Hullabaloo

Tuesday, April 08, 2003

 
The Doctrine of Infallibility

Matthew Iglesias posts the following and I quite disagree:

The other day I saw someone all upset by some kind of poll indicating that most American don’t think we need to find any WMDs in Iraq for the war to have been justified. I found myself actually agreeing with this proposition — whether or not the invasion was a good idea has almost nothing to do with whether or not we find WMDs.

For one thing, the whole WMD issue only speaks to the narrow topic of legal justification. As long as we’re on that topic, however, only one thing matters: compliance with UN resolutions. As everyone knows, Iraq was not in full compliance with the relevant resolutions and the United States did not receive authorization to enforce the resolutions by invading. You can make of that what you will (it was blogged to death about a month ago) but it has no relationship to whether or not we’re able to find any WMDs in the country. Saddam was supposed to comply with the inspectors, and he didn’t. We were supposed to get yet another UN resolution, and we didn’t.

This is truly perverse. One of the fundamentals of the Bush Doctrine is the doctrine of "preemption," stating that the US has an obligation to invade and depose any regimes that are developing weapons of mass destruction. "We can't wait for a smoking mushroom cloud." This, and the doctrine of overwhelming US military dominance, rejection of deterrence as a strategy, keeping Europe from presenting a military challenge and Mid-east and China regime change are what make up the global security guarantee envisioned as the Pax Americana. The worry about selling or giving WMD to terrorists was tacked on recently but it more or less fits with the overall construct and provides a powerful (if phony) argument post 9/11.

The threat of asymmetrical warfare and terrorists getting their hands on WMD is a real one. This is why the administration makes the argument that the preemption doctrine must be stretched to say that any existing WMD program in an unstable regime presents an "imminent" threat, merely by presenting an opportunity for terrorists to obtain fissionable material or small amounts of deadly chemicals and toxins. I don't agree that this situation presents an explicit rationale for invasion, and it seems clear that it is little more than a fig leaf for what is otherwise a doctrine of preventive war, but I can at least see some logic in the argument. But, if there is no evidence that such a program exists then we have no justification other than an arbitrary decision by our government to depose the rulers of a sovereign nation (and kill a bunch of their citizens in the process) for no better reason than that it suits our strategic objectives. (The “liberator” rationale so favored by the media is really only suitable for children and really dumb Republicans like President Bush.)This is a very dangerous concept and Americans should not accept it unless we actually believe that our leaders are all ordained by God and therefore always know what is right and just and need never present their rationale or evidence for taking action. This does not sound like liberal democracy to me.

If we do not need actual evidence of a regime's WMD development program and if this entire project relies instead on the idea that our government can be trusted to have total prescience of a regime's future intentions then the Bush Doctrine is a straight up doctrine of preventive war.

And, while the Bush Doctrine clearly backs into an embrace of preventive war, even the neocons aren’t going to openly admit that and for good reason. Their mission is to establish global military dominance to ensure American hegemony (and not incidentally ensure Israel’s security.) Therefore, even on their own terms it is in their best interest to at least appear to adhere to international norms that everyone understands.

A policy of straightforward preventive war would be intolerable to most of the world, which will justifiably feel threatened by a huge and powerful nation that believes it can reject agreed upon international law and tradition (which are far more longstanding than any UN resolutions) simply because it is powerful enough to do so. The United States does not, by virtue of its military power, really have any unusual claim to righteousness. If we do not adhere to the rules that have been designed to set guidelines of tolerable behavior for the nations less amenable to democratic values -- especially in the name of those same democratic values -- we will have become incoherent and unpredictable. We will have no allies who don't operate solely from fear and opportunism which is an invitation to perfidy. Nobody will share our "values," because our values are no longer known and predictable. And we will have taken a giant leap into creating an anarchic global system that no matter how powerful we are, we cannot hope to unilaterally control through force alone.

Even wild-eyed neocons have to adhere at least on some level to the rule of law and international norms if they truly believe in a Pax Americana. They cannot rely on a puerile notion of being selective “liberators” nor can they straightforwardly propose a policy of preventive war. Therefore, they must produce evidence of “imminent” threat (even as they elastically define it) before taking action like that in Iraq. And if they are proven wrong after the fact, the war should rightly be deemed illegal and immoral, on the terms the neocons themselves set forth.

.

Update: I see Kevin Drum has already posted a more cogent response.






digby 4/08/2003 11:07:00 PM |

 
A Thousand Flowers Bloom

Armed gangs in Najaf undermine peace plans
By Charles Clover in Najaf, Iraq
Published: April 8 2003 17:57 | Last Updated: April 8 2003 17:57


The people of Hay al-Ansar, a district on the outskirts of Najaf, were glad to be rid of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party rule when the city was seized by US forces last week.

But they appear to be just as terrified, if not more so, of their new rulers - a little known Iraqi militia backed by the US special forces and headquartered in a compound nearby.

The Iraqi Coalition of National Unity (ICNU), which appeared in the city last week riding on US special forces vehicles, has taken to looting and terrorising the people with impunity, according to most residents.

"They steal and steal" said Abu Zeinab, a man living near the Medresa al Tayif school. . "They threaten us, saying 'we are with the Americans, you can do nothing to us.'"

Sa'ida al-Hamed, another resident, says she has witnessed looting by the ICNU and other armed gangs in the city, which lost its police force when the government fled last week. One man told a US army translator on Monday that he was taken out of his house and beaten by ICNU forces when he refused to give them his car. They took it anyway, he said.

If true, the testimony of residents in Hay al-Ansar reveals a darker side to US policy in Iraq. In their eagerness to hand local administration back to Iraqis, US forces are in danger of losing the peace as rapidly as they have won the war, by handing power back to tyrants.

US special forces said they were looking into the complaints, which had been passed to them by US military sources. They declined, however, to discuss the formation of the group, how its members were chosen, or who they were.

The head of the ICNU, who says he is a former colonel in the Iraqi artillery forces who has been working with the underground opposition since 1996, announced on Tuesday that he was acting mayor of Najaf, and his group has taken over administration of the city. Other Iraqi exiles, brought in by the CIA and US special forces to help assemble a local government over the next few days, say the militia is out of control.

"They are nobody, and nobody has ever heard of them, all they have is US backing," said an Arab journalist traveling with a group of exiles from the US and UK in Najaf.

Abu Zeinab said the ICNU "has no basis in this city, we don't know who they are." He said the residents of Najaf, who are predominantly Shia Muslims, follow only one man, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, who lives in the city.

Ayatollah Sistani has so far refused to meet representatives of US forces, according to associates, and has made no public pronouncements on co-operating with the US military. Associates say he is "waiting for the situation to become clearer".

"We only follow Ayatollah Sistani, and so far he has said nothing," said Abu Zeinab.

Hassan Mussawi, a Shia' Muslim cleric who helps lead the ICNU, said on Tuesday that the reports of looting by his group were untrue and fabricated by religious extremists to discredit his movement.[uh oh..ed.]

"There are people with guns stealing things in their neighbourhood, but they think anyone with a gun belongs to our group," he said.

He added that his group was seeking to arrest former Iraqi government officials and "collaborators" with Saddam Hussein's regime throughout the city.

"If they do not resist arrest, we hand them over to the Americans. If they resist then we take measures accordingly."

The allegations against the ICNU threaten to undermine much of the goodwill built up by US forces among the people of Najaf, who still wave and cheer at US troops driving through the city. In an effort to curb the looting, which is rampant in Najaf, US forces have begun to patrol at night. They will not be undertaking specific police functions, according to their commanders, but "if we come upon looting, we will try to control the situation and disperse those doing the looting," said Lt Col Marcus De Oliveira, of the 101st Airborne Division.

The city's political rivalries appear to be affecting humanitarian assistance to the town. US special forces have objected to allowing certain local Shia religious leaders, with ties to Iran, to distribute food aid.

The 16 truckloads of food that recently arrived in the city from the Kuwait Red Crescent Society is being distributed according to a plan drawn up by the Iraqi ministry of commerce for the United Nation's oil-for-food programme.

US forces are also trying to restore running water and power to the city, by bringing in a 2.5 MW generator from Kuwait to restart the city's power plant, which was shut off by Iraqi forces.

Hussein Chilabi, a father of six in Chilabat, on the outskirts of Najaf, said until running water is restored, his family are forced to drink water from canals, which is not healthy. "The children are sick in their stomachs from drinking this water. We need running water more than food - more that anything right now."

How very interesting. US Special forces installed a bunch of thugs nobody has ever seen before to patrol the city of Najaf. It is unexplained and unremarked upon in the major papers.

Meanwhile, in Basra, they have named a local sheik as leader, but these reports don't seem to know much about him. Viceroy Garner signed off, so I guess we have to assume it's all part of his cunning secret plan...

..The sheik was identified as a tribal leader, but his name and religious affiliation were not disclosed. Col. Chris Vernon, spokesman for the British forces, said the sheik had met British divisional commanders Monday and been given the job of setting up an administrative committee representing other groups in the region.

The sheik and his committee will be the first civilian leadership established in liberated Iraq, even as retired U.S. Gen. Jay Garner, appointed by the Pentagon to form an interim post-war administration, tries to define a new leadership for the whole country.

The sheik's committee will be left alone by the British to form a local authority, Vernon said...

Interesting plan they have going. Locals are being chosen to lead by the US military. It looks like some, at least, aren't working so well. I wonder what will happen if it turns out that these local leaders aren't as schooled as they should be in the Enlightenment values that so animated our founding fathers and are sure to take hold in Iraq within a matter of days? Will we be forced to institute some more of that "regime change" in the name of democracy?

It's just so hard to tell the good guys from the bad guys and install a democratic beacon of lightness for the whole world to imitate when you haven't a fucking clue about anything or anyone you are dealing with. What a sticky wicket.

Surely, the new sub-Viceroys who have no experience with Iraq or the language or large organizations are sure to be able to sort all this out, though. And, although he has not been to Iraq since 1958, Mr Chalabi's vast experience leveraging his position in neocon salons from one end of Georgetown to the other will stand him in very good stead in putting together a government from scratch.

Of course, the sheik who shall remain nameless said that he will likely appoint Baathists whom he believes are tolerably good, so maybe the country won't have to start from scratch after all. Saddam's Baath party probably has some damned good administrators. And police forces, for that matter. Highly experienced. Surely they can be convinced to assume a more benign role in a post-Saddam Iraq. Maybe we don't have to engage in all that messy "accountability" mucky muck. Particularly when the ungrateful Iraqis are looting all the spoils (that we will just have to replace with our oil profits...)

I am just breathless with excitement as we watch this brilliant plan for regional, no global, democracy begin to take shape. Just like in Philadelphia circa 1787 we have gathered the finest minds of a generation, all together in one place, to ratify a bold new experiment in self-government. The names Perle, Wolfowitz, Garner, Bodine and the sheik with no name will long be remembered. Feel the magic.





digby 4/08/2003 05:56:00 PM |

 
In the Tank and Providing Sexual Favors

I just heard Wolf Blitzer argue with Christianne Amanpour that the journalists who were killed this morning were pretty much asking for it because they knew that Saddam was using them as human shields. A visibly pissed Christianne explained that the rules were very clear and that the dead reporters in Baghdad probably know a lot more about courage in warfare than any of those who were suggesting such a thing. She went on to say that this was missing the point because there was NO evidence that any shots had emanated from the building in the time before the tank opened fire and that this was the rationale being offered by the Pentagon. Wolf then said that a NY Times reporter indicated in this article that senior Iraqi officials were going into the hotel and not allowing journalists to leave as if that was supposed to mean something.

Needless to say, Wolf didn't bring up the fact that on the very same day, by pure coincidence of course, we also bombed the offices of al Jazeera. Ooopsie. Our precision weapons sure are hitting journalists today, aren't they? Damn that Saddam.

Gosh, I sure am glad that Wolf isn't let any feeling of solidarity with fellow journalists interfere with his deeply embedded gratitude at being allowed to bury his head as far up the asses of the Bush administration as humanly possible.


digby 4/08/2003 03:23:00 PM |

 
Daily Fix

Salon has a great article up today on Jon Stewart and The Daily Show. It makes the usual observations (only real liberal “news” etc.) but I think it gives short shrift to the extent to which the humor flows from puncturing the media and showing what complete whores for establishment power they are. Having said that, it does highlight one segment that perfectly nails the media’s wholesale absorbtion of the Republican strategy:

The show specializes in satires of bogus experts: No matter what the subject at hand, for example, Stephen Colbert is introduced as the show's "senior analyst." He's the senior U.N. analyst, senior media analyst, senior theater analyst, senior death analyst (commenting on a Texas execution), etc. He can always be counted on to speak utter drivel with unflappable authority.

After the war started, Stewart had the following conversations with Colbert, who was wearing his "senior media analyst" hat:

Stewart: What should the media's role be in covering the war?

Colbert: Very simply, the media's role should be the accurate and objective description of the hellacious ass-whomping we're handing the Iraqis.

Stewart: Hellacious ass-whomping? Now to me, that sounds pretty subjective.

Colbert: Are you saying it's not an ass-whomping, Jon? I suppose you could call it an ass-kicking or an ass-handing-to. Unless, of course, you love Hitler.

Stewart [stammering]: I don't love Hitler.

Colbert: Spoken like a true Hitler-lover.

Stewart: Look, even some American generals have said that the Iraqis have put up more resistance than they were expected to.

Colbert: First rule of journalism, Jon, is to know your sources. Sounds like these "generals" of yours may be a little light in the combat boots, if you know what I'm saying.

Stewart: I don't think I know what you're saying.

Colbert: I'm saying they're queers, Jon. They're Hitler-loving queers.

Stewart: I'm perplexed. Is your position that there's no place for negative words or even thoughts in the media?

Colbert: Not at all, Jon. Doubts can happen to everyone, including me, but as a responsible journalist, I've taken my doubts, fears, moral compass, conscience and all-pervading skepticism about the very nature of this war and simply placed them in this empty Altoids box. [Produces box.] That's where they'll stay, safe and sound, until Iraq is liberated.

Stewart: Isn't it the media's responsibility in wartime ...

Colbert: That's my point, Jon! The media has no responsibility in wartime. The government's on top of it. The media can sit this one out.

Stewart: And do what?

Colbert: Everything it's always wanted to do but had no time for: travel, see the world, write that novel. I know the media has always wanted to try yoga. This is a great time to take it up. It's very stressful out there -- huge war going on. Jon, hear me out, it was Thomas Jefferson who said, "Everyone imposes his own system as far as his army can reach."

Stewart: Stephen, Stalin said that. That was Stalin. Jefferson said he'd rather have a free press and no government than a government and no free press.

Colbert: Well, what do you expect from a slave-banging, Hitler-loving queer?

I think that is a masterful take down of the entire right wing “stifle dissent” strategy while at the same time totally eviscerating the silly, self-serving press corp. (Not to mention that it is just plain, fucking hilarious.)

But the author also makes the following statement that gives me pause:

Political humor used to belong to the left, but that all changed in the 1990s, when the priggishness of political correctitude injected new vitality into a segment of the population that had been shut out of comedy's pantheon: assholes. Suddenly, a guy could flaunt his most petty and vindictive prejudices and still get to feel like a champion of truth and freedom. You could rail against "victimology" when, say, sexually harassed workers dared to resort to it, and then turn around and avail yourself of the same trend by claiming that a pack of censorious puritans was trying to shut you up. In fact, the appeal of shock jocks and other bad boys mostly lies in the idea that they're offensive to somebody else, someone you can imagine gasping in horror at each transgression. Without political correctness (and that's fading fast), a big chunk of what passes for contemporary American humor would be flapping in the wind.

I do agree that asshole humor became fashionable as a response to political correctness. The Clinton hating cabal gained plenty of currency for being “shockingly” politically incorrect with their snide humor and bitchy outrageousness (but are now looking slightly passé.) Where would Ann Coulter or Lucianne Goldberg have been without political correctness to play off of? Much of the Clinton bashing was pure attitude --- snide, gossipy, derisive --- National Enquirer style.

But, I don’t see a lot of evidence that political correctness is fading fast. And, my evidence for this is the fact that I often find myself pulling my punches because I always hear from some people who will be offended by the fact that I would use a line like “slave banging, Hitler loving queer,” even as a way of exposing the other side for the bigots and extremists they are. Most disheartening is the fact that I frequently get arguments saying that by printing those words I am contributing to the problem – as if the context of words is completely irrelevant. Some very well intentioned people seem to believe that you can eliminate bigotry and hatred by eliminating the words that people use to express them. This rule applies to all except those who co-opted the term as a way to defiantly express pride in whatever the wing nuts are saying with derision. (Which is something I wholeheartedly approve of – take their slurs and turn them into badges of honor. Use language, be nimble, don’t create a bunch of rules that limit our ability to express ourselves.)

This probably shows why I fall into the Left/Libertarian spectrum on all of those stupid internet tests. I hate the idea that certain words or phrases are banned just because they have been used by some people with ill intent. And, something in me roars with frustration that because of that I should not even laugh when these bigots’ own words are used against them. It makes no sense to me. Ridicule is one of the surest ways to puncture the self-importance of pompous right wing asses.

The author of this article believes that Stewart is creating the new satirical form that leftwing comedy will take, using Bill Maher as the example of one whose show is much better in its serious segments than its comedy bits. The Daily Show certainly seems fresh and pointed to me, and explicitly political in a new way --- using familiar media formats to expose the idiocy of the current political/media establishment --- so I very much hope that this writer is correct. (At least the fiction of the bitchy right wing being "cool" seems to coming to an end.)

But, if our side hews to the idea that pointed satire is unacceptable or that context is irrelevant when judging the intent of a writer’s use of certain words or phrases, then we are relinquishing one of the most potent tools in our arsenal --- the ability to hoist the right wing and their media tools on their own artificially inflated petards.


Oh, and I’m officially endorsing Stephen Colbert for President in 2004. If we ever needed a Sr. Analyst of everything, it is now. Plus, his name is pronounced Col-bear – tres French, don’t you know. Vive Le Steve!




digby 4/08/2003 01:35:00 PM |

Monday, April 07, 2003

 
They're About As Relevant As OJ

The "movement " conservatives have these cutsie little bitch fests, (like the "Clinton Adminstration funeral") that they think are just screamingly clever. Unfortunately it's actually becoming embarrassing. The Clinton hating coven isn't exactly cutting edge these days, is it?

TBOGG reports on the Media Research Center "DisHonors Awards: Roasting the Most Outrageously Biased Liberal Reporters of 2002.

Notable Conservatives (two words not often used together) who made appearances included Cal Thomas, Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity, and Ann Coulter. John Fund was supposed to be a presenter but instead spent the evening slapping his girlfriend around in the parking structure. Just like last year. Entertainment was provided by washed-up cracker band, The Charlie Daniels Band, who played their one hit song six times before stumbling off-stage and back into obscurity

The highlight of the evening, besides the Kate O'Beirne/Phyllis Schlafly Astroglide Wresting Smackdown, was the award for the Quote of the Year, this year delivered by Bill Moyers:

[...]

More






digby 4/07/2003 09:10:00 PM |

 
Read This

This article, Rage, Hubris, and Regime Change via Josh Marshall is one of the best refutations of the starry-eyed neocon fantasy I've read yet. And it's from a Republican who supported the removal of Saddam.

The Bush national security doctrine is a response to the likely proliferation of horrendous “wildcat violence” when state disintegration and/or the covert actions of tyrannical regimes offer movements of rage access to insidious weapons whose advanced technology demands only global reach, not global power. Largely in response to this possibility, the Bush doctrine stresses American military predominance, military preemption, and political transformation. From an historical point of view, these are extraordinary ambitions. More, they represent the practical (not necessarily successful) integration of international relations with non-Western political development in the form of an American foreign policy based on the ideological concept, and political-military pursuit, of democratic regime change.

He breaks the "Bush" Doctrine (I use italics because it is really the Wolfowitz Doctrine) into three components:

Dominance

The first “person” in the new Bush “trinitarian” doctrine is military predominance — or, if you like, dominance. In the administration’s words, “our [military] forces will be strong enough to dissuade potential adversaries from pursuing a military build up in hopes of surpassing or equaling the power of the United States.” This tenet has no immediate bearing on the international issues facing the United States because it will most likely take at least a decade for any imaginable nation to be taken seriously as a military competitor (unless, of course, Japan undergoes radical regime change on its own nationalistic terms).

[...]

If the Bush administration’s foreign policy towards countries in the “axis of evil” is “either you become capitalist democracies or we will do it for you,” then for both ideological and material reasons, the leaders of those regimes have every incentive to do exactly what the United States doesn’t want them to do: develop a nuclear capacity. The Bush administration’s fundamental solution to the danger of terrorism, regime change, has a decidedly Jekyll-and-Hyde quality — to wit, in trying to create democratic Dr. Jekyll regimes, it is likely to create enraged Mr. Hyde regimes.

Preemption

Preemption, the second “person” in the trinitarian doctrine, is indeed a radical departure from deterrence as a strategy against hostile regimes. The difference between preemption and deterrence is simple: In the former case, you attack first. You don’t wait for an attack and then counter-attack. However, both deterrence and preemption rely on evidence of a hostile power’s weapons capacity, not simply its desire or search for such. The Bush doctrine rests on something much more radical (though, if Thucydides is correct, not historically unprecedented) than preemption: anticipation. The logic behind an anticipatory attack against a country like Iraq is that its leader will never cease in his search for military weapons of unprecedented destructiveness, and that once he possesses them, he will certainly use them against us in the form of blackmail, veto, or aggression.

[...]

So the logic behind an anticipatory strategy is powerful. However, its strategic application demands the combined wisdom of Pericles and Solomon. To begin with, the premise for an anticipatory attack posits a hostile leader and regime platonically impervious to any environmental changes whether domestic or international. This is not always a mistaken premise — Hitler and Pol Pot are cases in point — but it is almost always mistaken. Over time, most regimes do change substantially if not essentially. One has only to look at the Soviet Union after 1956 and China after 1978.

[...]

Regime change

Political transformation is the third part of the Bush administration’s national security trinity. If global military domination sounds somewhat un-American, not to mention impractical, and if a strategy based on anticipation carries the extraordinary risk that international politics will become more a matter of arbitrary intuition than sober threat estimation, then regime change — that is, the forceful transformation of tyrannical regimes and non-modern societies like Iraq (and North Korea and Iran) into democracies — signifies a radical change in our idea of democratization. By making regime change the central feature of American foreign policy, the Bush administration appears to favor the “imposition of democracy” over the “transition to democracy.”

[...]

History, the Bush administration has concluded, needs deliberate organization, leadership, and direction. In this irony of ironies, the Bush administration’s identification of regime change as critical to its anti-terrorist policy and integral to its desire for a democratic capitalist world has led to an active “Leninist” foreign policy in place of Fukuyama’s passive “Marxist” social teleology.

[...]

The 9-11 attacks made it clear to the Bush administration that a belief in the inexorable unfolding of History favoring the West was both unfounded and dangerous. In a quite remarkable about-face, the Bush administration has devised a radically new American global posture.

[...]

Its rationale is sophisticated and begins with the proposition that the United States cannot simply wait and hope for internal transitions to democracy, particularly in countries whose leadership is dogmatically and hysterically intent on preventing such. Regimes of this type might acquire or develop wmd and use them to end our history. (Point well taken.)

Second, internal transitions to democracy such as in Meiji Japan or Imperial Germany in the nineteenth century are often “arrested.” They stop short of creating a “constitution of liberty” and remain dangerously unstable political, military, and economic hybrids.

[...]

...the reconstruction experiences of Germany and Japan (as well as Korea and even the Philippines) are considered pertinent or exemplary. They are not. No envisaged invasion of Iraq will produce the psychological trauma, institutional disintegration, socio-cultural dislocation, or economic destruction brought about by our successful invasions of Japan and Germany.

I urge you to read the entire article. His conclusions are fresh and compelling, most especially his cogent analysis of the probable effect of "imposing" democracy on a nation and culture which does not see individualism as a virtue. He points out the "missionary" nature of this new form of enforced democracy and dryly suggests that "one might at least consider the fate of earlier Western crusades."

He finishes with a very interesting insight:

Given enough power, a conquering authority can impose any kind of rule it wishes on a defeated society. More often than not, however, military-political imposition produces social dissimulation, not cultural assimilation of the conqueror’s way of life. As Aristotle and Durkheim knew, the types of political innovation most likely to be accepted by a defeated society must closely resemble previous, familiar forms of political life. In the case of a defeated Iraq that requires, at a minimum, the Bush administration’s recognition of and respect for the reality of ruling families as the central feature of Arab political life. Surely an easy task for what the Financial Times considers the most successful political family in American history.

digby 4/07/2003 06:31:00 PM |

 
Victories Old and New

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan (AP)

-- Before executing the International Red Cross worker, the Taliban gunmen made a satellite telephone call to their superior for instructions: Kill him?

Kill him, the order came back, and Ricardo Munguia, whose body was found with 20 bullet wounds last month, became the first foreign aid worker to die in Afghanistan since the Taliban's ouster from power 18 months ago.

The manner of his death suggests the Taliban is not only determined to remain a force in this country, but is reorganizing and reviving its command structure.

There is little to stop them. The soldiers and police who were supposed to be the bedrock of a stable postwar Afghanistan have gone unpaid for months and are drifting away.

At a time when the United States is promising a reconstructed democratic postwar Iraq, many Afghans are remembering hearing similar promises not long ago.

Instead, what they see is thieving warlords, murder on the roads, and a resurgence of Taliban vigilantism.

``It's like I am seeing the same movie twice and no one is trying to fix the problem,'' said Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of Afghanistan's president and his representative in southern Kandahar. ``What was promised to Afghans with the collapse of the Taliban was a new life of hope and change. But what was delivered? Nothing. Everyone is back in business.''

Karzai said reconstruction has been painfully slow -- a canal repaired, a piece of city road paved, a small school rebuilt.

``There have been no significant changes for people,'' he said. ``People are tired of seeing small, small projects. I don't know what to say to people anymore.''

When the Taliban ruled they forcibly conscripted young men. ``Today I can say 'we don't take your sons away by force to fight at the front line,''' Karzai remarked. ``But that's about all I can say.''

But progress also is a question of perspective. Capt. Trish Morris, spokeswoman for the Coalition Joint Civil-Military Operations Task Force, said civil affairs teams have spent up to $13 million on projects affecting the daily lives of Afghans.

``That may not sound like a lot of money, but that's hundreds of schools and clinics and bridges and wells all over Afghanistan,'' Morris said in Kabul.

``That may not sound like a lot of money, but that's hundreds of schools and clinics and bridges and wells all over Afghanistan,'' Morris said in Kabul.

``Some might say not a lot is being done,'' but the U.S. government, the United Nations and the private aid agencies ``are all working very hard,'' Morris said. ``It's just going to take some time, because 23 years of war has destroyed a lot of things.''

From safe havens in neighboring Pakistan, aided by militant Muslim groups there, the Taliban launched their revival to coincide with the war in Iraq and capitalize on Muslim anger over the U.S. invasion, say Afghan officials.

Karzai said the Taliban are allied with rebel commander Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, supported by Pakistan and financed by militant Arabs.

The attacks have targeted foreigners and the threats have been directed toward Afghans working for international organizations.

I don't want to hear another word about how the US is on a humanitarian mission to bring peace and freedom to the world. Even the neocons, who supposedly really truly believe in spreading the American love, are obviously full of shit. If they really cared about the people in the countries we are "liberating" this would not be happening in Afghanistan.

We've spent the huge sum of 13 million dollars to help the lives of average Afghan people. Meanwhile, the Taliban are still around terrorizing the population, Pakistan is more radicalized than it was before 9/11 and is blatantly harboring Taliban and al Qaeda. Afghans are again living under the rule of fractious warlords and remain in deep, deep poverty. In other words, the Afghan campaign succeeded in sending the terrorists to another sympathetic country that happens to have nuclear weapons while leaving the people of Afghanistan living in anarchy. Victory.

Clearly, the Afghanistan campaign was just a way of letting off some of that post 9/11 steam, and letting Rummy experiment with his newfangled military doctrine, while we laid the groundwork for Iraq. And they knew nobody would care. The minute they sent Ashleigh Banfield home to cover the Elizabeth Smart kidnapping we knew the "story” had ended. Whatever happens now is a “new” story, unrelated to the story of how the Americans gloriously liberated the Afghans from the Taliban and destroyed the foundation of al Qaeda.

No matter that anti-American terrorism has been only slightly and temporarily thwarted.

It is very important to remember that the neocons do not take the threat of Islamic fundamentalism seriously. They never have, even to the extent that they have gone completely off the deep end trying to prove that the 1994 world trade center bombing was actually the work of Saddam. The first thing the claque did after 9/11 was send James "WWIV" Woolsey to Europe to root out the "evidence" that Saddam was behind it. In the rigid neocon worldview, the only true immediate enemy is a totalitarian rogue state run by a militaristic dictator (theocratic or secular.) The long term enemy is any state or group of states who would threaten American military dominance. The only danger from terrorism is the extent to which one of the rogue states gives it access to WMD. Any threat that falls outside of that paradigm is made to fit, whether it does or not.

(This is another reason why the military didn't "war game" guerilla tactics and was surprised by the paramilitary presence in southern Iraq. The Republican Guard, supposed crack troops using traditional forms of warfare would put up the biggest fight. Isn't that how Stalinist dictatorships behave?)

It has occurred to me in the last few weeks that one of the reasons these people are so stuck on this problem is because their lives were built around fighting communism and they truly believe that Reagan's large military buildup and bellicose threats were the instruments that ended the Soviet Union. They never believed in containment. Indeed, even after the Berlin Wall fell, Wolfowitz was planning for a large force based in Lithuania in order to be prepared for what he still considered the inevitable military confrontation with Russia.

It stands to reason that if you believe that threats and a massive military build up were responsible for the defeat of our rival superpower (and created a "reverse domino effect" of democracy throughout Eastern Europe) then you might believe that the same effect could happen in the Middle East. That is, if you see the entire world in stark manichean terms of "strong" vs. "weak" and view all of human behavior through the prism of your own experience and expectations.

One of the more interesting elements about this is that al Qaeda also believe that they defeated the Soviet Union when the Mujahadeen "forced" the Red Army to retreat from Afghanistan. Their arrogant assumptions of victory in Holy Jihad largely stem from the fact that they believe that action caused the USSR to break up. In their view, they took one superpower down and have one to go.

So, both the neocons and al Qaeda believe they single handedly ended the cold war and defeated the mighty Soviet Empire, but neither of them take the other seriously in the least. The Islamic fundamentalists think the US is soft, not because its military is not formidable but because its people are irreligious and cowardly. Therefore, they strike at our most vulnerable spot, the civilian population --- which in turn gives the neocons the green light to dispense with international law and initiate its plans for American Empire. The neocons believe that a show of force will intimidate everyone, including terrorists, so attacking a secular totalitarian state in the middle east is necessary in its own right and will have the salutary effect of cowing whatever rag tag terrorist organizations exist out there.

Because neither understand the other or ever really engage the other, they end up reinforcing rather than defeating each other's goals.

Each in their own way create the conditions for the other to pursue their separate ends. The neocons inflame the radical elements of the middle east thereby providing a valuable recruiting tool for terrorists and al Qaeda provide a useful excuse for the neocons to pursue their long standing goal of global military dominance. The result is an escalation of violence with little hope of “victory” because the violence of each is aimed at those who do not actually threaten them.

Both al Qaeda and Neoconservatism are built upon illusions about their own power based upon a willful misreading of their place in recent history. Their desire to be right about this delusional interpretation of recent events has made both of them dangerously ambitious.

Beware of “movements” that believe their own propaganda.


Addendum:

In response to some readers who think I've donned a tin foil "no blood for oil" hat, I don't suggest that an advance into Syria would be solely because of a pipeline to Haifa. There are many factors at work in these calculations. One of them, though, is most certainly the presence of vast amounts of oil in the region and a pipeline into the Mediterranean is certainly a benefit to both Israel and the US. In addition, I do not doubt for a second that contracts for building and rebuilding are relevant to the Bush administration both from a fund raising and a policy standpoint. They are as much carrots and sticks as any military operation as we are seeing in the refusal to allow anyone but the US and British to "share in the victory."

The problem with initiating this pipeline is that it will require a recognition of Israel by both Iraq and Syria. This is, in my opinion, a very worthy goal. But, if it is imposed by a pair of puppet governments without a Palestinian state in place, the United States will be occupying the middle east forever. Richard Perle is already out there telling anyone who'll listen that his Chalabi based dream of an Iraqi government has expressed its willingness to recognize Israel. This is such an obtuse comment at this particular time that I find it hard to believe that it could actually happen. But, with this crowd you just never know. There seem to be no limits.





digby 4/07/2003 03:35:00 PM |

Saturday, April 05, 2003

 
I'll Tread On You If I Damned Well Want To

Sadly, the United States is being run by people who believe their own hype. We've already won the war in Iraq, the occupation has gone perfectly, we have successfully scared the North Koreans and the Iranians into completely capitulating to our every whim and the entire world knows they'd better not mess with us or we will, well, we'll...you know. It won't be pretty. Welcome to the Pax Americana, mothafuckaaa.

Viewing the War as a Lesson to the World
By DAVID E. SANGER

WASHINGTON, April 5 — Shortly after Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld issued a stark warning to Iran and Syria last week, declaring that any "hostile acts" they committed on behalf of Iraq might prompt severe consequences, one of President Bush's closest aides stepped into the Oval Office to warn him that his unpredictable defense secretary had just raised the specter of a broader confrontation.

Mr. Bush smiled a moment at the latest example of Mr. Rumsfeld's brazenness, recalled the aide. Then he said one word — "Good" — and went back to work.

It was a small but telling moment on the sidelines of the war. For a year now, the president and many in his team have privately described the confrontation with Saddam Hussein as something of a demonstration conflict, an experiment in forcible disarmament. It is also the first war conducted under a new national security strategy, which explicitly calls for intervening before a potential enemy can strike.

Mr. Bush's aides insist they have no intention of making Iraq the first of a series of preventive wars. Diplomacy, they argue, can persuade North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons programs. Intensive inspections can flush out a similar nuclear program in Iran. Threats and incentives can prevent Syria from sponsoring terrorism or fueling a guerrilla movement in Iraq.

Yet this week, as images of American forces closing in on Baghdad played on television screens, some of Mr. Bush's top aides insisted they were seeing evidence that leaders in North Korea and Iran, but not Syria, might be getting their point.

"Iraq is not just about Iraq," a senior administration official who played a crucial role in putting the strategy together said in an interview last week. It was "a unique case," the official said. But in Mr. Bush's mind, the official added, "It is of a type."

In fact, some administration officials are talking about the lessons Mr. Bush expects the world to take from this conflict, and they are debating about where the he may decide to focus when it is over.

The president seemed to allude to those lessons in his radio address this morning, saying his decision to oust Saddam Hussein was part of his plan to "not sit and wait, leaving enemies free to plot another Sept. 11 — this time, perhaps, with chemical, biological or nuclear terror."

Well yes, there is that. We will not sit and wait while countries continue the pretense of national sovereignty. If a nation does not do what we tell it to do, and I mean right now, we will simply take them out. We believe that diplomacy is always a useless first step so we will send our smoothest most diplomatic state department representatives like John Bolton, to threaten...er negotiate with these countries. If they properly and obsequiesly bow down to our omniscience we might let them off with just economic punishment and public humiliation (to serve as another "lesson," don't you know.) But, at the end of the day, rest assured that if any nation even thinks of defying the United Goddamn States of America, we will kick it's ass from here to kingdom come.

But what we really want is to liberate the people from their despotic, violent rulers. Like we liberated the Germans from Hitler.

Today, Colin Powell is quoted as saying that nobody in the American government is discussing invading Syria or Iran.

Saturday, Apr 05, 2003; 11:29 AM

CAIRO, Egypt - Iraq should be ruled by its own people and American forces will not invade Syria and Iran after liberating Baghdad, Secretary of State Colin Powell was quoted as saying in an interview published Saturday.

Powell's comments in the London-based al-Hayat newspaper come as the Bush administration faces criticism over its plans to temporarily govern postwar Iraq, and amid speculation in the Middle East that Iran and Syria would be America's next targets.

"Nobody in the American administration (has) talked about invading Iran or Syria," Powell said. "It seems that there is a constant desire by everybody to accuse us of invasion operations. That didn't, and won't, take place."

Looks like ole Colin's a teensy weensy bit out of the loop, doesn't it?

It makes you wonder, with all of Junior's talk about global terrorism and September 11th and protecting the American people and Islamic fundamentalism, why we are completely ignoring the countries that are actually spawning those things, like Pakistan, and instead we're concentrating on the tough guy tin horn despots like Saddam and Assad? Sure, Syria bankrolls terrorists, but it bankrolls terrorists who blow up Israelis, not Americans. Not that that is a good thing, by any means, but it does make you wonder why the street protests in Islamabad (that number a quarter million or more people, where they're burning Junior in effigy and declaring holy war on the United States) aren't seen as a concern. But Syria is suddenly looming large on the radar screen.

Is this sudden interest in Syria only about a bunch of power mad neocon conquerors with delusions of grandeur and a neurotic attachment to the right wing party of Israel, or is there some additional reason why little Donnie Rumsfeld just "out-o-the-blue" practically declared war on them?

What ever could it be?

[Israeli] National Infrastructures Minister Joseph Paritzky has requested an assessment of the condition of the old oil pipeline from Mosul to Haifa, with an eye toward renewing the flow of oil in the event of friendly post-war regime in Iraq.

[...]

Hanan Bar-On, then the deputy director-general of the Foreign Ministry, confirmed Sunday that Israel was involved in talks during the mid-1980s on a plan for an Iraq-Jordanian pipeline to the Red Sea port of Aqaba. Among the participants in these talks was Donald Rumsfeld, then an adviser to U.S. president Ronald Reagan and currently secretary of defense. The American corporation Bechtel was slated to build the pipeline. According to the deal, which eventually fell through, Israel was to receive about $100 million a year via former Israeli businessman Bruce Rappaport in return for a commitment not to oppose the construction or operation of the new pipeline.

Isn't that something. What a coincidence. But, what does that have to do with Syria? Oooooh

As acknowledged by the Israeli minister, a prerequisite for the project is, therefore, a new regime in Baghdad with friendly ties with Israel. However, such a regime, if ever it comes to power, will still require Syria's consent to operationalize the pipeline. Given the overall political environment in the Middle East and Israel's continued occupation of Syria's Golan Heights, the existing Syrian regime will never grant its consent as long as the status quo prevails. As stated by the Iranian government, during the Iran-Iraq war (1980-88) when Iraq enjoyed cordial and close relations with Israel's mentor, the United States, Israel tried, but failed, to resume the oil flow through the pipeline. Syria, a friend of Iran and an enemy of Iraq, blocked the flow of Iraqi oil.

Hence, unless the pipeline were redirected through Jordan, another country bordering Israel and Iraq with normalized relations with Israel, the pipeline project will require a different regime in Syria. In other words, regime change in both Iraq and Syria is the prerequisite for the project. As Paritzky did not mention a redirecting option, it is safe to suggest that the Israelis are also optimistic about a regime change in Syria in the near future.

Mr. Bush smiled a moment at the latest example of Mr. Rumsfeld's brazenness, recalled the aide. Then he said one word — "Good" — and went back to work.





digby 4/05/2003 01:20:00 PM |

 
Rally Round The Conquest

In a testament to the intellectual consistency and personal integrity of my fellow Americans, the following article in today's LA Times shows that not only do a vast majority of the country now support the war, they also support taking huge casualties, (as long as it's somebody else, I assume) are content to stay in the middle east for years and are very open to the idea of "taking out" Syria and Iran next.

Needless to say, it will likely not be convenient to invade any of our many new enemies -- be it Syria, Iran, North Korea, France, Canada, Chile or Barbados until just a little bit closer to the election. The thrill of invading a much weaker country and kicking its ass to provide entertainment to bloodthirsty Americans makes for a helluva bounce. Better make sure we win, though. Murikans get testy when we don't annihilate our opponents.

One thing, though. It really is time to start talking about that draft. We are going to need a lot more troops if we are going to be "taking out" country after country. These reserves aren't going to be able to handle this alone forever. Since we are so dependent upon precision guided weapons and we can pretty much kill anyone we choose from miiles away, I would suggest that all those who support this war so fervently be the first to be called up. No matter what the age, Rummy's modern high tech military can find a use for them.

Support of U.S. Military Role in Mideast Grows

Americans' backing for Bush rises; many might endorse action against Iran or Syria.

WASHINGTON -- Buoyed by success on the battlefield, most Americans now express support for an expansive U.S. role in the Middle East, with a clear majority backing the war in Iraq and half endorsing military action against Iran if it continues to develop nuclear weapons, according to a new Los Angeles Times poll.

[...]

More than three-fourths of Americans — including two-thirds of liberals and 70% of Democrats — now say they support the decision to go to war. And more than four-fifths of these war supporters say they still will back the military action even if allied forces don't find evidence of weapons of mass destruction.

[...]

By 62% to 33%, those polled said the war is likely to make the world a safer place; 52% believe it will help stabilize the Middle East, while 21% believe it will seed more instability. Just under 20% think it's unlikely to have much effect either way.

[...]

Those optimistic about the war's long-term effect believe that removing Iraqi President Saddam Hussein could serve as both deterrent and inspiration. "Getting a foothold in creating a stable, pro-Western and hopefully democratic regime in Iraq, combined with what's going on in Afghanistan, can be a wellspring for good things to happen," Hart said.

But Americans are split almost exactly in half when asked whether the war will increase or diminish the threat of terrorism. Still, that's a significant improvement from the two-thirds who predicted more terror in a Times poll in December.

[...]

Americans are divided almost in half when asked whether the United States should take military action against Syria, which Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has accused of providing Iraq with military supplies. Syria has denied the accusation. But 42% said the United States should take action if Syria, in fact, provides aid to Iraq, while 46% said no.

More Americans take a hard line on Iran, which recently disclosed an advanced program to develop the enriched uranium that could be used in nuclear weapons.

Exactly half said the United States should take military action against Iran if it continues to move toward nuclear-weapon development; 36% disagreed. Perhaps surprisingly, women are slightly more supportive of such action than men.

[...]

In any case, most of those surveyed said they were willing to accept a lengthy commitment to oust Hussein. Among those backing the war, 60% said they would support it even if it took longer than a year, while 11% said they would back the war for up to a year. Just 17% of supporters said they would back the war for less than a year.

Few, though, expect it to run that long. About three-fifths expect the fighting to be over in six months. Fewer than one in six think it will take more than a year.

Those polled also indicated a willingness to accept relatively substantial U.S. casualties. Just 17% of war supporters said they would back it only if 500 or fewer U.S. troops are killed; 52% said they would continue to support the war even if the United States suffered more than 1,000 casualties.

[...]

Nearly eight in 10 Americans now accept the Bush administration's contention — disputed by some experts — that Hussein has "close ties" to Al Qaeda (even 70% of Democrats agree). And 60% of Americans say they believe Hussein bears at least some responsibility for the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks — a charge even the administration hasn't levied against him.

.

In fairness, the poll does say that Americans want the UN to handle reconstruction and that the war will not be won unless Saddam is killed or captured. But, lets face facts. If the Dauphin and his masters tell people that the UN shouldn't handle reconstruction and that capturing or killing Saddam was never part of the plan, the sheep will instantly be convinced that is what they thought all along.

There really is no excuse for this. No amount of "support the troops" sentiment can explain such a large number of Americans endorsing invading Syria and Iran based upon what they know at this moment. We are becoming a stupid and sick culture. Perhaps that finally explains why we are being led -- and so easily -- by someone as callow, puerile and mean as George W. Bush.




digby 4/05/2003 08:49:00 AM |

Friday, April 04, 2003

 
Kerry Fights Back

This is what we need to see. Give no quarter. Get right back in their faces. If the candidates don't do this now they will be hamstrung through the entire campaign.

Now, the rest of the Senate Democrats need to stand up and support an American citizen's right to run for president against the Cheerleader in Chief during wartime, and even {gasp} suggest that he should be turned out of office because he isn't doing a good job. That's bordering on treason these days, I realize. But making that claim is unprecedented. We have never before said that people could not criticize a sitting president during wartime, especially in the midst of a presidential campaign.

Jesus. Even Abraham Lincoln had to run for re-election during wartime. He faced numerous challengers even for the nomination and was second guessed in every paper by every politician in the country ---from both parties. FDR ran for re-election in the middle of WWII when Thomas Dewey called him a "tired old man." The Little Dauphin deserves no special treatment.

Kerry lashes out at Republican criticisms.

April 4, 2003 | WASHINGTON (AP) -- Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry lashed out at top congressional Republicans on Friday after they assailed him for saying the United States, like Iraq, needs a regime change.

"The Republicans have tried to make a practice of attacking anybody who speaks out strongly by questioning their patriotism," the Massachusetts senator said in a telephone interview with The Associated Press. "I refuse to have my patriotism or right to speak out questioned. I fought for and earned the right to express my views in this country."

Kerry, a decorated Vietnam War veteran, backed a congressional resolution last fall giving President Bush the authority to use force to oust Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, but he repeatedly has criticized the president for failing to give diplomacy more time.

In a speech Wednesday in Peterborough, N.H., Kerry said Bush so alienated allies prior to the U.S.-led war against Iraq that only a new president can rebuild damaged relationships with other countries.

"What we need now is not just a regime change in Saddam Hussein and Iraq, but we need a regime change in the United States," Kerry said.

Several leading Republicans said Kerry's comments were inappropriate with U.S. troops fighting in Iraq. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., said the statement amounted to "petty, partisan insults launched solely for personal political gain."

House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas, called Kerry's words "desperate and inappropriate." Said House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., "Once this war is over, there will be plenty of time for the next election."

Kerry dismissed the attacks, telling an Atlanta political gathering Thursday that patriotism is not mutually exclusive with questioning the war. One day later, he delivered an even sharper rebuke to the GOP complaints.

"If they want to pick a fight, they've picked a fight with the wrong guy," Kerry said in a telephone interview.

The lawmaker said this round of charges and countercharges is not the first time Republicans have made a "phony issue of patriotism." He cited last year's campaign against former Georgia Democratic Sen. Max Cleland, who lost both legs and an arm in the Vietnam War.

As part of a broader GOP campaign, Bush and other Republicans criticized Senate Democrats for holding up legislation to create a Department of Homeland Security over a labor provision, suggesting that the delay reflected weakness on national security. Republican Saxby Chambliss unseated the first-term Cleland in the November elections.

"I watched what they did to Max Cleland last year," Kerry said. "Shame on them for doing it then and shame on them for trying to do it now."

Kerry also mentioned recent GOP criticism of Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., who said Bush's diplomatic efforts had failed "miserably" because he didn't secure a U.N. resolution for the war.

Following a speech to the New York State United Teachers convention in Washington, Kerry said, "I'm not going to let the likes of Tom DeLay question my patriotism, which I fought for and bled for in order to have the right to speak out."

Neither Hastert, Frist nor DeLay served in the military. In response to Kerry, DeLay spokesman Jonathan Grella said, "There's a difference between loving your country and leading it. Demanding regime change in America isn't unpatriotic -- it's vile."

Kerry said Republicans have no right to criticize him when they are cutting funds to veterans hospitals.

Kerry's comments come on the eve of a trip to Iowa, where rival Howard Dean's strong anti-war stance has played well with the state's Democrats. Dean also has been critical of Bush and Kerry, suggesting that the senator waffled in his position on the Iraq war.

Dean also addressed the New York Teachers group Friday and said although he probably would not have used the words that Kerry did, "I have not criticized Senator Kerry for that, nor am I going to.

"It certainly would be unusual for me to line up with Tom DeLay, and I don't intend to start now," said the former Vermont governor.

Kerry's arrival on Sunday in Iowa also comes as another presidential primary rival, Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina, takes part in a town-hall meeting.

digby 4/04/2003 05:41:00 PM |

 
End Run

If the GOP congress, Colin Powell and Tony Blair cannot change the administration's mind on this, I think that Colin Powell may have to finally resign. I don't see how he can continue when it is obvious that Junior is completely in the hands of the neocon zealots who are intent upon pursuing their imperial fantasy. It was bad enough to insist upon this invasion on its own terms, but they now seem to be dead serious about rendering the UN permanently impotent, even when it comes to humanitarian action. It would seem that they are also intent upon completely gutting the state department's functions as well.

And, in typical Rumsfeldian backstabbing fashion, they did it while Powell was overseas trying to mend fences with the UN and the EU.

Tony Blair will rue the day he ever took up with these crazy bastards. They just cut him off at the knees, too.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States on Friday ruled out a leading role for the United Nations (news - web sites) in immediate post-war Iraq (news - web sites) and said Washington and its allies had earned top-status having given "life and blood" to the war effort.

Washington promised to include Iraqis in the decision-making process from the beginning, and said it hoped to get an interim Iraqi authority [can you say, Chalabi?]quickly up-and-running, possibly in parts of the country even before the government of President Saddam Hussein (news - web sites) is toppled in Baghdad.

"It would only be natural to expect that ... having given life and blood to liberate Iraq, the coalition would have the leading role. I don't think anybody is surprised by that," President Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, told reporters.

She also made clear that the Pentagon would oversee humanitarian and reconstruction efforts, while other agencies play supportive roles. That puts the Bush administration at odds with Congress, where this week both the Republican-controlled House of Representatives and Senate gave the State Department control of the purse-strings.

U.N. involvement in post-war Iraq is expected to be one of the issues to dominate next Tuesday's meeting between Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair in Northern Ireland

These people are now just blatently employing strongarm tactics all over the world:

Sounding like a third rate movie thug, a snarling Otto Reich threatened tiny Barbados of all places:

Reich responded to Caricom’s decision not to support the war and subsequent statements by regional leaders.

“It is not the kind of support that we expect from friends,” he said. “We listen very carefully to what our friends say and we’re very disappointed by some of the statements. We’re not violating international law, neither is Great Britain or any of the other countries and I would urge Caricom to study very carefully not only what it says, but the consequences of what it says.”

The US official, who is in the island to attend a conference on Competitiveness in the Caribbean sponsored by the Caribbean Latin American Action, noted that his country was at war and that Americans were being killed in the attempt to disarm Iraq and liberate it from president Saddam Hussein. With that in mind, he stated that the US would appreciate “a little support” from its friends, or at least not to be criticised in public.

He also made the link between support for the US-led war and access to that country for Caribbean goods.

Stating that the region must be more helpful to those who have to approach the US Congress on behalf of the Caribbean territories, he said: “What do I tell a member of Congress if I go asking for increased access for Caribbean products, for example, and he says, ‘well they didn’t support us in our time of need’?”

Godwin's Law be damned. It's looking more and more as if Iraq is our Czechoslovakia.





digby 4/04/2003 04:56:00 PM |

 
GUEST BLOG

Thumb, the Comment King, has some thoughts on why we are all feeling discombobulated by this administration. The psychos are making us psycho:

Are psychopaths running our government?

Throughout the 90's we employed anywhere from 6-15 people at any given time. Of all the destructive traits we had to contend with the sociopath was both the most destructive and the most difficult problem employee to identify. After several near ruinous encounters with this type of employee I developed a simple test; if someone made me psycho, they were a psychopath. On the small scale that is our company this has worked fine for years but now I find this same curious effect occurring with our present administration; they're making me psycho.

Greater luminaries than I have declared this group to be Psychotic Personalities (Kurt Vonnegut recently caught flack for suggesting as much) but I wanted to know if there was any means by which to make a more serious medical diagnosis than "because they make me crazy." There is. Giles Whittell, writing for the Times On Line, interviewed Dr. Robert Hare, who, along with his colleague Dr Paul Babiak, will publish a book called Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go To Work later this year. Hare defined psychopathy for modern scientists with an exhaustive questionnaire called the Psychopathy Checklist (PCL-R). Introduced in 1980 it has become an internationally recognized tool for identifying psychopaths. From the article:

. . . the PCL-R revealed that psychopaths are everywhere. Most are non-violent, but all leave a trail of havoc through their families and work environments, using and abusing colleagues and loved ones, endlessly manipulating others, constantly reinventing themselves. Hare puts the average North American incidence of psychopathy at 1 per cent of the population, but the damage they inflict on society is out of all proportion to their numbers, not least because they gravitate to high-profile professions that offer the promise of control over others, such as law, politics, business management ... and journalism. [emphasis mine]

[...]

Hare and Babiak will also produce a new diagnostic tool based on the PCL-R but designed to help businesses to keep their recruits and senior management psychopath-free.

Enter the B-Scan. It won't be available to everyone, and it won't be free. If you are B-Scanned, it won't be you answering the questions. It will be your colleagues, grading your personal style, interpersonal relations, organizational maturity and antisocial tendencies according to 16 buzz words, none of them uplifting. They include the following: insincere, arrogant, insensitive, remorseless, shallow, impatient, erratic, unreliable, unfocused, parasitic, dramatic, unethical and bullying.

Yikes. Who isn't most of these things, at least some of the time?

I meet Dr Hare in a London hotel and find him used to such anxieties. I know, I know, he says. People read this stuff and suddenly everyone around them is a psychopath. They pick up on three or four of the characteristics and say "yeah, he's one". But it's not like that. It's a medical syndrome. You've got to have the whole package.


Not having access to the specific B-Scan test or the ability to personally interview administration colleagues I'm going to use the next best thing, a recent article in USA Today describing Bush by those close to him that can be run through the filter of The serial bully: Identifying the psychopath or sociopath in our midst.

He rarely jokes with staffers these days and occasionally startles them with sarcastic putdowns.

- is frequently sarcastic, especially in contexts where sarcasm is inappropriate and unprofessional

''He's got that steely-eyed look . . .'' says a friend who has spent time with the president since the war began.

- often reported as having an evil stare, sometimes with eyes that appear black rather than colored

He's infuriated by reporters and retired generals who publicly question the tactics of the war plan. Similar complaints continue, and some people outside the administration are pressing current Bush advisers to urge him to retool his war plan. The president's aides say he's aware of those efforts but ''discounts'' them.

- displays a compulsive need to criticize whilst simultaneously refusing to value, praise and acknowledge others, their achievements, or their existence

His history degree from Yale. . .

- often fraudulently claims qualifications, experience, titles, entitlements or affiliations which are ambiguous, misleading, or bogus

. . . makes him mindful of the importance of the moment.

- has a short-term focus and often cannot think or plan ahead more than 24 hours

He's a critic who sees himself as the aggrieved victim of the news media and second-guessers.

- feigns victimhood when held accountable, usually by . . . claiming they're the one being bullied and harassed

- presents as a false victim when outwitted

Bush, who was drilled in corporate style while earning his MBA at Harvard, prefers his days to be structured.

- is fastidious, often has an unhealthy obsession with cleanliness or orderliness

Bush has imposed an almost military discipline on himself.

- finds ritual important and comforting, and frequently indulges in ritual and ritualistic activity

He understands that he is the one person in the country, in this case really the one person in the world, who has a responsibility to protect and defend freedom.

- is selfish and acts out of self-interest, self-aggrandizement and self-preservation at all times; everything can be traced back to the self

- is convinced of their superiority and has an overbearing belief in their qualities of leadership but cannot distinguish between leadership (maturity, decisiveness, assertiveness, co-operation, trust, integrity) and bullying (immaturity, impulsiveness, aggression, manipulation, distrust, deceitfulness)

- wraps himself or herself in a flag or tradition and usurps others' objectives, thereby nurturing compliance, reverence, deference, endorsement and obeisance; however, such veneration and allegiance is divisive, being a corruption for personal power which exhibits itself through the establishment of a clique, coterie, cabal, faction, or gang


Of course this is all simply anecdotal evidence that our Commander in Chief is certifiable, but there is one more distinguishing test that Dr. Hare uses to determine if someone is indeed a psychopath:

Babiak certainly counsels caution. Being psychopathic is not a sin, let alone a ground on its own for dismissal. But underpinning the PCL-R is hard science, hard to ignore. Before he published it, Hare performed two now-famous studies which suggest that psychopaths really are different from the rest of us. In the first, subjects were told to watch a timer counting down to zero, at which point they felt a harmless but painful electric shock. Non-psychopaths showed mounting anxiety and fear. Psychopaths didn't even sweat.

Could Bush's jocular demeanor, his "Feel good" as he prepared to declare war fit this description?

In the second, the two groups had their brain activity and response time measured when asked to react to groups of letters, some forming words, some not. Words such as "rape" and "cancer" triggered mental jolts in non-psychopaths. In psychopaths they triggered precisely nothing.

In the absence of such word association games lets instead look back to the morning of 9/11/01. The president is reading to a class when one of his aids approaches and whispers to him that the WTC towers have both just been struck with hijacked airliners. The towers are burning out of control and thousand are presumed dead in the worst terrorist act ever committed on American soil. With zero visible reaction, from a man who is serially unable to hide his emotions (think smirk), the president immediately goes back to and spends the next half hour reading to the class.

People read this stuff and suddenly everyone around them is a psychopath. They pick up on three or four of the characteristics and say "yeah, he's one." But it's not like that. It's a medical syndrome. You've got to have the whole package."

[...]

Being a psychopath is not something that ordinary people aspire to, but neither does it have to involve face-eating cannibalism (Hannibal Lecter probably wasn't a psychopath at all). The central qualification is to show no conscience; to fail to empathize.

[...]

They reveled in risk, took no account of its potential cost to others or themselves, and rose to power during a time of chaos and upheaval.

Are we there yet?



digby 4/04/2003 12:17:00 PM |

 
Rolling Democracy and Other Illusions

Junior's government is hurtling out of control and I don't know who is going to stop them. This is truly unbelievable:

Rumsfeld sent two memos to Bush calling for the United States to "support those Iraqis who share the president's objectives for a free Iraq" and arguing that Iraqi and Kurdish expatriates, with some experience of democracy, are better equipped to take over the country than Iraqis living under Hussein.

[...]

Sources confirmed that the memos probably would be discussed in the next day or two by Bush, Vice President Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell and CIA Director George J. Tenet. But they cautioned that the ideas expressed by Rumsfeld were more in the form of suggestions than fixed plans. The sources said Rumsfeld had not specified how authority would be divided between the exile leaders and the U.S. postwar administration.

A Pentagon spokesman declined to comment on the memos, saying, "We have nothing for you on that."

Even if there were agreement on the advisability of a U.S.-installed interim Iraqi authority, its composition probably would be disputed. The Pentagon's civilian leadership and other prominent hawks close to the administration have long supported Ahmed Chalabi, the leader of the Iraqi National Congress.

Chalabi is particularly close to former CIA director R. James Woolsey, whom Rumsfeld has proposed for a prominent position in postwar Iraq, and Richard Perle, a key Pentagon adviser. He is also backed by a group of influential Republican senators, including Sam Brownback of Kansas, Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, Jon Kyl and John McCain of Arizona and Norm Coleman of Minnesota, who this week wrote a letter to Bush asking him to clear "roadblocks within the State Department" for increased funding of Chalabi's group.

In public comments last month, Perle suggested that installing Chalabi in power in Baghdad would alleviate any Muslim fears of U.S. imperialist aims. It would also improve the chances for resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Perle said, because "Chalabi and his people have confirmed that they want a real peace process, and that they would recognize the state of Israel."

Can anyone think of a move more likely to create a total middle east meltdown than to instll a puppet government and then recognize Israel right off the bat? And, call me crazy, but I don't remember the recognition of Israel as being one of the 412 ever changing reasons set forth for going after Saddam these last few months. For those of you who do not understand how important this is to certain neocon nutballs, please spare me the accusations of being anti-semitic. It is simply a fact that many of the neocon claque have concentrated a huge amount of their time and energy on Israeli politics and are very closely aligned with the Likud party. Their hard-on to invade Iraq, which goes back many years, is intrinsically tied to that issue. And, just as they are putting Americans into more danger at home, their puerile, simple minded world view is actually going to make things much, much worse in the middle east, and that includes Israel. If I were Israeli, I would want these guys as far away from me as possible. It would only make my country even less secure than it already is.

And, I must ask again, why wasn't a post war plan finalized and approved before we invaded, particularly since they assumed we were going to win within the first 2 or 3 days? It's not like Saddam had actually launched one of his non-existent nuclear armed drone planes. We actually did have the time to present Junior with a coloring book version of various plans and let him play pin the tail on the donkey. It's amazing that we are surrounding Baghdad and nobody knows exactly what constitutes victory or what we plan to do once we declare it.

It's looking as if, in true EnronBush style, we'll just keep scrambling and scrambling, covering up one mistake after another, digging deeper and deeper until the whole damned thing just falls apart.

Meanwhile, over on Daily Kos, there are a number of exceptional posts today by his pinch hitters Billmon and Steve Gilliard. In particular, I was struck by Steve's post asking "who is the president?" I have also been taken aback by the fact that the actual illegitimate president is wearing cute little jackets and cheerleading before adoring military crowds while the functional illegitimate president, the secretary of defense, is threatening the entire middle east and setting up an amateurish and dazzlingly foolish post war government in Iraq without any real authority to do so. WTF?

We all know that Junior is incapable of holding a real press conference and answering questions with
anything other than repetitive, programmed bumper sticker phrases, but he should be worried that Rummy is running out of control and making policy on the fly. Particularly since that policy is absurd and dangerous. As Gilliard points out:

The PNAC Cabal are the most naive people to run US foriegn policy since Woodrow Wilson sailed to Paris in 1919. The expectation that the INC exiles can run anything in Iraq is as amusing as the Cuban-American Foundation being allowed to run a post-Castro Cuba. I always figured the Angolan vets would meet them at the dock and send them packing. So that was never serious.

This is an excellent observation. These guys live in a tight little echo chamber of reinforcing delusions, enhanced by their own sense of victimhood. The movement conservatives operate on the same principles as "exiles" which explains their frantic determination to check off every item on their agenda at record speed. They feel as if they were exiled by a virtual coup for 8 years when Clinton illegitimately seized power and they will never let that happen again. It's why they hated Clinton with the same fervor that the right wing Cubans hate Castro and it's why the "exiled" Iraqis hold such a place in the hearts of the neocon armchair warriors. They all believed they were unfairly denied their rightful positions as leaders.

What is so frightening about our new spokesman-in-chief is that his threats don't scare anyone. The Iranians and Syrians don't care, the Turks laugh at him, yet he keeps blustering. Rumsfeld is the Chainsaw Al Dunlop of international affairs. Dunlop was a CEO who had the reputation of firing people and cutting costs until he ruined Sunbeam. [He also turned out to be a crook, surprise. ed]

Rumsfeld and his deputies may think they're running the world, but the surprise they're going to get is due directly to their naivety about the Middle East. Tilting towards Israel? Are they kidding? Yes, the Shia clerics will agree to that. Just before issuing the fatwa to kill every American and their Iraqi quisling allies. Think car bombs are a problem now? Just wait...........

And, oh please, somebody explain to me how they can even dream of getting away with this shit, as reported in the Washington Post:

"The objective is not necessarily to take buildings or occupy areas," said a senior military officer involved in endgame planning. "It's the people. It's getting them to accept the fact that the regime is gone. That's the essence of the thing. It's not going to be a geographic piece."

The timing of declaring victory is important in military and psychological terms, and would be up to the president after a recommendation from military advisers. The administration is set on intimidating Iraqi leaders and seizing power, yet it would risk its credibility by declaring itself in charge while significant resistance remains.

Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said yesterday that Baghdad, the Iraqi capital, would not need to be under U.S. control for the administration to establish an interim Iraqi administration. When Baghdad is isolated from the rest of the country, he said, the city is "almost irrelevant."

But, but...what about holding Saddam and his regime accountable with war crimes trials? Not to mention shutting down all those al Qaeda cells hiding in Baghdad? And, how can we say we have "liberated" the fucking country if we haven't "liberated" the 5 million people in the biggest city? And, most importantly, what about the vast cache of WMD he's keeping in his underwear drawer? Don't we need to "control" the whole country to be sure they are all accounted for? Wasn't that the whole goddamned point?

It really is a bloody pageant. If we say we've won, then we have won. If fighting goes on for the next 10 years and we are forced to have tens of thousands of soldiers on the ground getting blown to bits by suicide bombers, we will still be the "victors" because we say we are the victors. But, hey, it worked in Florida, didn't it? Call yourself a victor and everyone, even the U.S. Supreme Court, will stand for your right not to be "irreparably harmed" by any assertion that you aren't. Good strategy.

If this is a recipe for democracy then I'm afraid we'd all better get ready here at home for a suspension of elections. After all, we have now reached the point where the Republicans are explicitly telling the Democrats to refrain from even putting up a candidate while we are at "war" (which James Woolsey says he doesn't expect to last quite as long as the cold war, thank goodness.) Via Atrios Marc Racicot said yesterday, in response to a call for "regime change at home" by John Kerry:

"Senator Kerry crossed a grave line when he dared to suggest the replacement of America's commander-in- chief at a time when America is at war..."

And finally, this piece in the NY Times struck me as being right on the money. The starry eyed neocons seem to be under the illusion that all Arabs and Persians are of the same frame of mind as the American founding fathers in 1776; that our notions of liberty and democracy are as clear and compelling to the average Iraqi worker as they are to the guest list at the AEI Christmas party. This is just stupid.

To Imagine Iraq After Saddam Hussein, You Must Think Like an Iraqi

We are running seriously off the track and somebody besides a bunch of blogging nobodies has got to start speaking up. Kerry made a good start and if he refuses to back down may give some of the others the will to speak up as well. If they don't, we're in trouble.



digby 4/04/2003 11:25:00 AM |

Thursday, April 03, 2003

 
Blowhard Mussolini

On CNN just now Tom DeLay told Judy Woodruff that Wesley Clark is a "blowdried Napoleon." Look for that phrase to be repeated.

Delay said that Clark was running for president and using his job at CNN to undermine the war for political purposes. He claimed that he (Delay) gets briefed every day and knows a lot more about battle planning than any ex-General.

He would have been one too if all the negroes and wetbacks hadn't ruined his chances by taking all the good slots in Nam. So, he spent the time huffing D-Con and puking in the hot tub, pre-requisites for assuming power in Dubya era Republican politics.



digby 4/03/2003 02:13:00 PM |

 
More Perles of Wisdom

Speaking of Perle, why do they send him all over the world to alienate every single one of our allies in the most rude and condescending way possible? It must be part of their cunning plan or they would tell him to shut his pie hole and stop doing things like this:

OTTAWA, April 3 (Reuters) - An influential adviser to the U.S. administration used an interview published on Thursday to write off Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien as "a lame duck" who was giving support to Saddam Hussein, and said Ottawa would pay a price for not sending troops to Iraq.

The comments by Richard Perle were the strongest attack yet by Washington on Chretien and underline how seriously relations between the world's two largest trading partners have deteriorated in recent months.
Officials say the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush is irate over Canada's refusal to send troops to Iraq and a series of anti-American comments by members of Chretien's ruling Liberal Party.
Perle, a prominent neoconservative who sits on the Pentagon's influential Defense Policy Board, told the right-wing National Post newspaper that Washington felt Chretien -- who plans to step down in February 2004 -- was being irresponsible.

"The Prime Minister is a lame duck. So that may help explain the failure to appreciate the disappointment that would be caused not only by the Canadian government policy on Iraq, but by the cacophony of criticism -- much of it ill-informed and much of it simply name-calling," he said.

"There is simply no other way to describe the positions of some countries -- not many, but some countries -- which is to lend far more support to Saddam Hussein's regime than they may have intended by the positions they have taken."

According to the Post, Perle said the White House was looking forward to dealing with Chretien's replacement. One member of Chretien's cabinet said Bush had failed as a statesman while one Liberal legislator said she now hated the "damned Americans" and called them "bastards".

[...]

Seriously, this continuing modus operandi of publicly proclaiming to the world that our policy is "my way or the highway" and that we will punish any country that dares to defy us is starting to get completely out of hand. I never thought William Kristol was completely blind and stupid, but apparently he is. If he weren't he'd put a stop to Perle. He's the only one who can.





digby 4/03/2003 01:34:00 PM |

 
Quisling Chalabi

I may have been too hasty in believing that the government had no plan. Wolfie of Arabia and his cohorts most certainly did have a plan, one that they had on the drawing board for many years. Barbara Bodine, by the way, was the choice of the State Department and the Pentagon hawks don’t want her near their little fiefdom. (Of course, she is a piece of work in her own right…) It is still unclear whether she will be part of the occupation. The problem, as usual, is that the government has more than one plan and it remains for President Junior to make a decision as to which faction he’s going to favor today. I hear he's feeling testy so who knows which way the wind is going to blow.

If today’s reports are to be believed, it is quite interesting that while the GOP congress has decided to give the State Department the purse strings, the Pentagon is still calling the shots on the post war planning. This promises to be another battle royale for the soul ‘o Dubya, and the ongoing and endless quest for control of American foreign policy. If the congress takes a stand as well, this could get very interesting.

Joe Conason has more to say about the post-war occupation cock-up and points to this editorial from the Washington Post that names names and points fingers. In particular, he discusses the neocon pet Ahmed Chalabi, the putative head of the Iraqi National Congress

I had been under the impression that Chalabi had been effectively sidelined some months back when the state department declined to give him any more “covert” money that he could not account for. But, I should have known better. He’s a member of the in-crowd and I mean the super-in-crowd --- the Wohlstetter/Wolfowitz/Perle nexus of true believers. They will fight for him:

This article from The American Prospect gives the lowdown on Chalabi:

In Washington, Team Chalabi is led by Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle, the neoconservative strategist who heads the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board. Chalabi's partisans run the gamut from far right to extremely far right, with key supporters in most of the Pentagon's Middle-East policy offices -- such as Peter Rodman, Douglas Feith, David Wurmser and Michael Rubin. Also included are key staffers in Vice President Dick Cheney's office, not to mention Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and former CIA Director Jim Woolsey.

And here’s more evidence of the wooly headed, think tank insularity of the neocon claque:

What makes Chalabi so attractive to the Washington war party? Most importantly, he's a co-thinker: a mathematician trained at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Chicago and a banker (who years ago hit it off with Albert Wohlstetter, the theorist who was a godfather of the neoconservative movement), a fellow mathematician and a University of Chicago strategist. In 1985, Wohlstetter (who died in 1997) introduced Chalabi to Perle, then the undersecretary of defense for international-security policy under President Reagan and one of Wohlstetter's leading acolytes. The two have been close ever since. In early October, Perle and Chalabi shared a podium at an American Enterprise Institute conference called "The Day After: Planning for a Post-Saddam Iraq," which was held, appropriately enough, in AEI's 12th-floor Wohlstetter Conference Center. "The Iraqi National Congress has been the philosophical voice of free Iraq for a dozen years," Perle told me.

The Plan:

Almost no one, not even the INC itself, thinks that Chalabi has any cachet inside Iraq. Entifadh Qanbar, the earnest, young ex-Iraqi officer who heads the INC's office in Washington, says that Chalabi represents Iraq's "silent majority." Asked whether people in Baghdad have even heard of Chalabi, Qanbar says: "They may not know the man. But he represents their views."

Others scoff at even that notion. "It's a formula for setting up a puppet regime," says David Mack, vice president of the Middle East Institute, a former U.S. ambassador to the United Arab Emirates and ex-deputy assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs who's dealt extensively with Iraqi opposition politicians and military officers. "And we will have responsibility for propping them up for a long, long time to come, possibly with the blood of American soldiers."

But indefinitely propping up an INC-style quisling regime might be exactly what the United States wants, as it would mean that U.S. troops would be occupying Iraq's oil fields for years to come.

Now, at least according to the NY Times article discussed below, it is unlikely that they will set up Chalabi as the head of government, at least right away. But, all of those newly minted neocon idealists who truly believe in their shiny little hearts of gold that America will bring peace and democracy and love for all the little children to the middle east with Operation AEI Wetdream need to take a closer look at the history of the people who have been planning this war for decades.

I do believe that some of this neocon madness is starting to seep into the mainstream. The W. Post has been single mindedly pro-invasion and yet they are starting to sound very skeptical of the occupation planning (something you’d think journalists would have found the time to investigate before now fergawdsake.) Perlegate drew some unflattering attention to one of the premiere architects of the Neocon Pentagon faction of the administration. Their loudmouthed assurances of Iraqi defections (predicated upon “intelligence” by none other than Ahmed Chalabi) have seriously damaged their credibility.

If Democrats operated like Republicans, every single Dem would be pounding the neocons at this moment. Salon would do a story a day. Bill Press would enlist Pat Buchanan in a rousing denunciation on each show. The backbench firebrands in the congress would hold press conferences. Oppo researchers would distribute literature about the wacky neocons to every journalist on the beat.

They would shrug off “anti-american” criticism saying that they are not concerned about the war effort itself. No matter how badly Rumsfeld planned it, we have complete faith in our most respected and competent military. What we are worried about is the aftermath which is being poorly planned by a cabal of radical ideologues who have duped the poor over-his-head President into supporting their crazy plans. They would not care if they were thought of as tin-foil hat wierdos because all that matters is getting the word repeated and talked about. They would build the whispers so that when the war (not likely to really “end” for some time) moves into the occupation phase, this information is already churning in the media sludge.

But, all we’ve got is this lousy Casio. A story like this will fade away in the white noise of flagwaving, yellow-ribbons and Jessica "Old Shoe" Lynch.




digby 4/03/2003 01:21:00 PM |

 
Wolfowitz of Arabia

It is simply inexplicable that the U.S. Government doesn't already have a plan in place for the Iraqi occupation. Why is this being done on the fly? Didn't anybody in the administration have the job of putting a scheme together before we launched the invasion? (And, isn't Wolfowitz stretched just a little bit thin?)

I am hard pressed to name even one thing this administration has done without screwing it up. Gawd help us. If the occupation goes as badly as the planning for it, I pity eveyone involved. This is an embarrassment.

KUWAIT, April 2 — Along a promenade of beachside villas, several hundred American government officials — from well-worn former generals to fresh young aid workers — are working at their laptops, inventing flow charts and examining maps of Iraq in what has become Potomac on the Persian Gulf.

This is the nucleus of the Bush administration's new Iraqi government. One of the faraway masters, in the minds of many here, is someone known fondly, or not so fondly — depending on one's political orientation — as Wolfowitz of Arabia.

The reference, of course, is to Paul D. Wolfowitz, the undersecretary of defense, who has dispatched some of his protégés here to prepare key Baghdad ministries for American management.

Mr. Wolfowitz is also passing judgment on others assigned here, making the transitory Potomac here as divisive and political as the permanent one at home, some participants say.

[...]

The overall boss of this Iraqi government-in-waiting, an operation that has been endowed with the Washington-speak title "Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance," is retired Army Lt. Gen. Jay Garner...
Arrayed below General Garner is a group of former army officers, former and present American ambassadors, aid bureaucrats who give themselves away by their many-pocketed khaki jackets, a smattering of State Department officials, several British officials and a cluster known as the "true believers."

[...]

Fairly predictably, State Department officials say, the Pentagon deemed the most senior State Department appointees as unsuitable for the enterprise, even though one of them, Timothy Carney, a former ambassador to Sudan, was invited to come here by Mr. Wolfowitz.

[...]

The politics of the Potomac aside, some of the officials acknowledge they have been handed complex jobs, the real complexity of which will not be known until they know how the war ends.

If there is a surrender by the Iraqi forces and Saddam Hussein is toppled, their jobs will be easier, they say. There could be a messier ending: perhaps some kind of festering war, with outbursts of urban fighting, that would make the Americans' jobs much more precarious.

Another complexity is the role of the Iraqi exile groups that the Bush administration has been courting.

The State Department and the Pentagon hold profound differences on this question, and advocates in the administration say, a definition of the role of the exiles still awaits a decision by President Bush and his senior foreign policy advisers.

Ahmad Chalabi, the head of the Iraqi National Congress, has made it clear that he would not be satisfied with just an advisory position. The State Department has made clear it would prefer a diminished role for Mr. Chalabi. In recent days Mr. Chalabi has said through spokesmen that he wants the formation of a provisional government in which he would be a leading figure. In this he has backing in the Pentagon.

"The decision on the new political class in Iraq is very hot. It has yet to be made in Washington," said one member of the Garner team here.

[...]

Many of the officials here rushed to Kuwait City in the belief they would be sent almost immediately to Baghdad. Now that the war has gone longer than they were led to expect, there is a lot of cooling of heels, and time for reading. Few of these people are Iraqi experts. But some have come armed with books and articles on the history of Iraq. The chapters on the mistakes of British rule are well underlined.

Well, gosh. What would be happening if we had already won the war under the rosy scenario? It sounds like they have absolutely no idea what they are going to do, yet.

There is no excuse for not planning this adequately before this war. They had months to work out plans for every contingency and have a team in place ready to go. Instead, they are infighting between State and Defense on this, as with everything else in Bush foreign policy.

When does this become the big story? The Pentagon and the State Department have been at each other's throats since the beginning of Bush's term. All the ups and downs of the past year with diplomacy and the UN and the alienation of our allies and the erratic and inconsistent lead-up to this war have been the result of the two factions of the Bush foreign policy team fighting for dominance.

Our vaunted Commander in Chief obviously cannot manage his way out of a paper bag. He has no control over his people and is drawn back and forth depending on who he talks to on a given day. His administration is incoherent because he is incoherent.

This occupation is going to be a trainwreck.




digby 4/03/2003 09:26:00 AM |

Wednesday, April 02, 2003

 
Bye, Bye, Bodine

I haven't seen any play of this article from today's NY Times. I think Rummy's in trouble. The GOP congress refused to let him have a blank check on how the 75billion will be spent. And, now they've taken away the reconstruction project.

It's a sad day when you have to depend on the Republican congress to hold back the megalomaniacal neocons, but it's all we've got.

Three weeks before the war in Iraq began, Bush administration officials based their plans for reconstructing the country on what they called a "major assumption" — that military operations would end in 30 days, according to briefing documents circulated in the White House.

But now, some senior administraton officials involved in making plans for aiding the Iraqi people, rebuilding the country and creating a new government say that that assumption appears overly optimistic. They say that the American military will likely need to retain tight control over the country for longer than they anticipated.

[...]

Even as the plans are debated and rewritten, however, bureaucratic battles are breaking out over who will control the new government and the aid effort.

State Department officials, speaking on condition that they not be named, complain that the Pentagon is seeking greater control over the roster of American officials who will be appointed as liaisons to oversee the operation of major Iraqi ministries.

Several former ambassadors with long experience in the Mideast, including Barbara Bodine, the former ambassador to Yemen; Robin Raphel, the vice president of National Defense University; and Kenton Keith, a former ambassador to Qatar, were in line for key appointments under Jay Garner, a former general who will be directing the reconstruction effort. But their names have been pulled back.

State Department officials say they suspect that some of the more ideological Pentagon officials, including Douglas J. Feith, the undersecretary for policy, are seeking to fill the slots with like-minded former officials who have strong views about what a new Iraq should look like. Some at the Pentagon have pressed for those who have led the charge for the overthrow of Mr. Hussein, including R. James Woolsey, a former director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

A senior defense official said tonight that the issue was one of timing, not ideology. "The fact of the matter is that the State Department put up their list of qualified candidates before we got together a list of our own," said the official. "We simply asked that we have some time to broaden the pool of candidates. It is in flux. Everyone's talents will be used."

On Capitol Hill, however, even the Republican-controlled appropriations committees of both the House and Senate voted today to take control of reconstruction out of the hands of the Pentagon, and give it to Secretary of State Colin L. Powell.

The committees voted to give the State Department and other agencies authority over the $2.5 billion in post-conflict aid that the Bush administration sought for the Pentagon under an emergency appropriation.

"The secretary of state is the appropriate manager of foreign assistance," said Representative James Kolbe, an Arizona Republican. "Bottom line: reconstruction is a civilian role."

digby 4/02/2003 06:22:00 PM |

 
Lesson Plan

David Neiwert shares this lovely e-mail making the rounds in Neanderthal circles:

With all of this talk of impending war, many of us will encounter "Peace Activists" who will try and convince us that we must refrain from retaliating against the ones who terrorized us all on September 11, 2001, and those who support terror. These activists may be alone or in a gathering... most of us don't know how to react to them. When you come upon one of these people, or one of their rallies, here are the proper rules of etiquette:

1. Listen politely while this person explains their views. Strike up a conversation if necessary and look very interested in their ideas. They will tell you how revenge is immoral, and that by attacking the people who did this to us, we will only bring on more violence. They will probably use many arguments, ranging from political to religious to humanitarian.

2. In the middle of their remarks, without any warning, punch them in the nose.

3. When the person gets up off of the ground, they will be very angry and they may try to hit you, so be careful.

4. Very quickly and calmly remind the person that violence only brings about more violence and remind them of their stand on this matter. Tell them if they are really committed to a nonviolent approach to undeserved attacks, they will turn the other cheek and negotiate a solution. Tell them they must lead by example if they really believe what they are saying.

5. Most of them will think for a moment and then agree that you are correct.

6. As soon as they do that, hit them again. Only this time hit them much harder. Square in the nose.

7. Repeat steps 2-5 until the desired results are obtained and the idiot realizes how stupid of an argument he/she is making.

8. There is no difference in an individual attacking an unsuspecting victim or a group of terrorists attacking a nation of people. It is unacceptable and must be dealt with. Perhaps at a high cost.

We owe our military a huge debt for what they are about to do for us and our children. We must support them and our leaders at times like these. We have no choice. We either strike back, VERY HARD, or we will keep getting hit in the nose. Lesson over, class dismissed!

Another example of why homeschooling by idiots is a very bad idea. Let’s make this lesson a little bit more relevant to actual events, shall we?

With all of this talk of impending war, many of us will encounter "Pro-War" patriots who will try and convince us that we can keep America safe by exercising military force against anyone who we think might threaten us in the future. When you come upon one of these people, or one of their rallies, here are the proper rules of etiquette:

1. Listen politely while this fellow explains his views. Strike up a conversation if necessary and look very interested in his ideas. He will say that we will invade any country that even thinks of threatening us. He’ll shake his fist and get in your face. He’ll loudly proclaim that everyone in the crowd agrees with him. When a couple of his friends speak up and say that they really don’t agree, he’ll tell them to piss off and that he never liked them anyway. He will then smugly tell you that this is why working with allies weakens our country and leaves America unable to protect its citizens. He says the US can do anything it damn well pleases.

2. In the middle of his remarks, without any warning, punch him in the nose.

3. When the guy gets up off of the ground, he will be very angry and he will shove you to the ground. But then, for some reason, he’ll run into the crowd and coldcock that creepy guy from your old neighborhood who he beat up at the last rally and left with two broken legs.

4. Because he has been so rude, and his actions are so inexplicable, none of his friends will help him (except his brother-in-law, who works for him.) He’ll shout to his victim’s family (who the victim treats like shit) that he’ll give them money if they’ll help him but blood runs thicker than water. (And they can’t help noticing that he seems awfully interested in their valuable heirloom jewelry.)

5. Meanwhile, you sneak around the corner and lie low while he beats the weakened opponent into the ground. The boys from the old neighborhood get more and more angry that this guy is grabbing at the jewelry and roaring that he's going to take down everybody they know unless they do what he wants. Gather them around you and tell them to go blow up his car, destroy his place of business and burn down his house.

6. When he sees his car explode and turns around looking alarmed and confused, sidle up from behind and hit him again, only harder.

7. Repeat steps 2-6 until the desired results are obtained and the idiot realizes that if you are going to fight back, it’s smart to fight the real enemy instead of invading a country that had nothing to do with attacking you. Keep doing it until he understands that it is stupid and counterproductive to rally everyone in the neighborhood to hate him with the same fervor as his attacker just so he can prove how tough he is.

8. There is no difference between an individual using the excuse of an unwarranted attack to attack someone who had nothing to do with it and a country using the excuse of a terrorist attack to invade a country that had nothing to do with it. It is unacceptable and results in a loss of moral authority, credibility and necessary allies in the fight against the real enemy.


We owe our military respect and must hope for as little bloodshed as possible in the current circumstances. But we must do everything in our power to vote out this administration so that these brave Americans are not asked to lay their lives on the line for a bunch of ivory tower think tank intellectuals who have always been much too willing to sacrifice others to fulfill their own dreams of imperial greatness. We either fight back VERY HARD and put these people out of power, or we will keep getting hit in the nose. Lesson over. Class dismissed!







digby 4/02/2003 03:38:00 PM |

Tuesday, April 01, 2003

 
NEWS RELEASE – April 1, 2003

Rengery Publishing wishes to announce publication on May 1, 2003, of the title:
“Brothers In Arms”
A novel of neocon love
by Lynn Cheney


In her first novel,”Sisters” Lynn Cheney gave us the sensual tale of Sophie Dymond, a beautiful, strong-willed widow who leaves New York to investigate her sister's death in Wyoming, and finds herself in a world where wives were led to despise the marriage act and prostitutes pandered to husbands' hungers . . . where the relationship between women and men became a kind of guerrilla warfare in which women were forced to band together for the strength they needed and at times for the love they wanted.

Now comes a story that blows the lid off the elite world of neocon think tanks and supply side salons. “Brothers In Arms” is a mid-life coming of age story about two young neocon hawks, Dick and Dick, who avoid the Vietnam war and spend the rest of their lives trying to prove their manhood. Married to high achieving women, superior in every way to their husbands, the two friends remain close, depending upon each other to reinforce their views of the world and reassure each other of their masculine prowess by saying “fuck” and driving drunk. In midlife, the boys attain the highest reaches of power and find that all the years of striving and conniving have left them feeling empty and unfulfilled. Whether it’s launching WWIII or bankrupting the federal government they can attain no satisfaction and no peace.

Until one night, desolate and lonely, they finally reach for one another in desperation and need to discover the love that dare not speak its name…

Full details are to be found at this Amazon listing
digby 4/01/2003 10:41:00 AM |

Monday, March 31, 2003

 
Wing-nuts Launch "Decapitation" Campaign Against Clark

When Coulter and Limbaugh both launch character assassinations on the same day, you know the word has gone forth. The Republicans are worried about General Wesley Clark. Rush says:

Wesley Clark Looks Really Bad

March 28, 2003

One of the Democratic Party's supposed rising stars has been former NATO General Wesley Clark. After a recent appearance on Meet the Press, many Democrats salivated over Clark as "our Colin Powell." CNN hired General Clark to use the occasion of the war as a platform for his presumed 2004 presidential bid. That was his strategy - and according to the London Spectator, it's backfired.

"So much for the Democrats' hope that retired general Wesley Clark was going to be their Colin Powell. 'He's more Benedict Arnold than anything else if you believe the mail we've been getting here,' says the Democratic National Committee staffer, who only a month ago was touting Wesley Clark as his party's answer to the military star power lined up with the Republicans." They say Clark has pretty much peed away his chances on TV by bemoaning the Pentagon and General Tommy Franks for their strategy in the opening days of Operation Iraqi Freedom.

"While several other senior retired military men have made critical comments about the ongoing fighting, such as Barry McCaffrey - another former Clinton era official - Clark has by far been the most vocal critic of this administration. 'It just looks really bad that he's knocking the troops and the way we're executing this war,' said the staffer at the Democratic National Committee. 'He's taking hits everywhere - on TV and the newspapers, talk radio. People are furious at Wesley Clark. We can't fund-raise off performances like this!'"

I have to laugh at that last part! "The only presidential candidate that would probably want to be seen with him right now is Howard Dean," said this DNC informant. Prior to crashing and burning at CNN, the DNC had pegged the chief of the Kosovo campaign "for political stardom." He even visited New Hampshire in his pre-presidential bid. Now the Democrats want him gone, because he's so negative about the war effort it's turning off the American people. This is great, folks. The Democrats thought Wesley Clark would be their Colin Powell, but he turned out to be their second George B. McClellan.

Sure. Lots of Democratic National Committee staffers talk to rabid right-wing newspapers and give them quotes like "We can't fund raise off performances like this!" They wouldn't make something like this up would they? And, how about this patented "put it in the british papers, circulate it to the Scaife funded press and the AM radio terrorists until it makes it into the mainstream press" gambit. The Wurlitzer remembers its favorite tunes.

Kevin Drum wonders why all the hoopla about Clark since we don't know what his positions are. He's a believer in just war theory, he's pro-choice, he's for affirmative action (he signed a friend of the court brief in the Michigan case). Now, that doesn't give us any idea about his positions on trade or health care or any of the thousand issues we all care about, but it certainly gives me a good idea of where he stands on the political spectrum.

Unless a Democrat is so outside the mainstream that I think he's worse than Bush, and I can't actually think of one who would be, I will vote for the Democrat who has, in my opinion, the best chance of ousting the current administration. I suspect that whoever this is will probably not be channeling my every thought and will likely disagree with me on any number of issues. This is a big country and a big party. Within that party are a number of coalitions that span the center-left continuum. We'd better start negotiating amongst ourselves in a serious strategic way to get a Democrat elected to the presidency. I gave my reasons for thinking Clark can beat Bush in the post below.

It would be great if we could take back the congress, as well, and it is not beyond our grasp in any way. But, a true Democratic governing coalition is going to be much harder because of the red-state conservative Democrats who must function as de-facto Republicans on issues of taxes and national security. These Democrats will be turned into Republicans if we push them too hard which is not going to help our cause.

It is far better to focus on usurping Bush and capturing one branch of government in its entirety. We can take a long term view on this and try to make our consituency grow, but I think our current situation is sufficiently dire that we need to concentrate everything we have on turning back the radical Republican agenda immediately. At this point there are absolutely no checks and balances and it is rapidly hurtling out of control

So, I pick a Democrat who is a 4 Star General because I think he has the best chance to beat Bush if this perpetual war plays out the way the Republicans plan it. If we disagree on matters of funding for Head Start or Gays in the Military, I'm going to live with that.

I know, I know. I'm tired of making those sorts of compromises, too. But, the world is what it is and there's no use in pretending that this issue of national security is going to fade away in a flood of concern about prescription drug coverage. The Republicans and media who are benefitting from it will not let that happen. So, we'd better face up to reality and try to form a coherent, common sense alternative to the radical path the Republicans are leading us down.

I'll be writing more about this today. I have been working on a long overdue post on a very interesting survey of the peace marchers in NYC. There are some real surprises and some interesting things to work with if we can get the centrists and the liberals to be pragmatic and form a two pronged strategy.



digby 3/31/2003 01:10:00 PM |

 
Iraqis to Gitmo

I thought this might happen. They are thinking of shipping Iraqi paramilitaries to Guantanamo as unlawful combatants.

Suspects are being segregated from enemy prisoners of war, in part because they may have been tormentors of regular army soldiers now being held. The detainees will be treated like POWs, but without official status, until a hearing is held under Article 5 of the Geneva Conventions, officers said.

Such hearings, to be held in Iraq, will determine whether the detainees are released, held as POWs or declared illegal combatants. If they are labeled POWs, they will be held until the end of the war and then released along with other prisoners.

Any who are determined to have used civilians as human shields or otherwise violated the international covenants of war will be declared illegal combatants and sent to Guantanamo Bay or other holding facilities, to be detained with al Qaeda and Taliban fighters captured in Afghanistan, military officers said. "That guy's going to get the full treatment," said the senior officer.

Military lawyers said they were trying to decide how to hold the hearings and said they wanted to conduct them as quickly as possible to return any innocents caught up in the roundups to their homes, but they acknowledged they were ill prepared for the venture. "We're still figuring this out," said the senior officer, "because we thought we'd have mass surrenders, not this crap."

I'm relieved that they'll be able to separate all the innocents so easily before they send the guilty parties to Cuba to live in prison and legal limbo until George W. Bush decides what to do with them.

There is a standard way to deal with people like this. It's called a war crimes trial. Yes, they get a lawyer and everything. But, it enforces the concept of the rule of law. Apparently, we now find that too inconvenient. I'm sure the captured US POW's will be delighted to hear it.




digby 3/31/2003 01:16:00 AM |

Sunday, March 30, 2003

 
Embedded

Read this amazing story about the battle of Nasiriya. This guy watched a group of marines turn from idealistic liberators into cynical warriors in a matter of a few days. Nobody deserves this, American marines or Iraqi civilians. Useless.
digby 3/30/2003 11:53:00 PM |

 
Command and Control

Reader Pi brings to my attention this post on Unintended Consequences that quotes a Stratfor article:

Ten days into the war, Iraqi command, control, communications, intelligence and information systems appear to be operational at all levels, including the national command authority. From the standpoint of U.S. war planning and doctrine, this should not be the case. The fact that it appears to be the case is shaping the war, as U.S. air power pounds these facilities in Baghdad. Clearly, the Iraqis have thought through the survivability of their systems and have made some adjustments. The United States must take down these systems. The difficulty coalition forces are having represents the first serious strategic crisis of the war. The problems the media have obsessed over are trivial

If this is so, the most basic objective of 3rd wave Information Warfare has not yet been met. It hasn't just been a failure of the more kooky aspect of the plan -- the clumsy psy-ops, "decapitation" and selective intelligence. It has not yet accomplished the one aspect of IW that everyone agrees is essential-- eliminating the enemy leadership's ability to communicate with their troops.



digby 3/30/2003 11:17:00 PM |

 
I've Been Leaning That Way Myself

Kos puts in a big plug for General Wesley Clark for president. He's being seen by a lot of Americans for the first time on CNN and he's been quite impressive. Perhaps that is why he opted to keep the CNN job rather than declare for President. An hour a night, 5 nights a week is a mighty good way to get some name recognition and public exposure.

I have been watching him for sometime and posted this analysis called General Dynamic about a month ago. People seem to believe that he is only viable as a VP, but I'm more and more convinced that the Democrats are going to need someone with the kind of sterling national security and demonstrated leadership credentials that someone like Clark could provide.

The fact that the heinous harpy Ann Coulter is already going after him by calling him "The Enemy Within" says that he is definitely on the GOP radar screen. I get the feeling he can take the heat.

Everyone's been complaining about Rumsfeld and company not planning for the worst case scenario, yet the Democrats seem to be making the same mistake with 2004. We should be planning for the scenario that has the Cheerleader in Chief riding atop a wave of popularity for his handling of the "war," which will be ongoing and ever more adventurous. If that is not happening and the war has left Bush with a weak hand, all the better. But, it would be wise for us to find somebody who can stand in a room with Bush and look like he's got just as much experience leading this country in battle as he does. (In my opinion, that could be Anna Nicole Smith, but I realize I'm not a typical middle American.) Clark is a Democrat who is also a 4 star General. I just don't see anybody who can match that profile.

My dream ticket would be Wesley Clark/Bob Rubin.





digby 3/30/2003 10:58:00 PM |

 
Incestuous Amplification

“defined by Jane's Defense Weekly as ‘a condition in warfare where one only listens to those who are already in lock-step agreement, reinforcing set beliefs and creating a situation ripe for miscalculation.’”

Paul Krugman uses this military term today to explain the Bush administration’s reaction to the California energy crisis. By doing so, he also cleverly highlights the fundamental problem with the Republican establishment that runs Washington. They live in an intellectual echo chamber of insular think tanks, political operatives and partisan media.

But, war is not as controllable as the American political process.

Brad DeLong posts this article and rightly points out that 3 senior administration officials say that: "President Bush's aides did not forcefully present him with dissenting views from CIA and State and Defense Department officials who warned that U.S.-led forces could face stiff resistance in Iraq."

The New York Times explicitly stated this back on March 18th:

During a White House planning session with his top military advisers late last month, President Bush turned to Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, with a pressing question: How long would war with Iraq last? But before General Myers could respond, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld put a hand on his arm and said, "Now, Dick, you don't want to answer that."

The exchange is recounted by senior officials at the White House and State Department, as well as the Pentagon, as a window into Mr. Rumsfeld's complicated management style — and, indeed, it presents a Rorschach test to separate Mr. Rumsfeld's detractors from his supporters.

Critics cite the meeting as evidence that Mr. Rumsfeld muzzles the military, as an effort by the defense secretary to prevent the nation's highest-ranking general from performing his lawful duty to give his best military thinking, unvarnished, to Mr. Bush.

Keep in mind that this article was written before the current cover-your-ass operation began. They had no way of knowing at that time that the rose colored glasses scenario would not come to fruition, but there was obviously concern on the part of some that Junior was being managed by the IraqHawks, particularly the starry eyed neocons.

As DeLong noted, this "Sr" complaint can only come from a very limited number of people (my guess being Rove, Card and possibly Powell.) And most amazingly, in the March 28th article, they name Cheney and Rumsfeld as being the ones who misled the Commander in Chief. It's possible that Rove is beginning to circle the wagons to protect Bush's viability and as a result, Rummy (and Cheney?) are feeling a little heat coming from the inside.

This is very intriguing, if true. Much depends upon developments in the war over the next few days. If the troops remain dug in outside of Baghdad for any length of time (even if air power is being used relentlessly against the Republican Guard positions) there will be a news vacuum that might very well portend a continued drumbeat of complaint against Rumsfeld. If suicide bombings become common, he looks very bad indeed.

And, that might lead him to want to take a big gamble and push into Baghdad before the situation on the ground is optimal. The question then would be whether Bush's true inner circle would start to lead Junior away from Rummy and toward the Generals. The only person, after all, who can stop Rumsfeld from ordering General Franks to take a wild unnecessary chance is Bush himself.

Rumsfeld's problem is of his own making. There were many reports of friction between Rumsfeld and the pentagon staff from long before Iraq planning began in earnest. Daily Kos has a great post up about Robert Novak’s reporting on the dissention in the pentagon going back more than a year. Everyone chalked this up to the "transformation" that Rumsfeld was attempting and in typical Howie Kurtz style, it was
reported by most of the press as it interprets everything -- as a high school turf battle. But, this goes way beyond that to a serious concern amongst the brass that Rumsfeld is actually endangering national security.

Perhaps the biggest issue is that he depends almost entirely upon a small group of advisors from Republican think tanks. His insistence on deploying a missile defense system that doesn't work, his uncritical dependence on unproven theories like "effects based warfare" and most importantly, his refusal to allow for contingency battlefield planning are seen by many as not just bad management, but as reckless and dangerous at this particular time. We aren't just playing any more, it isn't theoretical, Rumsfeld is insisting on actually using untried military doctrine based upon pop futurist and techno dreamer scenarios. And he is so sure he is right that he refuses to fully consider back-up plans, instead seeing any deviation as a political concession and therefore without merit in its own right. Franks asks for extra time to adjust to the Turkey debacle and Rumsfeld grumbles that he already gave him 50,000 more troops, what more does he want?

Military planners and intelligence sources were all very aware that Iraq was a different situation than Afghanistan, as anyone with half a brain could see. But, in the tight world of right wing thinkers (remember, they fired all the moderates and liberals that had previously given the Defense Policy Board a variety of perspectives) it was time to put their long time theories into practice. They were not going to be dissuaded by a bunch of cowardly military officers or ossified state department careerists.

They had spent many years, from the Plan B group up through the back halls of the Reagan administration to the AEI/CSP/PNAC echo chamber refining their dreamy utopian vision of a world easily dominated by American technology, business and values and they were not going to let a bunch of cynical naysayers get in their way with nitpicking about how to get there.

We've made this mistake before, as The Pentagon Papers made clear. But, this time it is even worse. There is no rival superpower to keep us from completely destabilizing the world order and then having nothing tangible to replace it with besides the chimera of brute American force.

Despite all the hype and all the money, we are kidding ourselves if we believe that we can rule the world with our military power. The American people are not Spartans and we are not willing or able to take on that project. These people know that which is why they are depending upon this "projection" of power, "effects based" warfare, "3rd wave" information manipulation and fake missile defense to do the job for us. They believed that we would not really have to demonstrate our power because we can make people believe that they face sure defeat.

And remember, many of the people who have theorized this new world order have no personal experience with war, have learned all the wrong lessons from history and formulated many of their ideas from popular fiction, movie myths and half baked futurist proselytizing. These are not the smartest guys in the world. Remember, the two top planners of the war with Iraq came from the Ford administration. The intellectual neocon claque of Wolfowitz and Perle are slightly deranged from having spent their entire careers convinced that the Soviet Union was so all-powerful that any compromise was a defeat. Wolfowitz thought Gorbachev was a stooge and lobbied hard for the US to name Lithuania a US vital interest so as to put a US presence on the ground to prepare for our inevitable invasion of Russia. And, this was after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

They have always been wrong. Always. But events have now taken on a life of their own. We may just have to depend upon Karl Rove to pull Bush back from the brink. That is a very slender thread to hang on to but it looks like it's all we've got.


Update: Josh Marshall also believes that this “3 senior officials” designation is significant also and may mean that there is some serious rumbling inside the administration.







digby 3/30/2003 08:33:00 PM |

Saturday, March 29, 2003

 
Fudgy Liar Cake

Ken "Cakeboy" Adelman just said that the war is going much better than anyone predicted because we haven't had any terrorist reprisals or nuclear war. And, they will STILL greet us with rose petals just as soon as we've won the war. Chris Matthews is such a nice polite fellow. He didn't mention the "cakewalk" comment.

Perhaps if Adelman had done something really dangerous like receive a furtive hallway hummer, Chris would have been reduced to screaming, spittle flecked outrage. There are limits.

digby 3/29/2003 05:33:00 PM |

 
The Worst and the Dumbest

Reuters reports that Sy Hersh has a big one coming out about Rummy:

"He thought he knew better. He was the decision-maker at every turn," the article quoted an unidentified senior Pentagon planner as saying. "This is the mess Rummy put himself in because he didn't want a heavy footprint on the ground."

Following up on my post below, here is a June 2002 article from National Review that discusses the ongoing tension within military circles between the radical technophiles and the traditional services. He describes the varying schools of thought as "strategic pluralists," "strategic monists," and "technophiles."

The first are the traditionalists who have believed that they need every possible weapons system and believe in maintaining a large capable force that can meet any threat. This group has been at odds with Army Chief Eric Shinseki, who began an ambitious and long needed Army transformation plan in 1999. But, they had no idea how good they had it until Rummy came along. He pretty much told Shinseki that his plan was scrapped in favor of a much reduced role for the Army in the future and that "boots on the ground" is a discredited concept.

The second group "strategic monists" are simply the types who believe that "air power (or whatever) is all you need." It has been proven wrong time and again. Still, it persists.

The third group falls into the Tofflerite category described in my previous post. Rummy is a technophile of the highest order with a deep and enduring belief in the efficacy of missile defense and space weapons. When he is forced to come back down to planet earth, in the near term this translates into a belief that "standoff and precision-strike weapons, delivered from the air or from space, will always provide a substitute for land power in future combat operations."

The author concludes with:

The fundamental flaw that characterizes both the strategic monist and the technophile is their certainty that they can predict the future. As Loren Thomson of the Lexington Institute recently observed, "much of what transpires under the rubric of transformation is actually grounded in implicit assumptions about future threats." But the future isn't knowable. The fact is that since 1940, the United States has suffered at least one strategic surprise every decade. "So any concept of transformation that proposes sweeping programmatic changes based on a presumed understanding of future challenges is likely to go wrong. There are simply too many possible threats, and the very act of preparing for some reduces the likelihood that those are the ones we will face."

We should be very skeptical of anyone who claims we can know the future well enough to eliminate or substantially reduce certain capabilities, such as land power. Strategic pluralism and balanced forces have provided a hedge against uncertainty in the past and, as such, have served the interests of the United States well. We should not use special cases such as Kosovo and Afghanistan to justify a return to the strategic monism of the 1950s to the detriment of overall U.S. security.

This is yet another example of the radical Republican experimentation with every institution of the United States. Like the wild supply side experiment with radical tax cuts, the Federalist Society assault on the legal system, and the abrupt change to a doctrine of unilateralism and preventive war, it is the result of insular, second rate, ivory tower think tank intellectuals taking the reins of power and completely running amuck.

It is hard to overestimate the level of damage this chaotic agenda of dangerous, radical change these people can wreak. This is no joke. The Democrats had better get a grip on this threat to our way of life. It is not about offended sensibilities or cultural niceties or social conformity. It is about a bunch of mediocre minds and megalomaniacal personalities who are experimenting with the most powerful government on the planet as if it is a Heritage Foundation seminar.

This war is still likely to turn out all right (for the US) in the short term, but it is not nearly the sure thing that it would have been if Rummy wasn't a pie-in-the-sky true believer who has no respect for history, tradition or intellectual inquiry. If we end up having to bombard civilians in large numbers in order to end the Saddam regime, the blood is on Rummy's hands. He really believed that you can win wars through nothing but propaganda and precision bombing of empty buildings. He didn't realize that the only enemies who are that gullible are the Democratic Party.

WE are the conservatives now, folks.





digby 3/29/2003 05:32:00 PM |

Friday, March 28, 2003

 
Future Shock and Awe

Last week I wrote a post about the likelihood that Newt Gingrich is heavily involved in the actual war planning for the Iraq invasion. I had no proof other than some gossipy items in newspaper columns. However, I have since been informed that Newt has had almost unequalled influence in long term strategic military planning for many, many years.

And, when he introduced the Generals to his intellectual mentors in the early 1980's he began a revolution in military affairs that is playing itself out in the Iraqi desert at this very minute.

Last November, Newt spoke to the U.S. Joint Forces Command about the future of the military in the 21st century. He spoke of fast paced deployments, joint services, men on horseback with cell phones commanding B52’s, “The Bridges at Toko Ri” and “The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean" and a whole lot of other stuff. It’s quite a speech and he’s given many just like it for the last 20 years.

… in 1979 as a freshman congressman …

My dad retired as a lieutenant colonel, and here is a brigadier general [Donald Starry] in the United States Army asking me to advise on the core pattern of how you fight a battle. I promptly said to my staff, "Hold the phone calls, postpone my next appointment…He said, “We have a real problem.” I whipped out a legal pad and said, “Now to understand what we're doing, let me share with you a framework so you can advise them." I was thrilled. Back then, this was pretty powerful, and he pulled out a little flip chart from his attaché case, and for 45 minutes he walked me through every battle doctrine.

[…]

Now, the thing that actually sold me was when he left he had taken notes that would begin a dialogue which continued until 1987. I advised the Army’s Training and Doctrine Command from the spring of 1979 through the fall of ’87 on Army battle doctrine. Oh, and I guess in that sense the only elected member of Congress to have ever done anything quite like that.

He says in the same speech:

…my stepfather who was an infantryman who was stationed in Orleans, France, and he took me to the battle field for the Verdun, and we spent a weekend with a friend of his who had been drafted in 1941, sent to the Philippines, served in the Bataan Death March and spent 3 1/2 years in a Japanese prison camp. And at the end of the weekend of Japanese prison camp stories at night and Verdun battle fields during the daytime, I had this sense that this stuff's all real. People die, and not just in Tel Aviv malls, but, as we discovered on September 11th, in our biggest cities.

So I come down here with a passion which is the equivalent to the passion some of you may have felt in combat…

One supposes that those who have actually been in battle might feel differently, but there you have it. In any case, Newt has been advising the Army’s Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) for many years, (where he also spent a lot of time talking politics apparently.) He remains very active in military matters since he left office:

(June 18,2002)Command leaders briefed Gingrich, who was accompanied by the Commander in Chief of U.S. Joint Forces Command and Supreme Allied Commander, Atlantic, U.S. Army Gen. William Kernan and Deputy Supreme Allied Commander, Atlantic, British Admiral Ian Forbes, at the JFCOM Joint Warfighting Center.

During those early years in congress he was also heavily involved with some other big thinkers, the authors of the popular bestseller, “Future Shock,” Alvin and Heidi Toffler. He introduced his good friends to the above mentioned General Starry in 1982 and they soon came to have an almost unimaginable influence on a certain group of military planners in creating a new military doctrine called alternatively “third wave” and “information warfare.”

This doctrine relies on the Tofflers' thesis that the United States is in the midst of a transition between the 2nd wave industrial society and the 3rd wave information society. This concept is the single biggest influence on Newt Gingrich’s “vision” and the military is the one place where Gingrich seems to have been taken very seriously as a planner and long term strategist from very early in his career. (At one time he had 5 active military officers serving on his congressional staff, a fact which raised eyebrows but since he was the Speaker nobody said much about the obvious conflict of active duty personnel directly involved in the political process.)

After the Gulf War the Tofflers wrote “War and Anti-War: Summit at the Dawn of the 21st Century,” in which they claimed that the first Gulf War was the first war to occur between the 2nd wave and 3rd wave of civilization and was the greatest military victory in history. There were
dissenters but many in the military began to plan along the lines that the Tofflers suggested developing a theory called Information Warfare.

In its most benign form it is merely a doctrine for attacking and defending the ever more important information systems (i.e command and control.) But the concept became merged with another doctrine called the Revolution in Military Affairs or RMA that includes the ideas of small, fast “niche” special forces, “information driven” airpower, psy-ops and propaganda and as Don Rumsfeld called it “Exquisite Intelligence.” And these ideas are the basis for Rumsfeld’s military transformation, including his personal favorite “effects based warfare.”

To 3rd wave military enthusiasts, Information Warfare is the thrilling notion that:

"Information dominance is superior situational awareness applied to seize and maintain the initiative, influence the enemy's actions, and induce operational paralysis while denying your adversary the ability to do the same."

In other words, war as mind fuck. “Shock and Awe,” falls into the Information Warfare doctrine with its psy-ops goal made possible by information driven precision weapons. IW relies upon the assurance that, in the face of proper information (i.e. the massive superiority of the offensive force) that logically the enemy will not fight. Well...

The target of information warfare, then, is the human mind, especially those minds that make the key decisions of war or peace and, from the military perspective, those minds that make the key decisions on if, when, and how to employ the assets and capabilities embedded in their strategic structures.

Newt put it more prosaically in a speech at the Hoover Institute last July:

…their [old] answer has been to design campaign plans that are so massive - I mean the standard plan in Afghanistan was either Tomahawks or 5 divisions, and that's why Rumsfeld was so important. Cause Rumsfeld sat down and said, "Well what if we do this other thing? You know, 3 guys on horseback, a B-2 overhead." And it was a huge shock to the army. I mean, because it worked. Now I'll tell you one guy who does agree and that's Chuck Horner who ran the air campaign.

You can still find people out there who are warriors who came up during the Reagan years, all of whom will say flatly to the Secretary of Defense, "The right model is simultaneous, massive, immediate combined air and land forces, period."

Now, some people see much of the Afghan campaign as a failed strategy, particularly the battle of Tora Bora, which was roundly condemned for its misjudgment of the Afghan “allies” and a failure to put adequate troops on the ground. (Sound familiar?) This was the battle from which Osama bin Laden was believed to have escaped. The guys on horseback with cell phones didn’t quite get the job done.

After Operation Anaconda was proclaimed a victory, (why, we do not know) Junior turned to Condi and said “what’s next?” Immediately, the planning began in earnest for the invasion of Iraq. News reports said that Rumsfeld and crew initially believed that the operation would only require 50-60,000 troops, in keeping with the rapid deployment of “niche” special forces theory. And although they were ultimately persuaded that a much larger force was needed, events of recent days suggest that the adjustment was badly planned and then micromanaged.

Certainly, it would seem that the planners badly miscalculated the Iraqi response to the invasion, sent in light armor when heavy armor is more appropriate and is now scrambling by putting forces into areas for which they are not specifically trained. Perhaps most importantly, their exquisite intelligence was very selective:

Intelligence officials say Rumsfeld, his deputy Paul Wolfowitz and other Pentagon civilians ignored much of the advice of the Central Intelligence Agency and the Defense Intelligence Agency in favor of reports from the Iraqi opposition and from Israeli sources that predicted an immediate uprising against Saddam once the Americans attacked.

Perhaps this is the fatal flaw of this 3rd wave Information Warfare theory (although there are many.) Relying upon rosy scenarios is a human failing, particularly amongst those who are invested in certain beliefs and ideals. No matter how good the information, if ignored it is useless.

(All of this was, of course, predicted by the Millenium Challenge wargames played earlier this year in which they simply refused to adapt to the idea that “the crazy middle eastern dictator” was not going go along with the script.)

This article from the Intl. Herald Tribune from last fall is interesting in light of Rumsfeld calling it “Franks’s Plan” today. Newtie himself said at the time:

Gingrich, who also is a member of the Defense Policy Board, a Pentagon advisory panel, said he was confident that General Tommy Franks, the commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East, would not be swayed by suggestions that he include more reinforcements and plan a more cautious attack.
He said that Franks, an army general, "will probably have a more integrated, more aggressive and more risk-taking plan."

"If the chiefs wanted to be extremely cautious, extremely conservative and design a risk-avoiding strategy, that would be nothing new," he said in an interview.

It appears that the high command of the military is not as smitten with the Toffler’s New Age vision as a military plan of action. They came through Vietnam and their desire for political support and a clear goal makes them McClellans to the civil war buffs like Cheney and the RMA types who read too much Tom Clancy. Derision toward the traditional idea of overwhelming force is emblematic of Newt and his 3rd wave super true believers.

I do not know how much Gingrich has been involved with the war planning since 9/11. There have been numerous reports that he has been advising Rumsfeld and we know that he is a member of the Defense Policy Board. But, even if he isn’t, in his own way, he has been as influential on the thinking in military affairs as any of the neocons (which he isn't, really) and his influence is being felt today and will continue to be felt for many, many years to come. He’s the man who brought pop futurism into the American military and got a lot of people to believe that we can run the world militarily without having to commit human beings in great numbers to face the enemies that result from such adventures. Perhaps someday that may be true. kosovo worked out ok, but Milosevic wasn't laboring under any illusions that his neighbors might join the fray or that he could leverage world opinion. The Afghanistan campaign was a very middling success considering the circumstances and Operation Exquisite Intelligence is turning out to be messy and ill-planned at the very least. The post war scenario looks quite grim.

I have no great quarrel with the Tofflers. They are pop futurists and they have had an enormous influence on the way we think about change and the information age. But, it is truly amazing to me that their thesis has become a serious basis for military planning. While these concepts are intriguing and give one plenty of food for thought about how the future will play out, they are also extremely limited. Their prescriptions for how to deal with new challenges in a non-military sense are almost entirely utopian nonsense and have no practical application. There is no reason to believe that their thinking about military strategy is any more realistic.

The vision of Information Warfare is premature at best. We would like to fight a 3rd wave war. But, it appears that Saddam, still mired in the 2nd wave, refuses to cooperate.

In “Creating a New Civilization, The Politics of the Third Wave,” the Tofflers define their ideas as this:

“The way we make war reflects the way we make wealth and the way we make anti-war must reflect the way we make war.”

I know that I will always be grateful to Newt Gingrich for introducing that kind of clear thinking into our military back in 1983. We can only be more secure as a result.






digby 3/28/2003 08:42:00 PM |

Thursday, March 27, 2003

 
Goin' Courtin'

Souter wonders why Texas doesn't limit sodomy among heterosexuals. "Because it can lead to marriage and procreation," says Rosenthal...

Wow. And I thought California had some unusual dating rituals.




digby 3/27/2003 09:24:00 AM |

Wednesday, March 26, 2003

 
Even If They Hate Him

I have often wondered how anyone could accept the Perle Wolfowitz claque's rose colored glasses scenario with a straight face. Perhaps they've all been watching "Patton" on a loop with Michael Ledeen and believed that it would be just like the scene of the Americans liberating Paris. (And when Condi said that the Americans had liberated the German people from Hitler, I just assumed she was carried away with the moment.) But, now that I fully realize how completely these people depended upon the Iraqi people to welcome them with open arms I'm convinced that their biggest problem, from diplomacy to war planning, is that they are completely clueless about what motivates and animates human beings. They are psychologically crippled.

Clearly they never gave even a moments thought to the fact that average Iraqis might assume that a bunch of American guys in uniforms running around shooting at Iraqis aren't really a whole lot different from a bunch of Iraqi guys running around shooting at Iraqis. Except for one thing. The Iraqis, at least, have not invaded their country under circumstances that many people in the world, much less the citizens of Iraq, find suspicious. And after our ignominious bail-out in 1991, it's not hard to predict that those most likely to rebel might just be a little bit gunshy. We don't exactly have a good reputation for follow through.

And, did it not occur to the neocon planners that our determination to overthrow and occupy Iraq without international sanction or support would be looked at askance, even by the victims of Saddam Hussein? Merely proclaiming yourself to be "good" and Saddam "evil" is unlikely to persuade anyone but silly red-staters who carry around signs that say "W Is A Hottie." Nobody else is going to buy it. Certainly not Iraqi people who have every reason to be a teensy bit skeptical of politicians who talk and act tough. They've learned the hard way that strong men aren't particularly thrustworthy.

And they underestimate the fact that just like people everywhere the Iraqis love and will protect their home, their country from a foreign invader. It's instinctive. One would have thought that if the Bush administration were depending upon a popular uprising against Saddam (or at least a passive reaction) they would not have cavalierly dismissed the value of international support, particularly from the UN, nor would they have neglected to make their post-war plans for a free and democratic Iraq known to everyone in great detail. It might, at least, have helped to allay the obvious fear that the Iraqis are trading a horrible Iraqi dictator for a horrible American one.

Via a great post on Liberal Oasis I found this article in the Washington Post from a couple of days ago that puts it in terms most Americans surely should be able to understand -- national pride:

When it came to the cause of Iraq's predicament, family members pointed to Hussein, describing him as rash. He invaded Iran, trapping them in an eight-year war. He seized Kuwait, bringing on the Persian Gulf War and the devastation of sanctions that largely wiped out Iraq's middle class. After that war, they were ready to overthrow him themselves.

But they bitterly denounced the war the United States has launched. Iraq, perhaps more than any other Arab country, dwells on traditions -- of pride, honor and dignity. To this family, the assault is an insult. It is not Hussein under attack, but Iraq, they said. It is hard to gauge if this is a common sentiment, although it is one heard more often as the war progresses.

"We complain about things, but complaining doesn't mean cooperating with foreign governments," the father said. "When somebody comes to attack Iraq, we stand up for Iraq. That doesn't mean we love Saddam Hussein, but there are priorities."

Tom Tomorrow said it best:

We took a lot of lessons from 9/11, but it occurs to me that there's one we might have overlooked. When you attack a nation, people tend to rally around their leader --- even if they hate him.

digby 3/26/2003 05:27:00 PM |

Tuesday, March 25, 2003

 
An Angry Dutchman

Martin Wisse tells it like a REAL leftist:

You may have noticed I have not blogged much this week; with the war now officially started I really have not felt like it. Now more then ever it feels like shouting into a vacuum. I just feel so helpless, you know? Bush finally has his war, innocent people are dying already and many more iwll die before this war is over and I get the feeling none of the socalled adults is taking this fucking serious. William Hague smirking his way through the war debate in the Commons on Tuesday, making oh so clever jokes about Claire Short. Bush and his cronies mouthing platitudes about peace and democracy, Blair and his cronies blaming France for this war because they opposed this war. The fucking reporters on the fucking BBC sounding so fucking pleased with the bombardments going on right now in Baghdad, getting their hardons from all this kewl military stuff. Finally, here's the New and Improved Gulf War for all those boys and girls who missed the first one: now they too can do the Hero Reporter from Beleaguered Baghdad or Tel Aviv or Kuwait or where fucking ever. Then, escaping to the wonderful world of blogging, I get the same sanctimonious pricks who all along told me I Was Doing it All Wrong that mass protests or direct action is sooo passe and shouldn't I just vote Democratic and get involved into nice, respectable ways of doing politics. You know the same sort of politics that DIDN'T WORK BEFORE EITHER?? Fuck 'em.

There's a war going on. It's time to get serious.

digby 3/25/2003 09:25:00 PM |

 
DittoheadJarhead

[...]

The marines are aggrieved: aggrieved that the Iraqis aren't more grateful, aggrieved that the Iraqis are shooting at them, aggrieved that the US army's spearhead 3rd Infantry Division tore through Nassiriya earlier in the invasion without making it safe.

"They didn't clear the place, and then they left, and now the marines sure have to clear it," he said. "Just like the goddam army."

And the Iraqis are aggrieved at the marines. A 50-year-old businessman and farmer, Said Yahir, was driving up to the main body of the reconnaissance unit, stationed under the bridge. He wanted to know why the marines had come to his house and taken his son Nathen, his Kalashnikov rifle, and his 3m dinars (about £500).

"What did I do?" he said. "This is your freedom that you're talking about? This is my life savings."

In 1991, in the wake of Iraq's defeat in the first Gulf war, Mr Yahir was one of those who joined the rebellion against Saddam Hussein. His house was shelled by the dictator's artillery. The US refused to intervene and the rebellion was crushed.

"Saddam would have fallen if they had supported us," Mr Yahir said. "I've been so humiliated."

Under the bridge, Sergeant Michael Sprague was unrepentant. The money, the marines said, was probably destined for terrorist activities - buying a suicide bomber, for instance. "The same people we determined were safe yesterday were found with weapons today," he said.

Marine scouts shot two Iraqi men yesterday when they were seen carrying Kalashnikovs. Each man was found to be carrying three magazines, but they never fired at the marines before they were killed.

"They were pointing their weapons in an aggressive manner, and they were taken out," said Sgt Sprague.

Nathen had been captured the previous day, along with dozens of others, and like them, had been let go, Sgt Sprague said. Then they caught him again with a Kalashnikov in mint condition and 3m dinars.

"So the question I would like to be asked is, if this person already went through EPW [enemy prisoner of war] questioning and was found to be OK, why on earth would he come back? The problem with these people is that you can't believe anything they say."

Could he understand the locals' distrust of the US after what happened in 1991?

"If it weren't for the liberal press, we might have taken Baghdad last time," said the sergeant.

[...]

So closely entwined were some populated localities with the tentacles of the VC base area, in some cases actually integrated into the defenses, and so sympatheic were some of the people to the VC that the only way to establish control short of constant combat operations among the people was to remove the people and destroy the village....

That it was infinitely better in some cases to move people from areas long sympathetic to the Viet Cong was amply demonstrated later by events that occurred when the discipline of an American company broke down at a place called My Lai.

--General Westmoreland in his memoir A Soldier Reports,

"We must necessarily appear to them in the nature of supernatural beings -- we approach them with the might as of a deity. . . by the simple exercise of our will we can exert a power and good practically unbounded."
Heart of Darkness




digby 3/25/2003 08:08:00 PM |

 
Neocon Ecstasy

Josh Marshall has some really interesting stuff up today, but this quote by looney tunes Michael Ledeen is just a pip:

I think it all depends how the war goes. And I think the level of causalities is secondary. It may sound like an odd thing to say. But all the great scholars who have studied American character have come to the conclusion that we are a warlike people. And that we love war. And one of my favorite comments on American character, which is Patton's speech at the beginning of the movie, where he says "Americans love war. We love fighting. We've always fought. We enjoy it. We're good at it. And so forth." What we hate is not casualties but losing. And if the war goes well, and if the American public has the conviction that we're being well-led, and that our people are fighting well, and that we're winning, I don't think causalities are gonna be the issue.

I guess Patton is his idea of a great intellectual. And, for an AEI "freedom chair" scholor, you'd think this idiot would know that the speech he is referring to actually took place and it took place on a very auspicious day --- June 5th, 1944. (But yeah, the movie was like, cool too.) Patton was speaking to his men on the eve of the Normandy Invasion and he knew that huge numbers of them were going to die. So, what he was doing was pumping up the troops. Here's (more or less) what he is supposed to havesaid:

Men, this stuff that some sources sling around about America wanting out of this war, not wanting to fight, is a crock of bullshit. Americans love to fight, traditionally. All real Americans love the sting and clash of battle. You are here today for three reasons. First, because you are here to defend your homes and your loved ones. Second, you are here for your own self respect, because you would not want to be anywhere else. Third, you are here because you are real men and all real men like to fight. When you, here, everyone of you, were kids, you all admired the champion marble player, the fastest runner, the toughest boxer, the big league ball players, and the All-American football players. Americans love a winner. Americans will not tolerate a loser. Americans despise cowards. Americans play to win all of the time. I wouldn't give a hoot in hell for a man who lost and laughed. That's why Americans have never lost nor will ever lose a war; for the very idea of losing is hateful to an American."

Now, I don't know what other "scholors" Ledeen may have been referring to, although Tom Hanks made a good speech in "Saving Private Ryan" and John Wayne was positively riveting in the "Sands of Iwo Jima."

One thing is very, very clear. It's damned easy being a war loving American when you are a flabby middle-aged doughboy sitting behind a desk and talking the big talk. This really is one of those situations where the chickenhawk label is completely apt. Ledeen is still a little boy in a grown man's think tank. Had he proved his manhood in Vietnam instead of onanistically watching Patton and absorbing it as "reality," this country would be a safer place today.

What an utter embarrassment. He makes Newtie's silly military history book reviews sound like Sun Tzu.











digby 3/25/2003 05:36:00 PM |

 
He Knows Something

Wampum posts this heartfelt plea for a call to your Senators to protest this outrage on the part of our own favorite Dr. Catkiller.

She believes that his relentlessness in getting this provision passed has to do with a larger ambition toward "tort reform" and capping medical malpractice awards. But, I actually think it may be more sinister than that.

That explanation makes a lot of sense as it pertains to Frist the majority leader, but it doesn't really explain his prior undeviating focus on what is surely a rather obscure issue in the entire medical malpractice scheme. Long before he was responsible for bankrupting the trial lawyers to cripple the Democratic party, he was trying to get this bill passed. He has been rebuffed again and again, but he keeps coming back. As we all know, he even stuck it into the Homeland Security bill and forced poor, drunk Dick Armey to take the fall.

No. There must be more to this. The best spin is that he is owned by Eli Lily and this issue is of extreme importance to them. He's a typical senate whore doing what he's paid to do. Simple. They do not want any liability on anything. And, one can easily see how it might be that Frist and his cronies want to raid the vaccine trust fund as Wampum speculates. I certainly wouldn't put it past them.

But, none of this explains why he specifically snuck the thimerosol issue into the Homeland Security bill in the dead of night.

In an earlier post Wampum links to a story about the new tobacco case that John Ashcroft apparently let slip through the cracks:

Five big cigarette companies and a public relations firm sat down to devise a fraudulent scheme "to preserve and enhance the tobacco industry's profits by maximizing the number of smokers . . . and to avoid adverse liability judgments" linked to smoking-related diseases, the government charges.

That's what these greedy bastards do. I think it's about the thimerosol. And Frist knows it.

correction: Dick Armey, not Bill.




digby 3/25/2003 04:10:00 PM |

 
Thanks

...to Eric Alterman of Altercation who, at Jeralyn's kind suggestion, added this humble site to his blogroll. I understand that if I want to stay there that I must shamelessly plug an obscure little book called...what was it? ...oh yes, "What Liberal Media?"

Has anyone heard of it?

I must say, it sounds ludicrous. Is he suggesting that the media are not run by left-wing socialists whose sole purpose in life is to steal the hard earned inherited wealth of the most deserving citizens and pass it out willy-nilly to lazy, low born losers? How ridiculous.

Buy it if you want to. But, anyone who thinks that careerist social climbers who work for giant media corporations run by billionaires aren't liberals to their bones just doesn't know what he's talking about.




digby 3/25/2003 02:12:00 PM |

 
All Resistence Is Terrorism

Rumsfeld just said that Iraqi troops who dress in civilian clothes or fake a surrender are terrorists.

We have invaded a country and their troops are fighting back employing guerilla warfare against our vast technological superiority. This is now called terrorism.

Terrorism.
In a war zone.
Against armed troops.

It would seem that the only form of warfare that Rumsfeld considers legitimate combat against Americans is standing up in uniform and walking into the line of fire. Perhaps if you shot your gun in that situation Donald Rumsfeld would not consider you a terrorist. But, you never know.

One wonders if our special forces, stealthily living by night in Baghdad for the last week or so, (and presumably not wearing their navy whites on the streets) are similarly considered terrorists. Or is this another of those situations where the distinction must be made between good (us) and evil (them.)

Am I not correct in saying that terrorism is specifically defined as violence against a civilian population for the purpose of spreading terror? (Unless it's called "Shock and Awe," of course. Then it's called "liberation.") Can we not assume that the battlefield is not exactly the prime location for that activity? Our soldiers, after all, do have guns and they know how to use them. And, while I have no doubt that they are frightened, they are trained professionals whom I think we can expect will react with something short of terror.

I would have thought he was being hyperbolic, but he's probably just laying the groundwork to justify "unlawful combatant" status for Iraqis caught out of uniform. They don't like treaties, as we know. If they try very hard they may just manage to trash the Geneva Convention as the coup de gras.




digby 3/25/2003 11:13:00 AM |

 
Fear Sells

In another chapter in the ongoing debate about whether we will scare off moderates with strident liberal rhetoric I must note Kevin’s post on Calpundit about the marketing of ideas and the politics of fear. If you read the article by Chris Mooney to which he links you see that it is about framing ideas. It's interesting in and of itself.

But then Kevin hurls a zinger at the misplaced idea that only a positive message will work.

It's true that doom-and-gloom messages by themselves don't sell, but something similarly negative does: fear. And it sells big.

Not fear of things like eventual environmental collapse (she's right about that), but fear of people. Conservatives have very successfully gained ground by convincing moderate swing voters to be afraid of liberals: liberals "blame America first," they have contempt for traditional values, they are atheists, they're soft on child molesters, etc. etc. These are not people who should be in control of our government…

Fear sells…

I could not agree more. It works and it works well. And, there is nothing more important than taking back the realm of what is considered “normal” in political discourse in this country. "Permissive liberals” have been so successfully demonized many have actually stopped calling themselves that. They have even made us believe that our ideas are offensive.

I would once more like to point out that there is no evidence that the vast majority of Americans are as conservative as the right wing ranters like to pretend. At least by any definition of conservative I’ve ever known. For instance, this survey found that 70% of employees admit to viewing or sending adult-oriented personal e-mail at work.

According to U.S. News & World Report, March 2000, the pornography industry brought in revenues of $8,000,000,000 (8Billion) in the year 1999. That exceeds the total revenue of the Rock and Roll and Country Music Industry combined.-

The south has the highest divorce rates in the country and the highest numbers are amongst born again Christians.

ABC averaged 24.1 million viewers during the first hour of the "Bachelor" finale … opposite the controversial "Victoria's Secret" special on CBS, which drew an audience of 10.5 million, according to Nielsen Media Research.

Oh , and by the way, the Dixie Chicks album went from number 6 to number 4 on the Billboard chart this last week.

Popular culture tells the tale. The idea that liberalism is something confined to a few deadheads on the coasts is a shibboleth. It is a highly successful propaganda ploy that has convinced many millions of Americans that they aren’t what they are and has created a straw man in its place to conveniently set aflame. It is quite brilliant and it will not be turned around by mealy mouthed appeals to sunshine and happiness.

As for the other side, David Niewert has some words for the left on the politics of fear:

The mainstream left has been content to make jokes about the stupidity of militiamen instead of recognizing the actual threat they represent. There has been little recognition of the way the far right is able to insinuate its ideas and agendas into the mainstream; indeed, the left's dismissive attitude about right-wing extremists has only helped further their ability to penetrate broader society.

Americans aren’t radicals. The right wing of the political spectrum actually is hurtling headlong into radicalism and a lot of that is due to their acceptance of truly freaky and dangerous elements into their mainstream. The Lott affair provides a lesson. They have developed a need to be seen as not being racist. Yet, the party is crawling with confederates, anti-semites and anti-immigrant haters. They have also made common cause with a bunch of end-days fundamentalists and self-styled militia. There should be a concerted effort to make the urbanites who profess such solidarity with the pick-up truck crowd confront this and explain it.

Of course I agree that the democrats have to offer a positive agenda. But, survey after survey shows that Americans already agree with the Democratic domestic agenda. And even though I believe whole heartedly that national security is going to be the number one issue in 2004, it consistently polls lower than the economy and education, areas in which the Dems traditionally hold a large advantage, particularly when jobs aren’t plentiful. So, clearly it’s not liberal ideas per se that so-called moderates don’t like. In many ways they are quite liberal themselves, at least compared to the stereotype we are fed of the “average” American from the heartland. But, still the Republicans hold enough of an edge nationally to control the congress and (sort of) win the presidency while rendering the political opposition virtually impotent .

Fear trumps everything. They created a monster and called it “liberal” then scared everybody into believing that it is extremist and dangerous.

Nothing we say will get past that until we expose the other side. What Neiwert has pointed out in his series on Rush, Newspeak and Fascism is that something actually is happening and it’s dangerous as hell. We don’t have to make anything up. We don’t have to construct a straw man. It’s real. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with pointing this out. Indeed, it is an obligation

Kevin said:

…we must convince the middle third of voters that they should be afraid of what extreme conservatives are doing. When they are more afraid of them than they are of extreme liberals, then the real work can start.

Yes. Playing by the old rules is going to kill us.




digby 3/25/2003 03:49:00 AM |

 
Newtie's Strategery

So Wolfie and his safari jacketed cohorts finally realized that war isn’t a movie or a video game. Actual humans are getting killed. I’m relieved they woke up. The surreality of videophone wargasm was really starting to get to me.

There is also the beginning of some rumbling that while there is still no uncertainty as to the outcome of the war, there is some question about the timing and the strategy. General Wesley Clark says in his interview in Salon today:

Well, I said two to three weeks. But that was all premised on our having our force there and being ready to go at the outset. Of course we weren't. The 4th Infantry Division was in ships off the coast of Turkey. The 1st Armor Division was still in Germany. The First Cavalry was still at Fort Hood.

Why would the Pentagon start the war if not all the troops were in place?

I can't explain it. I can't defend it; I've never seen the plan. This is the decision that was made. It might work out; then again, it might not.

Does this mean you'll change your prediction from two to three weeks?

It may be longer than that, but it's still early. So I'm not changing my prediction at this point

Of course, he says there is absolutely no chance that we will be defeated, but he echoes here again this question of why we adopted a plan that leaves our rear flank vulnerable and what in the hell was the hurry? (And how could we let things get so out of hand in Turkey?)

I think I have the answer buried in a little
Washington Whispers column in US News and World Report from earlier today:

Travels with Newt

The universe of ousted House Speaker Newt Gingrich continues to expand. Not only is he giving advice to war planners at Central Command, but he's also suggesting policy strategies to the White House and offering lines for Bush speeches.

Seriously, this is not the first we’ve heard of Newt being involved in the war planning.

Paleotraitor Robert Novak said as much way back in October:

Hawkish civilians, in and out of the government, have been suggesting that Saddam Hussein's elite Republican Guard will throw up its arms in surrender. No serious person believes that. The question is whether an uprising of the persecuted Shia majority will be enough to overthrow the Baghdad regime without heavy application of U.S. force. If there is no effective revolt, the generals and their friends on Capitol Hill worry that the unknown plans may not call for sufficient U.S. forces.

The concern goes to the executive style of Don Rumsfeld, who recalls the forceful and abrasive qualities demonstrated by war secretaries in the mold of Edwin Stanton during the Civil War. To his credit, Rumsfeld has attempted to toughen up the officer corps, softened by standards of political correctness during the eight Clinton years. However, the officers who thought that happy days were here again on the day that George W. Bush became president have been disappointed.

Their disappointment stems from Rumsfeld's inclination, born of a turbulent lifetime in governmental and corporate affairs, to make decisions within a restricted circle. That includes war planning. According to Pentagon sources, the secretary does not consult the uniformed service chiefs. Participating in the immediate planning are Gen. Tommy Franks, commander in chief of the Central Command, and a few officers from the Pentagon's Joint Staff.

What most bothers the generals, however, is Rumsfeld's preference for outside advice.For example, Pentagon sources say a frequent consultant with the secretary is former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, an amateur military expert and member of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board. There is no distribution through the Pentagon of such advice.

Generally, this advice probably follows the longtime line by Richard Perle, the Policy Board's chairman, that indigenous Shia forces will do most of the fighting to dislodge Saddam…

True, I cannot prove that Newt Gingrich is an architect of a battle plan that appears to have split the difference with the military --- theoretically giving them their requested number of troops, but not deploy them on time and insist that they rush to Baghdad and mop this thing up by May so the medal ceremonies can give FoxNews a needed lift for sweeps. But, it sounds so like him. Filled with hubris and macho bravado, sure that all he has to do is snarl convincingly and the other side will give up. It didn’t work with Clinton so he thought he’d try it on Saddam.

However, I know for a fact that Dick Cheney has a history of sticking his chickenhawk beak into battlefield planning. Frances Fitzgerald writes in the New York Review of Books:

In “A World Transformed,” the memoir that he and Bush senior published in 1998, [Brent] Scowcroft makes it clear that while all Bush senior's top advisers had different perspectives, the fundamental division lay between Defense Secretary Richard Cheney and everyone else. By his account, and by those of others in the administration, Cheney never trusted Gorbachev. In 1989 Cheney maintained that Gorbachev's reforms were largely cosmetic and that, rather than engage with the Soviet leader, the US should stand firm and keep up cold war pressures. In September 1991 Cheney argued that the administration should take measures to speed the breakup of the Soviet Union—even at the risk of encouraging violence and incurring long-term Russian hostility. He opposed the idea, which originated with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Colin Powell, that the US should withdraw its tactical nuclear weapons from Europe and South Korea. As a part of the preparations for the Gulf War he asked Powell for a study on how small nuclear weapons might be used against Iraqi troops in the desert.

This is the guy who has almost unlimited power today. Only Junior could stop him and, well…no need to even go there.

Stormin’ Norman Schwartzkopf related some even stranger stuff in his memoir, reviewed here in 2000:

Following one White House meeting at which he'd asked for more time and more troops, Stormin' Norman reports; Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Colin Powell called to warn the Desert Storm commander that he was being loudly compared, by a top administration official, to George McClellan. "My God," the official supposedly complained. "He's got all the force he needs. Why won't he just attack?" Schwarzkopf notes that the unnamed official who'd made the comment "was a civilian who knew next to nothing about military affairs, but he'd been watching the Civil War documentary on public television and was now an expert."

And then, twenty pages later, Schwarzkopf casually drops the information that he got an inspirational gift from Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney right before the air war finally got under way. Cheney was presenting a gift to a military man, and he chose something with an appropriate theme: "(A) complete set of videotapes of Ken Burns's PBS series, The Civil War."

But that wasn't the only gift that Dick Cheney had for Norman Schwarzkopf. Having figured out that the general was being too cautious with his fourth combat command in three decades of soldiering, Cheney got his staff busy and began presenting Schwarzkopf with his own ideas about how to fight the Iraqis: What if we parachute the 82nd Airborne into the far western part of Iraq, hundreds of miles from Kuwait and totally cut off from any kind of support, and seize a couple of missile sites, then line up along the highway and drive for Baghdad? Schwarzkopf charitably describes the plan as being "as bad as it could possibly be... But despite our criticism, the western excursion wouldn't die: three times in that week alone Powell called with new variations from Cheney's staff. The most bizarre involved capturing a town in western Iraq and offering it to Saddam in exchange for Kuwait." (Throw in a Pete Rose rookie card?) None of this Walter Mitty posturing especially surprised Schwarzkopf, who points out that he'd already known Cheney as "one of the fiercest cold warriors in Congress.

I certainly believe that policy and goals should be left to the elected and properly appointed civilians. But, the actual battles really need to be conceived and run by professional military planners. And, maybe they were. But, these reports of interference by Rumsfeld’s claque of armchair generals and political hacks rings very true. Rumsfeld is a micromanager of epic proportions and his good friend and closest confidante Dick Cheney has a history of liking to play GI Joe with real GI Joes.

It sounds like the generals won on the issue of troop numbers, but that the political leadership was so enamored of their “they’ll greet us with rose petals” scenario that they may have jumped too soon, discounting the military’s caution about their rear flank. Turkey, we know was a complete screw up from the get-go and probably has resulted in some serious last minute scrambling to make up for it. Josh Marshall expands on
this piece in the Washington post and explains why it was so damned dumb:

Buried in the last graf of this article in Saturday's Washington Post comes this ...
But one senior U.S. official acknowledged that U.S. pressure in recent months has backfired, saying that at one point Pentagon officials insinuated to Turkish politicians that they could get the Turkish military to back the request for U.S. troop deployments in Turkey. "It was stupid stuff. These are proud people," he said. "Speaking loudly and carrying a big stick wins you tactical victories from time to time, but not a strategic victory."

I am still hoping for a quick win and minimal loss of life. I don’t want to see anything bogging down. It’s bad for everyone. But, if Don Rumsfeld, Newt Gingrich and Dick Cheney are micromanaging the battle and overruling the military as Cheney sought to do in Gulf War I, this could get very bad. Rumsfeld and Cheney are very likely running the war and they have brought in the brilliant Gingrich to write the Contract on the Middle East.

It pays to remember that Newtie was stabbed in the back by his own best friends and lost his speakership when he miscalculated and thought the Republicans would gain 30 seats and ended up losing 5 instead. As a strategist, he leaves a lot to be desired. But, it is not impossible to believe that he and others might have insisted on a half assed battle plan that is making the job more difficult than it should have been if they’d listened to something but the sound of their own voices.

And by the way, in case anybody had remaining illusions that this dream of taking on the long term responsibility of rebuilding the country and establishing democratic government was for real, the newspapers report:

[Out of a request for 74.7 billion] Bush's request had only $543 million in humanitarian aid for Iraq, $1.7 billion to rebuild the country and nothing for a peacekeeping effort after the war. Prior congressional and private estimates suggested the long-range expenses for those efforts would be many billions of dollars, though administration officials are hoping allied nations will help with the financing.

Let’s hope they don’t have the crack team that negotiated with Turkey do the asking.


Note: For a little bit of insight into Newtie's thinking --- not to mention a fine list of all the Tom Clancy novels and spy thrillers he reads, check out his copious book reviews on Amazon.

(Strangely, reading them almost made me like him just a little bit. He obviously loves books.)

Update:

"The Secretary of Defense cut off the flow of Army units, saying this thing would be over in two days," said a retired senior general who has followed the evolution of the war plan. "He shut down movement of the 1st Cavalry Division and the1st Armored Division. Now we don't even have a nominal ground force."

He added ruefully: "As in Operation Anaconda in Afghanistan, we are using concepts and methods that are entirely unproved. If your strategy and assumptions are flawed, there is nothing in the well to draw from."

In addition, said senior administration officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity, Rumsfeld and his civilian aides rewrote parts of the military services' plans for shipping U.S. forces to the Persian Gulf, which they said resulted in a number of mistakes and delays, and also changed plans for calling up some reserve and National Guard units.

"There was nothing too small for them to meddle with," said one senior official. "It's caused no end of problems, but I think we've managed to overcome them all."

uh oh










digby 3/25/2003 12:32:00 AM |

Monday, March 24, 2003

 
Dehumanization


I know that it is old news now in this whirlwind of information we are living in, but I wanted to make one comment about the Oscars, Michael Moore and Adrian Brody before it all disappears into the ether.

First, if Michael Moore had not said what he said, his career would be over. His audience of strident liberals would have rightly treated him as a pathetic sell-out if he had not made that comment when and where he did it. So, you could almost say that Moore was just being a good careerist and looking out for number one.

But, of course, he wasn't. His words spoke for a good number of Americans and they have a right to have their furious, righteous anger heard just as much as the furious right wing Dittoheads have a right to have oh...50 to 60 hours per week devoted to non-stop liberal-hating vitriol broadcast all over the country. For more than 10 years they have owned the AM dial, developed their very own news network and run hundreds of newspapers within which anti-Clinton diatribes were delivered with a viciousness and relentlessness that Michael Moore can only dream of emulating (and, if he's very lucky, get a 250 million dollar contract to disseminate.) The only difference here is that the stakes are higher and many, many lives are at risk. And, that is not Michael Moore's fault; it is George W. Bush's fault.

Moore is a left wing polemicist. I'm sorry if his polemics offend people, but I'm pretty damned offended by Rush, Sean, Neal, Peggy, Annie, Charles, Michael, and the rest. Nobody seems to give a damn about ME being offended by a juggernaut of right wing polemicists who are blatantly and obnoxiously disrespectful of everything I believe in. Now, why is that? All I can say is that it seems to have worked pretty well for them.

As for the rest of Hollywood, I think it’s fair to say that there has never been much of a political flavor to the Oscars, even during the height of the antiwar movement during Vietnam when Hollywood was much more politically outspoken. The Academy Awards are almost sacred to movie people and they worry about devaluing their status as a high honor. Nobody liked Satcheen Littlefeather, either.

But, I was still disappointed that so few made any kind of statement, political or otherwise, about the huge elephant in the middle of the room. Adrian Brody was the only one who managed to bring some sorely needed humanity into the event by acknowledging that war...is...well, hell. That is indisputable whether you are for this one or agin' it, and I would have thought that more artists, purveyors of emotional catharsis, would have felt some necessity to infuse this strange event with some feeling.

But, nobody seems to be able to talk about this war in human terms. Yes, there are the little CNN profiles of the wives and the kids and the send-offs and the features about what the grunts are eating and how they wear a gas mask. But, these stories are modeled on the coverage of the Olympic moments, canned and artificial and completely without any sense of who these people are. When I watched the foreign footage yesterday of the POW's, unavailable in our clean and tidy media script at the time, I was struck once again by how very young and scared these soldiers are. One of them looks just like my next door neighbor, a carefree motorcycle loving kid who has a slew of girlfriends and passion for Eminem. He's over there somewhere.

I also forced myself to watch al-Jazeera and some of the photos on their web-site were so disturbing I had to shut down and take some time for reflection. Where our coverage is sanitized for public consumption, theirs is sensationalized. They are looking at rivers of blood in hospitals and crying children and desperate refugees. While we were seeing a war of overwhelming technological force, they were seeing bloodied Arabs bravely beating back the invaders.

After that, watching the battle plan unfold, compulsively following the war news, riffing on my blog and making pithy comments on others just seemed like another form of denial. I'm disassociating from the reality. And, it occurred to me that maybe we are all doing that to some degree -- maybe because we are biologically programmed to do so just to keep ourselves from going crazy in times of war. (Perhaps Richard Dawkins could shed some light on that.)

So, when I watched the Oscars last night, something I normally enjoy and go out of my way to see, I was just hoping for someone to say something heartfelt about peace. I was actually hoping that a lot of them would say something about peace --- not necessarily in the political sense, but in the universal value sense. Instead, sadly, most of them just pretended that nothing was happening.

But a few -- foreigners mostly -- did say some words about peace. Almodovar said, “I also want to dedicate this award to all the people that are raising their voices in favor of peace, respect of human rights, democracy and international legality. All of which are essential qualities to live.” (Thanks, Pete. At least the Europeans love us, even if our own timid political brethren want us to tone down the rhetoric and let Rush Limbaugh dominate the discourse.)

But then Adrian Brody, the guy nobody expected to win, came up and let himself be human and emotional --- for his win, naturally, but also because of the the nature of the role he was being rewarded for playing. He said:

“My experiences of making this film made me very aware of the sadness and the dehumanization of people at times of war,” he said. “Whatever you believe in, if it’s God or Allah, may he watch over you and let’s pray for a peaceful and swift resolution.”

Dehumanization. That’s what I’m feeling when I see the scared faces of those POW’s and the horrors of decapitated children.

This is why civilization was supposed to be beyond the superficially logical rationalizations of "preventive war" and grand global ambitions of world domination through military force. While tallying up the 20th century’s horrific body count we were supposed to have recognized that war must be a last resort in the face of NO OTHER OPTION. There can be no excuse but immediate self-defense to justify it. If Vietnam didn't teach us that, then it taught us nothing. Wars of aggression, by definition, cannot be glorious.

This war never met that test. And we have opened up Pandora’s Box.

The historians will sort out the rightness and the wrongness of the policy. But, as I was watching that glamorous telecast being held just a few miles from where I live, I could not help but be struck, once again, by the fact that we Americans are the luckiest people on the planet. I hope that we stay that way. We are good people, decent people, but we are being led astray by a leadership that is perpetrating a wrong. We simply cannot expect to remain safe and prosperous if we create a world in which it is the prerogative of one country, our country, to decide that a potential future threat is enough to justify a war. It is a dehumanizing undertaking that devalues every single one of us. It is not the America I know.





digby 3/24/2003 03:31:00 PM |

Saturday, March 22, 2003

 
Uh Oh.

He's into the Viagra and Makers Mark again. How much do you want to bet he's been listening to that CD of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir singing "Battle Hymn of the Republic," too. The fog of war (and bourbon) is making even him believe that 9/11 and Iraq are connected.

And the French should be embarrassed?

Update: Maybe this is what he's been swilling.







digby 3/22/2003 10:44:00 PM |

 
Practical Politics

Mary at the Watch posts some useful advice on how to deal with bullies. Considering that liberals like to deal in actual information it would seem obvious that we consult the experts. What they say is very interesting.

[...]

So what do we do? Orincus advocates shining a light on those that use intimidation to advocate violence. Some others say that if you keep your head down and don't disturb your neighbors, then you shouldn't have to worry about bullying. Others advocate noisily rallying against bullies. So what really does work?

One of the world's experts on bullying in schools can help as we try to find a way to counter the bullies in the White House. Dr. Ken Rigby has been studying bullying for a long time and has come up with a thesis that says the success of stopping bullying is based on the level of commitment that teachers (or adults) bring to that goal. He recommends that people who are serious about trying to counteract bullying begin by understanding how to get a commitment on what approach the group thinks will work. He says a concerted approach is more effective than a more ad-hoc, everyone do their own way approach. And he provides a worksheet that can be used by schools to help decide on tactics to confront bullies. I suggest we study the techniques and find ones that we think will work.

[...]

It would be very interesting to hear what people think is the right way to deal with it.







digby 3/22/2003 09:54:00 PM |

 
Secession

Thank you Kevin. Sometimes I think Americans are under the impression that California is a region of France or something.




digby 3/22/2003 08:23:00 PM |

 
Bad signs

From Tacitus

ABC News just aired a very troubling report from John Donvan, who was able to travel unescorted today in Safwan and other areas already overrun by Allied forces. He reports general hostility and suspicion among the locals (apparently they wanted to know if the Israelis were coming to take over), demands for immediate aid, and, disturbingly, active Iraqi irregulars still mounting attacks along the Kuwaiti border. (One wonders whether they had anything to do with today's attack on Camp Pennsylvania.)

Going on Donvan's anecdotal evidence, it seems that the local hostility stemmed mostly from a fear that self-government would be denied, and that aid would not be forthcoming. Three countermeasures immediately spring to mind:


Whatever reorganization of the civil administration is planned needs to follow as soon as possible behind the advancing Allied armies. If it does not include a strong component of local self-rule, it should. Whatever administration (and American administrator) is set up on high in Baghdad, the people of Safwan and every other hamlet in Iraq ought to feel in reason control of their own governance.


Civil affairs and psyops units have to do a much better job if Shi'as (who ought to welcome us) in Safwan think we're the leading edge of an Israeli occupation. Granted, they're probably concentrating on coaxing surrenders from conscript units on the front, but this is a task that cannot be ignored.


CA and psyops won't be able to do much of a job, though, unless aid -- lots of aid -- is delivered ASAP. Why we didn't have container ships loaded with pharmaceuticals ready to offload at Umm Qasr as soon as we took it, I'll never know. The Iraqis probably aren't starving, but they have lacked for decent medical care for over a decade. American aid personnel curing childhood ailments, conducting vaccinations, and rendering assistance to those wounded in the crossfire would go a long way toward establishing goodwill.

All in all, a rather discouraging development. This isn't going to be over this time next week. Not by a long shot.

UPDATE: This NYT piece has a surrendering Iraqi colonel who hates Hussein because -- get this -- he's almost certainly a secret American agent.

Building a civil society here is going to take a while.

All I can say is good luck. The Bush administration doesn't do nice and it doesn't do smart. It does bully. Look what they do to their fellow Republicans if they don't get with the program. Does anyone think they are going to futz around with a bunch of villagers?

All of you irrelevant anti-war protesters out there get out your pens and papers right now and writea firm but polite note to your congressman telling him that you want him to make Bush stop cutting taxes for his rich friends and spend some time getting the world stop hating us. Insist that he demand that George W. Bush allow us to be in on the planning for post war Iraq so that it can be done right. Stomp your little feet and threaten to hold your breath and turn blue if he refuses to do it.

Oh, and be sure and tell him you are a Republican. Democrats are best seen and not heard.



slightly edited for clarity.





digby 3/22/2003 05:12:00 PM |

 


Minneapolis, Minn


So, where did the signs come from?



digby 3/22/2003 04:42:00 PM |

 



What will we tell the children?




digby 3/22/2003 04:30:00 PM |

 
Doing Iraq Right

I am reading more earnest advice about how the war protestors should stop their bellyaching and get to work holding the Bush administration’s feet to the fire on its promises to build a democratic paradise in Iraq.

First, this assumes that war protestors even think it’s possible for such a thing to happen under current circumstances. I, for one, don’t think the analogies to post WWII Japan and Germany have ever made any sense. Aside from all the obvious arguments about the different cultural environments, the most salient issue is that the people of Germany and Japan were completely conquered, with no hope of any future allies and living in world that was totally in ruins. Both countries had been engaged in full out, nonstop war for many years.

Despite the public relations value of the term “shock and awe,” even if the United States completely levels Iraq in the next week, it will not have the same effect. Throughout the Middle East are excited and outraged young Muslims animated by the idea of fighting the foreign “occupiers.” Does anyone seriously believe that the al-Jazeera pictures of massive bombardment and American ground invasion are not being seen in the exact same context as Israeli troops in Gaza? And the pictures in the coming days, of American troops rolling through cities– even if many of them are being greeted with smiles – are far more likely to evoke the more recent images of Lebanon rather than scenes of European liberation in WWII. (This should have been one very good reason to have engaged in the Israeli Palestinian crisis before last Friday.)

By invading Iraq, virtually alone and with the disapprobation of the vast majority of the world, we have emboldened these jihadists to step up the fight. It should not be forgotten that al-Qaeda believe they were responsible in large part for destroying the Soviet Union.

From an interview with Dr. Ayman aL Zawaahri:

Here in Afghanistan, the course of history changed, when the Soviet Union, the largest land-based military force in the world, was dashed to pieces on the boulders of the Afghan Jihad. The Afghan nomads, villagers and their young comrades from the Arab and Islamic world, who destroyed the empire of the Soviet tyrant, were, Praise be to Allah, not affected by these opinions. For if they had, then the Soviet forces would today be in the Arabian Peninsula. The defeated Soviet Union fled from Afghanistan, turning their back only to face their own political break-up and intellectual collapse.

Clearly, they have a deluded view of their own potency and this operation, even if militarily successful, is unlikely to change it because of the fact that most of the world remained opposed, particularly the populations of the Arab world. He undoubtedly believes that he is isolating us, and in some ways he is right.

Unless one indulges in wishful thinking and believes that a miraculous democratic domino effect is likely, “doing Iraq right” is simply not possible as a unilateral American endeavor because no matter how many seeds of democracy are planted in Iraq, there is a much stronger and growing backlash against unchecked American power. “Doing Iraq right” really means that we must reverse the course of this administration’s foreign policy and it has to be done very, very quickly and unambiguously.

Under these circumstances, not to mention the obvious political realities in Washington, I simply don’t see how working the system can possibly accomplish much in the short term. The Democratic leadership, particularly the presidential candidates, threw away their ability to have any real effect when, in spite of receiving an unprecedented number of letters and phone calls from constituents begging them to vote no, they opted to give George W. Bush a blank check. (They may be in the process of doing the same with their capitulation on yet more tax cuts, ridiculously pretending that enacting 350 rather than 750 billion more is really a big win for our side.) Since the Democratic Party is too impotent to institutionally challenge the GOP’s radical policy agenda, you can’t blame people for thinking that the only way they can make their voices heard is though large public protests.

This grassroots public opposition to the Bush administration may be the only way that Americans of all stripes, and elected Democrats in particular, can see with their own eyes that Bush’s policies are not universally supported. Combined with the continued protests in the rest of the world, it may be the only way to actually stop Bush’s wider global plans at least until after the election.

Whether we can keep Iraq from disintegrating into chaos or being the ongoing catalyst for more anti-American terrorism is largely a matter of good luck until we can replace the current administration and begin the hard task of rebuilding trust with our allies. Only then will we be able to confront the terrorist threat and the dangers of proliferation with any hope of long term success.

William Saleton is joking here, isn’t he?





digby 3/22/2003 02:48:00 PM |

Friday, March 21, 2003

 
Going To The Mattresses

Bill Keller believes that Colin Powell should resign because Bush and his cronies are slightly mad and dangerously ambitious and he is the only sane one of the bunch.

For a time he managed to keep a lid on the new American exuberance. Our relations with Russia and China weathered the early roughhousing over missile defense and other disputes, in large part because Mr. Powell was such a calming figure. Old-fashioned diplomacy helped line up the world's support for our war in Afghanistan and the broader war on terror. Thanks to Mr. Powell we (belatedly) framed our grievance against Iraq as a United Nations grievance; that 15 to nothing vote on Resolution 1441 was probably the high-water mark of his diplomacy. Mr. Powell also, I am told, helped beat back the idea of fighting the war in Iraq on the cheap — with fewer troops, more high-tech dazzle, a little experiment with American lives. So he has won some big ones.

But that is exactly the problem. His formidable skills have been too much engaged in a kind of guerrilla war for the soul of the president, and it has shown. Critics in the administration and colleagues on this page have unfavorably compared his performance in the buildup to war with James Baker's whirlwind of global coalition-building before the gulf war in 1991. But Mr. Baker was operating as his president's right arm; Mr. Powell was busy protecting his right flank

[...]

The most important reason the secretary of state should go is that the president has chosen a course that repudiates much of what Mr. Powell has stood for — notably his deep suspicion of arrogant idealism. I don't mean that Mr. Bush is bent on a series of pre-emptive wars — surely the president would like to take the country into the election year at peace — but this is about how we throw our weight around in peacetime, too.

Critics of the Bush administration talk about the breach in the Atlantic alliance and the division at the United Nations as "collateral damage," as if, in the rush to get Iraq, the administration has blundered. That assumes it was an accident. It seems more plausible that this was not an attempt to put spine in the United Nations and NATO, but to discredit them. The global engineers talk with such contempt of these organizations, it is difficult to believe they want to salvage them as anything but appendages of American power.

[...]

Gosh Bill. Are you seriously suggesting that we would be better off if Bush hires another crazyass Cheney crony like the rest of his cuckoo's nest?

The non-borg war supporters are having quite a difficult time figuring out what to do about all this. They sincerely believed in the concept of freeing the Iraqi people and changing the repressive dynamic in the middle east, but they also have been slapped by the realization that Bush is so outrageously reckless that it is a mistake to hand him the means to unleash hell. This is a big lesson for some people, apparently. Yes, it's satisfying when somebody defies all the naysayers and growls, "Just Do It." Unfortunately, these same people are usually hot headed idiots who create far more problems than they solve. Sonny Corleone may be filled with righteous indignation and thoroughly justified in his outrage, but he's a dumbshit. He gets himself killed and makes everything worse, not better.

But, Keller's answer to the problem that Bush is out of control is bizarre. He seems to believe that Powell is the only one trying (and yes, mostly failing) to keep these guys from spinning out of control. But, he should resign in favor of someone who the President "trusts" and therefore, will help him to spin out of control.

Taken at face value, that's either deeply cynical or completely incoherent. But, there is the possibility that this is some kind of shot across the bow by Powell, who would cause a huge problem for Bush if he resigns. The word is that the Bush loyalists are pulling out the long knives and blaming him --- which Keller does too but only by saying that he is too good for such cretins, hardly a ringing indictment.

And he gets Powell on the record saying that he disagrees with the administration's view of America's role in the world. That's a big disagreement and he's gone public with it:

When I put the question of resigning to Mr. Powell yesterday, he was, characteristically, showing no signs of surrender. He has no intention of leaving, he said. He has the president's full confidence. He has been written off before. And Iraq is just Iraq — not the first in a series of military adventures.

"I think it's a bit of an overstatement to say that now this one's pocketed, on to the next place," Mr. Powell said. The larger question of America's role in the world, he said, "isn't answered yet."

Such a loyal and optimistic man would make some president a great secretary of state. Just not this president.

Who does he have in mind? Tony Blair?

Powell's not resigning. He's going to try to repair his tattered reputation (and maybe hold the line, if we're lucky.) And considering that his replacement would likely be some nut like John Bolton, it's just as well. An ineffectual Powell is still better than a wild-eyed neocon insisting on going to the mattresses. But, if this is Powell's way of making that statement, Keller sure did write it in the strangest form possible.




digby 3/21/2003 11:38:00 PM |

 
Misdirection

Gorilla-go-go points out that the brass ball House Republicans just slashed veterans benefits to the tune of almost 10 billion. Today. A-Day.

Forgetting the fact that it is being done so that the multi-millionaire Bush administration can cut their own taxes, and setting aside that it is the most blatently unpatriotic act I've heard of since 9/11, I have to wonder where these people get the sheer chutzpah to do this on the second day of our very first unilateral preventive invasion? I know they have no problem screwing the military personnel in favor of rich defense contractors, but this seems obtuse even by their standards.

Is it possible that the flaccid Democrats will even try to make these people explain themselves?

Update: Apparently this legislation actually passed on March 13th. Which answers my question. The Democrats are completely impotent.

From citizen k in the comment section:

Here's the quote [from Tacitus]:
"The crowd's loud cheers and shouts of applause were typical of the flatterer, excessive and insincere. Men vied with each other in their enthusiasm and prayers for his success, much as though they were sending off the dictator Ceasar or the Emperor Augustus. Their motive was neither fear nor affection, but a sheer passion for servility"
See the Republicans are right. Read the Dead White Males and learn about the Congressional Democrats. Zell, your master is calling. Oh, Congressman Gephart, it's goveling time.




digby 3/21/2003 09:07:00 PM |

 
Comment of the day:

by Hart

"A-Day..."

They left out "...that will live in infamy."




digby 3/21/2003 07:32:00 PM |

 
Grueling Schedule

TBOGG reports on President Skeepytime's week-end getaway.

The Commander In Chief takes his first R&R.




digby 3/21/2003 07:29:00 PM |

 
*Wargasm

Could somebody tell Wolf Blitzer to take a cold shower? He has done nothing but rhapsodise all day long about how "never in 30 years of journalism have I experienced such a bombardment, such a loud, nonstop, pounding cacophony of relentless American power, ogawdohgawdohgawd!"

This is why they are called media whores folks. Blitzer is in Kuwait City. He was responding to the same pictures that we all saw this morning. He didn't see anything we didn't see. But, like a good soldier he reported it as if he were live on the scene at Armageddon.

In theory, I don't object to this psy-ops campaign. If people give up before a lot of blood is shed, I couldn't be happier. But, Wolf Blitzer isn't faking it. He's a whore who loves his job.

(And, I would greatly enjoy seeing Wesley Clark grab Aaron Brown's toupe and shove it in his mouth the next time he makes some unctuous comment about the great job the troops are doing and then calls him Colonel. That's Supreme Allied Commander to you, Oprah.)


*The term "wargasm" stolen shamelessly from Atrios, who links to some excited little Freeper boyz.




digby 3/21/2003 04:45:00 PM |

 
You Want A Piece 'O Me?



White House political adviser Karl Rove tracked down the president of a conservative group at a friend's house and subjected him to a telephone tirade over perceived disloyalty. (Steve Pope -- AP)


Julia points out this article in the Washington Post that clearly reveals the Bush administration's only governing principles are loyalty to the President and strong arm tactics. Period.

[...]

As the United States wages war this week following a pair of ultimatums to the United Nations and Iraq, the airwaves and editorial pages of the world have been full of accusations that President Bush and his administration are guilty of coercive and harrying behavior. Even in typically friendly countries, Bush and the United States have been given such labels this week as "arrogant bully" (Britain), "bully boys" (Australia), "big bully" (Russia), "bully Bush" (Kenya), "arrogant" (Turkey) and "capricious" (Canada). Diplomats have accused the administration of "hardball" tactics, "jungle justice" and acting "like thugs."

At home, where support for the war on Iraq is strong and growing, such complaints of strong-arm tactics by the Bush administration nonetheless have a certain resonance -- even among Bush supporters. Though the issues are vastly different, Republican lawmakers and conservative interest groups report similar pressure on allies at home to conform to Bush's policy wishes.

Although all administrations use political muscle on the opposition, GOP lawmakers and lobbyists say the tactics the Bush administration uses on friends and allies have been uniquely fierce and vindictive. Just as the administration used unbending tactics before the U.N. Security Council with normally allied countries such as Mexico, Germany and France, the Bush White House has calculated that it can overcome domestic adversaries if it tolerates no dissent from its friends.

In recent weeks, the White House has been pushing GOP governors to oust the leadership of the National Governors Association to make the bipartisan group endorse Bush's views. Interest groups report pressure from the administration -- sometimes on groups' donors -- to conform to Bush's policy views and even to fire dissenters.

Often, companies and their K Street lobbyists endorse ideas they privately oppose or question, according to several longtime Republican lobbyists. The fear is that Bush will either freeze them out of key meetings or hold a grudge that might deprive them of help in other areas, the lobbyists said. When the Electronic Industries Alliance declined to back Bush's dividend tax cut, the group was frozen out when the White House called its "friends" in the industry to discuss the tax cut, according to White House and business sources.

[...]

Conservative interest groups get similar pressure. When the free-market Club for Growth sent a public letter to the White House to protest White House intervention in GOP primaries for "liberal-leaning Republicans," the group's president, Stephen Moore, picked up the phone at a friend's one evening to receive a screaming tirade from Rove, who had tracked him down. On another occasion when Moore objected to a Bush policy, Rove called Richard Gilder, the Club for Growth's chairman and a major contributor, to protest.

"I think this monomaniacal call for loyalty is unhealthy," Moore said. "It's dangerous to declare anybody who crosses you an enemy for life. It's shortsighted." Leaders of three other conservative groups report that their objections to Bush policies have been followed by snubs and, in at least one case, phone calls suggesting the replacement of a critical scholar. "They want sycophants rather than allies," said the head of one think tank.

Corporations are coming under increasing pressure not just to back Bush, but to hire his allies to represent them in meetings with Republicans. As part of the "K Street Project," top GOP officials, lawmakers and lobbyists track the political affiliation and contributions of people seeking lobbying jobs.

In a private meeting last week, chief executives from several leading technology firms told Rep. Calvin M. Dooley (Calif.) and other moderate Democrats that they were under heavy pressure to back the Bush tax plan, even though many of them had reservations about it. "There is a perception among some business interests there could be retribution if you don't play ball on almost every issue that comes up," Dooley said.

Read the whole thing. (And the editor's note at the beginning.) It is now out in the open. No excuses. Any real libertarian or conservative who continues to back these Mafiosi is complicit. These people are undemocratic and intolerant of dissent. They openly use threats to intimidate their allies and strike fear into their enemies. This is not business as usual. We are seeing more elements every day of a new and unique American form of totalitarianism

Refers to systems of government not representative in fact, characterized by the existence of a single political party, organized on a dictatorial basis, with so close an identity between such party and its policies and the governmental policies of the country in which it exists, that the party and the government constitute an indistinguishable unit, and the forcible suppression of opposition to such party.

There have been signs of this coming for the last 10 years. The propaganda machine, the intense partisanship, the trumped up impeachment (in collusion with the "independent" investigators and the courts), an unelected court deciding a presidential election and now an illegitimate and illegal war being pursued under a doctrine of preventive war in pursuit of American hegemony. And, we are operating under de facto one-party rule within which no dissent is tolerated.

What exactly do these people have to do to convince the Democrats that George W. Bush isn't running his Daddy's GOP? We are looking at something new here that is more than just the sum of it's parts.

Again, I urge everyone to read David Niewert's seminal series on Rush, Newspeak and Fascism. It isn't being hysterical or conspiracist to recognize that something has gone very, very wrong when virtually every country in the world and even many of his own political allies are saying that the President of the United States is a thug.





digby 3/21/2003 03:03:00 PM |

 
A-Day

Armageddon Day?


I'm watching the Al Jazeera feed on CNN. So are millions of people throughout the middle east.

I feel sick to my stomach.

What do you suppose people watching in Riyadh, Cairo, Amman, Beirut, Islamabad, Damascus and Gaza and elsewhere are feeling?





digby 3/21/2003 10:10:00 AM |

 
"The Constitution just sets minimums. Most of the rights that you enjoy go way beyond what the Constitution requires.''





Courtesy The Propaganda Remix Project


edited 3/21 -- corrected stupid error




digby 3/21/2003 12:20:00 AM |

Thursday, March 20, 2003

 
Oh Fergawdsake

But the government also consulted Parisoula Lampsos, who the Defense Department believes has passed a polygraph examination in support of her claim that she was Hussein's mistress in Iraq for many years. Lampsos has previously distinguished Hussein from his doubles in more than a dozen cases, one official said, and this time she said he was not the man in the broadcast.

This via Sean-Paul, the hardest working man in Blogtopia. His blog is the place to be for minute by minute analysis. (And here's to his lovely, understanding wife, the Russian beauty and her cat Barsik.)




digby 3/20/2003 11:44:00 PM |

 
Strange Bedfellows

We all know that Michael Kinsley is objectively pro-Saddam so there is no doubt that he deserves to be called a traitor for writing the following today in Slate:

Putting all this together, Bush is asserting the right of the United States to attack any country that may be a threat to it in five years. And the right of the United States to evaluate that risk and respond in its sole discretion. And the right of the president to make that decision on behalf of the United States in his sole discretion. In short, the president can start a war against anyone at any time, and no one has the right to stop him. And presumably other nations and future presidents have that same right. All formal constraints on war-making are officially defunct.

Well, so what? Isn't this the way the world works anyway? Isn't it naive and ultimately dangerous to deny that might makes right? Actually, no. Might is important, probably most important, but there are good, practical reasons for even might and right together to defer sometimes to procedure, law, and the judgment of others. Uncertainty is one. If we knew which babies would turn out to be murderous dictators, we could smother them in their cribs. If we knew which babies would turn out to be wise and judicious leaders, we could crown them dictator. In terms of the power he now claims, without significant challenge, George W. Bush is now the closest thing in a long time to dictator of the world. He claims to see the future as clearly as the past. Let's hope he's right.

I wonder though, if anyone asked the libertarian warmongers or the Republican patriot police about Joe Conason's post today pointing out that Charles V. Pena, director of defense policy studies at the libertarian Cato Institute, is also giving aid and comfort to the enemy when he says:

Ultimately, the path Bush has led the United States down is not about weapons of mass destruction, Security Council Resolution 1441, weapons inspections, or disarmament. It has always been about regime change and using America's military power to enforce a world order deemed favorable to U.S. interests. Further, the United States is setting a potentially dangerous precedent by engaging in preventative war -- not a pre-emptive strike against an imminent threat -- based on the uncertainty of not knowing whether a threat might materialize at some point in the future. Now that the administration is where it wanted to be all along and war seems certain, we must hope for a swift and decisive war with a minimum of casualties on both sides.

Anybody have a problem with that? Andy? Glenn?




digby 3/20/2003 08:13:00 PM |

 
All American Boys

Salon has a new column called "Homefront" collecting stories from around the land of the free during wartime. The first one is a doozy:

Windham, N.Y., is a ski town, nestled in the Catskills, about two and a half hours from New York City. Main Street, a short, quaint strip that cuts across the bottom of Windham Mountain, is where you can find everything you really need: a post office, a school, a deli, a diner, a gas station, and toward the end, an old restaurant and bar called Madison's.

Last Sunday, my friend Dawn and I found ourselves at this local haunt after a day of skiing. The place was dead. A lottery game and a golf tournament quietly flickered on the two TV sets. So we started making polite conversation with the bartender, and then the two men sitting next to us.

One was a 40-something, recently laid-off businessman from Little Silver, N.J., a town that's 15 minutes from where I grew up at the Jersey Shore. The father of two young girls, he had spent the day skiing with his family. His friend was a lawyer, a local, and the father of four, including three girls. They seemed amused to be sitting next to two young, single women from Manhattan, who were both journalists. After they gave us a tip about tax evasion at a local nightclub, they asked us what we thought of the war.

When Dawn and I said we were against the war, the men's expressions tightened and they looked down at their steaks. They were huge supporters of the war. They argued that if America didn't disarm Saddam Hussein, no one would, and that America usually acts alone anyway, so who cares what those European bastards think. I'd encountered opinions like theirs many times before. Their attitudes reminded me of many of the men I grew up with -- fiercely patriotic, desperate to protect their families from terrorism, bursting with faith in the president.

But when we suggested that Sept. 11 had nothing to do with Iraq, the conversation immediately shifted. Their faces reddened, and they began to talk quickly at the same time, the businessman slapping his hand against the bar to punctuate his outbursts:

"At some point, you have to trust your president! You have to believe that he knows something we don't!"

"They attacked our country. Now we have to get them!"

"I was down there at the Trade Center. I had a burning piece of paper on my face! Burning. Piece. Of. Paper. On. My. Face!"

The businessman seemed to have forgotten that thousands had perished at the towers -- he didn't mention them, anyway -- so consumed was he with his personal vendetta against the Sept. 11 terrorists, I mean, Saddam. In fact, our increasingly irate new friends accused us of supporting Saddam over Bush. When we explained that nobody "supports" Saddam, they went ballistic.

"You know what? You two are the reason why this country's going down the fucking toilet."

"This is why I hate you city folks. Fucking city folks. Why don't you go back to New York? The fucking toilet."

"Communists. That's what you are. Communist feminists. Fucking liberals."

As disturbed as we were, at that point all we could do was laugh. They were behaving so preposterously, each yelling louder than the other one, slamming the bar and sweating. A couple who'd arrived halfway through the conversation looked at them and shook their heads at us sympathetically. We shrugged.

They didn't appreciate our indifference to their anger. The calmer we were the more enraged they became.

The businessman slowly turned to face us directly.

"How 'bout this. You like those people so much? You like those fuckers so much? How 'bout I throw a veil over your head and drag you by your ponytail out the door? Veil. Over your head. Drag you. By your ponytail," he said, dissolving into a bizarre, almost tribal chant.

As I said before, these men had seemed familiar to me in some way. But their vitriol genuinely surprised me, especially since the prospect of gagging us with lace and pulling our hair really seemed to turn them on. Their excitement, as much as their hatred, was palpable. We grabbed our coats to leave.

"Hey, so I guess this means we don't get a kiss, huh!" the lawyer called after us, cackling ecstatically as we slammed the door.

I heard something similar not too long ago here in Southern California. Goose stepping to Rush isn't confined to the backwoods.






digby 3/20/2003 06:59:00 PM |

 
Power To The People

Yglesias approvingly quotes this TAPPED piece about the antiwar movement:

One of the problems with these big marches -- impressive as they may be as shows of strength -- is that they have little lasting value. The broad anti-globalization/anti-war movement has tended to disdain actual electoral politics, believing it to be corrupt beyond repair (which is, in its way, the ultimate kind of cynicism). But in the long run, the way you win in a democracy is by winning elections, and you win elections by organizing for candidates and helping them raise money.[...]If the people who spend their time organizing and marching would spend even a fraction of that energy and time involving themselves in real electoral politics -- not futile, Naderite third-party runs, another form of political narcissism -- they could actually punish Bush for what he's done

Well, yes. The organizers should all work to make sure that Bush is not elected in 2004. Everyone should get involved in electoral politics and try their damnedest to nominate the best possible candidate and they should give money and time to make that happen. Who can argue with that?

But, this isn't a zero sum game. In fact, for the average citizen, protests often serve as a catalyst for more general political involvement. It is very disheartening to read all these admonitions to this nascent antiwar movement saying that the participants are somehow being unserious.

We have spent years bemoaning the fact that people are politically disinterested, that voters are apathetic, that they don't feel they have a voice. Now, when rather large numbers of Americans have left the comfort of their homes and their shopping malls to make a sincere statement alongside a bunch of strangers, liberals behave as if it is nothing. Outside of college campuses, the fact is that street protests don't happen very often in America. Unlike in Europe, general strikes and large political protests are not a big part of our civic life. So, when it happens we should really take a good hard look at why. And we should pay special attention when the people who are protesting are average Joes and Janes who work for a living and have kids and own houses. Because that means that Americans are waking up and starting to pay attention.

Telling these awakened liberals that what they are doing makes no difference and that they should instead volunteer for a candidate and write a check is not exactly inspiring. But, getting citizens involved through a feeling of solidarity with millions of people all around the globe just might have the salutory effect of making a percentage of those protesters decide that they will write a check and walk a precinct in order to elect a candidate they believe in --- or to stop the war --- or to punish Bush.

People need to feel part of something in order to get involved in politics. And as someone who has volunteered in many a campaign I can tell you that for the last decade it has had all the uplifting inspiration of the Bataan death march. It is work with no satisfaction in the soul or spirit and without that politics becomes nothing more than a duty.

The Republicans have a base of committed true believers and we desperately need some of that too. Telling these newly galvanized Democrats that the only way they can legitimately express themselves is through the ballot box --- particularly in this day of manufactured, pre-fab campaigning --- is a very self-defeating idea.

We need to get our blood up if we expect to beat back the flag-waving cavaliers of the Republican party. This kind of tepid advice isn't going to cut it.



Post Script:
Tim Dunlop, erudite as always, on this topic.





digby 3/20/2003 04:18:00 PM |

 
Memo To The Democratic Presidential Candidates:

Do not fall for this bullshit:

While Democrats and Republicans closed ranks last night behind the troops, leaders of both parties have shown a willingness to seize on war issues to score political points. Many Republicans hope to chill criticism of Bush and his Iraq policy by sending a clear and early message that they will come down hard on vocal Democratic dissenters, especially those in positions of national prominence, GOP lawmakers said. These Republicans worry that France, Russia and other critics will seize on comments from high-profile Democrats to buttress their case internationally that a preemptive war is unwise and unwarranted.

[...]

Some Republicans see a longer-term political advantage in such applause. They believe Daschle and other Democrats will suffer in the 2004 elections, which may be dominated by themes of national security and terrorism, if voters view them as unpatriotic or soft on defense.

Most national polls show that about two-thirds of Americans back the war against Iraq. "When you are constantly criticizing the president, you are also criticizing the 70 percent of people supporting him," DeLay said.

National Republican Congressional Committee Chairman Thomas M. Reynolds (R-N.Y.) said Democrats will likely "pay a political price" for feeding the perception they opposed disarming and deposing Hussein. That is why most of the Democrats running for president have backed Bush in the conflict, Reynolds said.

Reynolds warned that politicians, such as Daschle, who hail from states Bush won in 2000 are particularly at risk in 2004 if they criticize the president's Iraq policy. This proves that attacks on Daschle are "so brazenly political and over the top and politically motivated," said Daschle's spokeswoman Ranit Schmelzer.

It should be obvious by now that there is no margin in playing Neville Chamberlain to Tom DeLay. Max Cleland proved that nothing will stop them from lying about your record and assassinating your character, no matter what you do. It will gain you nothing to worry about quelling Republican attacks on your patriotism.

If a Democrat wins, he will win despite being smeared as an unpatriotic coward by the Republican Party. Whether he supports the President or doesn't he will be portrayed as having tried to foil him at every turn. It is pointless to pretend otherwise. Put your head down and barrel along on your own terms.

Remember also, that the entire strategy is designed for only two reasons. The first and foremost is to get Bush legitimately elected, if possible (illegitimately, if not.) The second is to use his wartime popularity to pass their radical domestic agenda under threat of retaliation to moderates who stray. I doubt seriously that they have ever really understood that their bullying and hectoring is what drove Jeffords from the party, but they will likely not be quite as obvious about it as they were with him. It is in the Democratic Party's interest for Daschle and Pelosi to take some heat right now to give the GOP moderates some cover. This administration may very well overplay their hand (they're not good at sausage making and Frist is a virgin) so it is worth the Party's while to hang tough, really tough, on this budget. The presidential candidates can help by giving Daschle and Pelosi some cover as well. It's going to get bumpy and it would be nice if the Democrats could show a little bit of solidarity here. It would certainly be good for the country.

The Republicans have the strange habit of getting manic and agitated just after they win a battle. They become enraged when they find that winning didn't result in unconditional surrender by the political opposition. On the day the Washington Post revealed that the president had rallied 71% of the American public, George Will wrote:

Speaking of indiscriminate chaos, many elements of the Democratic Party, including most of its base and many of its most conspicuous leaders, seem deranged, unhinged by the toxic fumes of hatred and contempt they emit for the president. From what does this arise? It cannot just be Florida, the grievance that Democrats, assiduous cultivators of victimhood, love to nurse. No, many Democrats' problem, which threatens to disqualify their party from presidential responsibilities for a generation, is their incontinent love of snobbery and nostalgia -- condescension toward a president they consider ignorant, and a longing for the fun of antiwar days of yore

I don’t know why Republicans have such an overwhelming need for their opponents to cry Uncle and completely capitulate. I suspect it may be from frustration at fighting for an aggressive policy against Soviet communism but never being allowed a final, mano-a-mano battle from which they could derive the masculine satisfaction of dominance and victory. I don’t know. But, it is never enough that they win, they want the Democrats to grovel.

It is more and more clear that those who hated it the most developed a sort of Stockholm Syndrome in which they came to admire many facets of Soviet totalitarianism, one of the most obvious being the efficiency and power offered by the one party state. These people do not believe there is such a thing as the loyal opposition. Opposition is, by definition, disloyal.

Rush has been known to say, “I’d like to keep one liberal around in a museum so every body could see what they look like.” Republicans believe we are the enemy. We cannot win unless we understand this.





digby 3/20/2003 02:38:00 PM |

 
The War Show

CNN has it goin' on. Baghdad Under Seige, Part I put them on the map and they own the sequel, too, so far. Nic Robertson is the only guy worth watching. Aaron Brown's trying to be Dan Rather, but Dan Rather is still here and he does this verbose sanctimony so much better.

FoxNews proves what we always knew. It is to real news as professional wrestling is to boxing. Fake. They have nothing to offer when something real is happening. Colonel Ollie is unintentionally hilarious.

CBS has the insignia of the military unit in which their correspondent is "embedded" up as a huge logo on the side of the screen, while said correspondent, all dressed up like big grown-up soldier, broadcasts by video phone which delivers its images in an otherwoldly green.

Brokaw suddenly and shockingly looks old and Ted Koppel looks uncomfortably like Dukakis in a tank. Big hair just doesn't work with the military thing.

And, according to Strangefeld, the war hasn't even started. When "Shock and Awe" does start, it will be "something we have never seen before." Cool. Maybe phasers and lasers and MOABS. So, there is still time to get the show together. Tom Friedman's poppin' up the Reddenbacher as we speak, rootin' for president Quarterback's Hail Mary to hit Saddam right between the eyes. I'll bet he's got that CD of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" playing on a loop..

We're at blinking, neon orange. Tents are being pitched all over Washington as we speak. Atrios calls it "War Porn."




digby 3/20/2003 12:25:00 PM |

Wednesday, March 19, 2003

 


Who said that? I can't find the quote in the story.

Isn't it strange that this quote, "the evil one will run in defeat" is completely believable coming from either Saddam or Bush? ?




digby 3/19/2003 10:30:00 PM |

 
Resistance Is Futile

The United States knows all and sees all. Schwartzkopf said he's never seen anything like this "awesome" technology. The BBC said "it's as if the US has a 3 dimensional picture of every single thing that is happening in Baghdad." No need to tell the Brits about the strike, though. Gotta move fast. They may represent 70% of the coalition 'o the willin', but Blair is still a limey twit, always making Bush sound stupid. Killing Saddam's like swatting a fly. We have X-Ray vision and he's probably dead. We think. Like Osama.

Oh wait.

We got to watch Bush putting on his make-up on the BBC feed for about 5 minutes before the speech. He looked psyched. I believe he mouthed the words "what, me worry?"

Aaron Brown may cry at any moment with all this "exquisite tension." I believe he soiled his trousers when Nic Roberts said the word "anti-aircraft." Brian Williams needs some of that white stuff under his eyes but his shirt is mighty crisp. Oliver North is "embeded" with the Army and can't stop himself from screaming "charge, you cowards, charge!" The troops smile indulgently.

The war show is, so far, very disappointing. When Bernie and Peter were hiding under their beds back in '91 at the Baghdad Hilton, and a handsome gas masked Bibi spoke calmly from Tel Aviv in his mellifluous American accent, it was new and exciting. The Patriot missiles were faster than a speeding scud and could pluck that baby right out of the sky. Cool fireworks. (Of course, we later found out they couldn't hit water if they were pushed over the side of a boat.)

Still, it all was new and so post-pac man. I'm not seeing it now, no matter how they rhapsodise about the technology. I wonder if people are still watching. Especially since there's nothing to watch. We just turned on "Curb Your Enthusiasm."

But, I imagine it's pretty darned exciting in Baghdad this morning. I imagine it feels pretty real and stimulating to them.

In fact, I would imagine that in a day or two all those men and women and kids in Baghdad are going to feel like New Yorkers on the morning of September 11th .

They deserve it just as much as we did.





digby 3/19/2003 09:02:00 PM |

 
The opening stages of the "disarmament" of Iraq has begun.The President will speak to the nation at 10:15.

Fasten your seatbelt and start praying. Human beings are on the other end of those bombs.





digby 3/19/2003 06:49:00 PM |

 
I Can See Clearly Now

Real life has unfortunately intruded, so blogging is light at the moment. I hope to find some time later today.

Meanwhile, I find that my earlier post, "where'd they get all those flags?" has been answered.

Jesse links to the Chicago tribune article reporting that Clear Channel "sponsored" all those pro-war rallies of the last few days.

Now, why do you suppose they did that?

Clear Channel is by far the largest owner of radio stations in the nation. The company owned only 43 in 1995, but when Congress removed many of the ownership limits in 1996, Clear Channel was quickly on the highway to radio dominance. The company owns and operates 1,233 radio stations (including six in Chicago) and claims 100 million listeners. Clear Channel generated about 20 percent of the radio industry's $16 billion in 2001 revenues.

The media giant's size also has generated criticism. Some recording artists have charged that Clear Channel's dominance in radio and concert promotions is hurting the recording industry. Congress is investigating the effects of radio consolidation. And the FCC is considering ownership rule changes, among them changes that could allow Clear Channel to expand its reach.

Now, let me get this straight. Celebrities are stepping out of bounds when they express political views opposing the President. But, large media companies sponsoring phony pro-military "rallies" replete with free flag swag is perfectly a-ok. Just trying to get the rules straight.

"I think this is pretty extraordinary," said former Federal Communications Commissioner Glen Robinson, who teaches law at the University of Virginia. "I can't say that this violates any of a broadcaster's obligations, but it sounds like borderline manufacturing of the news."

No kidding. Perhaps the most interesting thing about this story is the fact that while rallies were extremely well covered this past week-end, they were presented as spontaneously growing up out of the pro-military grassroots. They were not portrayed as having corporate sponsorship and they certainly were not reported as being a product of a concerted talk radio campaign of right wing nut jobs and their GOP corporate masters.

And I didn't hear one journalist ask the obvious question of where they got all those damned flags! Somebody was handing them out and nobody asked who paid for them. More good work from the DeVry Institute School of spokesmodel journalism

Clear Channel stations are still banning the Dixie Chicks, as well, with the full support of their parent company. Since they own vast numbers of radio stations, and already practise a form of legal payola that is rivaled only by the Mafia, we can consider this a "Luca Brazzi sleeps with the fishes" kind of message to the beleagered recording industry. Of course, the fact that the Dixie Chicks' next tour is sponsored by Clear Channel may explain why they dragged poor Natalie out to make one of those SOS eye-blinking POW statements. They've got those girls by their black-roots.

Clear Channel plays Mighty Wurlitzer music only. And they are more than happy to pay for the privilege.




digby 3/19/2003 12:21:00 PM |

Tuesday, March 18, 2003

 
Crony Hegemony

Seeing The Forest quotes Drudge today :

THE BLITZ, THEN SIEGE OF BAGHDAD STARTS IN FOUR DAYS: Troops hope to have Saddam Hussein surrounded in Baghdad within four days after an unprecedented aerial blitz which will obliterate one in 10 major buildings in Iraq... Developing...

He then comments:

This fits with one of these rumors we have been hearing -- that the Iraq war is happening because the right wingers want to demonstrate America's superior power to the world. They want to show the world what we can do to anyone that opposes us.

Destroying one of every ten major buildings in Iraq? Because we think Iraq might attack us someday? Because, as Bush said in his speech last night, they might attack us in five years?

I might add that there now appears to be several other very important reasons to destroy one in ten buildings in Baghdad:

Bechtel
Halliburton
Fluor
Parsons
LBG
etc

These are American owned international construction firms. In a move so cynical and so audacious that it is hard to wrap your arms around, it would appear that the Bush administration is preparing to destroy the infrastructure of an entire country and then repay their largest campaign contributors with huge no-bid contracts to rebuild it.

And, happily for all concerned, these companies --- operating outside the onerous regulatory climate of the United States --- can cut corners to their hearts content while obscenely overbilling the government by the billions, all under the fog of war. And nobody pays any taxes at all!

This is not unprecedented, of course. There is a long history of war profiteering on the part of major players in this administration going all the way back to the 30's. Crony capitalism is nothing new. National corporatism has been seen before (notably Nazi Germany.) Colonialism is the oldest story in the book. But, this takes it to a new audacious level.

It's not all about oil. It's simpler than that. It's just all about money. Big Business spent over 100 million dollars installing the idiot sock-puppet to do its bidding and he is doing it --- not that he, or even many of those surrounding him probably know it explicitly. He thinks he's been ordained by God and some others are sincere, if deluded, in their belief that the best thing for the world is American "benevolent hegemony," however oxymoronic that is in the context of "Shock and Awe." Being generous one could say that those neocon idealists like William Kristol, who laid out the positive vision for the Pax Americana, are the most useful idiots the corporatists could have ever dreamed of.

The real question now is whether the businesses who own the Bush administration are thinking long term or short term. Do they value stability and predictablity to protect their long term investments or are they modern quick hit artists? If it is the latter then we are led back to the corporate scandals and find that the scariest aspect of this is that Bush's single most enthusiastic big money supporter was a company built on a foundation of quicksand --- Enron.

It's bad enough that the powers behind the throne are ruthless enterprises that care nothing for democratic institutions. What if the truth is that the modern American crony-run operations that really call the shots are not only undemocratic but incompetent as well? It's literally the worst of all possible worlds.





digby 3/18/2003 12:24:00 PM |

Monday, March 17, 2003

 
Corporate Welfare Queens

Yglesias posts this shocker via Marshall:

The Bush administration's audacious plan to rebuild Iraq envisions a sweeping overhaul of Iraqi society within a year of a war's end, but leaves much of the work to private U.S. companies.

The Bush plan, as detailed in more than 100 pages of confidential contract documents, would sideline United Nations (news - web sites) development agencies and other multilateral organizations that have long directed reconstruction efforts in places such as Afghanistan (news - web sites) and Kosovo. The plan also would leave big nongovernmental organizations largely in the lurch: With more than $1.5 billion in Iraq work being offered to private U.S. companies under the plan, just $50 million is so far earmarked for a small number of groups such as CARE and Save the Children.

[...]

European officials, and even some prominent Iraqi dissidents, have reacted to the current U.S. plans with disbelief. They charge that efforts to keep the U.N. and non-U.S. contractors on the sidelines will delay reconstruction in Iraq and stir deeper ill will toward Washington. Some U.S. humanitarian groups charge the Bush administration has downplayed the difficulty of the postwar work in the hopes of scoring some quick public-relations points.

[...]

Much of the heaviest work will fall to U.S. companies through a growing web of contracts with the Pentagon and the U.S. Agency for International Development. USAID is expected this week to pick the prime contractor for a $900 million job rebuilding Iraq's infrastructure, including highways, bridges, airports and government buildings. The agency is also contracting for five other large jobs, worth a total of between $300 million and $500 million, administering Iraq's seaport and international airports, revamping its schools and health-care system, and handling large scale logistics such as water transport. The Army Corps of Engineers is also taking bids for work worth up to $500 million for building projects such as roadways and military barracks. Additional contracts to refurbish Iraq's neglected oil industry would likely be handled through the U.N., which currently administers Iraq's oil exports.

Four groups of U.S. companies are competing for the $900 million contract, which was put out for bids in secret last month. The companies were picked under rules that allow U.S. agencies to skirt open and competitive bidding procedures to meet emergency needs. All have done government work for years and have deep political ties to Washington. Vice President Dick Cheney once served as head of Halliburton Co., whose subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root is part of one bidding consortium.

Other big bidders are Bechtel Group Inc.; Parsons Corp., which has allied with Brown & Root; and Louis Berger Group and Fluor Corp., which are bidding as a team. These companies made political contributions of a combined $2.8 million between 1999 and 2002, more than two-thirds of which went to Republicans, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a watchdog group. Bechtel was the largest single donor, having given $1.3 million in political contributions.

[...]

The U.S. postwar plans for Iraq, being directed by the new Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance in the Pentagon, are striking in their scope and intended speed. The administration's plan to rehabilitate the Iraqi school system, for example, envisions the chosen contractor sending in teams to obtain payroll lists and assess teacher salaries just as U.S. military forces secure parts of Iraq, according to a 10-page USAID contract proposal that went out to companies last month. The contract, officials say, could total $100 million, and will cover five pilot programs for "accelerated learning" to be launched within three months, and then rolled out nationwide within 10 months. Only a third of Iraqi children now enroll in secondary school, but within a year the contractor will have "all children back in school.

I see. Sure. Piece of cake.

I hear there are quite a few former Enron executives who are "at liberty." They should be brought in immediately to show some of that good ole Murikan know-how. Lord knows we have oodles of Americans who have the requisite knowledge of Iraqi culture. We should be able to bring this one in under budget and ahead of schedule, no problema.

I'm awfully relieved, though, that President GI Joe is eradicating evil and terror because it sure seems like it would be a teensy weensy bit dangerous for all those American targets there in Iraq if he doesn't. It's damned lucky that he has the whole world on our side so we won't have to keep hundreds of thousands of troops there to protect the corporate welfare queens from those pesky suicide bombers.

Jesus. This just keeps getting better and better...







digby 3/17/2003 04:37:00 PM |

 
A River Of Refugees

Seth D. Michaels has a very good post up about the possible scenarios facing American troops within the next week or so.

Excerpt:

Picture this scenario: a war some decades in the future between the U.S. and Canada. Canada informs us that in three days, Chicago will be no more, so people had best evacuate. How would they all get out? Cars would be clogging the roads, people would leave on foot, panic would set in. Where would these people go? Stay in hotels? Stay with friends? Imagine the impact of three million people, proud owners only the possessions they can carry, suddenly thrust into the suburbs and countryside. What would they eat? Where would they sleep? How many would have no choice but to stay and be killed?

Now, consider that Baghdad is bigger than Chicago, and that the area around has less infrastructure - no motels, no ATMs, no supermarkets. This is the humanitarian crisis the U.S. will be faced with - not at some unknown hypothetical future point, but in a matter of ten days or so.

Again, despite the unprecedented incompetence that defines this administration so far, we have to hope against hope that they achieve virtual perfection in this military operation. If they screw this up as badly as they have screwed up the federal budget, national security and world opinion we are in big trouble. We must place our faith in the professional military and hope they are less bloodthirsty and more competent than their civilian bosses --- and that they are allowed to run the show once the fighting begins.

The thought of Junior, Newt and Rummy in the war room scares the living shit out of me.






digby 3/17/2003 12:54:00 PM |

 
Let Me Introduce To You...

The one and only "Compassionate Conservatives!"





digby 3/17/2003 12:32:00 PM |

 


Where did all those exact same sized flags come from, anyway? Who paid for them?






digby 3/17/2003 11:16:00 AM |

 
Collateral Damage

British and American military commanders in the Gulf insisted yesterday that Saddam Hussein could not hide his elite forces inside Baghdad with impunity, saying they would target military units with "precision" while seeking to minimise civilian deaths.

The warning to the Baghdad regime will be seen as preparation of world public opinion for potential heavy loss of life among the Iraqi population in the event of US and British troops having to fight house-to-house in urban areas.

[...]

Gen Franks told ABC News: "The one who holds the key to civilian casualties . . inside Iraq is Saddam Hussein. We continue to see examples of the placement of military command and control, and military weapons, close to hospitals and close to schools and close to mosques and that sort of thing."

He said that targets where civilian lives were at risk were not "off-limits" but "one takes a very careful look at that and balances cost and reward."

Since Newtie and Strangefeld have apparently been fine tuning the battle plans, (they both watched "The Longest Day" more than 6 times, so they are experts) I have the sickening, sinking feeling that the actual war may end up being as fucked up as the non-diplomacy leading up to it.

God, I hope not. The only thing we can hope for at this point is that it is short and successful with a minimal loss of life. A unilateral preventive war waged by the most powerful military the world has ever known against a weakened dictatorship has almost no legitimacy as it is. If it requires a massive loss of life it will likely be looked upon by history as a war crime.

If you are a praying type, pray for a very quick victory.




digby 3/17/2003 10:39:00 AM |

 
Commander In Chief

Our Supreme Omniscient Commander of Good went out of his way after 9/11 to tamp down any vigilantism against American Muslims. But French people in America should not expect that he will show the same forbearance. In fact, just last week he spoke to regional reporters and made it clear that he endorsed the backlash against the French:

With the Mexican press full of a debate over the ramifications of a vote against the resolution, Bush added, “But, nevertheless, I don’t expect for there to be significant retribution from the government.”
His emphasis was on the word “government,” raising the possibility of adverse reaction to Mexico from the American business community and average citizens.

Making that point, he cited what he called “an interesting phenomena taking place here in America about the French.”

With many Americans unhappy at French resistance to a war in Iraq, the president said there has developed “a backlash against the French, not stirred up by anybody except by the people.”

Anyone who says the man doesn’t have leadership qualities isn’t looking in the right place. Atrios found this article from Houston:

For Francoise Thomas, the anger against France for its continuing opposition to military action against Iraqi President Saddam Hussein hadn't hit home until she read about it on one of her doors.

When Thomas took out the garbage Saturday morning, she saw red letters spray-painted on the garage door of her townhouse.

"Scum go back to France," it read.

I guess Karl isn’t worried about the “French” vote.

Here's More:

THE message scrawled on the side of an American bunker-busting bomb being wheeled out into the desert was blunt: “Fuque the French” had been scrawled on the side by a member of the US Air Force.

digby 3/17/2003 09:39:00 AM |

Sunday, March 16, 2003

 
Under Siege

Calpundit highly recommends this piece by Fareed Zakaria in Newsweek and it is very good. In fact, even for someone as deeply mistrustful of the Bush administration as I it is shocking to read that every single country that has had dealings with the United States in the last year (except Britain and Israel who are probably lying) has been left feeling humiliated. Yowza.

Kevin then makes the following comment:

Zakaria's observation that the most powerful nation in the world somehow feels as if it is "besieged" is a telling one. Time and again, when I try to figure out what is happening in America, I keep coming back to the palpable sense of fear that seems to envelop us. We are seemingly afraid of everything: child molesters, terrorists, street crime, sharks — in a way that is wildly out of proportion to the actual danger they present.

[…]

Our reaction to 9/11 has been the same. Instead of making use of the outpouring of support that we got in its aftermath, we have turned in on ourselves, and in the process we have changed from the flawed but generous nation that we are into a mean and paranoid country that lashes out at friends and enemies alike.

I have thought a lot about this question as well. I spent some of my grade school years in Kansas, where my father worked on the missile silos. Every single day at school we practiced diving under our desks in anticipation of a nuclear attack. When JFK was killed, the town I lived in went on nuclear alert. The assumption was that the Soviets had to be behind it.

But, I do not think there was the kind of pervasive paranoia and sense of fear that we see today. Maybe it was that many people had recent memories of war so they had a more philosophical perspective, I don’t know. Paradoxically, despite the fact that nuclear annihilation was an everyday concern, people didn’t seem to be afraid.

I think this current sense of being besieged stems in large part from the emergence over the last 10-20 years of the tabloid TV news media. In our insular society, where many people experience their community by watching the local news, the “if it bleeds it leads” directive makes people believe that they are inundated by crime and pestilence and deviant sex and everything else that a tabloid press has always used to sell advertising. I have seen polls that indicate that even when crime has gone down significantly, as it did during the late 90’s, people are still convinced that their community is drowning in crime. If you watch the 11 o’clock news here in LA, you are easily convinced that you are living in post-modern anarchy and that it is relentless and escalating even though statistics show otherwise. Fear is stimulating and stimulation is what gets people to pay attention in a sea of white noise and talking heads. It's very hard to look away.

But, there is more to it than that. We are in one of those periods in which the paranoid style in American politics has become dominant. Listen to talk radio or watch cable news, the two most explicitly political forums in the electronic media, and the paranoia is palpable. This sense of being under siege is fed daily by the likes of Rush and the rest, who mercilessly pound home to their devoted listeners the idea that they are victims of a liberal, permissive culture that is trying to undermine their values and a bloated, consuming government that is trying to steal their money. Everything they care about is in danger of being invaded, overtaken and eliminated by the political opposition. Even those who do not listen are subtly influenced by the conversation in the background. It drifts through the body politic like smoke.

Strangely then, it’s within the safety of their living rooms and their cars that the profitable message of paranoia is drummed into the minds of the free people of the United States over and over and over again. America’s insularity is the instrument of its fear.





digby 3/16/2003 11:30:00 PM |

 
Convincing Evidence

Bill Schneider on CNN just justified the US defying the UN on Iraq by showing a list of other wars that were fought without UN approval. He summed up by saying something like It may be better to defy the UN than to seek its approval. The list?

France invading Algeria
Vietnam
The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan
The Falklands

Well now, I don't know about you, but that list doesn't exactly make me feel any better, particularly considering that the first 3 were unequivocal quagmires. Not to mention morally bankrupt.






digby 3/16/2003 03:46:00 PM |

 
Great Game

Kevin links approvingly to Emma's interesting post about French motivation in opposing the invasion of Iraq and "how the game of nations is played."

However, I'm afraid I think her assessment is entirely too cynical. Yes, Chirac is a snake and nations act out of their own interests. Much more than principle or morality, by necessity and because we are humans, always goes into foreign policy. Nobody with any brains is arguing that France is acting purely out of altruistic love of the Iraqi children or entirely because they have a moral objection to war. That would be a silly and naive position.

But, neither can it be discounted that France is a democracy and Chirac is responding to the will of his citizens. Perhaps public opinion is irrelevant to him, but one cannot prove it merely by assertion. There is every reason to believe that Chirac would find himself under the kind of pressure that Blair is under and has decided to take a different tack based upon his personal self-interest, which is how the system is actually designed to work. It's hard to see that Chirac was particularly free under those circumstances to decide the issue based solely upon France's oil interests in the mid-east or his ambition to lead the EU, even if he wanted to. If he were acting out of economic self-interest alone, Chirac would have held out for the best deal and then played ball. That is certainly what the Bush administration expected to happen.

I also think she gives short shrift to the notion that the "Old Europe" experience of the last century has left them with a genuine suspicion of grand global plans like the starry-eyed neocon dream of Pax Americana and that assessment does have some basis in morality. (Certainly, the German position is undeniably rooted in its moral culpability for WWII.) They all see their own security in terms defined by two world wars fought on their own soil and they rightly mistrust propagandist phrases like "benevolent hegemony." Yes, that is "self-interest" but it isn't necessarily cynical and it isn't necessarily a hypocritical stance that would change if the players were different.

In other words, it's not naive to believe that there is a mix of genuine democratic principle and hard edged self-interested realism in France's position. That position, after all, is mirrored by far more countries than ours is and most of them do not have interests in Iraq that make it the least bit worth their while to side against the United States. Indeed, it cannot be seen as in the self interest of any individual nation. The U.S. is a powerhouse, both militarily and economically and there is little to be gained by a country like Chile or Mexico defying us on a war in a far off region in the world.

It is not believable to me that this large collection of democratic countries throughout the world are lining up against the US out of calculated individual self-interest alone. There are selfish motives involved in each, to be sure, but they are responding to their people and taking a big gamble that their collective power will serve to check what seems to be a very aggressive U.S. foreign policy doctrine. It's a ballsy move that makes no real sense if there is not a deep seated feeling amongst these players that the US must be put on notice that we do not have unfettered support for these global ambitions.

That global alliance of the unwilling simply cannot be explained as another Great Game.





digby 3/16/2003 03:19:00 PM |

 
Show Yer Cards


What a cocky, smirky, son-of-a-bitch.

This guy had a hard-on for war today. He is angry and he is excited and he is babbling incoherantly.

Yee Haw.


"We'll Meet Again Someday....."

Post Script:

It will be interesting to see if Karl's vaunted bandwagon effect will come to pass as it's obviously designed to do. Now that it's on for sure will everybody come scampering to be with the "winners?" We're about to find out.

And somebody should have given Junior a couple of valium before he went out there. He sounded suspiciously like he was about to declare war on France.









digby 3/16/2003 11:09:00 AM |

 
Bush aide: Inspections or not, we'll attack Iraq

GEORGE Bush's top security adviser last night admitted the US would attack Iraq even if UN inspectors fail to find weapons.

Dr Richard Perle stunned MPs by insisting a "clean bill of health" from UN chief weapons inspector Hans Blix would not halt America's war machine.

Evidence from ONE witness on Saddam Hussein's weapons programme will be enough to trigger a fresh military onslaught, he told an all- party meeting on global security.

Former defence minister and Labour backbencher Peter Kilfoyle said: "America is duping the world into believing it supports these inspections. President Bush intends to go to war even if inspectors find nothing.

"This make a mockery of the whole process and exposes America's real determination to bomb Iraq."

Dr Perle told MPs: "I cannot see how Hans Blix can state more than he can know. All he can know is the results of his own investigations. And that does not prove Saddam does not have weapons of mass destruction."

The chairman of America's defence policy board said: "Suppose we are able to find someone who has been involved in the development of weapons and he says there are stores of nerve agents. But you cannot find them because they are so well hidden.

"Do you actually have to take possession of the nerve agents to convince? We are not dealing with a situation where you can expect co-operation."

Mr Kilfoyle said MPs would be horrified at the admission. He added: "Because Saddam is so hated in Iraq, it would be easy to find someone to say they witnessed weapons building.

"Perle says the Americans would be satisfied with such claims even if no real evidence was produced.

"That's a terrifying prospect."

First of all, why the hell is Richard fucking Perle speaking for this country before members of parliament? Can somebody please explain what position he holds that allows him to go around the world shooting his mouth off as if he has some position of authority?

There can be no good purpose for them to want him telling the Brits at this moment that the entire inspections process has been a sham from the get-go. Why do they let him do this?

He seems to be having a bit of a public meltdown, what with the Hersh nuttiness, and I have to wonder why they don't tell him to shut his piehole.





digby 3/16/2003 10:39:00 AM |

 
It's Over?

Jayzuz, that's got to be the shortest "summit" in history.

President Sleepytime must have to get back before "the Wonderful World of Disney" starts tonight.

talk about pointless....




digby 3/16/2003 10:33:00 AM |

 
Whaddo I do now, Condi?

I haven't read Woodward's book "Bush at War" because, well, the thought of paying money to Bob Woodward to observe him give George W. Patton a metaphorical blow job smacks a little too much of voyeurism. But, it seems I'm going to have to do it just for the shock and awe value.

Maureen Dowd, in a surprisingly dark and realistic column today (and one which should be shoved into her face the next time she goes all Alpha Bitch Queen and forgets that she's not writing about the entertainment business) says:

And America is not known for its long attention span or talent for empire building. As Bob Woodward reports in his book "Bush at War," a month into the bombing of Afghanistan, when the Taliban stronghold of Majar-i-Sharif fell, Mr Bush turned to Condoleezza Rice, in a moment right out of "The Candidate," and asked: "Well, what next?"

He turned to Condi and asked what next. Has there ever been a more callow, infantile president in history?
President GI Joe likes to play with the toys that go ker-pow, but he's "not into nation building." What do you suppose the chances are that he remains interested in Iraq after Shock and Awe starts to get so, like, boring?






digby 3/16/2003 10:16:00 AM |

 
This Summer I Hear The Drumming

Atrios via Roger Ailes points out this nice story of some fine military "security" officers and their off base cross burning antics. These are some of the same military "security" officers who have authorization to use deadly force to protect residents and equipment from protesters on base --- at their discretion

Not all MP's are white supremecists by any means, but it should be remembered that this is why we have a system of justice. We don't let cops shoot to kill except in self-defense. It is impossible to believe that protesters could threaten some sort of vital equipment at Vandenberg Air Force base in California that would threaten the lives of servicement in Iraq. If they can, then somebody needs to take a much harder look at the security of the base overall rather than putting out the word that they are going to shoot first and ask questions later.








digby 3/16/2003 08:37:00 AM |

Saturday, March 15, 2003

 
Tin Soldiers And Junior Coming

Vandenberg Air Force Base authorizes 'deadly force' against trespassing protesters

VANDENBERG AIR FORCE BASE, Calif. (AP) - Security forces at Vandenberg Air Force Base may use "deadly force" against protesters if they infiltrate the military complex if a war starts, officials said.
Some anti-war activists plan to trespass onto base grounds in hopes of disturbing Vandenberg's mission and to vandalize sensitive equipment they contend helps guide the war effort.

Vandenberg officials revealed Friday that military security police may shoot to kill, if necessary, to protect base residents and machinery.

Anti-war protesters have a habit of threatening "base residents." And protecting "machinery" is a patriotic duty. Shoot the bastards. Where do they think they live, America?









digby 3/15/2003 03:05:00 PM |

 



Strangely, I've seen lots of this kind of thing, but I have yet to see any kind of "Down With Saddam" signs. Who, exactly do these people think we are going to war with?


Hesiod links to the following article and explains that this means the "pro-war" rallies are actually "pro-al Qaeda" rallies.

Anger on Iraq Seen as New Qaeda Recruiting Tool
By DON VAN NATTA Jr. and DESMOND BUTLER


LONDON, March 15 — On three continents, Al Qaeda and other terror organizations have intensified their efforts to recruit young Muslim men, tapping into rising anger about the American campaign for war in Iraq, according to intelligence and law enforcement officials.

In recent weeks, officials in the United States, Europe and Africa say they had seen evidence that militants within Muslim communities are seeking to identify and groom a new generation of terrorist operatives. An invasion of Iraq, the officials worry, is almost certain to produce a groundswell of recruitment for groups committed to attacks in the United States, Europe and Israel.


"An American invasion of Iraq is already being used as a recruitment tool by Al Qaeda and other groups," a senior American counterintelligence official said. "And it is a very effective tool."

Another American official, based in Europe, said Iraq had become "a battle cry, in a way," for Qaeda recruiters.

Some of the information about Qaeda recruiting comes from interrogations of captured operatives and from materials found at the house in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, where Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the third-ranking Qaeda leader, was arrested this month, officials say.

digby 3/15/2003 02:45:00 PM |

 
Crystal Ball

Matthew Yglesias says:

I've often wondered what, exactly, the UN's critics proposed that we put in its place. Well, David Gelernter has risen to the challenge with results that are a bit ... odd.

The core of the new organization--call it the Big Three--would be a Britain-Russia-America triumvirate. The underlying principle: No credible world organization could include only countries we like. But Russia's fluid condition gives us an unusual opening. Russia is a big country with a vivid history. No organization that includes Russia could possibly be America's cat's-paw. Yet Russia is uncertain of what she wants; she is open to persuasion. Yes, that means money; but international prestige is worth even more, especially to a humbled former champion. Including Russia (but not China or France) in the ruling committee might impart just the right soupçon of anti-Americanism to the new organization, which must be credible yet not intractable

There is much one can say about this, the most obvious being that this ridiculous concept that time is going to stand still and the US, Britain and Russia will always be in the exact positions they are currently in is well...dumb. But, instead of writing a thousand words I'll offer this instead:







digby 3/15/2003 01:12:00 PM |

 
Proud To Be An American


I just saw some fair and balanced footage of rallies, with scrupulously equal time given to the story of the hundreds of anti-war rallies thoughout the world and the one "Patriot" rally in Atlanta on CNN. They reported that the pro-war rally had expected 10,000 but were happily surprised to have doubled that number. The organizers finally feel they are "getting their message out."

To the melodic strains of Lee Greenwood, I watched one of the speakers whip the crowd into a frenzy by saying We thought they were the only ones out there...the ones with hairy underarms...lesbians or whatever. (much hooting and laughing from the crowd) We thought we were surrounded by...California. (booooooo) But that's not true. We surround them!"

The commentator said that most of speeches were primarily concerned with criticizing Hollywood and anti-war protesters.

Has anyone heard a lot of speechifying at the anti-war rallies against fellow citizens? I have been to some and watched a bunch on C-Span, and I don't remember anybody saying anything disrespectful of the American people, but instead confined themselves to the politicians who are making war policy -- which, after all, is the traditional way of politics.

I could respond in kind and insult say...the entire red-state region with rude comments about certain rural stereotypes, but that wouldn't be polite.


Hey, TBOGG....

UPDATE:

Here's the transcript. I forgot about the "freaks in limousines." Note the fawning CNN commentary:

DAVID MATTINGLY, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, promoters here were predicting a crowd of about 10,000 here at Atlanta, at the Rally for America, but they're now saying on the podium that they have more than doubled that.

Let's take a look at this crowd. People coming out today, decked out in their red, white and blue, thousands of people. Thousands of people carrying banners and signs, offering patriotic sentiments and supporting U.S. troops.

A part of what you're looking at could also be the power of talk radio. Stations across the country have been promoting rallies for America. They've been striking a chord that seems to resonate deeply with people in this crowd. They are pro-U.S., pro-military.

And some of the featured speakers also taking shots at anti-war demonstrators, particularly Hollywood celebrities protesting war in Iraq.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We were starting to believe that we were surrounded by them, by the ones that are the freaks in the limousine, the ones with the hairy armpits and the lesbian, whatever that is. We thought we were being surrounded by California.

Today, today, I'm proud to tell you they are clear, we surround them

(END VIDEO CLIP)

MATTINGLY: Things wrapping up right now. They just had the song, "Proud to be an American" playing. People singing along with it.

Again quite a few thousand more people than they expected for this rally, particularly with this kind of rain. So promoters very happy with the showing here today and people leaving with a very good feeling that their opinion is being made known across the country.

Back to you.

WHITFIELD: And David, to make it clear, the folks that are assembling there in Atlanta say this is not a pro-war rally but instead, it is one showing patriotism, showing support of the troops, as you mentioned, as well as the president's plans?

MATTINGLY: That is the theme here, support for the troops, for American soldiers right now in the Middle East. They say they don't want a repeat of what they saw after Vietnam, where soldiers came home and were not treated with respect. They want to make sure that does not happen again this time.

But there are some political undercurrents going on. There's a lot of signs here, a very partisan in support of the president, and a lot of signs critical of anti-war protesters, as we showed you before

That's an undercurrent??










digby 3/15/2003 12:44:00 PM |

 
Bush must follow in Queen Victoria's footsteps

Conservative Commentator explains it all:

ASTONISHINGLY GOOD COVER STORY from Daniel Kruger in today's Spectator. His thesis is complex, but essentially he argues that the West as a whole is divided fundamentally into foxes and hedgehogs. The foxes, hippy-dippy postmodernist intellectuals who don't believe in objective truth or ethics - the sort of people who can't bring themselves to use the word 'wrong' without speech marks - are represented by France, Russia, Germany, Belgium, the UN and the EU. The hedgehogs, more simple and single-minded in their ideals, comfortable with certainty and moral truths, are represented by the United States, the UK, Israel, Australia and Canada and NATO. These camps have existed side-by-side for a long while, mainly because of hedgehog American military support for fox France. But that cannot go on:

We stand at a parting of the ways. The coming war with Iraq is going to decide which side goes forward to face the next great threat to the West. If it goes badly, the foxes win. If it goes well, the 1990s myth of a post-modern order - beyond power, beyond war - will be finished. The day of the hedgehog will dawn. He compares tomorrow's chief hedgehog - Bush's America - to that of the 19th Century - Queen Victoria's Britain, and sees a similar role for her. This role is the assertion of liberty, democracy and the rule of law - the morally superior values that prevail in the West but are the right of all. Just as the British Empire saw its duty as the enforcement of its ban on slavery, America's role is to fight for these values across the world, exterminating terrorists and stopping rogue states just as Britain used the Royal Navy to smash the slave trade. Neo-colonialism, he says, is America's future.

Hedgehogs good. Foxes bad. Isaiah Berlin could have saved himself some breath, apparently.

And Pootie-Poot and the Russians are hippy dippy postmodernists just like their soul mates the pansy Belgians. Groovy. Who knew?



This fellow does have a little tiny bone to pick with Queen George, though:

A DAY AND A HALF after it was revealed, I still find it hard to believe that the business contracts for the rebuiling of post-war Iraq have all been given to American companies. It isn't that the war itself has not yet begun that concerns me - planning for after it is over is just sensible forward-thinking. It is the blazen disregard for a loyal ally, and indeed for Iraq itself, which surely can be better served by a greater variety of countries bidding to offer the best services. On what authority were such decisions made? Doesn't the next Iraqi government deserve a say?

Such actions are not only indefensible and petty, but they help put skin on the bones of paranoid conspiracy theories about the war being fought for the sake of US business interests. Just as these were finally being shown for the nonsense we knew them to be, every opponent of war is armed with a fresh arsenal of argument and some solid evidence.

I do not doubt for a moment that this war is right, but this incident alone has made me ask myself why Britain should not merely give America what America gave us as we fought the Battle of Britain single-handedly - our best wishes. Certainly, ending the Baathist Socialist regime in Iraq and disarming its weapons of mass destruction is in Britain's national interest. But if the United States is going to do this anyway, why not allow them, support them and stay out?

I suppose part of the answer is Britain's excellent training and special forces, which are of particular use where brute force and military might are not as effective as something more subtle. We can potentially make this war less bloody for the allies and end it more quickly. And by giving our help and making this an international force that is disarming Saddam, we show ourselves again to be the closest friends of the leading world superpower, which can only be a good thing.

But incidents like these do shake me, and make me ask rationally just what we gain from the special relationship. America's support made an immense difference in the Falklands, certainly, but that was over twenty years ago - and if we are going back decades it seems rather to have been cancelled out by Eisenhower's folly at Suez in trying to curry favour with the Arabs by opposing Britain, France and Israel - a ploy that failed miserably.

If the IRA starts up again in a few years time, will the US help us exterminate terrorism in Ulster the way we helped them in Afghanistan? They'll do their bit with regards intelligence, certainly, and it would be unfair to expect America to fight a threat to Britain alone the way Britain treated a threat to all of Western civilisation. So perhaps it would be unreasonable to expect such help. But that still leaves unanswered the question of what we get out of it. I certainly support the United States and the Bush Administration, but active support is another matter altogether. I think if Britain is to engage in active support for the US, it is right to expect some active support in return. Yesterday's revelations shook my confidence that we do receive such a thing. If they are a freak occurrence, they can be forgotten at once. But if, as is possible, they represent a more general trend, some serious questions need to be re-examined.

Was he under the impression that we were going to share in the spoils of post war Iraq? That Queen George feels some sort of loyalty to the United Kingdom?

Piss off you limey loser. The US 'o A is the only right and true true hedgehog on the entire goddam planet and you'd better get used to it.


Thanks to Baskett's Case for the link. Lotsa good stuff there.







digby 3/15/2003 10:20:00 AM |

 
Chile Proposal A Nonstarter

The Freepers,of course, are now boycotting Chili. With and without beans.






digby 3/15/2003 01:10:00 AM |

Friday, March 14, 2003

 
No More Time

As usual, the Republicans are in a big hurry. Urgency and technicalities are their main governing principles.

But Republican and Democratic pollsters, economists and operatives said part of the urgency for Bush is tied to his political standing at home. They said the uncertainty related to the war is depressing consumer confidence and postponing the sort of robust economic recovery Bush will need to win reelection.

A Gallup poll this month showed a decline in Americans' confidence to a seven-year low, with 36 percent satisfied with the country's direction and 61 percent dissatisfied. It is a decline that began in December 2001. The ABC News-Money magazine's gauge of consumer confidence released this week showed that 23 percent of Americans thought the economy was in good shape, the fewest in more than nine years.

"The number one concern is the impact [Iraq] is having on the economy and the harness it's putting around certain sectors and causing negative growth," GOP strategist Scott Reed said. "It's reaching into all nooks and corners, and causing great concern in both corporate boardrooms and small businesses and their bankers."

If consumer confidence and employment are not growing substantially by early next year, Bush's reelection could be jeopardized...

[...]

Analysts said a further delay also poses risks to Bush's political standing that go beyond the economic. In the most recent poll by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center, 54 percent of Americans approved of his job performance, 3 percentage points higher than in August 2001. At the same time, narrow majorities of Americans favor military action against Iraq without allied support. Both gauges will jump once hostilities begin, but "the question is how long it's going to last," poll director Andrew Kohut said.

[...]

Since last year, administration officials have said the weather would be too hot to launch an attack after early spring. But in recent weeks, defense officials have said that is less of a concern than originally believed and that another month's wait could be tolerated.

[...]

well, well, well.





digby 3/14/2003 10:43:00 PM |

 
Nothing To See Here, Move Along

This is completely illegitimate, I'm sure. Jay Rockefeller wants to have a little investigation into how we happened to be using blatently forged documents to bolster our case that Iraq has nuclear weapons.

Sarah Ross, a spokeswoman for Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Pat Roberts, said the committee will look into the forgery, but Roberts believes it is inappropriate for the FBI to investigate at this point.

The documents indicated that Iraq tried to by uranium from Niger, the West African nation that is the third-largest producer of mined uranium, Niger's largest export. The documents had been provided to U.S. officials by a third country, which has not been identified.

A U.S. government official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said it was unclear who first created the documents. The official said American suspicions remain about an Iraq-Niger uranium connection because of other, still-credible evidence that the official refused to specify.

In December, the State Department used the information to support its case that Iraq was lying about its weapons programs. But on March 7, Mohammed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, told the U.N. Security Council that the documents were forgeries.

Rockefeller said U.S. worries about Iraqi nuclear weapons were not based primarily on the documents, but "there is a possibility that the fabrication of these documents may be part of a larger deception campaign aimed at manipulating public opinion and foreign policy regarding Iraq."

Yah think?

Personally, I don't see any reason to investigate this until all congressional committees finally clear up the issue of whether Hillary was involved in firing the travel office staff back in 1993. They only spent 4 years on that subject, so I can't really feel confident that they got to the bottom of it. You've just got to have some priorities.








digby 3/14/2003 10:04:00 PM |

 
"Pivoting"

Forrest Sawyer just asked David Gregory if the White House is in chaos. Gregory said no, the White House says it is "pivoting" in a number of different directions.

This is also known as running around in circles.


heh.



digby 3/14/2003 07:21:00 PM |

 
Required Reading

Josh Marshall says to read this and he's right. It is devastating.

By Michael Lind


The United States is now more isolated from its major allies and more internally divided over foreign policy than at any time since 1945. The strategy of the Bush administration-and not merely its style-is to blame.

The grand strategy of the Bush administration rests on three axioms: American global hegemony; preventive war; and the so-called “war on terror.” All three axioms are fallacies that inevitably produce counterproductive and misguided policies. What the great French diplomat Talleyrand said of Napoleon’s execution of the Duc d’Enghien applies with equal force to Bush’s grand strategy: “It is worse than a crime; it is a mistake.”

Go





digby 3/14/2003 03:21:00 PM |

 
Not Quite Enough

With Democratic presidential candidates under fire for their reluctance to speak out about Iraq, Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry delivered a major policy address in San Francisco Thursday -- and omitted any substantive mention of the looming war.

In a 40-minute speech to a packed hall sponsored by the Commonwealth Club of California, Kerry offered a stinging indictment of Bush domestic policies on the environment, homeland security, eroding civil liberties and the declining economy. But he saved his comments on the war for a question-and-answer session afterward, and even in those tempered remarks, his position on Iraq was less than clear-cut.

The ongoing failure of the Bush administration to win allies in the U.N. Security Council "displays some of the weakest diplomacy we've ever seen in the history of the continental U.S.," Kerry said after the speech.

Although he voted last fall to authorize the president to use military force against Iraq and said Thursday that he did not regret his vote, Kerry did not say whether he still believes force should be used -- or if so, when. "The United States should never go to war because it wants to go to war," he said, echoing statements made in January. "We should go to war because we have to go to war. And that is not clear at this time."

He did flesh out a rather fine critique, however, of the Bush administration's handling of the diplomacy. Why he couldn't do it in his speech is anybody's guess, but I assume it's because he's afraid of Sean Hannity and Ari Fleischer:

Only one-third of the job of president is to be "CEO of the domestic choices of the country," he said in response to one question. "Two-thirds of the job of president is head of state -- therefore chief diplomat."

And the international chaos of recent months proves the need to have a strong person in that position, he said, suggesting that neither Bush nor Secretary of State Colin Powell have measured up well in the job.

In 2002, there was clearly a path to the inspections process that brought legitimacy and consent to an international endeavor, he said. What led to its demise is an endemic unwillingness to strengthen relationships with European nations. "I don't know if they put the lock and key on the airplane so he [Powell] isn't allowed to travel," Kerry said, "but somehow this has been a secretary of state who's been unwilling to go over and build those relationships."

"I regret the way this administration has conducted foreign policy and given the back of its hand to so many nations," he said. "The United States, the strongest military power on the face of this planet, has not had diplomacy that matches it."

I don't understand why Kerry can't just say that he is for ousting Saddam, but that they hashed it up so much and are so incredibly incompetent that the congress is going to have to assert itself like never before to ensure that they do not create complete chaos in the region, and the next president is going to have to clean up the mess that's been made of our international relations. He should be thundering his criticism of the unilateralist bent of the administration and their inability to convince the world that the invasion scheme is the right one.

He voted for the damned war. If he'd stick to his guns and use the opportunity to show how the Republicans have compromised their own goals, he would be a principled politician that even the doves could respect. Instead, he just seems vague and scared.

People are not going to vote for a candidate who is trying to split the difference on national security.

These Democrats have got to realize that there is no margin in trying to appease the GOP. They are going to get it coming and going, no matter what they say. They have to concentrate, instead, on laying out a principled alternative to Bush Imperialism and let the chips fall where they may. The have got to step up and fight and that does not mean that they must be doves. It just means they must stand for something.

And, it's not like the Republicans haven't given them enough to criticize, for gawd's sake. They've fucked up even on their own terms. How hard is it to make a passionate speech about Bush's failure in international relations?



digby 3/14/2003 02:36:00 PM |

 
All The Sock-Puppet's Men

TBOGG is on to Howard Fineman.






digby 3/14/2003 01:40:00 PM |

 
Burning CD’s

People are (literally) burning the Dixie Chicks' CD’s because of their treasonous statements objecting to the imminent invasion of Iraq. And, if that wasn’t bad enough, they also said they were ashamed that George W. Alamo is from Texas. The humanity.

I must remind all of you people who would like to show solidarity with the coalition of the willing, it really shouldn’t stop with the Dixie Chicks.

I wrote before that Shania Twain, Hank Williams Jr., Willie Nelson, Trisha Yearwood, Vince Gill, Reba McIntyre, Earl Scruggs, Mark Wills, Tom T. Hall, Lee Ann Womack, and George Strait all work for that Saddam loving enemy, Vivendi of….gasp….France.

I urge all righteous God fearing Americans to call Rush and Sean and the rest and let them know you want them to use their clout in the radio industry to put a stop to this traitorous war profiteering on the part of their employers. They, of all people, understand that allowing the radio and record industry to put profits over freedom is Un-American. DEMAND that Rush tell Clear Channel to stop playing the following artists immediately:


U2, Bob Marley, Elton John, Eminem, Nelly, Diana Krall, George Benson, John Coltrane, Enrique Iglesias, Limp Bizkit, No Doubt, Sheryl Crow, Sting, Ashanti, Elvis Costello, Smokey Robinson, B.B. King, Melissa Etheridge, Blink 182, Cranberries, Mary J Blige, Erykah Badu, Stevie Wonder, Ja Rule, Nirvana, 50 Cent, The Temptations, Bon Jovi, Ludacris, Jay Z, Shaggy, Placido Domingo, Andrea Bocelli, Lionel Richie, Hansen, Hooba stanks, Injected, Tatu, Wallflowers, MS Dynamite, 2 Pac, Ms Jade, American HiFi, Def Leppard, Die Trying, Letter Kills, PJ Harvey, Portishead, MJ Cole, Rosy, Shorty 101, Hoobastank, A Teens, Avant, Res, The Roots, Brian McKnight, India Arie, Remy Shand, AZ Black Coffey, Corey, DJ Rogers J,r Melanie Durrant, Dave Hollister, India.Arie, Jene Jose Brian McKnight, Stephen Marley, Remy, Shand, Charlie Haden, Al Jarreau.

These people are making blood money off of the backs of America’s freedom and they need to know that if they don’t quit working for the godless, Iraq loving French enemy, we will end their careers. You know that Rush will put his career on the line for this and require his employer to either stop playing all artists that work for Vivendi or he will quit.

He’s a patriot above all else. You know he is.

Update:

YOU can call The Rush Limbaugh Show program line between 12 Noon and 3PM Eastern Time at: 1-800-282-2882

You can e-mail Rush at: rush@eibnet.com

You can fax Rush at: 212-563-9166

You can write Rush at:
The Rush Limbaugh Show
2 Penn Plaza
New York, NY 10121


Update II: I can't believe I have to do this, but my comments section proves that I have been much too obscure with my little satire.

I don't really think that we should be boycotting Vivendi and I think the Dixie Chicks are a-ok. What I was trying (and obviously failing) to do, was show that Rush and his hate radio cohorts are being hypocritical in calling for a boycott of French products, when their own employers are making zillions from playing artists who work for one of the biggest French companies in the world.

It would be fun to see whether Rush would be willing to put his career on the line by threatening to quit Clear Channel if they continued to make money from a French company, but I have no illusions that he would give up one single penny in this cause. I would love to see him explain why, though, wouldn't you?

whew.






digby 3/14/2003 01:07:00 PM |

 
Word To The Wise

I don't subscribe to any GOP e-mail lists and I certainly don't have access to the daily talking points that so obviously are passed around amongst the bow-tied, doughboy Republican cognoscenti, but it doesn't take an insider to figure out what they are since they multiply like bacteria into the media within minutes of introduction.

Here's the current infection:

Yesterday, Perle gave aninterview on RTL in which he claimed that Chirac and Hussein have been "good friends" since the 70's. This is not news, but it was also put forth as a startling revelation on Brit Hume's show on Fox News yesterday. I would bet that it's all over Talk Radio again today.This adds to the contention that Chirac has given so much illegal contraband to his friend in the hopes of good deals on oil leases that he's petrified that good people everywhere will recoil in disgust when they find out the truth.

Charles Pierce pithily retorts to that last accusation today on Altercation saying, "if you’re keeping score at home, it should be noted that it wasn’t the Freedoms who redacted 12,000 pages of the Iraqi weapons report before they made it public. What did we edit out? The receipts?"

No way, Marseilles. Just so's ya knows -- Jacques has promised his lover Saddam a stocking full 'o Nukes for Christmas. And, apparently, out 'o principle, John Negropont and Don Rumsfeld kept those 12,000 pages of love letters from the world in order to spare Mrs. Chirac the embarrassment. Or something.

The Wurlitzer always plays on key.



digby 3/14/2003 11:37:00 AM |

 
Iraq, the Middle East and Change: No Dominoes

A classified State Department report expresses doubt that installing a new regime in Iraq will foster the spread of democracy in the Middle East, a claim President Bush has made in trying to build support for a war, according to intelligence officials familiar with the document.

The report exposes significant divisions within the Bush administration over the so-called democratic domino theory, one of the arguments that underpins the case for invading Iraq.

[...]

The domino theory also is used by the administration as a counterargument to critics in Congress and elsewhere who have expressed concern that invading Iraq will inflame the Muslim world and fuel terrorist activity against the United States.

But the theory is disputed by many Middle East experts and is viewed with skepticism by analysts at the CIA and the State Department, intelligence officials said.

Critics say even establishing a democratic government in Iraq will be extremely difficult. Iraq is made up of ethnic groups deeply hostile to one another. Ever since its inception in 1932, the country has known little but bloody coups and brutal dictators.

Even so, it is seen by some as holding more democratic potential — because of its wealth and educated population — than many of its neighbors.

By some estimates, 65 million adults in the Middle East can't read or write, and 14 million are unemployed, with an exploding, poorly educated youth population.

Given such trends, "we'll be lucky to have strong central governments [in the Middle East], let alone democracy," said one intelligence official with extensive experience in the region.

The official stressed that no one in intelligence or diplomatic circles opposes the idea of trying to install a democratic government in Iraq.

"It couldn't hurt," the official said. "But to sell [the war] on the basis that this is going to cause 1,000 flowers to bloom is naive."

Some officials said the classified document reflects views that are widely held in the State Department and CIA but that those holding such views have been muzzled in an administration eager to downplay the costs and risks of war.

[...]

Middle East experts said there are other factors working against democratic reform, including a culture that values community and to some extent conformity over individual rights.

"I don't accept the view that the fall of Saddam Hussein is going to prompt quick or even discernible movement toward democratization of the Arab states," said Philip C. Wilcox, director of the Foundation for Middle East Peace and a former top State Department official. "Those countries are held back not by the presence of vicious authoritarian regimes in Baghdad but by a lot of other reasons."

Bush has responded to such assessments by assailing the "soft bigotry of low expectations."

Wow. Move over George Kennan. I thought he said that the new regime would be reformers with results, leaders who knew how to lead. He said he had some stong talks with the Iraqi exiles and felt they would make fabulous leaders. He believes they can be united not divided and he promises to smoke out Saddam and keep him on the run. I never heard him say that not believing in fairy tales was the soft bigotry of low expectations though.

And then, there's the deft handling of US Russian relations.

Oh Dmitri...

Washington had calculated that Putin, a pragmatist, valued Russia's relationship with the United States above all other foreign policy issues. U.S. officials also thought that Moscow's interests in the Iraqi oil business and its desire to see Iraq repay $8 billion of debt would be enough to ensure Russian compliance.

There have been some veiled threats, however, notably from a senior Bush administration official in Moscow recently who warned Russia of the economic costs of blocking U.S. objectives.

"What we have said is that if you're concerned with recouping your $8 billion in debts and if you're interested in economic opportunities in liberated Iraq, it would be helpful if you were part of the prevailing coalition," that official said at a background briefing for reporters last month.

"The Americans failed to understand that in order to make Putin change his position on Iraq, it was necessary to offer and actually give him something," said one Moscow analyst, Viktor A. Kremenyuk of the USA-Canada Institute. "In fact, the Americans have done nothing real to attract Russia and win it over to their side."

These guys are so gooood.

That official, by the way, was likely our suave and debonair Assistant Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security --- John "there is no such thing as the UN" Bolton. He's the Zelig of diplomatic screw-ups.


digby 3/14/2003 12:12:00 AM |

Thursday, March 13, 2003

 
Be Nice To Colin, Junior

I made a private bet that Colin Powell would resign from this administration over policy. That was 2 years ago and I thought I'd lost. Maybe not.

Fineman seems to think that the scapegoating is about to begin now that even he has acknowledged that the administration's diplomacy has been a joke. Powell has his own constituency, particularly in the media. The Bushies had better be very, very careful. A Powell resignation could be the tipping point for a Bush freefall.



digby 3/13/2003 10:56:00 PM |

 
Here We Go Again

Even some antiwar Democrats are insisting they won't criticize the Bush administration once the fighting begins. Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry, who's staked out a complex pro-disarming Saddam, anti-unilateral-war approach to the mess, says he'll hit the mute button immediately. Former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, a more unequivocal war opponent than Kerry, told the Boston Globe he's not sure he'll keep it up once the shooting starts. War critics like former Sen. Gary Hart and Florida Sen. Bob Graham may postpone official announcements of their candidacies if war begins, as expected, in the next couple of weeks. Only Rep. Dennis Kucinich and former Sen. Carol Mosely-Braun, who are not given much chance of winning the nomination, have had the courage to tell reporters that they'll stick with their antiwar message come war.

This timidity is Reason No. 392 for the political question vexing Democrats right now: Why is it that polls show President Bush losing the '04 election to an "Unnamed Democrat," but beating all the Democrats who are currently in the race? Everyone knows this president is supremely vulnerable. He's plundered the surplus and pushed an economic policy that has arguably worsened the recession. He's angered most of our allies and is now on the verge of a potentially disastrous war whose rationale changes every day. His poll numbers dip almost daily, too.

But Bush can still probably beat any of the Democrats lined up against him, because no one yet has shown the charisma or the courage to break out of the pack. And otherwise admirable candidates like Kerry and Dean seem to be faltering in this early test of political integrity

[...]

Not just Kerry but the whole pack of '04 candidates seems overmatched by the current global crisis. In a disturbing Adam Nagourney piece in Monday's New York Times, dithering Democrats were featured complaining that in Iowa, nobody wants to listen to their speeches about women's issues or unemployment or the healthcare crisis; they only want to talk about war! Even Dean, who's benefited most from the surge of antiwar feeling in Iowa, whined to Nagourney: "I had a press conference and it was all about the war. And finally I said, 'Would anybody like to talk about the enormous jump in the unemployment rate that was announced in the morning papers?'"

[...]

...They may suffer politically, for a while, whatever they do, because it's true that the nation rallies around its president in a time of war.

But they'll suffer more permanent political damage if they look like they're backsliding on their antiwar views. Democrats have to remember this is a mess that's at least partly of their own making. They've been treating Iraq like a tough campaign curveball, rather than a test of leadership and conscience, since before the midterm election. Democratic Leadership Council chair Sen. Evan Bayh of Indiana typified the party's cowardice when he told reporters last year: "The majority of the American people tend to trust the Republican Party more on issues involving national security and defense than they do the Democratic Party. We need to work to improve our image on that score by taking a more aggressive posture with regard to Iraq, empowering the president."

Democrats mostly followed Bayh's bad advice, caving on the vote that essentially gave the president a blank check back in October, to polish their "image" and put the issue behind them -- so they could get back to talking about Social Security reform on the campaign trail. But voters didn't listen. "I hope the party learned a lesson in November 2002 about the perils of going into a fetal position," David Wade, a spokesman for Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry, told ABC News just a few days before his boss issued his statement about not criticizing Bush once war begins.

This is a trainwreck. If the Democrats cannot formulate a respectful, principled opposition to the crazyassed imperialistic foreign policy of this administration we are in big trouble. They have simply got to stop being afraid of the the Republicans. They will be called traitors even if they don uniforms and go into battle themselves. Saxby Chambliss proved that there is no limit to how far they will go to impugn the patriotism of Democrats so they have absolutely nothing to lose by telling it like it is. That the GOP is so brutal and dishonest is actually freeing. Since their characters will be assassinated anyway, they are free to speak their minds.

The question is probably whether they know their own minds enough to speak them. And that's depressing.




digby 3/13/2003 07:39:00 PM |

 
Necrophilia

Update: Apparently it is unclear that this post is referring to the absurd idea of bringing back remains of servicemen killed in France during WWII. The link below connects to that story. Kevin also has commentary.

They are working themselves into a complete frenzy, now.

This is embarrassing. I thought that only Condi Rice was deluded enough to believe that we joined WWII to "liberate the Germans from Hitler," but apparently this is common knowledge amongst the scholors on the right.

On September 1, 1939 Germany invaded Poland. Great Britain and France declared war on Germany on September 3, 1939. In May of 1940, Hitler invaded France using Blitzkrieg tactics.

We didn't rush right in to save the day like Superman as these morons apparently believe. While Hitler cut a swath through Europe we were sending some supplies and debating whether we should help out. When we were attacked at Peal Harbor on December 7, 1941 we declared war on Japan the next day. And on December 11th Germany and Italy declared war on us.

There was no overwhelming public outcry to liberate the French by good and wholesome Americans who cared nothing for their own lives but merely wanted to save all the little children. We went in because we had no choice. We had watched the war from afar for 2 long years before we actually joined and it was isolationist Republicans who were the most vociferous in their objections to doing it.

It was DAMNED LUCKY for us that it was the French women and French children and French old people who had to try to survive in a war zone on their own soil (not to mention for the American Jews who daily blessed their good fortune to escape the fate of the hundreds of thousands of French Jews who were carted off to concentration camps.) It is estimated that at least 150,000 French civilians died from bombing and Nazi terror and that's not even counting those who died in concentration camps. In Britain, from August 1940 to May 1941 alone, more than 40,000 civilians were killed and 40,000 more were seriously wounded in bombing attacks.

This petty French bashing is obviously being coordinated by the Wurlitzer to give their neanderthals somebody new to hate. But to distort the meaning of WWII for partisan reasons is beyond the pale. It dishonors the regular guys like my Dad who fought in that war. I do not recall ever hearing him say that France, England (or even Germany or Japan) owed the United States their blind allegiance until the end of time. To him, doing the right thing was its own reward. This seems to be one of those much vaunted values that the current spoiled, silly trivial warmongers seem to have overlooked.

The French paid their dues in the fight against Hitler. They do not owe us anything. We were on the same side in a war against a tyrant who threatened the entire world and the French people paid a price for that fight that we can only imagine in our worst nightmares. To demean their experience in the war as these people are doing is shameful.


We used to be better people than this.



digby 3/13/2003 06:41:00 PM |

 
A Certain Kind of Nonsense

A Brooklyn Bridge has a number of good posts up on the Arlon Lindner (R-Homophobe Nutcase) scandal.

He alerts us to yet another fine, upstanding religious ministry that has taken up the fine Christian tradition of lying about history to further its Christian message of hate.

Given his connection to Abiding Truth Ministries ("Helping families protect themselves from the 'gay' agenda"), Lindner's views about gays and the Holocaust are hardly surprising. Of the 19 books and tapes they offer, 15 of them are about gays and lesbians. (The others probably are, too, but they weren't explicit in the descriptions). Like its founder (and author of The Pink Swastika), Scott Lively, ATM seems to be convinced of deep connection between gays and Nazis. In addition to an article, "Is there a Gay Basis to Nietzche's Ideas?", there this book:


"The Poisoned Stream"
Traces the "poisoned stream" of homosexual influences throughout history, particularly in Germany between 1890 and 1945


Is this an emerging meme? Should we expect "homonazi" jokes on Limbaugh? Andrew Sullivan (who so far has managed to miss the Lindner controversy), did catch a truly vile ad in the Weekly Standard.


Unintended Humor Department: among ATM's recommend links are FoxNews, WorldNet Daily, and — rimshot, please — the Drudge Report.

Now, Peggy, I'm sure, will be having none of this. As she so righteously noted:

Republicans by and large don't suffer from blind loyalty or blind antagonism. They would think it irresponsible to the country. They will bolt on one of their own if he insists on a route they think is seriously wrong (the first Bush on taxes). They will kill his presidency if they conclude he is essentially destructive (it was his Republican base in Congress that ended Richard Nixon's career). Recently it was Republicans who did in their own Senate majority leader because they would not accept a certain kind of nonsense.

Needless to say, Peggy would not think it was a matter of conservative political philosophy to blatently lie by saying that gays were not amongst those targeted for extermination in the holocaust. Certainly, she must agree that saying that gays caused German fascism is a "certain kind of nonsense."

Will she lead the charge to purge the party of Lindner's outrageous hate mongering? Of course she will. This is Peggy we're talking about.



digby 3/13/2003 03:58:00 PM |

 
Past Not Prologue

Patrick at Electrolite opened his blog up to another round of Nader discourse, otherwise known as beating your head against a wall.

I argued so vociferously during the campaign and vented my spleen so often in the months just after the election that I no longer have it in me. I like Greens and Nader voters and I just want to call a truce. As far as I'm concerned the whole thing is ancient history.

But, I do have one request. Knowing what we all know now, we really have to make a pact that all progressive, liberal, sane normal people band together and promise to work as hard as we can to oust Emperor Bloodlust in 2004.

No one could be worse, not even Joe Lieberman ( gawd forbid.) This administration has taken extreme steps to create an Imperial foreign policy AND an Imperial Presidency. This is what must be halted as quickly as possible. They have assumed so much power in the executive branch that our government is seriously out of balance. Only another party can right that. And, for better or worse, that party is the Democratic Party.

If it is difficult to rationalize with your principles, I say vote for a Green for congress and allow the GOP to maintain control. I will hate it, but compared to this cabal in the white house the congressional Republicans are pikers. The presidency simply cannot be left in the hands of Junior and The Retreads.

There really is no choice. So, I say let bygones be bygones. The campaign of 2000 is over and I'm willing to put it to bed. But, going forward, we need every liberal with a pulse (and even those without one) to vote against George W. Bush.

Can we all agree on this, at least?






digby 3/13/2003 03:31:00 PM |

 
Another One Bites the Dust

Atrios goes to the dark side. What's next? Joining the Fox News AllStars? Partying all night with Ceci and Kit? Sharing a bottle of "151" with Hitch? My Gawd, sir! Have you no decency?



Seriously, congratulations to King of Left Blogtopia.May we dare hope that he will be getting some $$$$?







digby 3/13/2003 02:59:00 PM |

 



Well, here's a big surprise. It turns out that Shock and Awe is yet another one of those dusty tomes that Strangelovean neocons have kept in their back pocket just waiting for a Chauncey W. Bush to be installed so they could test its crazy theories. Here's the official DOD book on Shock and Awe. It's part of a military doctrine called Rapid Dominance.

Rapid Dominance would seek to be more universal in application through the overriding objective of affecting the adversary's will beyond the boundaries traditionally defined by military capability alone.

I hear that they originally wanted to call it Hegemonic Terrorism, but they figured that might have bad public relations implications.

To affect the will of the adversary, Rapid Dominance will apply a variety of approaches and techniques to achieve the necessary level of Shock and Awe at the appropriate strategic and military leverage points. This means that psychological and intangible, as well as physical and concrete effects beyond the destruction of enemy forces and supporting military infrastructure, will have to be achieved. It is in this broader and deeper strategic application that Rapid Dominance perhaps most fundamentally differentiates itself from current doctrine and offers revolutionary application.

Flowing from the primary concentration on affecting the adversary's will to resist through imposing a regime of Shock and Awe to achieve strategic aims and military objectives, four characteristics emerge that will define the Rapid Dominance military force. These are noted and discussed in later chapters. The four characteristics are near total or absolute knowledge and understanding of self, adversary, and environment; rapidity and timeliness in application; operational brilliance in execution; and (near) total control and signature management of the entire operational environment.

Whereas decisive force is inherently capabilities driven—that is, it focuses on defeating the military capability of an adversary and therefore tends to be scenario sensitive—Rapid Dominance would seek to be more universal in application through the overriding objective of affecting the adversary's will beyond the boundaries traditionally defined by military capability alone. In other words, where decisive force is likely to be most relevant is against conventional military capabilities that can be overwhelmed by American (and allied) military superiority. In conflict or crisis conditions that depart from this idealized scenario, the superior nature of our forces is assumed to be sufficiently broad to prevail. Rapid Dominance would not make this distinction in either theory or in practice.

To their credit, the planners did offer the following caveat:

We note for the record that should a Rapid Dominance force actually be fielded with the requisite operational capabilities, this force would be neither a silver bullet nor a panacea and certainly not an antidote or preventative for a major policy blunder, miscalculation, or mistake. It should also be fully appreciated that situations will exist in which Rapid Dominance (or any other doctrine) may not work or apply because of political, strategic, or other limiting factors.

No shit.


Thanks to High Water for the link. He also links to this analysis called "Awe Shocks" by Joseph Stromberg.

Here's a bit:

Chapter Three catalogues and evaluates recent US interventions and teases out apparent lessons. There is muted praise for our sometime friend Saddam Hussein's ruthless rocket attacks on Tehran, undertaken back when he was still salonfähig, attacks approvingly said to have "amounted to a reign of terror."

It really does: Here's what it says:

When our troops were having difficulty dislodging Grenadian soldiers from their main fortress, Marine tanks were sailed around the island to confront them. At the sight of tank guns, the seemingly stubborn occupants surrendered almost immediately without a fight.

The cease fire in the bloody Iran-Iraq war was quick to follow after the commencement of daily Iraqi long-range rocket bombardments of Tehran that amounted to a reign of terror. Given that both sides were exhausted at that point, a show of force could have been convincing. Strong U.S. action in response to Iran's mining of neutral waters may also have had a sobering effect on the mullahs. Not only were Iran's vulnerable oil-producing platforms in the Gulf boarded and destroyed with impunity by the U.S., but Iranian naval forces that had come out to challenge the U.S. Navy were destroyed. Iraq's reign of terror, and the strong American message to Iran, possibly helped end the war.

You cannot make this stuff up. Read the whole document, if you can stomach it.

All I can say is, "Gee, I wish we had one of them doomsday machines."





digby 3/13/2003 02:39:00 PM |

 
Thank You Peggy

It was so nice of her to help out the hapless Dems with some sad, heartfelt observations of our snobbishness, elitism and exclusionary tactics. She said:

"Be pro-free-speech again. Allow internal divisions and dissent. A vital political party should have divisions and dissent."

"Stop being the party of snobs. Show love for your country and its people--all its people. Stop looking down on those who resist your teachings

"Stop the ideology. A lot of Democratic Party movers and intellectuals have created or inherited a leftist ideology that they try to impose on life. It doesn't spring from life; it's forced on life, and upon people. Stop doing that--it's what weirdos who are detached from reality do."

That was such good advice. You can't say too much about it. What could be more important to a political party's intellectual vitality
than to allow all points of view?This is what makes Peggy a national treasure. Her consistency, her caring advice to the opposition, her committment to values and principles that all Americans should (and so rarely do) hold dear are the very definition of the American character.

It's called Honor and Integrity

Or, as Peggy says, "It's called, class."




digby 3/13/2003 01:49:00 PM |

Wednesday, March 12, 2003

 
Eastern Front

MOSCOW - The US envoy to Russia has warned Moscow to think twice about the consequences of using its UN veto to block military action against Iraq.

And in a further sign of deteriorating US-Russia relations over the Iraq crisis, a top Russian official said Washington's bellicose stance could freeze a key nuclear arms pact

Why are we ratcheting up the rhetoric at this particular time? What could be causing this relationship -- with a country that actually has a whole big bunch of nuclear weapons -- to deteriorate like this? It just doesn't seem like a good idea to be even thinking about freezing nuclear arms pacts and withholding economic aid from Russia right now. Who would even think of such a thing?

A Kremlin spokeswoman said US President George W Bush discussed the Iraq crisis with Russian President Vladimir Putin by telephone on Wednesday.

Not a good idea.

I knew President Merkin Muffley. President Merkin Muffley was a friend of mine. And you sir are no President Merkin Muffley.




digby 3/12/2003 06:59:00 PM |

Tuesday, March 11, 2003

 
Psychotic Break

Kieren and others are talking about how den Beste has lost his bearings, but it's pretty clear it's just symptomatic of a much wider form of mass psychosis on the right.

Michael Ledeen, esteemed fellow of the American Enterprise Institute, and intimate of the neocon nutballs who are running our foreign policy has gone completely around the fucking bend:

A Theory

What if there’s method to the Franco-German madness?

Assume, for a moment, that the French and the Germans aren't thwarting us out of pique, but by design, long-term design. Then look at the world again, and see if there's evidence of such a design.

Like everyone else, the French and the Germans saw that the defeat of the Soviet Empire projected the United States into the rare, almost unique position of a global hyperpower, a country so strong in every measurable element that no other nation could possibly resist its will. The "new Europe" had been designed to carve out a limited autonomy for the old continent, a balance-point between the Americans and the Soviets. But once the Soviets were gone, and the Red Army melted down, the European Union was reduced to a combination theme park and free-trade zone. Some foolish American professors and doltish politicians might say — and even believe — that henceforth "power" would be defined in economic terms, and that military power would no longer count. But cynical Europeans know better.

They dreaded the establishment of an American empire, and they sought for a way to bring it down.

If you were the French president or the German chancellor, you might well have done the same.

How could it be done? No military operation could possibly defeat the United States, and no direct economic challenge could hope to succeed. That left politics and culture. And here there was a chance to turn America's vaunted openness at home and toleration abroad against the United States. So the French and the Germans struck a deal with radical Islam and with radical Arabs: You go after the United States, and we'll do everything we can to protect you, and we will do everything we can to weaken the Americans.

The Franco-German strategy was based on using Arab and Islamic extremism and terrorism as the weapon of choice, and the United Nations as the straitjacket for blocking a decisive response from the United States.


[...]

If this is correct, we will have to pursue the war against terror far beyond the boundaries of the Middle East, into the heart of Western Europe. And there, as in the Middle East, our greatest weapons are political: the demonstrated desire for freedom of the peoples of the countries that oppose us.

Radio Free France, anyone?

Somebody had a little Ecstasy with his Freedom Toast this morning.

The next time somebody says that the left is full of conspiracy theorists I'm going to pop a gasket. This guy is a MAINSTREAM Republican, writing on the National Review website, for crying out loud. His nutsy wife worked in the Reagan administration and formerly ran the Barbizon School of Dyed-Blond Former Prosecutors.

Michael Ledeen gets invited to the White House. He is crazy as a loon.










digby 3/11/2003 07:09:00 PM |

 
Epitaph

"One of the tests of a leader is to convince your allies what's right and what's wrong," Bush said. "And that's what a leader does. A leader builds up alliances."

December 1999, ABC "This Week"

I hear ye, Junior.






digby 3/11/2003 04:59:00 PM |

 

OPERATOR

Colonel, you better have a look at this radar.

COLONEL

What is it, son?

OPERATOR

I don't know, sir, but it looks like a giant--

CUT TO COCKPIT - JET

PILOT

Dick!

CO-PILOT

Yes?

PILOT

Take a look out of starboard.

CO-PILOT

Oh my God, it looks like a huge--

CUT TO WOODS

MAN

Pecker!

WOMAN

Where?

He raises his binoculars.

MAN

Over there. A rare red-billed woodpecker!

(looks over with binoculars)

What sort of bird is that? Oh goodness, it's not a bird, it's-

CUT TO ARMY BASE

SERGEANT

Privates! We have reports of an Unidentified Flying Object. It has a long, smooth shaft, complete with-

CUT TO BASEBALL DIAMOND:

UMPIRE

Two balls! No strikes.

(looking up)

What is that? It looks just like an enormous--

CUT BACK TO RADAR ROOM:

COLONEL

Johnson!

RADAR OPERATOR

Yes, sir?

COLONEL

Get on the horn to British Intelligence and let them know about this.



Official transcript







digby 3/11/2003 04:22:00 PM |

 
Tory Unrest

If the Tories are starting to falter then there is a faint (very faint) possibility that the Brits will drop out. If that happens, then all bets are off.

Conservative whip John Randall has quit his post because of his concerns over a possible Iraq war.

With the Tory leadership backing Tony Blair's stance on the Iraq crisis, Mr Randall's resignation shows divisions are not exclusively confined to the Labour benches.

His move comes after International Development Secretary Clare Short launched a searing attack on Mr Blair's "reckless" Iraq policy.

One Labour ministerial aide, Andy Reed, has already resigned over his concerns and others have signalled they will follow if war begins without new United Nations backing.

[...]

They're coming at Bush's Freedom Poodle now from the right as well as the left. It's probably just a "Ron Paul" moment, but you never know.




digby 3/11/2003 03:30:00 PM |

 
A Good Dad

TBOGG proves that it's the smart, sensitive people who are the most devastatingly funny.

Here's my pick for "oh my Gawd, my life just changed" reading:

When you look directly at an insane man all you see is a reflection of your own knowledge that he's insane, which is not to see him at all. To see him you must see what he saw and when you are trying to see the vision of an insane man, an oblique route is the only way to come at it. Otherwise your own opinions block the way... The ghost [Phaedrus] pursued was the ghost that underlies all of technology, all of modern science, all of Western thought. It was the ghost of rationality itself."

Oooh baby.

I was 17 years old and the world tipped off its axis and sent me flying in a brand new direction.



digby 3/11/2003 01:55:00 PM |

 
Orcinus

If those of us on the left read nothing else, we need to read this series from David Neiwert, called Rush, Newspeak and Fascism.

He is writing about something that we really don't want to hear about. Marshalled with data and first hand experience in the field, he is laying out the scenario --- step by step --- for how the United States of America can slowly but inexorably move into fascism.

This is not hysterical nonsense nor is it tin-foil hat conspiracy mongering. Those of us who like to think of ourselves as fairly earthbound (polemic blogging notwithstanding) and who have grown up in a time of unprecedented peace and prosperity where nothing really politically catastrophic has happened to us, are hard pressed to believe that something truly bad can happen here.

I have friends who have maintained until just recently that we would not go to war because well.. it didn't make sense and the wise men who "really run things" wouldn't let it happen. I know other who have faith that our electoral system could never be compromised in any serious way because well...it's America. We don't do that.

And, indeed, we have had an incredible run. We always existed within the context of the time, and as such we perpetrated genocide, institutionalized slavery, pandered to every bigoted and racist proclivity known to man. As a culture we have been no better (and probably no worse) than any other collection of flawed human beings. Rather, it has been the government, while certainly corrupt at times and thoroughly tainted by the necessity for the human species to run it, that has been the fundamental basis of the bold American experiment. A certain committment to that ideal has formed the core of what it means to be an American.

But, there is no guarantee that it remain so. Under stress, whether real or manufactured, the institutions we take for granted are subject to change. We are not immune from the dark side of human ambition or the folly of small men with grand ideas and little know how. It's impossible to know if we are marching toward fascism but there is no law of nature that says it is impossible.




digby 3/11/2003 12:54:00 PM |

 
How Inappropriate

Bob Novak (singing along with the Mighty Wurlitzer) is upset that Jimmy Carter is speaking out of turn and criticizing President Legacy:

NOVAK: There was a time when ex presidents acted like elder statesmen, rarely seen, almost never heard. But on "60 Minutes" this past weekend, there was Bill Clinton, basking in the spotlight of big money and criticizing President Bush's proposed tax cut. Even that wasn't as grading (sic) as yesterday's sanctimonious op-ed column in "The New York Times" by Sunday school teacher and ex-President Jimmy Carter. "As a Christian and as a president who was severely provoked by international crises, I became thoroughly familiar with the principles of a just war, and it is clear that a substantial unilateral attack on Iraq does not meet these standards."

He's right, as always. But, I really think he needs to have a talk with this guy too:

''We need to make clear the new world order is not some code for American imperialism, but making freedom and self-determination widely accepted norms''

It's highly inappropriate for former presidents to speak out of turn this way.




digby 3/11/2003 10:06:00 AM |

Monday, March 10, 2003

 
Ari and Karl Do The Tango

The new NY Times Poll has a roaring headline saying:

Growing Number in U.S. Back War, Survey Finds

Americans are growing impatient with the United Nations and say they would support military action against Iraq even if the Security Council refuses to support an invasion, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News Poll.

The poll found that 58 percent of Americans said the United Nations was doing a poor job in managing the Iraqi crisis, a jump of 10 points from a month ago. And 55 percent of respondents in the latest poll would support an American invasion of Iraq, even if it was in defiance of a vote of the Security Council.

The problem with this headline is that they didn't mention that while the public feels the United Nations isn't "managing" the crisis well, the Bush administration has a bare 51% of Americans who think that he is. And that number hasn't budged. The same number feel he is doing a good job on foreign policy in general, 51%.

The second question concerning defiance of a Security Council vote has never been asked before, so saying that such sentiment is growing is based upon total conjecture.

On the other hand the answers to many of the questions are so contradictory and incoherent that you really have to wonder what the hell people are thinking.

My personal favorite is:

From what you have seen or heard so far, how much progress have the U.N. weapons inspectors made in finding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq --- a lot, some, not much, or none at all?

9% say "a lot", 47% say "some", 33% say "not much", 8% say "none at all", and 3% say "don't know."

56% of the public believe that the inspectors have made some or a lot of progress finding weapons of mass destruction. I suppose they could mean since 1991, but surely a fair number think that Blix and his boys have found them in this last round.

oh...


digby 3/10/2003 08:26:00 PM |

 
Are We Better Off Now Than We Were Six Months Ago?

Vote Quimby points out that the very hegemony and military dominance so prized by the neoconservative warmongers, and on which they base their starry-eyed plans for a Pax Americana, is being seriously diminished by the incompetence of this administration.

Let's just look at this last few months and ask this simple question: Is America more powerful than it was last summer, or less?

I thought that perhaps the answer was 'more' after seeing the 15-0 Security Council vote that got inspectors back on the ground. Achieving unanimity on a security council that included Syria was no mean feat.

But since then, America's ability to influence events has receded dramatically. We've seen a coalition of the unwilling form between France, Germany, Russia and China; and we've been blown off by Turkey(!). It's unclear how many of these diplomatic failures were caused by massive disagreement over matters of substance vs. team G-Dub's ultra-manly approach to getting what it wants. But it seems pretty clear to me that the most powerful nation in the world gets less powerful every time another country publicly refuses to go along with its positions.

Be careful what you wish for, boys...




digby 3/10/2003 06:42:00 PM |

 
Judy Garland Bush

Uppers and Downers:

One of the leaders described Bush as "cocky and relaxed" and said he conveyed the clear impression that he had concluded that attacking Iraq was inevitable. Another lawmaker described Bush as being "in high spirits." This leader said that at the congressional breakfast a month earlier, Bush had "seemed to have the weight of the world on his shoulders."

The lawmakers' accounts were echoed by Bush's aides, who said he is still an optimist in settings unrelated to the war. People close to Bush said he has kept to his usual schedule of sleeping from roughly 10 p.m. to 5:30 a.m. And they said he continues to work out for at least half an hour, at least five or six days a week, alternating between weight-lifting and running -- sometimes on a treadmill and sometimes on an outdoor track.

"I do work out daily. And I'm sleeping well at night," Bush told a roundtable for regional newspaper reporters Monday.

digby 3/10/2003 01:46:00 PM |

 
How Low Can We Go?

This is just wonderful, just peachy. It makes me proud to be an American.

Now, let's suppose the (suspected) terrorist (supposedly) knows that there is going to be a terrorist attack somewhere at sometime in the future. In order to protect the innocent people who might be harmed, isn't it incumbent upon us to torture his children to find out that information?

Because, if torture is called for because of the number of innocent lives that could possibly be saved, then there really is no limit on who is eligible for the torture, is there? Since the moral argument rests on "we have to do it to save lives" then the calculus is pretty straightforward.

Boys "Quizzed" About Their Terrorist Boss Father

Yousef al-Khalid, nine, and his brother, Abed al-Khalid, seven, were taken into custody in Pakistan in September when intelligence officers raided a flat in Karachi which their father had fled hours earlier. They were found cowering behind a wardrobe with a senior al-Qaeda member.

The boys have been held in Pakistan, but this weekend they were flown to America to be questioned about their father.

CIA interrogators confirmed on Saturday that the boys were staying at a secret address.

"We are handling them with kid gloves. After all, they are only little children," said an official. "But we need to know as much about their father's recent activities as possible. We have child psychologists on hand at all times and they are given the best of care."

Yeah, I'm sure that these kids have a lot of important information to impart.

(Hey, aren't 7 year old's eligible for the death penalty in Virginia? If they aren't, they should be, little terrorist bastards...)

Of course there is that pesky little problem of whether torture actually works.

Patrick Nielsen Hayden posts a spot-on comment from one of his readers, James D. Macdonald, that really should give pause to even the most bloodthirsty proponents of the "torture for the sake of the greater good" school of cruelty:

Oliver, lad, let me explain something to you.

Give me a pair of pliers, a soldering iron, and two hours alone with you, and you will confess to being a member of Al Qaeda. Another half hour or so, and I'll have a list of all the terrible things you did, and most of the details of the things you plan to do. Then I'll get a list of the other secret members of Al Qaeda you know. Give me a little time with them, and they'll confess too, confirming that you're a terrorist.

Are we so fucking deluded that this is not completely and totally obvious?

I give up.






digby 3/10/2003 01:19:00 PM |

 
General Dynamic

I hope that the Democrats face up to the reality that national security is going to be the foremost issue in the coming Presidential campaign and find a way to deal with the fact that we are considered to be complete losers on the issue. This is a HUGE problem and it's not going to magically disappear no matter how badly they manage to fuck up the economy. They are going to keep asserting that the economy is in the ditch because of the "war" on evil and there is nothing to be done but to keep cutting taxes and invading countries that might threaten us someday. They are committed to this and they aren't going to budge.

And we are going to lose if we don't find a way to answer the charge that Democrats are pussies.

I like Dean's feisty iconoclasm and I've always thought that Kerry is a good man. Hart is one of the smartest politicians, ever. But, all of these guys are going to be going up against a guy whose hagiography has turned him into a cross between Winston Churchill and Stonewall Jackson. It's bullshit, but you have to picture the flagwaving, near hysterical cheering crowds that will be seen every single day on the whore media for the next two years as President AWOL begins his re-election campign in earnest. And they will consistently portray him as resolute, strong, manly, etc., etc., etc., while Kerry will be seen as a creature of the Senate debating society and Dean as an obscure northern Governor with no foreign policy experience. Hart = Monkey Business.

And, to ignore the importance of the southern constituency at a time when the public is very evenly divided is folly. As Michael Lind pointed out in his fascinating article called "America's Tribes", the martial tradition in the south is a fundamental, defining issue in american politics and we Democrats ignore it at our peril.

I have held off really looking closely at this guy until now because I had no idea of his domestic positions and I wasn't sure if he was going to be a reliable Democrat. This article , called "Mr Credibility" by Michael Tomasky went a long way toward allaying those concerns, at least in the short term. (I also noticed that he has quite a bit of education and some political experience ('75-'76 White House Fellow OMB) in economics.)

Think Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) looks good because he fought in a war? Well, check Clark out. Clark, now 58, fought in Vietnam, too, of course, but that was just his stretching routine. He won a war. He was NATO commander during the Kosovo operation. Granted, this may not be the military equivalent of beating back Adolf Hitler. But it arguably is something of a moral equivalent in that it led to the downfall of a Hitler manqué in the person of Slobodan Milosevic. It was, however sliced, a successful, multilateral mission that largely achieved its objectives, both military and political. And the Kosovo campaign was merely the most recent in a long line of Clark's feats. After graduating from high school in Little Rock, Ark., in 1962, he went to West Point, where he finished first in his class; after that, to Oxford University, where he earned a master's degree in philosophy, politics and economics as a Rhodes Scholar (an Arkansas Rhodes Scholar, eh?); to Vietnam in the late 1960s; thence up the ladder, all the way to NATO command, which Bill Clinton bestowed on him in 1997. Although both from Arkansas, Clinton and Clark first met, Clark says, at a 1965 student leadership conference while both were in college. Since then, Clark has won the Defense Distinguished Service Medal, a Silver Star, a Purple Heart, and more accolades and decorations than Secretariat.

So there's all that. And there's this: He votes Democratic. In Arkansas most voters enroll with no party affiliation; you show up on primary day and select the ballot of whichever party you want to support. Clark told me he voted in the Democratic primary in last year's state elections. He seriously considered seeking the Democratic nomination for governor of Arkansas in 2002, challenging Republican incumbent Mike Huckabee. He told me in an interview that he favors both abortion rights and affirmative action. We spoke just after the Bush administration filed its brief against the University of Michigan's admissions policy, and Clark said he was "surprised and dismayed" by the president's decision. He has "tremendous regard" for the Clintons. And, just as a little sweetener for the culture department, he quotes Bob Dylan toward the end of his book, Waging Modern War, and writes affectionately about the protest folk music that he used to love to listen to as a young man.

A lot of this is still sketchy, but I am gravely concerned that we are going to be in a campaign framed as if it is between John Wayne and Michael Jackson and if that is so, we are going to be in deep shit.

I think he could be the one --- and I mean at the top of the ticket, not the bottom.




digby 3/10/2003 12:28:00 PM |

 
Oh, That Explains It

I had long wondered why the very influential Richard Perle, who often acts as spokesman for the administration position both here and abroad, wasn't brought on in any official capacity. They hired Elliot Abrams, John Negropont, John Poindexter and Otto Reich, so they are certainly not constrained by matters of reputation or even criminality when bringing zealots and crazed ideologues in to the administration. So why not Perle?

Well, it would appear to be the oldest reason in the book. Greed. According to that well known terrorist Sy Hersh, he stands to make a great deal of money with his new company (coincidentally, I'm sure) formed in November 2001 that sells homeland security and defense products.

Of course, the good news is that he still maintains all the influece he could possibly want with Rummy and Wolfie, but he doesn't have to give up making huge sums of money to do it. In fact, his crazy-assed scheme to remake the world in his own image is finally being implemented and he can make a boatload of money from it at the same time.

Is this a great country or what?

(But, I still don't think we have the full story on what Bill Clinton knew about that 1985 check they found in the trunk of that rusted out Chevy. Corruption in high places is intolerable.)




digby 3/10/2003 10:55:00 AM |

Sunday, March 09, 2003

 
Beware The Ides Of March

Zizka is back and asks the logical question:

What do we do when the war starts? He has a list of possibilities, beginning with the obvious call to arms for regime change at home.

Matt Yglesias has also brought this up a number of times, particularly as it pertains to the anti-war movement shifting its emphasis from stopping the war to re-building Iraq properly.

I have been convinced that the war would happen since last August, barring a miraculous spine transplant from the Democrats or the UK bowing out. Since neither of those things have happened, we're going, (supposedly on the 17th, although just because this group is so incredibly predictable, it will probably be on the 15th. Hail Caesar.)

Leap-frogging over the horrible carnage we are about to wreak but over which we so clearly have no say, I ask all 12 of my readers to weigh in on this because I'd really like to know. Taking all of Zizka's points into account, how can we also persuade the Bush administration to deal with post-war Iraq properly?







digby 3/09/2003 01:59:00 PM |

 
The Regents and the Dauphin

The most confounding aspect of this Iraq debate is the question of motivation. Why in the world are we really doing this? Clearly, the official explanations don't make sense, the "case" has been presented over and over again, but it has never been made. We spend hours and days researching the past writings of the advisors, reading 5 pound tomes about the history of the middle east, and desperately scanning the foreign press for hints about what they are really up to. We force ourselves to fight the nausea that listening to the President inevitably brings and make ourselves watch him repeat his bumper stickers mantras over and over again. Oil, Pax Americana, personal revenge, bloodlust, delusions of grandeur, Israel, end-times...it goes on and on.

Oddly, it's a somewhat serious Maureen Dowd who most accurately answers the question of motivations, and illustrates why the "case" has been so shockingly incoherent:

The president wants to avenge his father, and please his base by changing the historical ellipsis on the Persian Gulf war to a period. Donald Rumsfeld wants to exorcise the post-Vietnam focus on American imperfections and limitations. Dick Cheney wants to establish America's primacy as the sole superpower. Richard Perle wants to liberate Iraq and remove a mortal threat to Israel. After Desert Storm, Paul Wolfowitz posited that containment is a relic, and that America must aggressively pre-empt nuclear threats.

And in 1997, Bill Kristol of The Weekly Standard and Fox News, and other conservatives, published a "statement of principles," signed by Jeb Bush and future Bush officials — Mr. Rumsfeld, Mr. Cheney, Mr. Wolfowitz, Scooter Libby and Elliott Abrams. Rejecting 41's realpolitik and shaping what would become 43's pre-emption strategy, they exhorted a "Reaganite policy of military strength and moral clarity," with America extending its domain by challenging "regimes hostile to our interests and values."

And then there is Karl, whose influence is easily as great as any of the above and who weighs in with the electoral calculation and the motivation that has to be a primary one in Junior's mind --- not to be booted out of office after having attained it on a technicality, an asterisk forever after his name, less successful even than his wimp of a lip reading Poppy. Bush family honor, sis boom bah.

And, there is the scary question of Bush believing he is anointed by God, as Jack Beatty writes about so vividly in the Atlantic:

Why? The surface explanations—Saddam has weapons of mass destruction, has used them on his neighbors, on his own people, and "could" use them against us—fall short, don't balance the heaping price Mr. Bush is prepared to pay. To judge by his rhetoric, the President believes God has chosen him to lead the U.S. in a war against "Evil"; beside that eschatological assignment, NATO, the UN, our allies, Arab opinion, world opinion, the war on terror, the budget, are as nothing.

So, the problem isn't that there is one overarching sinister reason for the insane foreign policy actions we are taking. It's that every member of the administration has his own overarching reason, and they are all competing and conniving and complimenting to the extent that we are now being pushed by events and nobody knows quite how or why we are doing it.

All of this comes around, once again, to the absolute folly of allowing a callow, gladhanding brand name to assume the office on the assurance that he would be "advised" by a committee of cool hands with limitless expertise. Human nature and history shows that this never works. An ignorant, childlike Dauphin is always spoiled, stubborn and convinced of his own infallability while also being easily manipulated by his Regents. They battle amongst themselves, and with him, until the government becomes nothing more than a game board upon which each faction presses his advantage of the moment, only to be outmaneuvered or overtaken by a rival. The boy-king, meanwhile, is always also held close by some who whisper in his ear that he has been ordained by God to maintain the power of his forebears.

Democracy and an open meritocratic society were supposed to insure that the government was never led again by a silly boy and his unaccountable cabal. Yet here we are, once again.








digby 3/09/2003 12:55:00 PM |

 
The Experts

Right wing talk show hosts have been highly critical of "Hollywood celebrities" like Janeane Garafolo because, while they certainly have a right to speak, they don't have the expertise or credentials to discuss serious issues of foreign policy and national security. They should not be taken seriously, nor should they be given valuable air time when such grave matters as war and peace are at stake.

I agree. Therefore, I think that such celebrities as Rush Limbaugh (3 semesters at Missouri State before dropping out to become a top 40 radio DJ), Michael Weiner Savage (PhD in ethnobotany) and Sean Hannity (biography only states he was a college radio DJ, no mention of where anywhere) should not be allowed to expound for a combined 40+ hours per week on radio and television stations throughout the country about their political beliefs.

Discussions of national security are much too important to be left to unqualified celebrity dilettantes.





digby 3/09/2003 10:15:00 AM |