So in a modern refashioning of the obvious — that war is harmful to civilian populations — the United States military has begun basing doctrine on the premise that dead civilians are harmful to the conduct of war. The trouble is, no past war has ever supplied compelling proof of that claim. . . . [A]n overemphasis on civilian protection is now putting American troops on the defensive in what is intended to be a major offensive. . . .

Of course, all this is not to say that the United States and NATO should be oblivious to civilian deaths, or wage “total” war in Afghanistan. Clearly, however, the pendulum has swung too far in favor of avoiding the death of innocents at all cost.  General McChrystal’s directive was well intentioned, but the lofty ideal at its heart is a lie, and an immoral one at that, because it pretends that war can be fair or humane. . . .

Wars are always ugly, and always monstrous, and best avoided. Once begun, however, the goal of even a “long war” should be victory in as short a time as possible, using every advantage you have.

Note how her cursory, oh-so-humane caveat at the beginning (“Of course, all this is not to say that the United States and NATO should be oblivious to civilian deaths, or wage ‘total’ war in Afghanistan”) is casually dispensed with by the end, when she demands “victory in as short a time as possible, using every advantage you have.”  Does anyone need it explained to them why causing large civilian deaths through air attacks in Afghanistan is not only morally grotesque but also completely counter-productive to our stated goals?  For those who do, here’s one good response to this Op-Ed.  Here’s another from Stephen Walt at Foreign Policy.  If one can locate her, one might also ask her how well the strategy she craves worked for the Soviets in Afghanistan, or does she think the Soviet Army was also too soft, restrained and worried about civilian life?

But for the moment, I’m more interested in knowing who “Lara Dadkhah” is and, more important, what she does.  She’s identified only by this conspicuously vague and uninformative line at the end of the Op-Ed:  ”Lara M. Dadkhah is an intelligence analyst.”  In the Op-Ed itself, she writes:  ”While I am employed by a defense consulting company, my research and opinions on air support are my own.”  What defense consulting company employs her?  Do they have any ties to the war effort?  Do they benefit from the grotesque policies she’s advocating?  What type of “analyst” is she?  Who knows?  In the Op-Ed, she cites her so-called ”analysis of data compiled by the United States military.”  Where is the data behind that analysis, and for whom was the analysis done?  The NYT doesn’t bother to tell us any of this, and doesn’t require her even to specify her “defense consultant” employer.

More strangely still, it’s virtually impossible to find any information about “Lara Dadkhah” using standard Internet tools.  Google produces almost nothing about her prior to references to her Op-Ed today.  Nexis produces zero returns for her name — zero.  And when I asked about her on Twitter, the only answer anyone could provide was that she authored this December, 2008 paper (.pdf) at Small Wars Journal, where she made exactly the same rancid argument:  ”even as mounting civilian casualties are alienating the Afghan populace, excessive restraint in the use of airstrikes may be handicapping [COIN] efforts” (h/t Majlisblog).  At the end of that article, she was identified this way (click to enlarge image): 

That, too, vaguely refers to the work she has done — “as an open source analyst covering biodefense issues” and ”as a data analyst for current coalition information operations in Afghanistan” — while conspicuously omitting for whom that work is done.

What bizarre behavior from the NYT:  it publishes an extremist, repellent Op-Ed calling, in essence, for the deaths of more innocent Afghans and accusing the Obama administration of sacrificing the lives of American troops due to excessive concern about civilians, all while providing basically no information about the author and allowing her vaguely to refer to a “defense consulting company” for whom she works while concealing its identity.  There’s no way to assess her credentials, her expertise, her employment, her motives, her possible conflicts — nothing.   In short,  the NYT allows her to spout extremely ugly and inflammatory claims on its Op-Ed page under the cover of alleged expertise, while concealing even the most basic information about her credentials, employment and professional background.  What kind of journalistic standards are those?

But when Rush Limbaugh upped the ante by declaring “Our political correct society is acting like some giant insult’s taken place by calling a bunch of people who are retards, retards … There’s going to be a retard summit at the White House,” Palin unsurprisingly had no problem with Limbaugh’s terminology. Instead, his fellow conservative pundit decreed it “satire,” prompting Stephen Colbert to invoke satirical immunity and pronounce Palin herself a “fucking retard.” 

Further complicating matters, the occasionally retard-tolerant Palin again stoked the fires of controversy when Sunday’s episode of “Family Guy” featured a Down syndrome character whose mother is “the former governor of Alaska.” After describing the show as a “kick in the gut” on Facebook, Palin appeared on “The O’Reilly Factor” last night, reiterating that Emanuel’s retarded remark was “insensitive,” while Limbaugh was simply “using satire.” (Best, least self-aware moment of the clip award, however, goes to O’Reilly, who described “Family Guy” creator Seth MacFarlane as “a hater” “who makes a lot of money for Fox.”)

Meanwhile, this week at the TED (Technology, Education, and Design) conference, that elite annual festival of middlebrow self-congratulation, Sarah Silverman shocked a crowd whose sense of humor runs more toward cryptic New Yorker cartoons by dropping several R bombs of her own. Distinguishing herself from the feel-good rah-rahism of typical TED speakers, Silverman instead did a routine featuring her desire to adopt a special needs child. “The only problem with adopting a retarded child is that the retarded child, when you are 80 is, well, still retarded,” she reportedly said, adding that her solution was going to be to adopt a terminally ill retarded kid. That stuff may kill at Zanies Comedy Club, but it’s less popular among people hoping for African fractals.

TED organizer Chris Anderson soon moaned via Twitter that he found Silverman “god-awful,” ultimately posting on his blog that he wished Silverman well, but “I still think humor about terminally-ill ‘retarded’ kids is an acquired taste. And not a taste I personally want to acquire.” 

The “retard” revival isn’t new, of course — Lynn Harris chronicled it here back in 2008, fresh on the heels of the word’s contentious use in “Tropic Thunder.” Frankly, I found the movie’s “retard” storyline hilarious. It wasn’t a dis on the mentally challenged; it was a viciously dead-on parody of Hollywood’s misguided ennobling of them, and actors’ narcissistic, Oscar-baiting pursuit of those Forrest Gumpy roles. When Robert Downey Jr.’s character, a guy so aggressively clueless he’s in blackface, for god’s sake, talks about going “the full retard,” the joke is on him.

While I generally try to err on the side of sensitivity (and often fall impressively flat), I also don’t get my own knickers in a twist when I hear an occasional “retard” among friends. I don’t want to give any word that much power. On the spectrum of outrage, surely most of us can distinguish between using an inappropriate term for someone who truly does have his or her full faculties and building an entire comedy routine around taking potshots at the disabled. There’s a difference.

However one may feel about Rahm’s, Rush’s and Colbert’s use of the word “retard,” at least they all applied it to someone dumb, rather than someone disabled. Silverman and “Family Guy,” in contrast, built their material on the apparent hilarity of the mentally challenged — or in a cheap send-up of “political correctness,” if that’s how they prefer to view it. But the material smacks of artless cruelty. That’s why it’s offensive, because it’s the same comedically lazy, “Look at me! I’m so transgressive! Can you handle it?” routine they’ve both been hiding behind since the freakin’ ’90s.

It’s easy to be offensive. It’s easy to make people uncomfortable. And it’s petty and mean to get laughs at the expense of people who actually are laughed at and teased all the time, and then pass it off as edgy social commentary. (“South Park” making fun of Scientology? Now that is funny.) 

As for Sarah Palin, it’s hypocrisy for her to chastise Rahm Emanuel while tolerating Rush Limbaugh, but her anger at the “Family Guy” episode — one in which the word “retard” is not, in fact, uttered — seems pretty damn justified. No matter how frequently awful Palin is or how often she herself uses her youngest kid as a political prop, it doesn’t make it any less loathsome for anybody else to pick on the handicapped. It also, significantly, doesn’t make it funny. So I don’t mind if Stephen Colbert brands someone as a “retard.” I can’t even raise much of an eyebrow when Rush Limbaugh does it. But when entertainers make dumb jokes about people living with Down syndrome, mocking those with learning and developmental disabilities for some envelope-pushing shock value? That’s just lame and weak. You might even say it’s retarded. 

He goes on to advise the president that all he needs to do now is get the Republican poobahs in a room together and appeal to them to work with him for the good of the country. This solution is always considered common sense among numerous important players and observers, such as George W. Bush:

Blair said Rice has “got to succeed” if she goes to the region. Bush replied: “What they need to do is to get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this shit.

And then there’s John McCain:

“One of the things I would do if I were President would be to sit the Shiites and the Sunnis down and say, ‘Stop the bullshit,’”

Easy as can be.

Actually, it’s possible that if Obama agrees to pass the GOP agenda, preferably without as few Democratic votes as possible, they might even agree to help him (although that’s a long shot too.) But short of that, I think the “stop the bullshit” approach isn’t going to get him very far.

It’s not surprising that Halperin is throwing Obama’s campaign promise back in his face. It’s entirely predictable that they would blame him for failing to magically force the Republicans to become different people. But it’s also Obama’s fault for having promised such a thing in the first place. He handed the Republicans the weapon with which to beat him by promising something that required their cooperation. I’m not sure I ever understood that particular approach except that it was a very nice way to use the symbolism of his historic campaign to give the impression that he had powers to do things that ordinary mortals do not have.

But I have to admit that the “he failed to make us cooperate” theme is even more clever than it seems at first blush. Aside from making Obama look like a failure for being unable to deliver Republican votes, it masks another, more important problem: it isn’t just a lack of bipartisanship that caused the gridlock; it is also a lack of partisanship, particularly in the Senate where “centrist” egomaniacs hold Democrats hostage. And by the way, they have been doing so for a good long time. I wrote this back in 2008 during the embarrassing “Unity 08″ boomlet, knowing full well that this was going to be the problem:

David Broder loves David Boren and Bob Kerrey and thinks the country is best served by rabid conservative ideologues and preening Democratic narcissists who lay down for Republicans and fight their own president every step of the way if he wants to enact any kind of progressive legislation. That’s called “getting things done.”

Bayh is complaining about the nastiness of the liberal blogs as his reason for taking his ball and going home, and I think that’s probably a real issue for him. These Democratic Senate egomaniacs are a huge problem and they are being called on it. They see their role in America’s patrician institution as protecting the rightful owners of America from the Democratic rabble that elected them. And so does the elite political and media establishment at large, which in turn protects them. When they are actually held up to scrutiny for playing such a role, they get very angry. How dare anyone, much less the dirty liberal rabble, question their judgment and their integrity. Their response is to leave the field and turn their seats over to a similarly compromised Democrat or a Republican to teach the Democrats a lesson — a lesson which the Dems have so internalized that they reflexively run in fear of offending conservative Democrats without even questioning it.

This isn’t a bipartisan problem, by the way. The owners allow Snowe and Collins off the leash from time to time to provide cover for something that needs to be done to calm the markets. But other than that this band of aristocratic centrists of both parties have but one role to play and that is to thwart the liberal economic agenda and advance conservative initiatives whenever they are needed. The problem is that this game is being publicly discussed and there is now a (small) price to pay — the village media isn’t the only game in town anymore and there are voices that embarrass the poor sensitive darlings when they “follow their conscience” and obstruct progress for ordinary people. This is very upsetting to them.

So, yes, there is a problem with this bipartisan fetish inside the Beltway. The parties and the country are ideologically polarized and this means that politics aren’t a genteel pursuit best decided over scotch and cigars among like-minded nobility. But people must also be aware that these “centrists” are false flag conservatives and any discussion of the partisan make-up of the Senate needs to account for their position as de facto Republicans. It’s much better to wage this ideological war with a proper troop count, knowing which side everyone is really on.

Update: Michael Bérubé has obtained an exclusive dispatch from the bizarroworld reality based community on this subject. If only we could all live there.

Update II: Matthews had on a couple of these corporate “centrists” William Cohen and John Breaux, whining and moping about the horrible people on the left and right who are ruining just everything.

Breaux made this boilerplate assertion:

I would say to the people on the far right and the far left, you don’t represent a majority of the people of this country. And this is a government by a majority. If you become the majority, then you can become the majority view. But you’re not in the majority. We’ll listen to you, but we have to govern and you have to govern from the center.

Does this “center” really have a majority in the Congress? I don’t think so. “The center” as they define it is, as far as I can tell, no more than a quarter of Congress at most, and far fewer if you want to use the legislation proposed this year to measure it. This is a total fallacy. The majority votes for individual politicians for the House and the Senate, they vote for a party’s political platform and for a president. Every politician has to decide for him or herself how to interpret what that means. Automatically rushing to the “center” (defined, by the way, as equidistant between Barack Obama and Michelle Bachman) is a lazy and stupid way to interpret the majority will (and, not incidentally, a very convenient way to keep conservatives in power.)

If what Breaux says is correct, then the Democrats should a pass Barack Obama’s agenda, period. He and Joe Biden are the only individuals in the government a majority of people in this country voted for. (Now, I actually would call him a centrist too, but I’m guessing that Breaux would have been right beside Nelson in torpedoing even the approved tepid, corporate friendly health care plan that finally emerged from months of coddling the handful of bipartisan “centrists” who worked to defeat it.) But then when these Senate narcissists look in the mirror they see a president too, so it’s natural that they would see the true manifestation of the will of the majority as — themselves.

First line: “Is Judd Gregg a tease or a real potential partner for President Barack Obama in trying to salvage some health care reform in this Congress?”

Let’s go ahead and take a stab at that one: He’s a tease. You can tell by the way he’s not interested in helping Democrats enact any of their proposals. Classic giveaway.

Rogers runs through Gregg’s various ideas and propositions for healthcare reform. The guy is, after all, a former chairman of the Senate Budget and Health, Education, Labor and Pension committees. Surely, he knows his stuff. Gregg, apparently, is interested in a sharply scaled-back approach, which would focus on preventive care and catastrophic coverage for families.

In a letter to the president outlining his own ideas, Gregg warned that the bills already passed by both houses of Congress couldn’t be the basis of a compromise with the GOP. This is a nice way of saying exactly what Republican leaders have been harping about for weeks: Start over, and we might play ball.

It’s funny how Democrats spent the better part of last year assiduously trying to court Republicans to compromise, and found them completely unwilling. Instead, we get guys like Gregg, who seem to think that compromise would consist of the White House and congressional majority abandoning their own preferences wholesale and adopting Republican ideas instead.

So Gregg’s behavior is unsurprising on that count. By offering a proposal to substitute for the Democrats’ ideas, rather than augment them, he’s continuing to act the way every Republican senator has for almost a year now. Rogers writes in Politico, “His approach is sure to face criticism for being too late and too small bore.” I wonder why that would be.

But it’s also unsurprising coming from Gregg, in particular, because the guy just has a history of being a jerk to the White House. Most famously, he accepted the president’s nomination to be Commerce secretary, then backed out shortly afterward. Gregg claimed to have discovered, in the intervening two weeks, that the White House was pursuing a left-wing agenda he couldn’t support.

“I’m a fiscal conservative, as everybody knows, a fairly strong one,” said Gregg. “And it just became clear to me that it would be very difficult, day in and day out, to serve in this cabinet or any cabinet.” Apparently, he couldn’t be bothered to ask that stuff, or do some basic reading up, before accepting the job.

If he couldn’t be in the president’s Cabinet, the next-best option for Gregg was apparently to harass the White House. In September, just as the Gang of Six bipartisan negotiation process was wrapping up, Gregg said, “The White House has to first incentivize, or at least give its imprimatur of authority, to a bipartisan negotiating group. I do think the opportunity is sitting there — and has been literally in the Senate for six months.” That’s literally a description of what the White House had just done, in the form of a demand that they do it. How helpful.

In early December, he produced a memo showing how the GOP could more or less shut down the Senate to stop healthcare from passing. And by the end of the year, when the House and Senate were actually voting to pass reform, Gregg was warning the National Review Online, “An ideological supermajority in Congress, along with a government run by community organizers, has taken over.” He darkly intimated that we are heading for “banana republic status” and that the Senate healthcare bill “was purchased.” And the coup de grâce? ”Our system of checks and balances is gone. We now have a government that lurches with great speed even though our system is founded upon incremental change.”

So there you have it. The problem with healthcare reform, according to Gregg, is that this year-long process has been much too fast. The author of the memo on how the minority party can block action indefinitely thinks that our system of checks and balances has disappeared. Can you smell the compromise?