Bush Hates My Vacation

Clearly, because the euro is now worth $1.60 as I write this. Mary and I are going to Italy this fall, as we did two years ago when the euro was worth approximately $1.30, so this hurts.

Not that this price increase is a deal-breaker, but really, it's almost like the powers that be want to keep us Americans locked up inside our own borders. Maybe it's because Bush knows how hated we are abroad, but I really wish that he could find a way to be hated without increasing the price of my pasta (and hotel and airfare and everything else) by 20%.

Why Am I Not Surprised?

When I heard a few weeks ago that Charlotte might be hosting a Democratic Presidential debate, I was excited. When I heard last week that the state Democratic Party was involved and that Raleigh was now in contention to host, I just knew Charlotte would be passed over. And I was right.

The state party's longstanding pattern of excluding Charlotte is getting more than a little annoying. I'm enough of a yellow dog that it won't affect my vote, but I can't say this won't effect my donations. I'll give money, but I would be more likely to be more generous if I got more out of it than a thank-you page on a website.

Making a 5 hour round trip to Raleigh doesn't make for a fun day, and springing for an overnight hotel stay is just money that the party is missing out on. But these would be things I would consider more seriously if I didn't have the distinct impression that the state party isn't willing to hit the road and visit the largest, richest city in the state from time to time. There are supporters with money here — don't ignore that.

The Current Crisis

Every time the call comes to withdraw from Iraq, we're told by the administration and its supporters that such a move will surely lead to a humanitarian disaster. Of course, many disasters have already occurred during our time in Iraq — the ethnic cleansing of Baghdad neighborhoods; 2 million refugees; hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths — all despite the assurances of these same infallible prognosticators back in the day. So we have good reason to be skeptical that they know what they are talking about now.

The one thing we do know, however, is that people are suffering now, and that this administration hasn't really done much to alleviate that suffering. Part of it has to do, I think, with an unwillingness to admit publicly that anything has really gone so terribly wrong. There's a reason why the US don't officially track civilian deaths — so we can argue that any large number reported by anyone else isn't plausible. Another factor is the unreasonable optimism displayed by war supporters that a stable, peaceful, pro-Western Iraq is just around the corner. ("Success is within reach", says John McCain.) Since we're apparently about to turn the corner and transform Iraq into the kind of place where such bad things don't happen, we can ignore the current crises as transient events that will soon be forgiven and forgotten in the new Bablyon.

Do we have a humanitarian duty to reduce the suffering of Iraqis? Of course. But it would be easier to believe that war supporters took this duty seriously if they weren't so good at turning a blind eye to the current crises. For the cost of a month of war, we could make life much easier for refugees abroad. And for a follow-up, we might decide to make it a priority to admit more refugees than a small town in Sweden. As long as Bush or McCain is in the White House, however, talk about making the lives of Iraqis better will just be empty rhetoric deployed for domestic political gain.

Stuck

So, after listening to a bit of Petraeus and Crocker's traveling roadshow, and reading some of the after-action reports, it really does appear that we lack any kind of coherent plan for staying in Iraq. Without such a plan, any talk from the administration about staying or leaving quickly devolves to tautology: we have to stay just because. Yglesias sums it up this way:

We need to stay because of these various problems … and what we're doing is working, and yet somehow there's no path from Point A to Point B — no way to connect the dots between what's happening now, and a situation where the problems have actually been solved.

More than that, even — Petraeus seems to say that we can't know where "Point B" might actually be. If we can't know what conditions are required for us to leave, we can't make any plans for that contingency, or even know what to do in the meantime to hasten our way to that magic end-point. In all practical respects, then, it's a recipe for staying forever. Which is what Bush has wanted all along. Big surprise, eh?