"Side Of The Road," Lucinda Williams

Following that unbroken line. Austin City Limits, 1989

Iraq And A Hard Place

As U.S. troops come home from Iraq (thanks be to God), some domestic political realpolitik from Christopher Preble at "The National Interest," who says it's all the same for Barack Obama if the Iraqi government succeeds or fails:

The American people want this war to end, and he wins credit, fairly or not, for following through on his promise to end it. And if Iraq descends into chaos and civil war, or if Iran somehow manages to consolidate power over its restive neighbor, Obama can claim, justifiably, that these things wouldn’t have happened had people listened to him in 2002. But he doesn’t have to say it. Others will say it for him. Nearly every news story reporting on this week’s events have reminded viewers, listeners and readers that the president opposed this war. That one fact translates to a relatively favorable perception of the president’s handling of foreign policy, generally.

It's easy to worry about Iraq if you saw Ted Koppel's inaugural report for NBC's "Rock Center" last week. Some 16,000 Americans are staying behind in our fortress embassy and consulates, keeping an eye on both Iraq and Iran. The terrorist threat remains acute. Cleric Moktada al-Sadr, allied with his fellow Shi'ites in Iran, promises that his militiamen will be gunning for Americans. Koppel's report makes clear that you need an advance team and two motorcades to go out for a pack of cigarettes.

Will the Iraqis protect our personnel against the dozen or more insurgent groups that are intent on tearing down the country's fragile government? Can Iraq's Shi'ites, Sunni, and Kurds figure out how to coexist and collaborate? Most analysts sound pessimistic.

Analysts are, of course, changeable. Most sounded giddily optimistic during the Arab spring. We were assured that the region's secular-minded young people were using Facebook and Twitter to grasp for democracy, inspired neither by the U.S. project in Iraq nor the lure of Islamism. As the year ends, the picture isn't so clear. "The Economist" and New York Times counsel readers not to panic as the Muslim Brotherhood and more extremist Islamists win a majority of seats in Egypt's unfolding parliamentary elections.

Pro-democracy advocate Natan Sharansky, the former Soviet dissident, counsels patience:

Nothing is instantaneous in politics. To think of elections as a panacea, let alone a sure road to real democracy, is to evince a failure of historical imagination. The proper role of the free world is not to encourage or to stop elections. Its role should be to formulate, and to stick by, a policy of incremental change based on creating the institutions that will lead ineluctably to pressure for more and more representative forms of government. The free world should place its bet on freedom — the hope and demand of Tahrir Square — and work toward a civil society defined by that value.

That sounds more or less like what George W. Bush tried to achieve in Iraq. History's judgement about whether he was right to do so by force of arms, in a war that left 4,500 Americans and 100,000 Iraqis dead, still depends to a considerable extent on the condition in which history finds Iraq in a quarter-century. For now, maybe advocates of a form of Arab democracy in which sectarianism takes a back seat should take another look at what the U.S. and Iraqis have tried to accomplish. Obama didn't support the war, and Preble is probably right that his political fortunes wouldn't be harmed if Iraq foundered after a decent interval. How much better for everyone -- both U.S. presidents and especially Iraq -- if it didn't.

Arise, Shine, For Thy Light Has Come

St. John's on the eve of the fourth Sunday in Advent

DeterrIRANce

Ron Paul's right about at least one thing: Iran.

Practical Theology

Wrestling With-- Whatever

Suck it up, Christopher, says Eric Reitan. Celestial bliss awaits whether you like it or not:

I cannot agree with a statement made earlier today by Douglas Wilson—Hitchens’ conservative Christian debating partner and friend—in his otherwise sympathetic reflection on Hitchens in Christianity Today. “We have no indication,” Wilson writes, “that Christopher ever called on the Lord before he died, and if he did not, then Scriptures plainly teach that he is lost forever.”

Against this invocation of conservative dogma I cannot help but juxtapose the words of an earlier iconoclastic writer, the French mystic and philosopher Simone Weil: “…one can never wrestle enough with God if one does so out of pure regard for the truth. Christ likes us to prefer truth to him because, before being Christ, he is truth. If one turns aside from him to go towards the truth, one will not go far before falling into his arms.”

Those who, like Hitchens, are devoted to the true and the good are, by implication, oriented towards anything that could rightly be called God. And so, if there is a deity waiting on the other side of death, I cannot but believe that Hitchens is even now stumbling in surprised wonder into those arms.

BlackBerry Jam

Better get an iPhone.

Begging To Be Newtered

I don't understand how anyone can listen to this Dec. 8 "Fresh Air" interview with Washington Post reporter Karen Tumulty, who's been covering Newt Gingrich for years, without concluding that his nomination would be the greatest gift to an opponent's ad writers in the history of politics. He tried to pocket a $4.5 million book advance while in office. He was fined $300,000 by the House for ethics violations. He took millions from Freddie Mac, whose executives were sued today by the SEC. He shut down the federal government while trying to cut Medicare and said it was because President Clinton didn't let him ride up front on Air Force One. Whether it's technically lobbying or not, he's cashed in on his access to fellow politicians. Former allies and intimates say he has political ADD, flitting from one half-baked idea and policy crusade to the next. His own people tried to oust him as Speaker. He resigned before being driven from office.

Gingrich and his team have explanations and excuses for every allegation. Tumulty says the IRS repudiated the House Ethics Committee finding that resulted in his fine, for instance. But attack ads don't have footnotes. Besides, there's just too much here. Incumbent presidents seeking reelection, Obama included, don't have half this much baggage. As they spent their advertising millions, the Obama team and its associated PACs might not even get around to his personal life or outrageous policy statements such as comparing Muslims to Nazis (which Gingrich's former House colleague Joe Scarbourgh called hate speech), flip-flopping on the Libya intervention, or saying Palestinians are a manufactured people.

Tumulty says, "Newt Gingrich views himself as a historic and even transformational figure." And that he was, an historical 17 years ago. She credits him with the destruction of the career of former Speaker Jim Wright (over his own book deal) and the astonishing GOP takeover of the House in 1994 and passage of the Contract with America, which died in the Senate. But since then he's been a gadfly, and so too for almost all of the run-up to the 2012 caucuses and primaries. His surge occurred after no one else -- neither Palin, Trump, Bachmann, Perry, nor Cain -- got up a head of foam as the tea party's desperately yearned-for un-Romney. Gingrich isn't transformational anymore. For those desperate to prevent a center-right realignment of the GOP, he's just the best of what's left.

Holy Families

At the St. John's School Early Childhood Center Christmas pageant, last week on Grandparents Day

At last night's elementary school pageant

St. Christopher's Mettle

David Frum on a great man of the middle:

If Christopher [Hitchens] quit the left...he never joined the right. Like his great hero George Orwell, he was a man whose most creative period of life was a period of constantly falling between two stools: his new hatred for George Galloway never dimmed his old animosity toward Henry Kissinger. He was for the Iraq war without ever much trusting or liking the leaders who led that war. The stock phrase of the 2000s on the right was "moral clarity." If moral clarity means hating cruelty and oppression, then Christopher Hitchens was above all things a man of moral clarity. But he was also a man of moral complexity, who would not submit to Lenin's demand that who says A must say B. Christopher was never more himself than when - after saying A - he adamantly refused to say B.

I wrote to Hitchens in June 2010, after I'd finished reading Hitch-22 and just before his cancer diagnosis. I never heard back. I'm not even sure I had the right address. Yesterday, before learning of his death, I'd been thinking of the e-mail as news came of the formal end of the U.S. war in Iraq:

Dear Mr. Hitchens:

Thank you for your wonderful memoir. I loved many things about it, but I'll confine my comments to some passages for which I was especially grateful.

As a seminarian, I preached a sermon about the Iraq war in the spring of 2003 (attached, not that you would possibly have time to read it) which, in our liberal Episcopal diocese, was viewed as bloodcurdlingly pro-war by virtue of not being antiwar. In the receiving line, a woman called me a liar for associating Saddam Hussein with Islamic totalitarianism. Since then, I've often wondered if I should've kept my intern's mouth shut, because of what our congregant said and also because of the way the war sometimes was going. Your summary of the evidence of Saddam's latter-day fundamentalism stanched one vein of second-guessing, and some patience about the ultimate outcome for the region and the people of Iraq should take care of the rest.

Thanks again.

Yours ever,

John Taylor