Dowd and Friedman

In “Cain Not Able” MoDo is going to ‘splain Herman Cain’s media narrative for us: from “is he legitimate?” to “will this ruin his legitimacy?”  The Moustache of Wisdom is in Agra, India.  The son of a bitch all of a sudden is an authority on history.  Or maybe he’s read him some Kipling (about damn time for that)…  In “A Long List of Suckers” he’s decided to offer us a refresher on the history of “The Great Game” — the struggle for supremacy in Central Asia.  He says it shows that no one ever wins for long.  I don’t recall any of this vast knowledge of his being trotted out during the Bush Era…  Fucker.  Here’s MoDo:

We have the starchy guy — tall, handsome, intelligent and rich, with a baronial estate — who’s hard to warm up to. And we have the spontaneous guy, who’s charming and easy to warm up to — until it turns out that he has an unsavory pattern with young women and a suspect relationship with facts.

It’s the Republican primary. Or “Pride and Prejudice.” Take your pick.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that it’s not the scandal that kills you; it’s the cover-up. Herman Cain has added a corollary: It’s not the cover-up that kills you; it’s the cascade of malarkey that spills out when you try to cover up the cover-up.

Sure, the dalliance with the grandfather, gospel singer, motivational speaker and self-made millionaire in the black cowboy hat was fun while it lasted, just as it was with Ross Perot, Donald Trump, Sarah Palin and The-Rent-Is-Too-Damn-High dude.

You have to give props to the C.E.O. of a pizza company who dons a white choir robe at a press event to sing a Lennon parody, “Imagine There’s No Pizza.”

And you have to give Cain credit for breaking creative new ground in unconventional when he responds to a scandal about sexual-harassment complaints when he was chief of the National Restaurant Association in the ’90s by standing up at the National Press Club here and singing a gospel song about “Amazing Grace” to the tune of “Danny Boy.”

Yet despite the taunting tweet from the Times blogger Nate Silver the other day, before the sexual-harassment scandal broke, asking if there was “anyone out there who 1) gets paid to write about politics; 2) is so sure Cain can’t win that they promise to quit their job if he does,” Cain was never going to be the Republican nominee.

Even Barack Obama couldn’t be lucky enough to waltz past two wacky black conservatives, first Alan Keyes and then Cain.

The Herminator was just a raffish passing fancy, like Mr. Wickham, a place for Republicans to store their affections while they try to overcome their aversion to Mitt Romney’s Mr. Darcy.

Early in October, the improbable shooting-star candidate was preening with David Brody on the Christian Broadcasting Network, saying he “felt like Moses when God said ‘I want you to go into Egypt and lead my people out.’ ” He bragged that he was ready for the gotcha questions from the press, saying: “When they ask me who’s the president of Ubeki-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan, I’m going to say, ‘You know, I don’t know. Do you know?’ ”

Yet despite being aware that the scandal would surely pop at some point, and despite 10 days’ warning from Politico, which broke the news, Moses was flailing in the media Red Sea.

When Politico’s Jonathan Martin waited outside the CBS News bureau here to catch Cain after “Face the Nation” and ask him, “Have you ever been accused, sir, in your life of harassment by a woman?,” the candidate’s lame riposte was: “Have you ever been accused of sexual harassment?”

If your appeal lies in being refreshingly plain-spoken, you can’t turn into a verbal corn maze.

He has contradicted himself even more risibly on his memory of the harassment charges than he has on his abortion position.

At first, he said he wasn’t aware of the five-figure settlement to one woman; then, suddenly, he was aware. Instead of the meaning of “is,” Cain tried to parse the meaning of “settlement” versus “agreement.” He still claims he doesn’t remember the other five-figure settlement to another woman.

His memory may soon be jogged. A lawyer for one of the women, an Ivy League grad who works for the federal government and lives in suburban Maryland, said that she wants to be released from a confidentiality agreement on the settlement since Cain is going around disparaging the accusers.

Trade association boards have been known, especially in the flush ’90s, to lavish money on silly things: face-lifts for top executives and their wives and payoffs to executives’ cast-off mistresses.

But if Cain is right that the charges were “baseless” and he’s the victim of a “witch hunt,” why did the association pay the women anything? The Times reported on Wednesday that the payment to one of them was $35,000 — a year’s salary.

Ann Coulter has a point when she says that feminists rewrote their own rules on sexual harassment to support Bill Clinton. It is never right for any boss, especially the president of the United States, to mess with an intern, even if she’s the aggressor.

But Coulter falters when she charges that, like Clarence Thomas, Cain is the victim of a high-tech lynching, that “if you are a conservative black, they will believe the most horrible sexualized fantasies of these white women feminists.”

This isn’t an incendiary story about race. It is the most hackneyed story in Washington — another powerful man who crossed the line and then, when caught, tried to blame the women.

Here’s The Moustache of Wisdom:

Last week, I toured the great Mogul compound of Fatehpur Sikri, near the Taj Mahal. My Indian guide mentioned in passing that in the late 1500s, when Afghanistan was part of India and the Mogul Empire, the Iranian Persians invaded Afghanistan in an effort to “seize the towns of Herat and Kandahar” and a great battle ensued. I had to laugh to myself: “Well, add them to that long list of suckers — countries certain that controlling Afghanistan’s destiny was vital to their national security.”

There were already plenty on that list before, and there have been even more since. As America now debates how to extract itself from Iraq and Afghanistan, it is worth re-reading a little Central Asian history and recalling for how many centuries great powers — from India to Persia, from Britain to Russia, and now from America to Iran, Turkey and Pakistan — have wrestled for supremacy in this region, in different versions of what came to be called “The Great Game.” One can only weep at the thought of how much blood and treasure have been expended in this pursuit and how utterly ungreat this game has been in retrospect. No one ever wins for long, and all they win is a bill.

It is with this bias that I think about the debate following President Obama’s decision to withdraw all U.S. forces from Iraq, on schedule, at the end of this year — a decision that has been greeted with much huffing and puffing from hawkish Republicans about how Obama will be remembered for losing Iraq to Iran. Iraq will now fall under Iran’s “influence,” they proclaim, and none of us will ever be able to sleep well again.

Please put me down in the camp that thinks Obama did the right thing and that Iran’s mullahs will not be the winners.

Why? Well, for starters, centuries of history teach us that Arabs and Persians do not play well together. Yes, Iraq has a Shiite Muslim majority and so does Iran. But Iraqi Arab Shiites willingly fought for eight years against Persian Iranian Shiites in the Iran-Iraq war.

Moreover, I am certain that in recent years America’s lingering troop presence in Iraq actually gave Iran greater influence in Baghdad. The U.S., however well intentioned, became a lightening rod that absorbed a lot of Iraqis’ frustrations with their government’s underperformance, and the U.S. “occupation” drew all attention away from Iran’s shenanigans inside Iraq. Iraqis are a proud people. Once our troops are gone, Iraqi Arabs will surely focus entirely on their own government’s performance and on any Iranian or other attempts to try to be the puppeteer of Iraqi politics. Any Iraqi leader seen as Tehran’s lackey will have problems.

Indeed, once we’re gone, I actually think the dominant flow of influence will be from Iraq toward Iran — if (and it is still a big if) — Iraq’s democracy holds. If it does, Iranians will have to look across the border every day at Iraqis, with their dozens of free newspapers and freedom to form any party and vote for any leader, and wonder why these “inferior” Iraqi Arab Shiites enjoy such freedoms and “superior” Iranian Persian Shiites do not.

“Iran’s interests were served by the Arab status quo ante — ideologically bankrupt regimes brutalizing disenfranchised populations,” argues Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran expert at the Carnegie Endowment. “The more representative governments there are in the Middle East, the more it highlights the fact that the Islamic Republic of Iran is a salmon swimming upstream against the current of history.”

Some say Iran was the geopolitical winner of the U.S. intervention in Iraq. I’d hold off on that judgment, too. “The Iranian regime is at its lowest moment of influence in the region — 14 percent popularity in the latest Zogby poll,” remarked Abbas Milani, who teaches Iranian politics at Stanford. What you see today if you look underneath the Islamic revolutionary facade in Iran, added Milani, “is a flourishing of painting, films and music, driven by technology. It is a society seeking its own bottom-up blend of Islam and modernity. The regime has no role in this.”

Just as I don’t buy the notion that we need to keep playing The Great Game in Iraq, I also don’t buy it for Afghanistan.

“If the U.S. steps back, it will see that it has a lot more options,” argues C. Raja Mohan, a senior fellow at the Center for Policy Research, in New Delhi. “You let the contending regional forces play out against each other and then you can then tilt the balance.” He is referring to the India, Pakistan, Russia, Iran, China and Northern Alliance tribes in Afghanistan. “At this point, you have the opposite problem. You are sitting in the middle and are everyone’s hate-object, and everyone sees some great conspiracy in whatever you do. Once you pull out, and create the capacity to alter the balance, you will have a lot more options and influence to affect outcomes — rather than being pushed around and attacked by everyone.”

America today needs much more cost-efficient ways to influence geopolitics in Asia than keeping troops there indefinitely. We need to better leverage the natural competitions in this region to our ends. There is more than one way to play The Great Game, and we need to learn it.