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Consider:

"It is better to be drunk with loss and to beat the ground, than to let the deeper things gradually escape."

- I. Compton-Burnett, letter to Francis King (1969)

"Cynical realism – it is the intelligent man’s best excuse for doing nothing in an intolerable situation."

- Aldous Huxley, "Time Must Have a Stop"







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Wednesday, 12 July 2006
Curiosities: Matters Some Are Considering
Topic: Couldn't be so...

Curiosities: Matters Some Are Considering

Now What?

The back issues of Foreign Affairs magazine - the subscription was a gift from a friend - sit on the top shelf of the one of bookcases here in Hollywood. They should go - what seemed incisive and urgent then is not now, and if you do want to look up anything in those issues you can use Google. Most of it is online. But they look impressive sitting there. Of course those who would be impressed never visit here, and those who do, if they notice them, are indifferent, or a bit frightened. Who reads such things?

But here in the Washington Monthly it seems that Kevin Drum wants those who do read such things to go back a few months and reconsider the Stephen Biddle piece, Seeing Baghdad, Thinking Saigon. The idea there is that comparisons of Iraq to Vietnam are useless - Iraq is a communal civil war, not a nationalist war, and counterinsurgency and "Iraqization" won't work. Things are different now.

So what will work to produce some sort of stable and functioning government there? It may be too much to ask that it be pro-American, but maybe "not hostile" would be good enough. Can we have something there that works well enough that the region is marginally stable and we can bring most of our people home? Or some of them? Will this have an end, or at least a winding down?

That leads to the current issue of Foreign Affairs, where all sorts of people - Christopher Hitchens, Fred Kaplan, Marc Lynch, and Drum himself - have a roundtable on the issue of "what will work" to fix this mess. Now what? Everyone has their say.

The following discussion of who said what, and who's full of crap and who isn't, is here.

Drum's view -
Hitchens aside - since he appears not to have even read the roundtable pieces and instead simply banged out a random column on Iraq - the most remarkable thing about the responses is that everyone seems to agree that (a) we're virtually powerless to affect events in Iraq and (b) none of the proposals by the roundtable authors are remotely practical. Despite this, none of my fellow responders support even a phased and prudent withdrawal of US troops. Apparently we are to stay in Iraq forever despite the inability of anyone to produce a plan for victory - or even bare stability - that inspires even minimal confidence.
That's probably why the pile of Foreign Affairs magazine frightens visitors here. Careful and clever thinkers look at we've managed to get ourselves into in Iraq, and see no good alternatives. Better to read People or Popular Science.

As for Kevin Drum, he favors "a prudent withdrawal" - because no one has proposed "an even remotely credible plan" that would allow American troops to regain control of the low-level civil war that seems to be humming along over there. When there is no possible way to "regain control" that anyone can see, hope against hope is stupid. It could work, you never know, verges on the delusional.

And Drum adds a twist. He says he had been reluctant to bring this up. Everyone says if we haul out of there they'll really have a civil war, and it'll go regional. But there's a problem if we stay -
The worst that could happen is a full-blown Iraqi civil war with the US military caught in the middle. At that point, our options would be to either take sides and become a tacit party to a near genocide, or stand by helplessly while Iraqis slaughter each other in our presence. That would be devastating not just for Iraq and the Middle East but for America's prestige and its future freedom of action as well.
But it seems the second alternative is happening already, as everyone on Wednesday, July 12, was citing the "Riverbend" web log from Baghdad, discussing events of the previous Sunday here -
The horrific thing about the killings is that the area had been cut off for nearly two weeks by Ministry of Interior security forces and Americans. Last week, a car bomb was set off in front of a Sunni mosque people in the area visit. The night before the massacre, a car bomb exploded in front of a Shia husseiniya in the same area. The next day was full of screaming and shooting and death for the people in the area. No one is quite sure why the Americans and the Ministry of Interior didn't respond immediately. They just sat by, on the outskirts of the area, and let the massacre happen.
Drum adds this -
Actually, the reason for the non-response is probably pretty obvious: the Shia-controlled Interior Ministry had no interest in stopping the massacre and the US military wasn't capable of stopping it. They "sat by" because there was nothing they could do to prevent the fighting and no one wanted to be caught in the middle of a full-blown (though neighborhood-sized) civil war when it finally broke out.

Despite everything, I'd be in favor of staying in Iraq if anyone could provide a plan for success that seemed even minimally credible. But no one has. That leaves only one sensible option.
Sensible? Cowardly? Morally wrong? Morally right? Take your choice.

And what is success? This particular war, sold to us all on some nifty slight-of-hand, had as its aim what was both pretty much impossible and clearly mad - invade and occupy a country that had nothing to do with the terrorism of that September almost five years ago, strip away its government and destroy its infrastructure, and fashion a friendly government there, to prove something or other. So we won't leave until we've "won" - and that seems impossible. We should stay if... what? Define what success is here.

And Drum didn't quote this from "Riverbend" - who lost a good friend ("T") last Sunday -
Why don't the Americans just go home? They've done enough damage and we hear talk of how things will fall apart in Iraq if they 'cut and run,' but the fact is that they aren't doing anything right now. How much worse can it get? People are being killed in the streets and in their own homes - what's being done about it? Nothing. It's convenient for them - Iraqis can kill each other and they can sit by and watch the bloodshed - unless they want to join in with murder and rape.

Buses, planes and taxis leaving the country for Syria and Jordan are booked solid until the end of the summer. People are picking up and leaving en masse and most of them are planning to remain outside of the country. Life here has become unbearable because it's no longer a 'life' like people live abroad. It's simply a matter of survival, making it from one day to the next in one piece and coping with the loss of loved ones and friends - friends like T.

It's difficult to believe T is really gone... I was checking my email today and I saw three unopened emails from him in my inbox. For one wild, heart-stopping moment I thought he was alive. T was alive and it was all some horrific mistake! I let myself ride the wave of giddy disbelief for a few precious seconds before I came crashing down as my eyes caught the date on the emails - he had sent them the night before he was killed. One email was a collection of jokes, the other was an assortment of cat pictures, and the third was a poem in Arabic about Iraq under American occupation. He had highlighted a few lines describing the beauty of Baghdad in spite of the war... And while I always thought Baghdad was one of the more marvelous cities in the world, I'm finding it very difficult this moment to see any beauty in a city stained with the blood of T and so many other innocents.
And that's only a small part of it. Now what?

The Third War

Not Iraq. Not Afghanistan. Hamas kills two Israeli soldiers and takes another captive, and Israel took the bait, and attacked Gaza and the Palestinian war was on again. The Palestinians had tossed out the old guard and elected this Hamas government, the folks who don't recognize Israel's right to exist and will not disavow terrorism as a political tool. And the war goes on - the Palestinians face the prospect of no water, food or electricity - the elderly and the children die first - and you wonder what the Hamas government was thinking. Like this wouldn't happen? They really do love this martyr thing. And what was Israel thinking? It's the one soldier and nothing else matters?

Wednesday, July 12, the second front opened. Hezbollah in southern Lebanon joined in - cross-border strike and abduction of two Israeli soldiers, followed by Israel rolling the tanks into southern Lebanon, or the first time in six years, and bombing this and that. The United States is saying Syria and Iran is behind Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, and they are the real villains. The Lebanese government in Beirut is saying, hey, we never had much control over those Hezbollah folks and don't have much say in southern Lebanon at all, so back off. Israel bombs the main runway at Beirut International, so commercial flights get diverted.

We used to broker peace in the area, twisting arms on both sides, or all sides, to get things calmed down a bit. We don't do that any longer. That's a Jimmy Carter thing, not Bush. We were all behind the Palestinian elections last year - we spread democracy - but they elected the wrong people, and we want them gone. We gave up on that sissy mediation stuff long ago. And now this.

And they're all mad, as here, where in southern Lebanon the reaction to the new kidnapping of Israeli soldiers and the resulting Israeli bombs dropping elects this -
"Look, we're used to it - 25 years, 26 years it's been like this," Hassan Qaryani, a 21-year-old butcher from Burj Rahal, said of the airstrikes. The kidnapping, he said, was "like a crown on my head ... as soon as I heard the news I was overjoyed. It was like Italy winning the World Cup."

In the southern suburbs of Beirut, people handed out candy in the streets and set off fireworks. Fireworks also were set off on the airport road, snarling traffic.
Looking at it logically, there's this -
As for Israel, I have no idea what they think their response is going to accomplish. They're retaliating in exactly the way that the most militant members of Hamas and Hezbollah were hoping for, and it's unlikely that there's any exit strategy for them that actually improves their internal security or their strategic position. We've been down this road a dozen times before, after all.
Logic fails.

And how could thing have gone so wrong in the last six years? We called out the Axis of Evil, and we took care of one of them, sort of, and it's all turned to dust.

Take North Korea. Maybe, as Randal Mark suggests here, doing nothing is sometimes a good idea -
In reality, North Korea, although highly militarized, is a small, impoverished, Third World dictatorship that is comprehensively outclassed, in technological and numerical terms, by the U.S. and its allies. The U.S., on the other hand, currently spends almost as much on military force as the rest of the world put together, and has enough nuclear weapons to destroy the world many times over.

There are no conceivable circumstances whatsoever in which North Korea could substantively attack the U.S., or any ally the U.S. chooses to shield, without facing its own certain, immediate, and total destruction. There is no plausible future scenario in which this situation could change.

... The only situation in which North Korea (or Iran, or Saddam's Iraq) might attack the U.S. in the face of their own certain national destruction would be in the case of utter desperation, having been driven to the wall by U.S. economic and political pressure, or following an act of military aggression doubtless mendaciously dressed up as a defensive "preemptive" attack. It is up to the U.S. to make sure this doesn't happen (though in practice it is highly unlikely the Chinese would allow it to, in the case of North Korea). In the meantime, however, confrontation merely confirms to the North Korean people that their government's claims of an external threat are true.
Arthur Silber here -
Here, then, is the simple policy solution to the "problem" of North Korea for the U.S. president: do nothing. It's also known as masterly inactivity. In due course, the nature of the North Korean regime will change, whether that change is peaceful or violent. It will probably change a lot more quickly if North Korea's economy has more wealth and wider links with the outside world, rather than being further isolated by demonization and sanctions on top of the constraints imposed by its own government. It will also help if Kim's attempts to seek nationalist legitimacy by claiming an external threat aren't regularly demonstrated true by Washington. In the meantime, North Korea isn't going to attack anybody so long as Kim knows that the result would be his own destruction.

In its essentials, this is exactly what I proposed some time ago with regard to Iran, as well as in connection with a non-interventionist foreign policy more generally. But of course, doing nothing is anathema to the political leader, for whom action, and today the more destructive and bloodier the better, is considered to be synonymous with and absolutely required for any achievement whatsoever. Yet on many occasions, in foreign policy and in many other circumstances in life, the bravest and best course is to keep a watchful eye should serious dangers arise, but to refrain from acting until it is absolutely necessary.
But we do things. Israel does too. "Doing something" is the name of the game now. It's manly or something.

Overwhelming force will keep people in line, except when it doesn't. The "other side" in all these cases is supposed to give in, and they're just not doing it. They're ruining everything. So you apply more force, and they get even more difficult and try to embarrass you, or worse. So you apply more force, and they still won't play their part right, refusing the role assigned. So you apply more force, and they fight back harder, in nasty, sneaky ways. So you apply more force, because you know that works. And they laugh in your face and capture and kill your soldiers and get their nukes or whatever. So you apply more force.

Someone has the concept wrong here.

Legal Ripples

Okay, the Supreme Court ruled that the administration's proposed military tribunals at Guantánamo were illegal. What was proposed was a joke, and had nothing to do with fairness. Because we ratified and became part in the Geneva Conventions, that made them our law too, and the rules for trying the captured are clear there. So be it. And a lot of the discussion of the secondary effects of that concerned how, if the Geneva Conventions are our law too, our interrogation techniques have to change - no more waterboarding, stress positions, forced nudity and sexual humiliation or dogs (discussed here). The reason the tribunals were shot down as important as that they were.

And there's more. Wednesday, July 12, the curiosity was that people were beginning to realize that other things in the Supreme Court decision might mean the whole warrantless wiretapping business was going to have to be abandoned. But it wasn't because of any treaty we entered into. It was that the court found a particular line of legal reasoning the administration was using, underlying much of what they're up to, was just bogus.

Now the NSA spying program clearly violates the FISA Act, which requires the government to get warrants before it places wiretaps on "US persons." They didn't do that. They said they didn't have to. And there were two reasons - the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), passed just after the World Trade Center fell and the Pentagon was hit, overrides FISA, as the congress "implied" the president could authorize anything he thought might help in the battlefield - and then, too (and two), the whole FISA law is an unconstitutional infringement of the president's inherent power as commander-in-chief, as the congress can't pass any law to tell him how to manage any war, day to day.

Perhaps they shouldn't have argued those precise two points in the Hamden case, as Jack Balkin explains -
The Court ... held that "Neither [the AUMF or the Detainee Treatment Act] expands the President's authority to convene military commissions. ... [T]here is nothing in the text or legislative history of the AUMF even hinting that Congress intended to expand or alter the authorization set forth in Article 21 of the UCMJ."

....What about the President's inherent powers under Article II as Commander-in-Chief? Don't they override Congressional limitations? No, said the Court in Hamdan in a footnote: "Whether or not the President has independent power, absent congressional authorization, to convene military commissions, he may not disregard limitations that Congress has, in proper exercise of its own war powers, placed on his powers."
So if the Authorization for Use of Military Force didn't override the Uniform Code of Military Justice and you had to have real trials, not this kangaroo court crap, for the same reason it doesn't override the FISA Act. Different things, but they were justified the same way. And if Congress can limit the president's Article II powers when it comes to military tribunals, it can do the same thing when it comes to domestic surveillance, and, in fact it did, in 1978 and amended many times.

The administration is still arguing the two points (here) - implicit authorization from congress they just didn't know they were giving, and congress has no constitutional power to stop it no matter what laws they feel like passing in their spare time - standing by the arguments the Supreme Court said were bogus.

It seems they haven't though this through. Curious.

But there are a lot of curious things in the air.

Posted by Alan at 23:00 PDT | Post Comment | Permalink
Updated: Thursday, 13 July 2006 07:55 PDT home

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.Click here to go there...

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
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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
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