Sullivan's Dim Bulb Flickers Once More

As seems to be his pattern lately, Andrew Sullivan suckles onto one fact and uses it to fatten up a dishonest charge he cannot support:

While the media is obsessed parsing the ad libs of someone on no ballot this fall, something truly ominous has just happened in Iraq. The commander-in-chief has abandoned an American soldier to the tender mercies of a Shiite militia. Yes, there are nuances here, and the NYT fleshes out the story today. But the essential fact is clear.

What Andrew Sullivan obtusely states as "fact" is nothing of the sort.

U.S. forces withdrew from checkpoints around the Sadr City slum at Prime Minster Maliki's request, but it is quite a leap to suggest that by turning over checkpoints to the Iraqi Army, that efforts to secure the release of captured U.S Army translator Ahmed Qusai al-Taei have been abandoned.

Does Sullivan honestly believe, and does he even have the basis to believe, that the cordons around Sadr City were the only measure being taken to secure al-Taei's release? If so, Sullivan betrays a stupefying naiveté. More likely, however, he just abandoned any pretense of honesty in favor of a cheap partisan shot that suits his increasingly fractured and incoherent ideology.

I'll state in advance that I do not know specifically what U.S. and Iraqi military, police and political forces are doing to retrieve al-Taei (nor would I reveal the details if I knew them), but what I can state with a fair degree of certainty is that those who kidnapped him at gunpoint:

• had planned the kidnapping in advance
• had a pre-planned and nearby location where they would take al-Taei, in what they consider a safe and sympathetic area from which they are very unlikely to move

It is almost certain that al-Taei was already in this pre-planned containment area before a cordon was ever established. They are now even less likely to move him because of the much greater risk of exposure that any move would entail.

We also know that a passive cordon would only be part of an overall plan to rescue this missing soldier, based upon all-too recent experience.

When Pfcs. Menchacha and Tucker were kidnapped by al Qaeda in June, more than 8,000 soldiers from the U.S. and Iraqi armies participated in the search. We know that forces have actively searched for al-Taei by foot and air, and that there is no sign that the active searches, those that are most likely to be effective at this late stage of the kidnapping, have abated in the least.

Sullivan, of course, does not mention this, perhaps purposefully.

He wouldn’t want to ruin his pre-determined narrative:

The U.S. military does not have a tradition of abandoning its own soldiers to foreign militias, or of taking orders from foreign governments. No commander-in-chief who actually walks the walk, rather than swaggering the swagger, would acquiesce to such a thing. The soldier appears to be of Iraqi descent who is married to an Iraqi woman. Who authorized abandoning him to the enemy? Who is really giving the orders to the U.S. military in Iraq? These are real questions about honor and sacrifice and a war that is now careening out of any control. They are not phony questions drummed up by a partisan media machine to appeal to emotions to maintain power.

Actually, these are "phony questions drummed up by a partisan media machine," and, that machine is an intellectual Trabant at that.

Andrew Sullivan disingenuously misrepresents a small (and increasingly irrelevant) part of the rescue effort as the entire rescue effort, discounting all active military and police searches, intelligence gathering efforts, and back-channel political maneuvering that we know from past experience is certainly taking place.

I don’t expect Sullivan to be nonpartisan or ideologically neutral, but a do expect him to approach the subject with at least a hint of intellectual honesty that he has not thus far shown.

11-02-06 Update: Fox News confirms this morning that the back channel negotiations I mentioned above are indeed occuring. More here.