Andrew Sullivan Loses Me

I've been reading Andrew Sullivan's blog for several months, and while I sometimes disagree with what he writes, especially regarding religion, I thought he was an intellectually coherent, serious writer. Some of his recent posts have cause me to reconsider my assessment of him.

The premise of the speech, and of the strategy, is that there is a national democratic government in Baghdad, defending itself against Jihadist attacks. The task, in the president's mind, is therefore to send more troops to defend such a government. But the reality facing us each day is a starkly different one from the scenario assumed by the president. The government of which Bush speaks, to put it bluntly, does not exist. The reality illumined by the lynching of Saddam is that the Maliki government is a front for Shiite factions and dependent for its future on Shiite death squads. U.S. support for the government is not, therefore, a defense of democracy in a unified country, whatever our intentions. It is putting the lives of American soldiers in defense of the Shiite side in an increasingly brutal civil war.

If the president tonight had outlined a serious attempt to grapple with this new situation - a minimum of 50,000 new troops as a game-changer - then I'd eagerly be supporting him. But he hasn't. 21,500 U.S. troops is once again, I fear, just enough troops to lose.

If the Maliki government isn't worth defending, as Sullivan concludes, then why does he want even one more soldier sacrificed to it, let alone 50,000? But he gets worse. In an earlier post, he wrote this:

Only they can solve their own pathologies. We have lost a chance to guide this process; so we may as well let it play out on its own. If it means $100 a barrel of oil, great.

$100 a barrel of oil could easily precipitate a worldwide economic collapse. And such an event invariably is very, very hard on the middle class and the poor.

I think Sullivan's line about how great he thinks $100 a barrel of oil would be without the slightest consideration of what that would actually mean exposes his intellectual irresponsibility and frivolity.