As seen from Just Above Sunset

Tuesday, 11 July 2006

Are Things Changing?
Topic: NOW WHAT?

Are Things Changing?

There were three big news stories on Tuesday, July 11, and two were astounding, and one just depressing. That third was the massive railway bombing in India, in what used to be Bombay but has a different name now - Mumbai. But it's still the financial center of that nation, and, depending on what source you use, 147 or 163 people died, and nearly five hundred were badly injured. Being precise about the number dead is for the sensationalists. It was more than enough. Precision is for the cable news channels wanting more eyeballs on the commercial slots they sell to advertisers - how awful, so watch more. Horror keeps people from switching to Antiques Road Show.

And what was this about - Kashmir? Or are the Muslims still ticked about splitting things up in 1947 and the Hindus getting modern India while they got Pakistan? Is that still playing out internally? Pakistan has condemned the bombings, but that is pretty much pro forma these days. All the commentary on the right over here is that this was obviously al Qaeda and they're out to kill everyone, and only George Bush can stop them, if we'd just let the man do whatever he wants that we don't want to know anything about. The commentators on air from India found that idea rather stupid, but they were polite about it - no, this is something else. But we over here need a narrative that feels both familiar and scary, so that got a bit of play. But this wasn't about America and those who despise our policies and actions. This just wasn't about us. That's hard for Americans to understand. Everything else is, isn't it? Yeah, it's not fair.

The two other big stories of the day were all about us, much to the relief of many a news anchor and media sales department.

The first was that, in a stunning reversal, which the administration said wasn't a reversal at all, the Pentagon sent out a directive ordering civilians and uniformed commanders in the field to review all practices and paperwork to ensure that they follow Common Article Three of the Geneva Conventions, the one they said just didn't apply to those we have held down Guantánamo way. That one outlaws violence, torture, cruel treatment, and "humiliating and degrading treatment" of prisoners of war. That's explained here. We would never do any of that of course, officially (only a few "bad apples" did such things), so this is just a clarification. We said we could do such things if we decided we should, and now we're saying we won't, maybe.

We'll play by the rules of the treaty we ratified and signed, as the Supreme Court ruled here (PDF format) that this was, in effect, the law - treaties are the law of the land when ratified - and the law is clear, it does apply to the guys we picked up here and there. All the stuff about these folks being a different sort of prisoners - not prisoners of war and not criminals but something entirely new and amazing, with no traditional rights - was baloney. What we ratified clearly and explicitly accounted for such "enemy combatants" - so the proposed military tribunals, where you couldn't know what you were being charged with, you couldn't see the evidence or know your accuser, and you couldn't attend much of the proceedings, where evidence obtained by torture was entirely admissible, and you could only challenge anything at all after you were convicted, were clearly lame, to be generous. The rights of prisoners of war pertained. Common Article Three of the Geneva Conventions (here) had to be followed. The administration had argued in court that following such rules would make hunting down terrorists impossible. And now they say they've really been following the rules all along, and this directive is no big deal, just paperwork.

That's very puzzling, but you have to save some face. And if Common Article Three is to be followed, not only are the odd tribunals unlawful, so are the other approved techniques to get these people to say things - waterboarding, stress positions that sometime end in death, forced nakedness, the dogs, the sexual stuff and so on and so forth. Of course when they don't die, or commit suicide, what they do say is rather worthless - just anything at all to make it all stop. That this is obvious makes what's been going on even odder. Perhaps one thing said in a thousand might be important, but you just never know what. But then it is doing something. That seems to matter a lot, or did until now. And of course you feel powerful and in control.

Timothy Noah here is puzzled by the claim we've been following the rules all along, and unpack the logic this way - "1.) The United States is inherently good; 2.) Inherently good countries don't violate the Geneva conventions; 3.) Ergo, the United States can do anything it wants to suspected terrorists and it still won't be violating the Geneva conventions." And at this link he posts the actual directive ordering everyone to play be the rules (scroll down), and highlights what bullshit it contains. It's depressing.

Andrew Sullivan, the one conservative who seems to have had a little problem with torture, here, is very happy with the directive -

The United States has now apparently ended the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld-Gonzales nightmare of abandoning the base-line demands of the Geneva Conventions. After Hamdan, this is a great moment in a war we can now fight as honorably as the United States has fought every other war since the Geneva protocols were instituted. Much of the military, most of the CIA, almost all the JAG's, the Supreme Court and overwhelming majorities of both Senate and House disagreed with the torture policy. But the White House cabal prevailed. No longer - in the Pentagon, at least. As far as the military is concerned, America is America again. And this president's brutality has been reined in.

And he points to the New York Times quoting some of those JAG and military officers here -

"This was the concern all along of the JAG's," Admiral Guter said. "It's a matter of defending what we always thought was the rule of law and proper behavior for civilized nations."

... "We should be embracing Common Article 3 and shouting it from the rooftops," Admiral Hutson said. "They can't try to write us out of this, because that means every two-bit dictator could do the same." He said it was "unbecoming for America to have people say, 'We're going to try to work our way around this because we find it to be inconvenient.'"

"If you don't apply it when it's inconvenient," he said, "it's not a rule of law."

Yep, these guys didn't give into what Sullivan calls "the demands of foolish expediency or the cult of the president-as-monarch."

And there's what the Army captain who blew the whistle to the business at Abu Ghraib said here -

Some argue that since our actions are not as horrifying as Al Qaeda's, we should not be concerned. When did Al Qaeda become any type of standard by which we measure the morality of the United States? We are America, and our actions should be held to a higher standard, the ideals expressed in documents such as the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

Others argue that clear standards will limit the President's ability to wage the War on Terror. Since clear standards only limit interrogation techniques, it is reasonable for me to assume that supporters of this argument desire to use coercion to acquire information from detainees. This is morally inconsistent with the Constitution and justice in war. It is unacceptable.

Both of these arguments stem from the larger question, the most important question that this generation will answer. Do we sacrifice our ideals in order to preserve security? Terrorism inspires fear and suppresses ideals like freedom and individual rights. Overcoming the fear posed by terrorist threats is a tremendous test of our courage. Will we confront danger and adversity in order to preserve our ideals, or will our courage and commitment to individual rights wither at the prospect of sacrifice? My response is simple. If we abandon our ideals in the face of adversity and aggression, then those ideals were never really in our possession. I would rather die fighting than give up even the smallest part of the idea that is '"America."

Yeah, yeah, but Dick Cheney is pissed.

And other things are afoot. The fellow who made the Pentagon announcement was James Haynes, and on the same day the Senate opened nomination hearings - an appointment to the US Court of Appeals for the Fourth District. The item is here. When he was general counsel to the president, back in November 2002, he endorsed this list of "interrogation techniques" for use by the military and CIA -

... forced nudity; forced grooming; "[u]sing detainees['] individual phobias (such as fear of dogs) to induce stress"; 20-hour interrogations; stress positions (i.e. hanging from wrists from the ceiling); waterboarding (the use of a wet towel and dripping water to induce the misperception of suffocation); and "scenarios designed to convince the detainee that death or severely painful consequences are imminent for him and/or his family."

It's a little joke. Pack the court with judges who start moving things back to where they had been. Very clever.

Andrew Sullivan is all worked up about this matter here, and links to others who are too. But the man will be approved. It's a loyalty test for the Republican senate.

And too there's this, someone pointing out the directive about following the rules is fine and dandy, except it doesn't have much to do with those we won't say we have in custody, the ghost detainees we don't report to the International Red Cross or anyone, and those in places no one knows about. Cheney and his chief-of-staff Addington, wanted to create what they call "outer space" - beyond our laws and anyone's knowledge - where all bets were off and no one would know what we're doing at all. That's still out there.

So should the president have given in here? There's a lot of anger out there at what seem to be what the Supreme Court forced him to do. Why not just let the man do whatever he wants that we don't want to know anything about?

See what one conservative says to other conservatives at "Right-Thinking from the Left Coast" here -

I'm generally not against what Bush is doing in principle, but I am totally opposed to the way he has gone about it. As I've said a thousand times before, think long term people. You might be one of the Kool Aid drinkers who thinks that George W. Bush has the light of God shooting out of his asshole, but what is going to happen the next time a liberal Democrat gets elected? What are you going to say when President Hillary decides to spy on the American people, and uses Bush as a precedent? I imagine all of these self-styled 'conservatives' are suddenly going to remember that old Constitution thing from way back.

Freedom and liberty are, at least in my mind, not negotiable, no matter which party is in power. The right in this country is split. On the one hand there are people like me who still give a shit about the concepts of limited government and individual liberty, and then there's the other side, for whom making sure queers can't marry and getting Adam and Eve into science class ranks a close second to blindly supporting anything a president does, provided he has an R after his name.

Things aren't going well on that side. As Nelson Muntz would say - "Ha, ha."

The other big story of the day on Tuesday, July 11, wasn't really a story about an event, but a realization that something else has changed. That started with the Time Magazine cover story here - we witnessing a "seismic" shift in the Bush administration's foreign policy - "the end of cowboy diplomacy" and the substitution of "patience" for "pre-emption."

The end of Cowboy Diplomacy? The New York Times said just about the same thing here, and the Washington Post and others ran similar items.

Fred Kaplan has something to say about all that here - Reports of the death of "cowboy democracy" are greatly exaggerated.

The Time item did say Bush's response to North Korea's Fourth of July missile tests "even more surprising than the tests" themselves -

Under the old Bush Doctrine, defiance by a dictator like Kim Jong Il would have merited threats of punitive U.S. action - or at least a tongue lashing. Instead, the Administration has mainly been talking up multilateralism and downplaying Pyongyang's provocation.

And the New York Times said Bush "finds himself in an unaccustomed position: urging patience."

Kaplan says this is no big deal -

Bush did denounce North Korea as a member of the "axis of evil" in his 2002 State of the Union Address; he has colorfully (and accurately) disparaged Kim Jong-il, the country's dictator, before and since. But he never issued "threats of punitive U.S. action," not even at the end of '02, when Kim crossed a truly serious "red line" by abrogating the Non-Proliferation Treaty, kicking international inspectors out of his nuclear reactor, and reprocessing his once-locked fuel rods into weapons-grade plutonium.

Bush took no action three and a half years ago for the same reason that he took no action after the missile test: The Joint Chiefs of Staff told him there were no good military options; they didn't know where all the nuclear targets were, and North Korea could retaliate by launching chemical rockets at South Korea and Japan.

As for "talking up multilateralism," that's not new either, and, when it comes to North Korea, it doesn't mean as much as the reporters seem to think. Yes, Bush is urging the reconvening of the "six-party talks" - a Beijing forum at which the United States, China, Russia, Japan, and the two Koreas - discuss Pyongyang's nuclear program. But the first round of those talks took place in August 2003, back when the Bush Doctrine was riding high, before Condoleezza Rice became secretary of state and supposedly pushed the president onto diplomatic avenues.

The thing is, Bush never took the six-party talks seriously. Every time they crept toward progress, Vice President Dick Cheney took care to tug at his envoy's leash. When the envoy was finally permitted to meet face to face with North Korean diplomats, he was given strict orders not to offer terms of negotiation. He could talk - just not about anything meaningful.

Same with Iran. There's nothing new, just no other options.

It comes down to this -

The Times analysis states the matter more accurately: "Mr. Bush is discovering the limits of his own pre-emption doctrine." Yes, he's bumping into its limits, not rethinking or overhauling it.

Whatever's happened to the "old doctrine," the Time story does pose a question that's on the mark: "Can the U.S. find a new one to take its place?"

This is what's really going on. Bush and his team have slowly discovered that their prescriptions for changing the world - regime change, preventive war, and spreading democracy by force if necessary - aren't working and aren't going over with the world. But they don't know what to do about it; they don't know how to go about their business differently. Bush is drifting, not changing.

Time quotes a "presidential adviser" as saying, "There's a move, even by Cheney, toward the Kissingerian approach of focusing entirely on vital interests. It's a more focused foreign policy that is driven by realism and less by ideology."

This is preposterous. Where is the shuttle diplomacy? Where are the beginnings of a regional conference to stabilize Iraq? Where is the slightest nod toward talks - serious talks - aimed at keeping Iran and North Korea from joining the club of nuclear nations? These are "vital interests." Where is the "focusing" and the "realism" to attain them? When the administration starts behaving in a way that suggests it's asked these questions, then we can start to talk about a "seismic" shift in foreign policy. Until then, there's only the rumble of hot air.

Oops. There was no story there. Or the story is that the administration looks like it's changing quite a bit, but it's just because they can't avoid the conclusion that Plan A is crap and there is no Plan B. They don't do Plan B's - that's for the weak-willed. So whatever it is they're doing looks all new. But it's just deer-in-the-headlights panic, both harmless (no new wars), and completely ineffectual.

Hey, it's an improvement. The news of the day was dismal enough as it is. Take what you can get.

Posted by Alan at 23:26 PDT | Post Comment | Permalink
Updated: Wednesday, 12 July 2006 07:03 PDT home

Monday, 10 July 2006

Getting Real
Topic: Reality-Based Woes

Getting Real

The other night the writer Bill Montgomery - "Billmon" - went to see the new Al Gore movie An Inconvenient Truth, because, as he says here, "I needed a break from the gritty, existential realism of movies like Pirates of the Caribbean II and Superman Returns." Right.

He notes that this film Gore's slide show "takes an enormously complex topic and turns it into a presentation that's both scientifically accurate and engaging enough to be worth a hundred minute movie. Al's fighting the good fight, and I salute him for it."

But then "there is something tragic, even a little pathetic, about Gore's stubborn faith in the ability of facts and reasoned argument to save the world. The scenes of him schlepping through airports - alone, laptop in hand, on his way to yet another city to show his slides to another room full of college students or environmental activists - hit the edge of bathos. They make Al look too much like Willy Loman. 'Attention must be paid to this man.'"

That's the problem. The man is the "earnest wonk who takes serious ideas seriously, and assumes his audience does, too."

That's both sad and oddly pathetic in a way. The days of taking ideas seriously have passed. They're long gone -

In that sense, Gore's project makes him the diametrical opposite - the antithesis - of the unnamed Cheney administration official quoted by Ron Suskind immediately after the 2004 election: "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality - judiciously, as you will - we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors ... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

There are, of course, some truly sinister overtones to that quote - echoes of Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will and totalitarian delusions about the mutability of "Aryan" or "proletarian" science. As a practical guide to running the complex affairs of a modern industrial superpower, it's certainly demonstrated its flaws, in Iraq and elsewhere. But as a political slogan - that is to say, as the basic operating principle of a propaganda machine based on lies, fear and the emotional manipulation of popular myths - it's proven extremely effective. Even now, when the regime's real-world failures are obvious to most, the consequences in terms of lost public support haven't been nearly as severe as one might otherwise have expected.

Riefenstahl, Hitler's filmmaker, fits here, as does the title of her most famous film.

Matthew Yglesias notes, in looking at the latest argument for bombing the snot out of Iran next (Reuel Marc Gerecht here) -

They seem to think that, roughly speaking, we can accomplish absolutely anything in the world through the application of sufficient military force. The only thing limiting us is a lack of willpower.

What's more, this theory can't be empirically demonstrated to be wrong. Things that you or I might take as demonstrating the limited utility of military power to accomplish certain kinds of things are, instead, taken as evidence of lack of will. Thus we see that problems in Iraq and Afghanistan aren't reasons to avoid new military ventures, but reasons why we must embark upon them: "Add a failure in Iran to a failure in Iraq to a failure in Afghanistan, and we could supercharge Islamic radicalism in a way never before seen. The widespread and lethal impression of American weakness under the Clinton administration, which did so much to energize bin Ladenism in the 1990s, could look like the glory years of American power compared to what the Bush administration may leave in its wake."

I don't even know what else to say about this business. It's just a bizarre way of looking at the world. The wreckage that the Bush administration is leaving in its wake is a direct consequence of this will-o-centric view of the world and Gerecht takes it as a reason to deploy more willpower.

Your policy isn't working? It cannot be flawed. It must be you're not trying hard enough, and a character flaw in you. You need the will - and then you can do anything. Ignore the facts on the ground, and the empirical evidence. It's the triumph of the will that matters.

Well, the media ignored Al Gore on the environment, and everything else, all these long year, and mocked him - he's a "facts guy" after all and the New York Times' Maureen Dowd mocked his "earth tone" outfits.

But Montgomery hits on the real, underlying issue -

... their pro-lies, anti-reality spin isn't entirely a product of the familiar culprits: corporate control, concentrated ownership, and the elite biases...

There's something deeper at work here than just conventional media bias or capitalist economics, although they're certainly part of it. There's always been a powerful current of anti-intellectualism in American politics, just as there is in American life. It's the dark side of democracy: The pressure to accept what the majority, or the most vocal minority, thinks is true as truth - even when the evidence is entirely on the other side. When Henry Ford said history was bunk, he wasn't talking about the past but about the present, and his ire wasn't directed at historians per se but at the revisionist historians of the Progressive Era, who were telling him and his fellow know-nothings inconvenient facts they didn't want to hear. Pump Henry full of Hillbilly Heroin and put him on the radio, and you've got Rush Limbaugh, still making the same point.

The difference between Ford's time and Limbaugh's is that the political presumption against rationality is now shared, or at least pandered to, even at the top of the political and cultural pyramid. It's curious that people who are paid to think and write for a living, and who, like Gore, attended the "best" schools, are now nearly as susceptible to the politics of ignorance as your average conservative talk show host, but then the elite media ain't what it used to be. Like academia, it's fighting a losing rear-guard action against the spirit of the times and the angry, irrational prejudices that go with it.

But wait. There's more. And that would be the media owned and operated by corporations "vulnerable to the growing institutional and commercial pressures to tell the customers what they want to hear." Conservatives are the larger and more economically attractive audience, things move right, "which these days means the authoritarian right and the artificial reality it prefers to live in."

That about sums it up. Tell 'em what they want to hear. It is, in fact, "commercialized ignorance."

And it's bleak, or so Montgomery sees it that way -

... In my darker moments, it sometimes seems as if the entire world is in the middle of a fierce backlash against the Age of Enlightenment, the Scientific Revolution and the ideological challenges they posed to the old belief systems. The forces of fundamentalism and obscurantism appear to be on the march everywhere - even as the moral and technological challenges posed by a global industrial civilization grow steadily more complex.

Climate change is only one of those challenges, and maybe not even the most urgent one - at the rate we're going, civilization could collapse long before the Antarctic ice shelves do. Maybe as a species we really have reached the same evolutionary dead end as Australopithecus robustus - intelligent enough as a species to create problems we're not bright enough, or adaptable enough, to solve. I don't know. But if extinction, or a return to the dark ages, is indeed our fate - or our grandchildren's fate, anyway - I think it will be a Hobson's choice as to which cultural tendency will bear the largest share of the blame: the arrogant empiricism that has made human society into an instrument of technological progress instead of the other way around, the ignorant prejudices of the masses, who are happy to consume the material benefits of the Enlightenment but unwilling to assume intellectual responsibility for them, or the cynical nihilism of corporate and political elites who are willing to play upon the latter in order to perpetuate the former, which is, after all is said and done, their ultimate claim to power.

Oh, that's cheery.

But why not just believe what you know is really not true? What not just accept what Arthur Silber calls The Monsters' Reality?

Here's how he sees it, in relation to what's up in Iraq -

In terms of the overall contours of our national debate, I think we may have entered new territory as the catastrophe in Iraq is on the very edge of exploding into uncontrollable bloodshed and unending mayhem on a very large scale. The massacres and violence in Baghdad itself are only the latest indication of what may be in store, and of a trajectory that it may be impossible to stop or alter at this point. The denial and avoidance of facts that contradict or call one's beliefs into question is a necessary part of the True Believer psychology. But when all the available facts are in direct opposition to one's preferred view of the world, the True Believer faces a stark choice: he can either begin to acknowledge the complete failure of his delusions, or he can reject reality completely. I do not exaggerate, and I do not intend to be at all humorous, when I say that the latter is the path to extremely severe neurosis, so severe that it should serve as a frightening warning to others about the grave dangers of placing the demands of a totalist ideology and of cult loyalty above everything else.

You might think that this kind of profound psychological disorder would disqualify a person from the role of prominent commentator on politics and world events. In our country today, of course, you would be wrong.

And he then examines an item from Fred Barnes of Fox News - there's joy in the White House, things are just fine, the "excesses of the press and Supreme Court are bringing Bush and rebellious conservatives closer together" - and the economy is super, so the poll number will go up. And there was that gutsy trip the president made to Baghdad, and they've had three elections over there, and Zarqawi is real dead and so on and so forth - "At worst, Bush has bottomed out. At best, he's on his way to renewed popularity."

Well, that's one way of looking at things. Either optimism or delusion - take your choice.

Silber quotes a friend in Baghdad, desperate, as many are, hoping the Americans stay and fix things but knowing nothing is working, and concludes -

Given the ungraspable nightmare that is their life every day, it would be more than understandable if many Iraqis temporarily retreated into fantasy, simply as a last means of preserving the few remaining strands of sanity we have left them. But to the extent they still desperately cling to life and hope to survive this hell on earth, they know that is a luxury they cannot afford. They must acknowledge and deal with the horrors that surround them, if they wish to survive.

Meanwhile, our leaders like Bush and Cheney, and supporters of theirs like Barnes, live in circumstances as close to perfect safety as possible - and they choose delusion over fact. They make certain that the horrors their policies have unleashed have no way of touching them directly, so they can continue to indulge in fantasy, and to refuse to acknowledge the agonizing death spasms of an entire country. And they do all this simply because they will not question their belief system, and because they refuse to admit they were wrong.

Can there ever be forgiveness for this kind of deliberate self-blindness, or for this refusal to acknowledge the unbearable pain and suffering their actions and their policies have caused so many countless, innocent people? We are not gods; the perspective of eternity is not ours. In the human realm, where life and the possibility of happiness are the indispensable primary values, forgiveness is not possible, nor should these barely human monsters expect it. They are monsters by choice, and they may not now escape the consequences of their actions. In a tragedy beyond measure, many, many thousands of entirely innocent people will not escape those consequences, either.

Maybe they're really not "monsters by choice" but optimists and idealists. Maybe it's the same thing. Yeah, reality is a drag. Do we forgive them for disavowing it entirely? Probably not.

But then, sometimes it's a bit irritating, as we see that on Monday, July 10, we find out all this business North Korea and their nukes and their missiles, is all Bill Clinton's fault, and the White House Press Secretary, Toney Snow, late of Fox News, explains here -

I understand what the Clinton administration wanted to do. They wanted to talk reason to the government of Pyongyang, and they engaged in bilateral conversations. And Bill Richardson went with flowers and chocolates... and many other inducements for the "Dear Leader" to try to agree not to develop nuclear weapons, and it failed.... We've learned from that mistake.

Ah, but Kevin Drum at the Washington Monthy says some facts are in order here -

North Korea first began reprocessing plutonium during the administration of George Bush Sr. and may even have built one or two nuclear bombs during that period. Then, in 1994, they began preparations to remove plutonium fuel rods from their storage site, expel international weapons inspectors, and build more bombs. Clinton threatened the North Koreans with war if they went down this road, and then, after sending Jimmy Carter to Pyongyang for negotiations, signed a deal to keep North Korea's plutonium under international control in return for the delivery of two light water nuclear reactors, shipments of heavy fuel oil, and normalization of relations.

For the next six years that agreement held together and North Korea built no more bombs. North Korea even made some promising overtures about missile development late in Clinton's term, but there was no time to conclude the negotiations and the Bush administration showed no interest in following up on anything that it associated with the Clinton era.

Or maybe that never happened. You could look it up, but do you trust historical fact, or your gut instinct that it was that Clinton fellow who messed this up.

Fred Kaplan foolishly likes the facts here -

On Oct. 4, 2002, officials from the U.S. State Department flew to Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea, and confronted Kim Jong-il's foreign ministry with evidence that Kim had acquired centrifuges for processing highly enriched uranium, which could be used for building nuclear weapons. To the Americans' surprise, the North Koreans conceded. It was an unsettling revelation, coming just as the Bush administration was gearing up for a confrontation with Iraq. This new threat wasn't imminent; processing uranium is a tedious task; Kim Jong-il was almost certainly years away from grinding enough of the stuff to make an atomic bomb.

But the North Koreans had another route to nuclear weapons - a stash of radioactive fuel rods, taken a decade earlier from its nuclear power plant in Yongbyon. These rods could be processed into plutonium - and, from that, into A-bombs - not in years but in months. Thanks to an agreement brokered by the Clinton administration, the rods were locked in a storage facility under the monitoring of international weapons-inspectors. Common sense dictated that - whatever it did about the centrifuges - the Bush administration should do everything possible to keep the fuel rods locked up.

Unfortunately, common sense was in short supply.

But resolve and showing strength of will wasn't in short supply at all. They were told that if the stopped all this we might talk to them, but not before. You don't reward evil doers. And the rest is history, or one version of it, the unappealing version, with the facts.

But Clinton will do. The media likes the narrative. That'll sell airtime. You just don't look at what you published or broadcast earlier. There's a reason the newspapers call their old files "the morgue." That's dead stuff. Doesn't matter.

Everyone likes a good story.

But can you make awful and real stuff, happening because of decisions you made, look good?

Over at the blog of The New Republic - the call it The Plank - Lawrence Kaplan tries here (paragraphing changed for clarity) -

Even by the degraded standards of everyday life in Baghdad, this report from CNN's Nic Robertson comes as a shock: "One international official told me of reports among his staff that a 15-year-old girl had been beheaded and a dog's head sewn on her body in its place; and of a young child who had had his hands drilled and bolted together before being killed."

From its gruesome particulars, the report goes on to describe the fear that has gripped even the most hardened Iraqis during this latest round of sectarian bloodletting. Robertson's dispatch points to a revolting truth about the war in Iraq - one that American officers discovered long ago, but which has yet to penetrate fully the imaginations of theoreticians writing from a distant remove. The fact is, there is very little that we can do to dampen the sectarian rage and pathologies tearing Iraq apart at the seams.

Did the Army make a mistake when it banished "counterinsurgency" from the lexicon of military affairs? Absolutely.

Does it matter in Iraq? Probably not. How can you win over the heart and mind of someone who sews a dog's head on a girl?

Would more U.S. troops alter Iraq's homicidal dynamic? Not really, given that, on the question of sectarian rage, America is now largely beside the point.

True, U.S. troops can be - and have been - a vital buffer between Iraq's warring sects. But they cannot reprogram their coarsened and brittle cultures. Even if America had arrived in Iraq with a detailed post-war plan, twice the number of troops, and all the counterinsurgency expertise in the world, my guess is that we would have found ourselves in exactly the same spot. The Iraqis, after all, still would have had the final say.

Josh Marshall unpacks that here -

The brutality described here is difficult to move past. But I want to try. As we walk around the carnage, it's worth noting too that there's a good measure of excuse-making Kaplan has bundled into this post. In those rhetorical questions toward the end, he is reviewing a series of debates which his side of the debate (the regime-change, Chalabi, transformation of the Middle East side) was now clearly on the wrong side of.

He raises them to dismiss them. Did we have a crappy post-war plan, Kaplan asks. Yes, he answers, but in the end it didn't matter one way or another.

My point here isn't to pile on. To a degree at least, on these points, he's clearly right.

What I want to focus on is the final, totalizing message - one that's worth taking note of. You could summarize what Kaplan is saying as, our guns and our money and ideas are no match for their history and their hate.

And that - phrased different ways or from different perspectives - was the conservative realist line of opposition to the whole enterprise - the arguments Kaplan and his compatriots vilified and slurred for literally years. Kaplan's one of the smartest and most candid of the neocons (not much of a compliment in itself, I grant you, but deserved in a fuller sense in his case). But here you have the final come-down. Not an admission of error here or there or in execution, but total - that the whole idea and concept and program was upside-down-wrong in its essence.

Mark the moment - that's the ghost given up.

Yep, the idea was fine, and even if we did make a few mistakes, not admitted here, what can you do with these people? It's a bit racist, and idealistic, and angry, all at once. These people just aren't good enough for what we tried to do for them. It's them, not us.

By the way, CNN's Nic Robertson said the dog's head sewn on the girl's body was a story going around, and some believed it was true. His point was this is what some assumed to be true, because that was what they expected to be true - and his story was actually about the psychology there and what rumors are given credence, and how awful things are now when such things are given credence.

You believe what you want to believe - here and there.

How did the old Doobie Brother's song go? "What a fool believes, he sees." (Listen here if you'd like.)

And a minor note on what happens when you don't believe, the case of the very conservative Andrew Sullivan, who thinks maybe we shouldn't torture people.

Mark Levin in the neoconservative National Review here - "Andrew Sullivan considers himself an opponent of torture. But he's not. He's against the war in Iraq, which has ended a great deal of state-sponsored torture, not to mention state-sponsored rape, state-sponsored executions, and all the other inhumanity unleashed by maniacs like Saddam Hussein."

Sullivan here - "So now I'm not only not a conservative, I opposed the war against Saddam. In the unhinged world of the Republican far-right, anything is possible."

One of Sullivan's readers here - "The far right has finally sunk to the level of Soviet propaganda. Just as Stalin had photos altered to remove those who had been shot or sent to the gulag for thoughtcrime, Mark Levin has erased your support for the Iraq war because you are guilty of thoughtcrime. In your case, the thoughtcrime is holding the United States' conduct in war to a higher standard than that of Ba'athist Iraq."

Sullivan's comment - "I was also told by someone present at the Ramesh Ponnuru/Laura Ingraham discussion at Aspen that two other conservatives are now regarded as suspect by the ruling Republican intelligentsia: George Will and David Brooks. I imagine William F Buckley Jr, who has pronounced the Iraq war a failure, is also no longer a conservative in good standing. The attitude of people like Ponnuru and Ingraham and Levin is indeed Stalinist in form, if not content. But when you have to defend a massive increase in government spending and power in the name of conservatism, this kind of newspeak is necessary."

So the Stalinist purges begin. Only the true believers will remain. Reality and the facts can get you in trouble.

When people are reminded of Stalin and Leni Riefenstahl on the same day, six days after the Fourth of July, something is up.

Things are coming to a head. Head for the hills, or someplace real.

Posted by Alan at 21:43 PDT | Post Comment | Permalink
Updated: Tuesday, 11 July 2006 06:41 PDT home

Sunday, 9 July 2006

Hot off the Virtual Press
Topic: Announcements

Hot off the Virtual Press

The new issue of Just Above Sunset, the weekly magazine-format site that is parent to this daily web log, is now online. This is Volume 4, Number 28, for the week of July 9, 2006.

The week, extended commentaries on press freedom and press responsibility, on the narratives now in play that frame current events as things get hot on the Korean peninsula, a somewhat personal item on working in corporate America, all that odd news that broke at the end of the week and too, this weekend's stories of political silliness.

At the International Desk, Our Man in Paris, Ric Erickson shows us the city all tense before the World Cup game (actually looking just fine), and Our Man in Tel-Aviv, Sylvain Ubersfeld, provides an amazing photo essay on Jaffa, with a dozen photographs.

The Southern California photography - four pages of the ultimate Fourth of July parade, and cars and culture as there's a bit of dialog between here and Paris on the ultimate American car - and botanicals, and turtles and fish (really), and a wall. And there's a bit of Hollywood lore of course.

Our friend from Texas brings us more of the weird, and the quotes this week are on just being happy.

Extended Observations on Current Events ______________________________

Press Notes: A Tale from the Fourth of July
Story Telling: Notes on Current Events
Working: American Values
Friday Follies: The World Turned Upside-Down
Kid Stuff: Delusion or Something

The International Desk ______________________________

Our Man in Paris: Nothing New Under the Moon
Our Man in Tel-Aviv: Jaffa, Gate to the Sea

Southern California Photography ______________________________

Americana: The Fourth of July (four pages)
Car Talk: Conspicuous Consumption
Botanicals: Keeping Cool
Beating the Heat
One Shot: A Simple Wall

Hollywood Matters ______________________________

Movie Madness

Weekly Features ______________________________

The Weird: WEIRD, BIZARRE and UNUSUAL
Quotes for the week of July 9, 2006 - Don't Worry. Be Happy.

Posted by Alan at 18:23 PDT | Post Comment | Permalink
home

Saturday, 8 July 2006

Kid Stuff: Delusion or Something
Topic: Couldn't be so...

Kid Stuff: Delusion or Something

Saturday, July 8, the New York Times ran an interesting item -

In his most detailed comments to date on the Supreme Court's rejection of his decision to put detainees on trial before military commissions, President Bush said Friday that the court had tacitly approved his use of the detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

"It didn't say we couldn't have done - couldn't have made that decision, see?" Mr. Bush said at a news conference in Chicago. "They were silent on whether or not Guantánamo - whether or not we should have used Guantánamo. In other words, they accepted the use of Guantánamo, the decision I made."

Mr. Bush's remarks put a favorable spin on a ruling that has been widely interpreted as a rebuke of the administration's policies in the war on terror. The court, ruled broadly last week in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld that military commissions were unauthorized by statute and violated international law.

The question of whether Mr. Bush had properly used Guantánamo Bay to house detainees was not at issue in the case. At issue was whether the president could unilaterally establish military commissions with rights different from those allowed at a court-martial to try detainees for war crimes.

There's more, but that's essentially it. The Supreme Court was ruling on something else entirely, but, you see, they were silent on whether the Guantánamo prison itself was illegal, and since they were silent, they obviously approved of it. Silence, even when the topic is something else entirely, is really approval. It's all how you look at it. So it's obvious that they think what "the decider" decided is fine, because, after all, he's the decider.

Is Sheryl Gay Stolberg of the Times mocking him, or just reporting?

There's been some interesting comment on this, like this from Digby at Hullabaloo -

Do you remember the term "Clinton fatigue?" You know, back when everybody was really, really tired of peace and prosperity and talking about oral sex? (You can understand why everyone wanted our long national nightmare to be over.)

It occurs to me that some conservatives, at least the educated ones, must be feeling some serious "Bush fatigue" about now. When they hear ignorant, puerile drivel like this come out of his mouth, some of them (a couple of them?) must look at the calendar and count the days until their personal nightmare is over.

I'm the decider, see. They accepted my decision, see.

Whenever he sounds this moronic I'm reminded that it's probably how it was explained to him. That "see" is the tip-off. He can't actually understand the decision and then go out and expect that people won't think he's a complete idiot for saying what he just said. He doesn't get it. Nobody can spin that badly, not even him.

As TBOGG put it, this is Bush's version of: "That chick at the bar? She's totally digging on me."

It does seem a bit absurd. Be he's the man we chose to lead us.

Then there's this from Jack Grant at The Moderate Voice -

In what twisted universe is it that the President of the United States has to be TOLD by the courts that an extra-legal prison that uses "stress positions" and other "coercive" means of interrogation is not only ill-advised in a war that depends more on image than on casualties but also completely contrary to the most fundamental of American values including the rule of law?

I wish I could say this type of "thinking" along with the willingness of many people to actually support it is incomprehensible to me, but it is not. It merely shows how some are willing to twist responsibility into a rationalization of "they didn't tell me not to" while others are willing to believe whatever their leader tells them. America is not the first nation to support this idiocy, but I had hoped we would be immune.

We're not.

Well, somewhere in the civil courts of Los Angeles Country someone ruled on a workplace injury case in Long Beach, and since they didn't say renters in the Hollywood part of Los Angeles could not keep pet goats, that must mean we can. They were silent on the matter. They didn't say we couldn't.

The problem is, of course, the whole matter is a little complicated, as David Ignatius explains in the Washington Post here -

The post- Hamdan debate involves some long-standing divisions within the administration over anti-terrorism policy. On one side are Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and her advisers, who believe that Guantanamo has become a dangerous rallying point for anti-Americanism. On the other are conservative administration lawyers, led by Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, David Addington, who worry that any attempt to involve Congress or international lawyers in writing new rules would produce an unworkable legal mess that would endanger U.S. security. In the middle, seeking to resolve the issue over the next several weeks, are Stephen Hadley, the national security adviser, and Joshua Bolten, the new White House chief of staff.

Bush's comments about closing Guantanamo suggest that he wants to turn a page. But as sometimes happens with this administration, the debate isn't over until it's over - and even then it isn't over. That was the case with the McCain amendment banning harsh interrogation. The president signed the law and then appended a signing statement saying that his executive power wasn't bound by such limits, then made a public statement indicating that despite the signing statement, he would follow the law. Confused? So is the CIA, which is said to have stopped interrogating terrorist suspects altogether until the rules are clarified.

You can see why the president wants to simplify things. The Supreme Court didn't say shut the place down, so it must be fine. Now maybe his own subordinates will stop arguing amongst themselves. You just need to follow the logic. The court said nothing, so they must approve. No ten-year-old gets away with such things with his or her parents - but you never told me I couldn't set my sister's hair on fire - but the idea is that this will fly with the American public. And, oddly enough, it probably will. Everyone loves the clever kid who can find a way out of just about everything. And it is pretty clever, in a junior high way. He's a pip.

But at the same time, some others aren't to pleased, as in this news breaking the same day (emphases added) -

In a sharply worded letter to President Bush in May, an important Congressional ally charged that the administration might have violated the law by failing to inform Congress of some secret intelligence programs and risked losing Republican support on national security matters.

The letter from Representative Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, the Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, did not specify the intelligence activities that he believed had been hidden from Congress.
But Mr. Hoekstra, who was briefed on and supported the National Security Agency's domestic surveillance program and the Treasury Department's tracking of international banking transactions, clearly was referring to programs that have not been publicly revealed.

… "I have learned of some alleged intelligence community activities about which our committee has not been briefed," Mr. Hoesktra wrote. "If these allegations are true, they may represent a breach of responsibility by the administration, a violation of the law, and, just as importantly, a direct affront to me and the members of this committee who have so ardently supported efforts to collect information on our enemies."

He added: "The U.S. Congress simply should not have to play Twenty Questions to get the information that it deserves under our Constitution."

It seems the Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee doesn't like this "clever kid who hides things" routine much at all. And too, what haven't we found out about even more secret intelligence programs? There's more? Great.

But then, the man does keep us safe, as in this from Peter Alford in The Australian -

A top North Korean propagandist raised the threat of nuclear war yesterday as the fighting talk triggered by the isolated regime's missile launches got scarier than any disintegrating Taepodong-2.

Kim Myong-chol, a freelance propagandist for the Stalinist state, claimed North Korea would treat any country supporting UN sanctions against it - and that would definitely include Australia - as a nuclear missile target.

"Now the US is seeking sanctions for us doing nothing in violation of international law - this is outrageous," he said in Tokyo yesterday. "North Korea considers this an act of war and North Korea will launch a missile at any country that joins such a resolution."

Regarded as a trusted, though unofficial, international spokesman for Kim Jong-il's regime and with excellent Pyongyang access, Mr Kim also claimed every major US city was now targeted by nuclear-tipped warheads and could be destroyed within half an hour.

Oh yeah, it just keeps getting better.

And there's this -

"I'm afraid America has no sense of humor," said Mr Kim, who heads the Centre for Korean-American Peace north of Tokyo.

"Kim Jong-il has offered celebrations to the US and happy birthday to George Bush."

The missile firings were timed to coincide with American July 4 celebrations and a pre-emptive party for the US President, whose 60th birthday was yesterday.

Ah, it was a compliment and a celebration! That clears it all up.

The kids are running things.

Posted by Alan at 17:27 PDT | Post Comment | Permalink
home

Friday, 7 July 2006

Friday Follies: The World Turned Upside-Down
Topic: Reality-Based Woes

Friday Follies: The World Turned Upside-Down

Sometimes it's hard to keep it all straight, so just some notes on what happened as the week closed, Friday, July 07, 2006 -

Words

The president had a news conference, which he seems to be doing a bit more now, even if far less often than any president since the days before FDR. One senses he really resents having to explain himself to anyone, when Cheney and Rumsfeld and Rice do the work so he can get his four hours of exercise and ten hours of sleep each day. Let them do it. The evening before he and Laura has been interviewed by Larry King on CNN, and that was fine. Larry pitched softballs and it sometimes rose to the level of seriousness of, say, People Magazine. But most of it was fluff. How hard could the news conference be?

This news conference was supposed to be a big deal - it was in Chicago, not Washington, in some sort of attempt to connect with "the people" (not the policy wonks and overeducated thinkers) and escape the White House press corps with their feisty and embarrassing questions. And in a gesture of royal benevolence this time the president would allow the questions to come from the local press, not the big-time, large-newspaper, network and cable correspondents. This would be different.

But it wasn't. The questions were the same. What about North Korea, and what about Iraq, what about Iran and all the rest? No one asked about the Cubs, or farm subsidies. There was nothing about "the real concern of real folks." Or there really was, and his advisors had miscalculated. It seems they had been reading too much Carl Sandburg and that "hog butcher to the world" stuff, and thought that those in Chicago had other concerns. That must have been depressing.

The Associated Press covered the news conference here, but as it was the same questions, just from the wrong people, there's not much new.

The Osama bin Laden question was amusing - the New York Times had reported a few days earlier that the CIA had disbanded their secret unit to find the guy, and they had done that last year. What's up with that?

Tim Grieve puts what the president said in Chicago in perspective -

Sept. 17, 2001: George W. Bush is asked if he wants Osama bin Laden dead. "I want justice," he says. "There's an old poster out west, as I recall, that said, 'Wanted: Dead or Alive.'"

March 13, 2002: At a press conference, Bush says that he doesn't know if bin Laden is dead or alive. "You know, I just don't spend that much time on him…. And I wouldn't necessarily say he's at the center of any command structure. And, again, I don't know where he is. I - I'll repeat what I said. I truly am not that concerned about him."

Oct. 13, 2004: "Gosh, I just don't think I ever said I'm not worried about Osama bin Laden. It's kind of one of those exaggerations."

Jan. 31, 2006: "Terrorists like bin Laden are serious about mass murder - and all of us must take their declared intentions seriously."

May 25, 2006: "I learned some lessons about expressing myself maybe in a little more sophisticated manner - you know, 'Wanted dead or alive,' that kind of talk. I think in certain parts of the world it was misinterpreted, and so I learned from that."

July 4, 2006: The New York Times reports that the CIA last year disbanded a secret unit assigned to track down bin Laden and his top lieutenants in an effort to focus on "regional trends rather than on specific organizations or individuals."

July 7, 2006: At a press conference in Chicago, Bush calls the Times report "just an incorrect story." "I mean, we got a - we're - we got a lot of assets looking for Osama bin Laden. So whatever you want to read in that story, it's just not true, period." Asked if he's still on the hunt for bin Laden, the president says: "Absolutely. No ands, ifs or buts. And in my judgment, it's just a matter of time, unless we stop looking. And we're not going to stop looking so long as I'm the president." Bush said he had announced regret over the "dead or alive" comment only because "my wife got on me for talking that way."

You can see why Cheney and Rumsfeld and Rice should be the ones doing the explaining. They're good with words, and people unfairly remember what you say, and these days can call up when and where you said it and to whom (the item above has links to that). And even his wife was on his case for that "dead or alive" comment. It's like words really mean something - or something like that. You can see that idea frustrates him.

But it was a day for frustration - "President Bush expressed frustration Friday with the slow pace of diplomacy in dealing with North Korea and Iran and prodded world leaders to send an unmistakable message condemning Pyongyang's long-range missile test."

Yeah, it's slow, and he hates that, and they use all those words. Drat.

And he is amazed by how odd it is -

"And it's, kind of - you know, it's kind of painful in a way for some to watch, because it takes a while to get people on the same page," Bush said. "Not everybody thinks the exact same way we think. Different words mean different things to different people. And the diplomatic processes can be slow and cumbersome."

But he has had an insight - that different words mean different things to different people. That's growth, even of most fourteen-year-olds figured that out long ago.

But then any sort of diplomacy is new to the administration, as their muscular "forward-leaning" policies have bumped up against reality - sometimes you just cannot bomb, or invade, or intimate, and refuse to talk at all. Sometimes you have to talk, and use words. He seems to hate that. But there you have it.

And things just aren't going well, as noted here - North Korea threatened on Friday to take "stronger physical actions" after Japan imposed sanctions in response to its missile tests this week, while the United States and Japan struggled to set out a unified diplomatic response to the launches.

Great.

And the tale of how we got into this pickle one where "we don't talk" and "words don't matter" really got us in trouble, as Eric Alterman recaps here, starting way back in the days when Colin Powell was Secretary of State, back as the administration settled in -

The tone of Powell's tenure was set early in the administration when he announced that he planned "to pick up where the Clinton administration had left off" in trying to secure the peace between North and South Korea, while negotiating with the North to prevent its acquisition of nuclear weaponry. The president not only repudiated his secretary of state in public, announcing, "We're not certain as to whether or not they're keeping all terms of all agreements," he did so during a joint appearance with South Korean president (and Nobel laureate) Kim Dae Jung, thereby humiliating his honored guest as well. A day later, Powell backpedaled. "The president forcefully made the point that we are undertaking a full review of our relationship with North Korea," Powell said. "There was some suggestion that imminent negotiations are about to begin - that is not the case." He later admitted to a group of journalists, "I got a little far forward on my skis." It would not be the last time.

As former ambassadors Morton Abramowitz and James Laney warned at the moment of Bush's carelessly worded "Axis of Evil" address, "Besides putting another knife in the diminishing South Korean president," the speech would likely cause "dangerous escalatory consequences [including] ? renewed tensions on the peninsula and continued export of missiles to the Mideast." North Korea called the Bush bluff, and the result, notes columnist Richard Cohen, was "a stumble, a fumble, an error compounded by a blooper. ? As appalling a display of diplomacy as anyone has seen since a shooting in Sarajevo turned into World War I."

Bush made a bad situation worse when, in a taped interview with Bob Woodward, he insisted, "I loathe Kim Jong Il!" waving his finger in the air. "I've got a visceral reaction to this guy, because he is starving his people." Bush also said that he wanted to "topple him," and that he considered the leader to be a "pygmy." Woodward wrote that the president had become so emotional while speaking about Kim Jong Il that "I thought he might jump up." Given what a frightful tinderbox the Koreas have become, Bush's ratcheting up of the hostile rhetoric could hardly have come at a worse time. In December 2002 the North Koreans shocked most of the world by ordering the three IAEA inspectors to leave the country, shutting down cameras monitoring the nuclear complex in Yongbyon and removing the IAEA seals in their nuclear facilities. The following month, Pyongyang announced it had withdrawn from the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), restarted its small research reactor, and began removing spent nuclear fuel rods for likely reprocessing into weapons-grade plutonium. In October 2003, it announced that it had finished reprocessing spent fuel rods into plutonium and now possesses "nuclear deterrence" - another way of saying it has the bomb. No independent confirmation was available. Even including Iraq and Iran, the Korean peninsula is probably the single most dangerous and possibly unstable situation on Earth. As Jonathan Pollack, chairman of the Strategic Research Department of the Naval War College, observes, "If you wanted a case of imminent threat and danger, according to the principles enunciated in the National Security Strategy document, then North Korea is much more of a threat than Iraq ever was in the last few years."

Bush had already undermined the extremely sensitive negotiations under way to bring the North Korean regime into the international system. When South Korean president (and Nobel laureate) Kim Dae Jung visited Washington six weeks after Bush took office, Bush humiliated both his guest and his own secretary of state by publicly repudiating the negotiations after both had just publicly endorsed them. (Powell had termed their continuation "a no-brainer.") One suspects the president's decision was motivated by a combination of unreflective machismo and a desire to provide military planners with an excuse to build a missile-defense system. But in doing so, he displayed a disturbing lack of familiarity with the details of the negotiations he purposely sabotaged. "We're not certain as to whether or not they're keeping all terms of all agreements," he said at the time. But at the time, these "agreements" numbered just one: the 1994 "Agreed Framework," which froze North Korea's enormous plutonium-processing program - one that was bigger, at the time, than those of Israel, India, and Pakistan combined - in exchange for economic aid. Bush aides were later forced to admit they could find no evidence to support the president's accusation. (A White House official tried to clear up the matter by explaining: "That's how the president speaks.")

In the heat of the moment, when now North Korea promises total war with the United States if we attack their facilities, it is easy to forget the fiasco above, where macho bluster blew away all the fancy-pants diplomacy that we were assured just didn't work - it hadn't worked and it wouldn't work. The evidence ran the other way, but there's the principle of the thing - you don't talk, you just do. And now we're in deep do-do (sorry).

Alterman deals in facts. We do have our thirty-seven thousand troops there. They have eleven thousand artillery guns, some possibly chemically tipped, within fifty miles of Seoul. Oh yeah, they have thirty-seven hundred tanks and seven hundred Soviet-built fighter jets, and all in all a million soldiers and seven million reserves, making them the fourth or fifth largest standing army on planet. This is a problem.

And now turning to words is a problem, ironically -

But choosing not to deal with the problem of North Korea presents the world with two profoundly worrying prospects. The first is that North Korea will make one of its bombs available to a party that would in fact like to use it - perhaps even al Qaeda. (U.S. weapons inspector David Kay claimed to discover a $10 million deal for just such a transfer between North Korea and Iraq, though the former kept the money and did not deliver the material, insisting that U.S. pressure made it impossible.) Second, a spiraling collapse of the regime could lead to a last-ditch attack on Seoul, with both conventional and nuclear weapons. As one U.S. official put it, toleration of a nuclear North Korea sends the same message to Iran that the invasion of Iraq sent to North Korea: "Get your nuclear weapons quickly, before the Americans do to you what they've done to Iraq, because North Korea shows once you get the weapons, you're immune."

We seem to have backed ourselves into a corner - can't act, and never believed in negotiating anything and in using words. And the alternative is? There is none.

Well there is one, as Alterman notes -

The Bush plan seems to be to persuade several key Asian countries that now provide cash and assistance to Pyongyang to turn off the taps and stand by as its people starve and the nation - with its nukes - implodes. But those upon whose cooperation the policy rests appear to have little inclination to support the plan. South Korea's population, like that of most of the world, has grown increasingly distrustful of the Bush administration's behavior and is far less eager to follow the U.S. lead. Its current president, Roh Moo Hyun, won his office by following the German pattern, with a campaign that stressed his independence from the United States and its martial declarations. The Chinese remain by far the North Koreans' most important trading partner, supplying for instance 70 percent of its crude oil needs and much of its foodstuffs. Its leadership has shown no interest in doing Bush's bidding or participating in a strategy that appears designed to create political change through mass starvation. And the last thing Japan wants to see is the collapse of the regime, thereby finding itself facing a nuclear-armed, unified Korea on its borders.

The obvious solution - both to the strategic problem and to the humanitarian crisis - is clearly some sort of negotiated buyout, along the lines that the Clinton administration began, but fumbled. Under the terms of that deal, North Korea was to freeze and eventually eliminate its nuclear program while the United States spearheaded an international effort to provide fuel and light-water (non-weapons-producing) nuclear reactors.

But then that would have been too "Bill Clinton." And the whole idea is you don't reward evil-doers, and you don't talk with them, unless you do, when no alternative is left. But you don't like it. You don't like it at all.

It was a bad day in Chicago.

Getting Voted off the Island

The political buzz as the week ended was all about the debate Thursday night in Connecticut, really. The August Democratic primary to decide who runs for the senate seat in November has people buzzing all over. Will Joe make it that far? And it goes like this -

A combative debate between Connecticut Sen. Joseph Lieberman and challenger Ned Lamont has exposed Democratic Party fault lines on the Iraq war and set a harsh tone for next month's primary showdown.

Lieberman, a three-term senator and vice presidential nominee in 2000, emphasized his experience and bluntly dismissed Lamont as a political novice whose call for a timeline on withdrawing troops from Iraq was "dumb."

But Lamont, a millionaire businessman who has gained on Lieberman in the polls by portraying him as too supportive of President George W. Bush, attacked Lieberman as a knee-jerk cheerleader for the war.

Neither candidate delivered a knock-out blow in Thursday's debate, analysts said, but the campaign's focus on Iraq and Lieberman's plan to run as an independent in November's mid-term elections if he loses the August 8 primary have brought national attention to the contest.

? Lamont's criticism of Lieberman for his steadfast support of the war has made him a darling of left-wing Internet bloggers who have poured money and grass-roots muscle into his campaign.

? The debate's sometimes caustic exchanges mirrored the tough negative ads that both candidates are airing in the state, including one from Lamont combining images of Bush with audio from Lieberman that makes it seem like the president is speaking in Lieberman's voice.

? Analysts say Lieberman, who is more popular with Republicans and independents in Connecticut than with Democrats, would likely win the election as an independent even if he loses the primary.

Well he has the endorsement of Sean Hannity and Michelle Malkin and Hugh Hewitt and, of course, Ann Coulter. Joe has said no one, and certainly no Deomcrat, should undermine the credibility of the president - we're at war and that would help the enemy or whatever. Don't raise questions. A lot of folks want to just toss him out of the Democratic Party.

The even hit the local Los Angeles Times on July 7 with this editorial -

Democratic voters in Connecticut have the right to nominate the candidate of their choice. But it is more than a little disturbing for the longtime popular senator (and the party's 2000 nominee for vice president) to be targeted for defeat by national fundraisers based on his foreign policy views. There were principled people on both sides of the debate to go to war in Iraq. This page did not support the war, but it cannot cheer on liberal activists who run the risk of being guilty of the same sort of insistence on ideological purity that they deplore in Republicans.

The Democratic Party - the party of Woodrow Wilson, Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy - is a big enough tent to include voices on the conservative end of national security policy. Lieberman's views shouldn't trigger a nationwide jihad against him.

And that sets offthe famous political cartoonist "Tom Tomorrow" who says this -

Speaking as a Connecticut voter, I'm just awfully sorry to learn that these delicate Angelenos find it disturbing to witness democracy in action. The fact of the matter is, Lieberman is a pisspoor excuse for a Democrat, and that's saying a lot given that the Democrats themselves are mostly a pisspoor excuse for an opposition party. We sure as hell don't need a Democrat who plays kissy-face with the President, supporting everything from the nomination of Torturin' Al Gonzales ("I believe in giving people the benefit of the doubt"), to this misbegotten war. A Democrat who suggests that rape victims who can't get proper medical care simply take a "short hike" to another hospital. Etc., etc. Look, I was prematurely anti-Lieberman - I was appalled when Gore chose him as a running mate in 2000, for chrissakes. This is absolutely not about a "single issue" for me - but even if it were, well, the war's a pretty goddamn big issue isn't it? Pretty much the defining issue of the day. And the Democratic voters of Connecticut have every right to say, this man simply does not represent my values - and to work to try to replace him. (Afterthought: if that resonates on a national level, great. But the decision is ultimately up to the voters of Connecticut, "nationwide jihad" notwithstanding.)

Anyway - and I say this with great affection, as a former longtime Californian - I'm not sure Connecticut voters really need to be lectured about appropriate political behavior by residents of a state in which a legitimately-elected governor was recalled and then replaced - out a field of candidates that also included a porn star, a down-on-his-luck former child actor, and Arianna Huffington - with an actor best known for playing a killer robot from the future.

Ouch.

Well, maybe the Democrats are falling into a "negativity trap" as John Dickerson suggests here, or maybe the man from the Greenwich Town Council might be a better choice than the darling of Fox News who tells Democrats to stop ragging on the president, and that things are getting better every day in Iraq, and that rock lyrics should be censored, and we may yet find those weapons of mass destruction. Yeah, he marched with the Civil Rights folks in the sixties and opposed the Vietnam War. That was then. This is now. "Remember what I was like" only goes so far.

The debate itself was full of local issues, but this captures the anger -

Still, for those of us outside The Land Of Steady Habits, there was a little too much about the Greenwich Town Council and submarine bases and who said what when and to whom. But there was one quote that didn't come up, and it's the only quote that should matter to those of us outside Connecticut. It's this one:

"It's time for Democrats who distrust President Bush to acknowledge he'll be commander-in-chief for three more years," the senator said. "We undermine the President's credibility at our nation's peril."

You may recognize that final sentence as the soft outer frontier of the rhetoric that ends up in a place where newspeople are accused of treason and where roam free the eliminationist fantasies of the lunatic right. It's where we find "reasonable" people treating John Yoo's authoritarian delusions as though they had something to do with America. I couldn't care less if Ned Lamont once took a Republican stand on water rates. I saw enough last night to know he'd never say anything like that.

If Joe loses the primary he will run as an independent. He may get buried. The new opposition campaign slogan really is "Had enough?" The results are coming in.

But to be fair and balanced, there is a parallel to all this on the right. The conservative columnist Andrew Sullivan was denounced this week by all the major commentators on that side of things. Sullivan is a lifelong Republican and on board with it all, against abortion, affirmative action, in favor of massive tax cuts and the smallest possible government. But this week all said he was not a conservative at all. The problem is he thinks torture is wrong and we shouldn't do it, and he's troubled by the president claiming no rules apply to the executive branch at all, and all this Christianization of the government. He's a bad boy (and he's gay). He's been voted off the island.

And at his website he posts this letter he received from one of his readers -

Actually, I don't consider you a conservative anymore either, for the same reasons I don't consider myself one anymore. In this day, in this country, to be a conservative is to buy into a program of relativism and deconstructionism (scientific knowledge in evolution and climate science is just one "perspective" or is totally unreliable because scientists are a bunch of liberals and science is just a political agenda). To be a conservative is to believe that good government rests on the personal character and godliness of an unshackled executive, not on the time-tested processes and institutions of democracy. To be a conservative is to let your worst enemies dictate your moral values. To be a conservative is to believe that insufficiently conservative judges are enemies of America and should be eliminated or marginalized as illegitimate.

Above all, to be a conservative is to use the power of the government to Christianize Americans and the US government to the greatest extent possible.

Andrew, today liberals are the better defenders of the Enlightenment. Conservatives are the enemies of the enlightenment. So you want to cut entitlements? Pardon my French, but big fucking deal. You want to cut entitlements because you have weighed the evidence of their effectiveness and found it lacking. You're still part of the democratic machine and you still respect democratic reasoning.

Conservatives aren't as quaintly obsessed with evidence and balancing costs and benefits as you are. They want to cut benefits on principle, no matter what. They want to slash taxes as a first principle, expensive wars and basic human decency be damned. They are not rational decision makers in the sense that they distinguish between effective and ineffective programs. The slash taxes, period - no thinking required.
And - this isn't a minor point - they don't actually cut entitlements. They expand them. So there goes that argument.

My choice - and yours - is to join up with a reality-based community that trusts expertise, democratic processes, and established institutions and makes fact-based decisions (these days called liberals), or to join up with a community of relativistic mystics who are not open to reason or persuasion, distrust democracy, reject standards of behavior because they believe themselves to be inherently godly, and have no use for traditional democratic institutions. These tradition-despising relativistic mystics we call conservatives.

Andrew, you and I have much more in common with the liberals. Because they're more conservative.

Cool, and amusing. Everything is moving around.

What?

There is no category for this.

It seems General George Patton was very fond of something called "Country Captain Chicken" and someone suggested that might make a good MRE (meals-ready-to-eat) thing for our troops in combat. Field rations can be dismal, and Patton might be onto something.

But then it gets odd -

So MRE-makers cooked up a prototype of the dish and tested it with soldiers. The Joes liked it. At first. "Our war-fighters gave it a thumbs up; it scored very high," Gerald Darsch, the Defense Department's director of combat feeding, told me. "But, within several years, it began to rate on the low end."

What happened? Country Captain Chicken got a reputation... "Country Captain Chicken," a young specialist told me, "will make you gay."

... For the record, the Army says the soldiers of the 101st were mistaken. "I don't think the currants we put in Country Captain Chicken have any metabolic effect that would change your preference, sexually," Darsch claims.

Oh. But it's gone now.

What?

There is a category for this - trouble. The item hit the press Friday, July 7, and goes like this - "A decade after the Pentagon declared a zero-tolerance policy for racist hate groups, recruiting shortfalls caused by the war in Iraq have allowed 'large numbers of neo-Nazis and skinhead extremists' to infiltrate the military, according to a watchdog organization."

The Army is on this, as they know this is trouble, and the Aryan Nation and Nazi graffiti in Baghdad are starting to cause a bit of trouble. This is not what they want, and they're taking it seriously. They'll get these guys out. But when you need all the bodies you can get, it did happen that these guys seemed good enough, and weren't.

One reaction was this from Digby at Hullabaloo -

Well now, this certainly does explain a few things, doesn't it?

I'm not sure there's anything more stupid than hiring a bunch of neo-Nazi's to occupy a foreign country. But it is par for the course with the Bush administration.

The thing is that it doesn't take much to push people over the line in these stressful situations anyway. Racism is clearly rampant among the Americans already. It's obvious in this sophomoric Ali Baba/Hadji bullshit they talk all the time. I'm not even sure that it isn't part of every war to a certain extent. It's primitive stuff.

I definitely believe that racism lies at the heart of why many people supported a war against a country that had not committed any crime against ours - and why they don't care if there were any WMD or any other justification. One dead Arab's as good as another dead Arab. It didn't matter which Arab country we invaded as long as we invaded one and fucked some of "those people" up.

But regardless of the strain of racism that already exists in that war zone, putting white supremacists in their midst and allowing them to spew their Nazi propaganda among those frustrated, frightened, bored soldiers is a recipe for disaster. Instead of the sort of common tribal hatred you might see in any dangerous warlike environment, you suddenly have someone providing a whole philosophy and intellectual structure for it. It's the perfect recruiting ground for white supremacy and gives certain types permission to act out their violent fantasies against those they already consider racially inferior. And they are also training them to think of it in ways that are very dangerous when they come back to the US.

I don't know if these any of these atrocities we've recently heard about are related, but I wouldn't be surprised. And frankly, the way this administration has conducted their war so far, I also wouldn't be surprised if they haven't loosened the rules on this on purpose. I'm sure they think skinheads are tough guys. And we know how the chickenhawks love the tough guys.

Well, maybe. The rules may have been loosened on purpose in Washington for this, or it may be something no one thought about until too late. But the Army will have none of it. You need discipline and loyalty and fairness in the ranks, and the officer in my family, the Lieutenant Colonel who has been there and back, who I saw graduate from West Point, would put and end to this real fast, no matter who set it up. Any good officer would. On the other hand, the minority soldiers themselves might just make it real hard for the Aryan tough guys in the unit. You fight together, and for each other. Calling your buddy in the field ghetto trash or wetback crap might be counterproductive. You might find yourself alone at a bad time and place. This is self-correcting.

The Usual

The big news Friday, July 7, was this -

A terrorist plot to flood lower Manhattan by attacking train tunnels under the Hudson River used by tens of thousands of commuters was thwarted before the conspirators could travel to the United States, authorities said Friday.

Eight suspects - including an al-Qaida loyalist arrested in Lebanon and two others in custody elsewhere - had hoped to pull off the attack in October or November, federal officials said. But federal investigators working with their counterparts in six other countries intervened. The other five suspects remained at large.

"It was never a concern that this would actually be executed," Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said in Boston. "We were, as I say, all over this."

Caught it early, or really, before there was an "it." Why now? Just a reminder. It was the main news all day. It served its purpose.

Posted by Alan at 23:44 PDT | Post Comment | Permalink
Updated: Friday, 7 July 2006 23:48 PDT home

Newer | Latest | Older

«	July 2006					»

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
						1
2	3	4	5	6	7	8
9	10	11	12	13	14	15
16	17	18	19	20	21	22
23	24	25	26	27	28	29
30	31