wish THIS President would want so much less! Before he starts planning democratic revolution in Syria, Lebanon and Saudi Arabia it might be nice if ge could get the water and lights turned on in Baghdad, that he stand up and Iraqi police force and army, that he provide enough armor for our own troops. I dont trust this president to organize a booze-up in a brewery...oh.. on second thought .. maybe that he could do!

Heh, there you go again Marc. The Syrians and Iranians are arming lots of Iraqis, but you jump on us for empowering the Iraq Shi'ites. But they and the Kurds amount to --what?--seventy percent of the population. So we're empowering the Iraqis. Meanwhile we have gotten all kinds of political conessions for the Sunnis, even for ex-Baathists. So we're doing what we should do, give the Iraqis what they need.

If you want to criticize, it would be better to criticize us for failing to give the Iraqi Army and Police good weapons. Why won't we sell American weapons to the Iraqi Armed Forces?

But seriously.. you say in you last book that Iraq is the wrong war, the wrong time, the wrong place. Who knew you were a Kerry supporter? Are you now having second thoughts about the Iraqi invasion?

So we should let the decapitators run amok because there isn't enough electricity in Baghdad?

I wanted to attack Saddam politically first, and then militarily if it proved necessary (footnote: I wanted to support revolution in Iran first, then worry about Iraq; Iran is the leading terror master). I wanted to proclaim the two no-fly zones "free Iraq" and say to the IRaqi people: "you don't have to die for this man. Go North, go South, live freely, join with us, we will help you govern yourselves."

So no, I haven't changed my mind. We did it wrong. But doing it wrong is still better than appeasing the tyrants, so I wasn't Kerry supporter.

Question: Why wont we sell American weapons the Iraqi Army?

After you answer...It seems the one good morsel that fell from Bush's speech last week was --finally-- a begrudging addmission that much of the enemy in Iraq are not "terrorists" or "bin ladinists" but are rather disgruntled Sunni. That's a baby step by Bush, and a good one.

But what makes anyone think the Sunnis are gonna roll over into the political process? This isnt Capitol Hill where you appease this or that faction with some Transportation Bill pork. This is rather about the future of Iraq; who holds power; who controls the oil; who controls the army and courts; and how much Iranian influence you dont want in ur country.

My guess is that next week's elections will only exacerbate that divide.

So tell me, Marc, what ever happened to the Left in this country? You guys used to support revolution against tyranny, now the Left either appeases or retreats. And those of us who support revolution in the Middle East are called "conservatives." What's up with that?

No, I dont want to let beheaders run amok. And while Bush and the war suppporters have much to answer for, those of us who want to drawn down this war and US involvement have the obligation of answering that query in some serious way.

But Michael, there was NO beheading by these terrorists going on in or from Iraq before the Bush invasion. Saddam was in a box with some rubber bands to keep him entertained and Iraq was hardly a terror foco. As you know.

Your idea of declaring the no-fly zones liberated instead of us pouring into Baghdad with 130,000 troops, sounds like a wonderful, thougtful alternative to the quagmire we are currently in. If we had done that, kept up the inspections and the Intl pressure, we would have put a terrible squeeze on Saddam and probably toppled him without this $150 billion a year invasion.

Why DIDNT the Bush admin take this more political course instead of stampeding the country into war?

Hey, I asked YOU why we won't sell American weapons to the Iraqi Army? You can't ask ME that question.

Anyone looking at the behavior of the Sunnis should, I think, be surprised at their rising participation in the political process. Most of them realize that staying out will only leave them smaller pieces of the national pie. I think Bush--relying yet again on our intel people?--was wrong to stress the Sunni/Shi'ite divide, when the most surprising and encouraging thing about the last couple of years is the degree to which so many Iraqis have refused to be drawn in to ethnic and religious conflict, despite the desperate efforts of the Saudis, Iranians and Syrians to foment such clashes.

I have proposed that the Iraqi people should be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. They have truly overperformed, don't you think?

And the mullahs must be enraged, since it's clear that the Iraqi Shi'ites are not falling for the Khomeini model: no Islamic Republic for Iraq, thank heavens.

LOL! Well, it's a good question. And one Im willing to debate. I think the short answer is something like this: There is part of the left that is isolationist... period. And quite comnfortable reading Pat's American Conservative. There's another more internationalist left which does favor supporting democratic revolution abroad BUT...it finds itself lacking confidence in the military-political establishement to do the right thing. Too many times that American power has been exercised to support the wrong side. And in the case of Iraq, when it has been deployed against a barbaric dictatorship it has failed -- at least so far-- to guarantee stability and real democratic change.

But we can say the same thing of the right, you know. All those principles of freedom and democracy but in the end using our power to support dictatorships in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, The Gulf States etc etc etc

I don't buy that fable about Saddam being in a little box. He was killing tens of thousands of Iraqis. You've seen those tapes, haven't you? Weren't they posted on The Nation's website?

I don't know if we could have brought down Saddam by purely political means. I tend to doubt it. And when you say we should have "continued" the inspections, well, uh, they didn't work very well, did they? But I do think if we had supported the Iranian opposition, we could have brought down the mullahs, and that would have changed the entire Middle East overnight. Hell, even bringing down Saddam in a fierce battle changed the region, there are democratic forces openly at work today that nobody dreamt of three years ago.

Wait a minute.. YOU are the arms trader guy!Didnt I just see you in Syriana? So the arms sales question is for you.

Now back to the present. What about the December 15 elections in Iraq? You are supporting your bud Chalabi I take it?

Okay, let's talk about those leftists who pretend they're in favor of supporting democratic revolution against tyrants, but are unhappy with one or another democratic government, or establishment, in the West.

When we supported Solidarity in Poland, which was the key to the defeat of the Soviet Empire, a great deal of that was done by trade unions, American and European above all. Today, so far as I know, not a single trade union in the West is doing anything for the Iranian workers. That doesn't require a lovable military-industrial complex. It only requires a commitment to fight for freedom.

Let's stay with revolution for a minute, then do Chalabi ok?

Do I get royalties for Syriana? Who did I sell to?

Let's sort out the semantics here. Saddam was responsible for not tens but rather hundreds of thousands of deaths during his reign. We agree on that.
Fact is -- and this is NOT some sort of rationale-- it's a fact... that sort of mass killing had ceased by the time of the standoff with Bush. In fact, as you know, the last great spasm of killing was in 1991 when the Shia rose up to overthrow him and the small-d democrats of Bush 41 stood by and let Saddam massacre them.

I think the arms inspections were working, sorry. The previous decade of UN disarmament programs HAD worked. Saddam had been stripped of his WMD. And the final rounds of UN inspectors found no WMD because there were none to find.

I beleve it was folks like Chalabi who told the Bushies something else.

Come with me to Iraq, I'll introduce you to some Kurds who will tell you about the slaughter of their people throughout Saddam's reign. In fact, I'm sure you'll hear about it at the trial.

I am still waiting to hear about all those good, internationalist leftists who justify their appeasement of oppressive, reactionary regimes by saying "Bush lied." It just doesn't wash. It stinks. I know you're not one of those, Marc, but they should be outed. They're reactionaries.

Trying to stay on topic.. so bear with me... Do you know that in 1981 when u were helping to fund Solidarnosc, The Nation magazine organized a New York Town Hall meeting with, among others, Susan Sontag (!) under the banner of "Solidarity with Solidarity?"

There was an instance when the intelligent Right and the intelligent Left converged on the need to politically support a democratic insurgency against a totalitarian state.

I think that would have been easily doable again after 9/11. But the Bushies are cowboys and they are zealots... thoug not very good ones.

If they had rallied the American people in a palpable, understandable way to deploy American influence for a democratization of the Middle East, they would have wide support. But the sort of either/or bluster, the fudging and manipulation of intel and the domestic political stampede that preceded the war in Iraq was the opposite sort of strategy. Too bad.

On WMD, two things. First, I think they were there. I think the mystery is, what happened to them in the runup--excessively long, maddeningly long--to the overthrow of Saddam. I suspect some were destroyed, some were hidden, and some were exported. It's hard for me to believe that everyone on earth was wrong about this. And I mean everyone. Mubarak told us, a few weeks before the invasion, that Saddam had chemical weapons ready to use. The Russians believed it, so did the French (the FRENCH!!), the Spaniards, the Italians, the Turks....

Second, Chalabi's people provided precisely two defectors who claimed to have knowledge about WMDs. Two. The CIA had hundreds. To blame the CIA's failure on Chalabi is like blaming Edison's thousands of failed experiments on two bad filaments.

Michael.. here's the rub. Neither the Right nor the Left holds a monopoly on either moral purity or political stupidity. There are reactionaries on the Left who have taken a basic America First isolationist position, for sure. But there are tons of reactionaries on the right who dont want to recognize that complex social problems are not usually solved by invading armies, that occupations do not necessarily sprout democracies, that the projection of US military power if not done properly can create some awful backlashes that will haunt us for a long time and that.. ultimately.. our most potent weapon is the democratic high ground. When we compromise THAT in a =supposed war for democracy,we get onto the slippery slope. I refer, of course, to the recently revealed global network of "black" interment centers... as one example.

Yes, things were better in 1981. There was support for Solidarnosc from the Left. But surely you're not saying that the Left was more positive about Reagan than it is about Bush? Give me a break. Bwaaahahaha.

That said, I entirely agree that the Bush Administration has totally failed to design an effective strategy. I've called it a failure of strategic vision. We chant from the same hymnal on that one.

Well, as to those WMD's. Until someone comes up with an explanation, they weren't there. Sorry.
I play blackjack and yesI count the cards. There are moments when Im willing to bet the house -- or almost the house-- that the next card HAS to be a ten. Often it isn't.

So if the CIA so bollixed up this war in Iraq as you argue, why did GW Bush give George Tenent the medal of freedom? Why wasnt he fired? Why havent the Bushies gone after the CIA and hung'em out to dry on Iraq? At least as political scapegoats?

Okay, thanks, we've outed the leftist reactionaries. I'm not as eager as you to condemn things like "black holes" where we can do, or have done, nasty things to prisoners. Can I suggest we leave that one for next week? It's a long topic.

You've put your finger right on the "rub," which is that this is a nasty business. True enough. That's what war is. But we keep trying to correct our sins, even though we're fighting against decapitators, child burners, woman killers, etc. etc. Let's remember the context please.

If we want to maintain moral virginity, we lose. Machiavelli chapter 2.

It's a strange irony about 1981.. No the Left detested Reagan which you know in the flesh.

But I guess the answer is that both the Right and the Left were smarter twenty five years ago. Both were less reactionary.

Compared to Bush, Reagan starts looking a whole lot better. In spite of his buster, he managed the end of the Cold War quite comptently. In the Middle East he didnt start any wars.

Where of course I part company with y'all is on Central America. But that's an entire other blogjam, aint it?

I'm glad you're a card player, I love card players. I used to be a professional bridge player (with a famous Egyptian, yet).

CIA should be shut down, as Pat Moynihan rightly said. Tenet should have been fired on Sept. 12th. Why hasn't Bush seen that? Beats me. It's a colossal blunder. It almost brought him down, and it's cost us enormously.

We can do secret prisons next week. Condi assures us they're not going anywhere for the time being.. or better said.. they ARE going elsewhere, just not out of business.

So let;s wrap this up with a final round. I take it you're arguing that in spite of its strategic misconception we "stay the course" in Iraq and that if we do things will pay off/.

I on the other hand conclude that we now have to look for a way to move out, without --if at all possible-- provoking the gotterdammerung. I think we both face challenges!

Michael? Get off the phone with Chalabi and get back here for a final comment damnit!

Try this one, Marc. I think that when the Soviet Empire fell, a large part of the Left found itself totally awash ideologically. They believed in Communism--perhaps not in the Soviet version, perhaps in something more cuddly, more human-faced--and when it fell, they lost the ability to understand the world. They were, and are, terribly confused. How could capitalism have won, and communism lost?

So they retained their anticapitalism--through its various incarnations, environmentalist, antiglobalist, pacifist, etc--but without the ability to propose anything sensible in the way of policies. And this made them angrier and angrier. Bush sets their teeth on edge, and they cannot bear the thought of "Bush wins!"

Unfortunately, they don't see that revolution--in which they once believed--is still the winning strategy, and they just can't bear to consider the possibility that Bush, with all his faults, is prepared to support revolution.

Or maybe not. I don't understand him. He talks like a revolutionary but does nothing to promote it. Pity.

Michael must have gotten a casting call for Syriana the Sequel. We'll score it a draw and try to draw some real blood next week.

Oops. It was Sharon, not Chalabi. I'm not interested in 'staying the course.' I want to win. I want to bring down the mullahs, the Assads and the Royals. I want the real thing.

Thanks, Marc, you're terrific, even though you're wrong. About the wine, of course.

Bye bye from here.

Here's the way I see it... Bring down the mullahs, string up the Assads and roast the Sauds.. just call me when it's already over.

Wrong on wine? Please.