August 29, 2007
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Iraq War, God and religion, Topless Pools, Las Vegas, Today's Papers Mike Silverman, Hollywood
- 87, Square and Ever So There
Jonathan Alcorn for The New York TimesSMALL TALK Mike Silverman, 87, a k a the mascot of Malibu, chats with the actresses Nicole Moore, left, and Vail Bloom
87, Square and Ever So There
MALIBU, Calif.
MIKE SILVERMAN didn't get up once during the entire party. Celebrities and aspiring starlets kept coming by, some of them leaning down in flimsy tops to kiss his cheek, some just saying "Hi."
Friends served Mr. Silverman crab legs and oysters. The D.J. turned down the music for him. When bystanders blocked his view of a lovely actress, he asked them to move, and they obliged.
Two young men made their way to the white-haired guy in the orthopedic shoes to ask, you know, how he does it.
"I'm a bad boy," Mr. Silverman said with a wink. He raised his arm from his walker and pointed to a plastic medallion around his neck that read "Bad Boy."
"You are bad," Ryan Purcell, 24, said admiringly. "Every time a girl walks by here, it's like you're getting a lap dance or something."
Mr. Purcell was exaggerating, but there is no doubt that Mr. Silverman — charming, bawdy, 87 years old — is enjoying his perch at Polaroid House, a bungalow on Malibu's "Billionaires Beach" that a public relations agency rented for a summer of parties, photo opportunities and promotions for corporations, chief among them Polaroid. Here, he has become a mascot of the Malibu party circuit.
"Everybody loves Mike," said Fritz Gerhardt, a deeply tanned surfer and Polaroid House devotee. "He's a legend in Malibu. He's got a good soul."
And good opening lines. With a vocabulary of bygone phrases ("doll face") and a few old dirty jokes ("A woman was having sex with her husband, and an earthquake woke her up"), Mr. Silverman has won over the likes of Paris and Nicky Hilton, Matthew McConaughey and a pre-rehab Lindsay Lohan, as well as the nearly famous and non-famous who frequent the house.
"I could have the hottest guy in my house and you'll find half the girls around Mike," said Jessica Meisels, an owner of Fingerprint Communications, the public relations company that manages Polaroid House. At the start of the summer, Fingerprint extended invitations to the neighbors — a kind of good-will, please-don't-call-the-cops gesture. Mr. Silverman, who owns the $20 million Cape Cod-style house next door, gleefully accepted.
To some Polaroid House guests, Mr. Silverman seems an incongruous character in a room full of revelers many generations his junior, worthy of the same attention one would give an elderly relative at a family function.
"You're adorable!" cooed Ali Larter, the coquettish star of the television series "Heroes." She planted a kiss on Mr. Silverman's cheek, which he returned in kind before she bounced away.
But to others, he is a welcome presence — a living link to a dignified Hollywood that seems long gone, if it existed at all.
"You're back!" Romi Maggorno, a 29-year-old music publicist, said when she spotted Mr. Silverman. She celebrated his attendance with a kiss on the cheek and a shake of her rump.
"Mike is a good guy," Ms. Maggorno said as she introduced a group of friends to him. "He's very regal. He flirts, but he's not a dirty old man. It's an old Hollywood kind of flirting."
"I'm having just a great time," Mr. Silverman explained as an old Run-DMC song boomed in the background. "This crowd is colorful, interesting. They all have a lot of spirit — and occasionally, some depth."
The Virile Elder has become an archetype in Hollywood, where a man on the right side of the line between envy and pity can stay at the dance long after he has stopped recognizing the music.
There's Hugh Hefner, who at 81 is still followed about by a gaggle of young girlfriends, and the late talent agent Irving (Swifty) Lazar, who in his autumn years was famous for giving the only Oscar parties that mattered. Like them, Mr. Silverman's history stretches back to Hollywood's Golden Age.
As a Beverly Hills real estate broker in the 1950s, Mr. Silverman once enjoyed a celebrity of his own and was described everywhere from National Geographic to German fashion magazines as the "Realtor to the stars."
He hung out poolside at the Beverly Hills Hotel, the pockets of his swim trunks filled with waterproof business cards that he passed out to famous sunbathers.
Newspaper stories of the era tell of Mr. Silverman selling mansions to Zsa Zsa Gabor, Frank Sinatra and Tony Curtis, and buying property from Mae West that he turned into commercial real estate. All the while, he partied with his clients, usually at sit-down dinners. "Because it was in a controlled atmosphere," Mr. Silverman explained, "it couldn't get too crazy or too wild."
Still, Mr. Silverman was able to win a remarkably intimate degree of access to his famous clients. A sampling of photographs from his albums show him on an African safari with William Holden, at a party with Pat Boone and on a picnic in the English countryside with Rex Harrison.
Mr. Silverman said he began his working life as an unsuccessful, socially awkward commercial artist with a debilitating stutter. A chance encounter with a real estate agent at a bar in 1949 changed all that. Over a few beers, the agent told him that selling houses could turn an uneducated man into a millionaire.
And it did. Mr. Silverman reinvented himself as a playboy with a penchant for gimmicks. "Now," he said, "I have the ability to turn a cold stranger into a friend."
Indeed, Mr. Silverman didn't marry until 10 years ago — to a woman more than 20 years his junior who supports his active life.
"This has been absolutely the best summer for him," said his wife, Davey Davison, 64, a former actress. "I don't really care for parties, but he gets a kind of energy from them."
Of course he can't maintain the same party-hopping pace that he kept up 50 years ago. He was hospitalized with pneumonia for five weeks earlier this summer. When he returned home in July, he found photographers lining his beach and Matthew McConaughey playing in the sand.
When Mr. McConaughey's Frisbee landed on his deck, Mr. Silverman tossed it back, along with a joke about the "beached paparazzi" on his property.
Ms. Meisels said: "Matt went over to talk with him, and then I brought him some barbecue and ended up talking with him for three hours. Now we're obsessed with him."
And so, what was supposed to be a summer of recuperation has turned into a wildly good time.
At the final Polaroid House event last week, Russell Crowe and Heath Ledger were expected, but only Wilmer Valderrama and, of course, Paris Hilton, showed. Mr. Silverman made the scene but decided not to stay.
A pair of tattooed musicians from the rock band Only the Young cleared a path through the crowd as Mr. Silverman bid them adieu. He was almost out the door when a smiling blond chef asked him to pose for a photo.
"I've heard about you," she said.
He smiled for the camera, then shuffled out the door.
"I have another party to go to," he explained.
- Today’s Papers
More and More
Posted Wednesday, Aug. 29, 2007, at 6:07 A.M. E.T.The Washington Post leads with word that the Bush administration wants more money for the Iraq war and is planning to ask Congress for up to $50 billion next month. The thinking seems to be that lawmakers won't be able to say no after Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker ask for more time to build on the progress they have made. The New York Times leads with a look at how even though the United States has pledged to accept more Iraqi refugees whose lives are threatened because of their work for the U.S. government and military, "very few are signing up to go." Iraqis have to leave the country to apply, which means taking a costly and dangerous trip to neighbors such as Syria and Jordan, where, if allowed in, they could languish for months. The State Department says the security challenge would be too great to process applications inside Iraq.
The Los Angeles Times, USA Today, and the Wall Street Journal's world-wide newsbox lead with new census figures that show the number of people without health insurance increased by 2.2 million in 2006 to a grand total of 47 million. In terms of the overall population, 15.8 percent of people lacked insurance, which is the highest level since 1998. At a time when President Bush is in a fight with Congress over health insurance for children, the LAT points out the number of uninsured children grew by 600,000. The LAT also mentions, while USAT goes inside with, economic figures in the census that showed there was a slight increase in median household income and a modest drop in poverty rates in 2006, although pretty much no one (except President Bush and some Republicans) saw this as particularly good news.
The extra money for Iraq would be in addition to the approximately $460 billion in the defense budget and it will probably be added to the $147 billion supplemental bill to pay for Afghanistan and Iraq. The Post breaks it down: "the cost of the war in Iraq now exceeds $3 billion a week." The additional request is a sign the administration sees the "surge" lasting "into the spring of 2008." Near the end of the story an unnamed officer at the Joint Chiefs of Staff continues the campaign to reduce expectations for the Petraeus-Crocker hearings, saying he doesn't expect "any surprises."
Although the State Department wants to give priority to those who worked directly for the U.S. government, the approximately 69,000 Iraqis who work on U.S. contracts for the private sector face many of the same threats. There's no official count of how many Iraqis working for the war effort have been murdered, but one large company says 280 of its employees have been killed since 2003.
The modest rise in median household income to $48,201 was mainly due to people working longer hours, or more people entering the workforce, and not because they were being paid more. And the household income still remains below the pre-2001 recession peak. In addition, the slight decrease in the poverty rate was not a reflection of a widespread improvement as old people were the ones that saw the largest benefit. The WSJ points out that even though the poverty rate saw its first significant decline in a decade, the figures "showed how meager some of the gains for those in the middle class have been," which is partly because of the continuing trend of increased income inequality.
Yesterday, the WSJ introduced us to Norman Hsu, a political fund-raiser who got into the game three years ago and has given lots of money to Democratic candidates, a big chunk of it to Sen. Hillary Clinton. The paper raised questions about how a family of apparently modest means with ties to Hsu has donated $200,000 in the last few years. Today, the WSJ looks into how Hsu is one of Clinton's top fund-raisers but has maintained a "remarkably low-profile." In a Page One story, the LAT reveals Hsu might have a reason to want to stay (relatively) far from the limelight: "He's a fugitive," said the man who handled the case 15 years ago in which Hsu agreed to serve up to three years. Although the paper notes Hsu has been photographed at numerous events, authorities are still technically looking for him since he disappeared after pleading no contest to grand theft.
The Post fronts, and everyone mentions, Senate GOP leaders calling for an ethics investigation of Sen. Larry Craig of Idaho after it was revealed that he pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct charges. The NYT fronts a look at the exasperation currently felt by Republicans who seem to be engulfed in scandal after scandal.
Yesterday, Craig tried to begin the process of saving his career and reputation and denied any wrongdoing. He said it was a mistake to plead guilty after he was arrested by an undercover officer in a Minneapolis airport restroom. Craig contends he was under pressure from a newspaper that was investigating claims he had sexual encounters with men in bathrooms. He has now hired a lawyer, but experts said he faces an uphill battle if he hopes to reopen the case.
The NYT is alone in trying to look into claims that there had been a number of arrests "regarding sexual activity in the public restroom" at the airport. But the airport wouldn't talk numbers and although it's clear there had been stepped-up security patrols, it's less clear whether anyone was caught having sex or whether there were complaints. Most of the major airports say they haven't experienced problems of this nature. Unfortunately, the paper doesn't take the extra step of questioning whether this is a real or fabricated problem for places like airports. But it does talk to the owner of a popular Web site that lists places where men can have sexual encounters with other men, and explains that foot tapping is part of the "little unspoken code" of bathroom sex. Although the site's URL merely consists of the words "cruising" and "sex," the Times doesn't name it and prefers to call it simply a "gay sex Web site."
Daniel Politi writes "Today's Papers" for Slate. He can be reached at todayspapers@slate.com.- Losing Your Shirt, but Not in the Casino
Isaac Brekken for The New York TimesON THE BEACH Tops are mandatory, not optional, at the pool area Tao Beach at the Venetian.
Losing Your Shirt, but Not in the Casino
UNDER an oppressive desert sun, 1,500 revelers squeeze in and around a complex of pools at the Palms resort, showing off their dance moves and late-summer tans. The hotel's weekly bacchanal, Ditch Fridays, is in full flare.
The sloshed and the giddy sled on plastic saucers down an artificial hill, created with 25 tons of snow, then drop into chest-high heated water. D.J.'s spin a blend of rock and hip-hop, and cabanas overflow with pretty people in designer swim trunks and bikinis. A glass-bottom pool, which serves as the ceiling of an outdoor bar, echoes swingy decadence, 1970s-style.
"It feels like spring break," says Heather Fordham, a trainer from Texas visiting here with 20 girlfriends. "The only difference is that we're all in our 30s and we need more time to recover from our hangovers."
Along the Las Vegas Strip, new-breed pools have dovetailed with nightclubs to become a magnet for attracting customers to casinos. Growing from simple hotel amenities to small resorts after steroidal makeovers — a $35 million expansion at the Palms — many have their own entrances, bottle service and admission policies enforced by doormen at a velvet rope.
To justify the investments, properties strive to outdo one another by conjuring flashy approximations of Gen X joie de vivre.
Some of the hotels manufacture sex appeal by wooing local strippers with free cabanas. Ordinary guests at elite pools are provided with free goodies like ice-cold towels, frozen fruit kebabs and sunblock.
Mandalay Bay has a full-blown gambling den overlooking its wave pool ($100-minimum blackjack tables afford a view of topless sunbathers in a discreet section called Moorea Beach). Wynn Las Vegas has a poolside menu from the kitchen of one of its restaurants, Tableau.
And at Tao Beach, a spinoff of Tao Nightclub, in the Venetian, employees resolve problems that are easily endured.
"We have guys who walk around with water tanks on their sides," says a Tao owner, Richard Wolf, "and their job is to spritz guests so nobody gets too hot."
Mr. Wolf instructs his door staff to maintain a two-to-one ratio of women to men.
"There are girls who clean people's sunglasses and then there's our mood director," Mr. Wolf says. "He makes sure that groups of guys and groups of girls get introduced to each other all day long."
Happening pool scenes have proved to be a profitable gambit for Las Vegas casinos. Usually managed by the same entities responsible for filling stylish dance floors around town, the pools lure big players and keep customers in-house.
"Casinos are turning swimming pools into clubs and leveraging what had been underutilized assets," says David Schwartz, director of the Center for Gaming Research at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
And the pools' what-happens-here-stays-here atmosphere also puts players in a casino-friendly frame of mind, says Anthony Curtis, president of lasvegasadvisor.com, which tracks local action.
"Just like the nightclubs, pool parties get guests loose and ready to gamble," Mr. Curtis says. "It's midday and they're already in a full-on, damn-the-torpedoes Vegas mood. It's what the casinos want, but it's also what the people want."
In 1941, the El Rancho, the first Las Vegas hotel passed by tourists driving in from Southern California, placed its pool facing the street. Coming upon it from the desert, Mr. Schwartz says, "The idea was that you'd be drawn by the refreshing pool and would check in at the El Rancho rather than proceeding downtown — in your non-air-conditioned car — to where most of the casinos were."
Fifty-one years later, the Rio hotel and casino started the city's first modern pool party. But the enterprise was elevated to its current state by Chad Pallas, who made a name in Las Vegas by overseeing a nightspot called Baby's at the Hard Rock.
After a while, however, management decided that Baby's had cooled. Suddenly, Mr. Pallas needed to justify his paycheck. He envisioned Rehab, a Sunday afternoon party at the pool. That was in 2004, and Las Vegas daylife has not been the same.
According to Mr. Pallas, Rehab grosses around $6 million a summer.
"Before Rehab, the pool was generating $15,000 on a Sunday," he says. "Now we have cabanas going for $2,000 to $5,000 per day, and 40 people were on the waiting list today. Plus there's the bottle service, a private waitress, a special wristband."
If that's not enough, showoffs at Rehab have developed a custom that they call making it rain. "They drop $100 bills from the cabanas up above," Mr. Pallas says, "and watch the crowd down below go crazy. We have a guy come in every Sunday on his private jet. He stays for the day and makes it rain."
Rainmaking aside, how expensive can it get for high-end customers seeking a raucous Sunday afternoon? Randy Lund, a C.P.A. who works as a branch manager for mortgage broker Meridias Capital, has been going to Rehab since Day 1. He says he spends more than $100,000 a year on cabanas, food and alcohol for him and his guests. Yet as much as Rehab is about recreation for Mr. Lund, it is also about business.
"I bring Realtors and clients and they love it at Rehab," says Mr. Lund, trim, shirtless and wearing board shorts. "I met a guy here who was a friend of a friend, I invited him to hang out with us in my cabana, and I bought him a few drinks. He turned out to be a multimillionaire who owns shopping centers and a jet. Now he's a mentor to me, and we're in the process of developing our own shopping center here in Vegas."
But these kinds of free-spending customers are tough to lure. And in Las Vegas's highly competitive atmosphere, everyone tries to outdo everybody else.
In recent years the Mirage, Wynn Las Vegas, Caesars Palace and Mandalay Bay have introduced what they call European sunbathing. It takes place in sequestered pools, often requires an additional admission, and men always pay more than women (as much as $50 a day, and with day beds or cabanas, costs can easily reach $1,000 for an afternoon). The policy is part capitalism and part crowd control. As one pool manager says, during the busy Cinco de Mayo weekend, "I turned away $15,000 worth of business because we didn't want too many guys in here."
At the Mirage, the top-optional pool club is known as Bare. There, one weekend afternoon, the N.B.A. star Devon George hung out with friends in an elevated V.I.P. area with its private, glass-walled pool while, on a nearby lounge, a half-dozen out-of-town girlfriends debate doffing their tops.
One of them casually takes the plunge, and others follow. The lone holdout, Libby Chansky, of Santa Cruz, Calif., who is here on vacation, suddenly finds herself in what resembles a female rugby scrum. She emerges topless. Looking slightly abashed, she says she hasn't had any work done so told her friends that she didn't want to remove her top. Pointing to the ringleader, she says, "But my friend whipped it off anyway."
As potential visitors are endlessly told, being a little naughty is part of Sin City's allure, and Las Vegas's pool scene works hard to feed into that.
"Las Vegas is about creating experiences that people cannot have at home," says Scott Sibella, president of the Mirage and the force behind Bare. "You see the girl next door here and know that she would not go topless at home."
Toplessness may be the latest tactic in the Las Vegas pool wars, but not for all. Palms and Rehab have never gone that way ("I like having something left to the imagination," says Mr. Pallas); Tao Beach did it for a while before retreating.
The manager of a rival pool maintains that Tao's new modesty stems from the fact that it stays open after dark as part of Tao Nightclub and that it was hard to persuade guests to cover up after sunset. "The way it was going, they would have had to change their designation to topless bar," says the competitor.
Mr. Wolf explains it differently: "We ultimately decided that it would be better, in terms of being a classy, fun, hip beach-club, to not be topless. It was a hard decision but it was a good decision."
Whatever the case, it apparently has not hurt business. As Sunday evening encroaches, Rehab winds down and the party kicks up at Tao Beach. A drummer from "Stomp" plays on top of a D.J.'s beats, and a trumpeter roams among the Buddhas meant to imbue an exotic air. A bride-to-be in a monokini rubs lotion into a muscle-boy's biceps, and Mr. Wolf marvels over a man with the Tao logo tattooed on his stomach.
For the people behind this pool-club-cum-disco, it all adds up to profits. But, looking around, even among the fabulousness, a pall sets upon Mr. Wolf's face. What's wrong?
"I'm noticing that as it gets later on Sunday, the crowd shifts," he says. "It seems that we have more guys and fewer girls. And, to be honest, it concerns me."
Then he bucks up and declares, "But, don't worry, I'm going to fix it."
Marco ...Polo
Many of the following require guests to be 21 or older.
TAO BEACH (Venetian) Monday to Saturday, 10 a.m. to sunset; Sunday, 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. Free Sunday to Friday, with a selective door policy; $20 Saturday, but free for local women and hotel guests. (702) 388-8588.
BARE (Mirage) Daily 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. $10 for women, $30 for men Monday to Thursday; $20 for women, $40 for men Friday to Sunday. Selective door policy, including hotel guests. (702) 791-7442.
DITCH FRIDAYS (Palms) Friday, noon to 7 p.m. $20, but local women and hotel guests free. (702) 938-9999.
REHAB (Hard Rock) Sunday, noon to 7 p.m. $20 for women, $30 for men. Free for hotel guests, through express line. Otherwise, the wait can exceed two hours. (702) 693-5555.
VENUS POOL CLUB (Caesars Palace) Daily 9 a.m. to sundown. $20 for women, $30 for men. (702) 650-5944.
- God and Belief
God's Still Dead
Mark Lilla doesn't give us enough credit for shaking off the divine.
Posted Monday, Aug. 20, 2007, at 11:06 AM ET
Those of us in the fast-growing atheist community who have long suspected that there is a change in the zeitgeist concerning "faith" can take some encouragement from the decision of the New York Times Magazine to feature professor Mark Lilla on the cover of the Aug. 19 edition. But we also, on reading the extremely lucid extract from his new book, The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West, are expected to take some harsh punishment. Briefly stated, the Lilla thesis is as follows:- The notion of a "separation" of church and state comes from a unique historical contingency of desperate and destructive warfare between discrepant Christian sects, which led Thomas Hobbes to propose a historical compromise in the pages of his 17th-century masterpiece, Leviathan. There is no general reason why Hobbes' proposal will work at all times or in all places.
- Human beings are pattern-seeking animals who will prefer even a bad theory or a conspiracy theory to no theory at all, and they are thus (in an excellent term derived by Lilla from Jean-Jacques Rousseau) by nature "theotropic," or inclined toward religion.
- That instinct being stronger than any discrete historical moment, it is idle to imagine that mere scientific or material progress will abolish the worshipping impulse.
- Liberalism is especially implicated in this problem, because the desire for a better world very often takes a religious form, and thus it is wishful to identify "belief" with the old forces of reaction, because it will also underpin utopian or messianic or other social-engineering fantasies.
Taken separately, all these points are valid in and of themselves. Examined more closely, they do not cohere as well as all that. In the first place, it is not correct to say that modernism relied on a conviction about the steady disappearance of religious belief. Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud, to take two very salient examples, looked upon religion as virtually ineradicable—the former precisely because he did identify it with secular yearnings that would be hard to satisfy, and the latter because he thought it originated in our oldest mistake, which was (and is) wishful thinking.
In the second place, it is interesting to find Lilla conceding—though not in so many words—that religion is closely related to the totalitarian. As he phrases it when writing about Orthodox Jewish and Islamic law (and as was no less the case for Christianity in its pre-Hobbesian heyday), divine or revealed teaching is "meant to cover the whole of life, not some arbitrarily demarcated private sphere, and its legal system has few theological resources for establishing the independence of politics from detailed divine commands." How true. Now, there is one thing one can say with relative certainty about the totalitarian principle, which is that it has been repeatedly tried and has repeatedly failed. Try and run a society out of the teachings of one holy book, and you will end with every kind of ignominy and collapse. There is no reason at all to confine this grim lesson to the Christians who were butchering each other between the Thirty Years' War and the English Civil War; even the Jews who established the state of Israel and the Muslims who set up Pakistan understood the importance of some considerable secular latitude (as did the Hindus who were the majority in independent India). In other words, while it may be innate in people to be "theotropic," it is also quite easy for them to understand that religion is a very potent and dangerous toxin. Never mind for now what Islamist fundamentalism might want to do to us; take a look at what it did to the Muslims of Afghanistan.
So, when Lilla says that the American experiment (in confessional pluralism and constitutional secularism) is "utterly exceptional," he forgets that there had to be many dress rehearsals for this and that only a uniquely favorable opportunity was the really "exceptional" condition. Men like Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine had been eagerly studying the secular and agnostic and atheist thinkers of the past and present, from Democritus to Hume, and hoping only for a chance to put their principles into action. There are many minds in today's Muslim world who have, by equally scrupulous and hazardous inquiry, come to the same conclusion. It is repression as much as circumambient culture that prevents the expression of the idea (as it did for many, many, Christian and Western centuries).
Lilla's most brilliant point concerns the awful pitfalls of what he does not call "liberation theology." Leaving this stupid and oxymoronic term to one side, and calling it by its true name of "liberal theology" instead, he reminds us that the eager reformist Jews and Protestants of 19th-century Germany mutated into the cheerleaders of Kaiser Wilhelm's Reich, which they identified—as had Max Weber—with history incarnate. Lilla might have added, for an ecumenical touch, that Kaiser Wilhelm, in launching the calamitous World War I, was also the ally and patron of the great jihad proclaimed by his Ottoman Turkish subordinates. So, could we hear a little less from the apologists of religion about how "secular" regimes can be just as bad as theocratic ones? Of course they can—if they indulge in acts of faith and see themselves as possessing supernatural authority.
Lilla goes on to cite the many liberal religious figures who became apologists for Nazism and Stalinism, and I think he is again correct to stress the Jewish and Protestant element here, if only because most of the odium has rightly fallen until now on the repulsive role played by the Vatican. So, what is he really saying? That religion is no more than a projection of man's wish to be a slave and a fool and of his related fear of too much knowledge or too much freedom. Well, we didn't even need Hobbes (who wanted to replace a divine with a man-made dictator) to tell us that. To regret that we cannot be done with superstition is no more than to regret that we have a common ancestry with apes and plants and fish. But millimetrical progress has been made even so, and it is measurable precisely to the degree that we cease to believe ourselves the objects of a divine (and here's the totalitarian element again) "plan." Shaking off the fantastic illusion that we are the objective of the Big Bang or the process of evolution is something that any educated human can now do. This was not quite the case in previous centuries or even decades, and I do not think that Lilla has credited us with such slight advances as we have been able to make.
Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair and the author of God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.- Iraq War Perspective
Iraq War Commentary
Keith Negley
Op-Ed ContributorA War We Just Might Win
Washington
VIEWED from Iraq, where we just spent eight days meeting with American and Iraqi military and civilian personnel, the political debate in Washington is surreal. The Bush administration has over four years lost essentially all credibility. Yet now the administration's critics, in part as a result, seem unaware of the significant changes taking place.
Here is the most important thing Americans need to understand: We are finally getting somewhere in Iraq, at least in military terms. As two analysts who have harshly criticized the Bush administration's miserable handling of Iraq, we were surprised by the gains we saw and the potential to produce not necessarily "victory" but a sustainable stability that both we and the Iraqis could live with.
After the furnace-like heat, the first thing you notice when you land in Baghdad is the morale of our troops. In previous trips to Iraq we often found American troops angry and frustrated — many sensed they had the wrong strategy, were using the wrong tactics and were risking their lives in pursuit of an approach that could not work.
Today, morale is high. The soldiers and marines told us they feel that they now have a superb commander in Gen. David Petraeus; they are confident in his strategy, they see real results, and they feel now they have the numbers needed to make a real difference.
Everywhere, Army and Marine units were focused on securing the Iraqi population, working with Iraqi security units, creating new political and economic arrangements at the local level and providing basic services — electricity, fuel, clean water and sanitation — to the people. Yet in each place, operations had been appropriately tailored to the specific needs of the community. As a result, civilian fatality rates are down roughly a third since the surge began — though they remain very high, underscoring how much more still needs to be done.
In Ramadi, for example, we talked with an outstanding Marine captain whose company was living in harmony in a complex with a (largely Sunni) Iraqi police company and a (largely Shiite) Iraqi Army unit. He and his men had built an Arab-style living room, where he met with the local Sunni sheiks — all formerly allies of Al Qaeda and other jihadist groups — who were now competing to secure his friendship.
In Baghdad's Ghazaliya neighborhood, which has seen some of the worst sectarian combat, we walked a street slowly coming back to life with stores and shoppers. The Sunni residents were unhappy with the nearby police checkpoint, where Shiite officers reportedly abused them, but they seemed genuinely happy with the American soldiers and a mostly Kurdish Iraqi Army company patrolling the street. The local Sunni militia even had agreed to confine itself to its compound once the Americans and Iraqi units arrived.
We traveled to the northern cities of Tal Afar and Mosul. This is an ethnically rich area, with large numbers of Sunni Arabs, Kurds and Turkmens. American troop levels in both cities now number only in the hundreds because the Iraqis have stepped up to the plate. Reliable police officers man the checkpoints in the cities, while Iraqi Army troops cover the countryside. A local mayor told us his greatest fear was an overly rapid American departure from Iraq. All across the country, the dependability of Iraqi security forces over the long term remains a major question mark.
But for now, things look much better than before. American advisers told us that many of the corrupt and sectarian Iraqi commanders who once infested the force have been removed. The American high command assesses that more than three-quarters of the Iraqi Army battalion commanders in Baghdad are now reliable partners (at least for as long as American forces remain in Iraq).
In addition, far more Iraqi units are well integrated in terms of ethnicity and religion. The Iraqi Army's highly effective Third Infantry Division started out as overwhelmingly Kurdish in 2005. Today, it is 45 percent Shiite, 28 percent Kurdish, and 27 percent Sunni Arab.
In the past, few Iraqi units could do more than provide a few "jundis" (soldiers) to put a thin Iraqi face on largely American operations. Today, in only a few sectors did we find American commanders complaining that their Iraqi formations were useless — something that was the rule, not the exception, on a previous trip to Iraq in late 2005.
The additional American military formations brought in as part of the surge, General Petraeus's determination to hold areas until they are truly secure before redeploying units, and the increasing competence of the Iraqis has had another critical effect: no more whack-a-mole, with insurgents popping back up after the Americans leave.
In war, sometimes it's important to pick the right adversary, and in Iraq we seem to have done so. A major factor in the sudden change in American fortunes has been the outpouring of popular animus against Al Qaeda and other Salafist groups, as well as (to a lesser extent) against Moktada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army.
These groups have tried to impose Shariah law, brutalized average Iraqis to keep them in line, killed important local leaders and seized young women to marry off to their loyalists. The result has been that in the last six months Iraqis have begun to turn on the extremists and turn to the Americans for security and help. The most important and best-known example of this is in Anbar Province, which in less than six months has gone from the worst part of Iraq to the best (outside the Kurdish areas). Today the Sunni sheiks there are close to crippling Al Qaeda and its Salafist allies. Just a few months ago, American marines were fighting for every yard of Ramadi; last week we strolled down its streets without body armor.
Another surprise was how well the coalition's new Embedded Provincial Reconstruction Teams are working. Wherever we found a fully staffed team, we also found local Iraqi leaders and businessmen cooperating with it to revive the local economy and build new political structures. Although much more needs to be done to create jobs, a new emphasis on microloans and small-scale projects was having some success where the previous aid programs often built white elephants.
In some places where we have failed to provide the civilian manpower to fill out the reconstruction teams, the surge has still allowed the military to fashion its own advisory groups from battalion, brigade and division staffs. We talked to dozens of military officers who before the war had known little about governance or business but were now ably immersing themselves in projects to provide the average Iraqi with a decent life.
Outside Baghdad, one of the biggest factors in the progress so far has been the efforts to decentralize power to the provinces and local governments. But more must be done. For example, the Iraqi National Police, which are controlled by the Interior Ministry, remain mostly a disaster. In response, many towns and neighborhoods are standing up local police forces, which generally prove more effective, less corrupt and less sectarian. The coalition has to force the warlords in Baghdad to allow the creation of neutral security forces beyond their control.
In the end, the situation in Iraq remains grave. In particular, we still face huge hurdles on the political front. Iraqi politicians of all stripes continue to dawdle and maneuver for position against one another when major steps towards reconciliation — or at least accommodation — are needed. This cannot continue indefinitely. Otherwise, once we begin to downsize, important communities may not feel committed to the status quo, and Iraqi security forces may splinter along ethnic and religious lines.
How much longer should American troops keep fighting and dying to build a new Iraq while Iraqi leaders fail to do their part? And how much longer can we wear down our forces in this mission? These haunting questions underscore the reality that the surge cannot go on forever. But there is enough good happening on the battlefields of Iraq today that Congress should plan on sustaining the effort at least into 2008.
Michael E. O'Hanlon is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Kenneth M. Pollack is the director of research at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at Brookings.
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