Notes on how things seem to me from out here in Hollywood... As seen from Just Above Sunset
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Photos and text, unless otherwise noted, Copyright © 2003,2004,2005,2006 - Alan M. Pavlik
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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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Sunday, 16 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 29, for the week of July 16, 2006.Click here to go there...

The middle of July and in the ongoing national dialog we're still arguing about what is what (it's that reality thing). And is the big change in how the White House does what it does a big change, or a big fake? And there are some thinking about Iraq and where that's going in odd ways, even with the other, third war getting hot, and that fire is covered too. And then what is it with the president and that German pig? It's very curious.

On a happier note, Our Man in Paris, Rick Erickson, sends a gallery of photos - the fireworks at the Eiffel Tower on Bastille Day, and a second column, with photos, notes on two new items just opened in Paris, neither of which works very well. Elsewhere at the international desk, our man in Tel-Aviv, Sylvain Ubersfeld, really tries to be a true Israeli, but it's hard - there are cultural differences.

Photography this week is for those who love old buildings, as three from the glory days of Hollywood are here - a lot of detail of what was hot in the late twenties. They don't build them like that any more. And there is Hollywood today - get a feel for how strange this place really is. And enjoy the new botanicals. There are more than usual.

Our friend from Texas of course provides your weekly dose of the weird, and the quotes this week are about it being summer and the time to be a bit lazy.

Oh, and Sunday, July 16, was Bastille Day Los Angeles - words and pictures here.

As for the new issue -

Extended Observations on Current Events ______________________________

Getting Real
Are Things Changing?
Curiosities: Matters Some Are Considering
Fireman's Ball
That Pig Thing

The International Desk ______________________________

Our Man in Paris: Bastille Day Fireworks
New in Paris
Our Man in Tel-Aviv: Different Folks, Different Strokes

Southern California Photography ______________________________

Architecture: Hollywood in the Twenties (four nested pages)
Hollywood Today: Things Have Changed
Hot Blooms
Roses

The Weird: WEIRD, BIZARRE and UNUSUAL
Quotes for the week of July 9, 2006 - Lazy Summer Days

Posted by Alan at 21:04 PDT | Post Comment | Permalink
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Saturday, 15 July 2006
Day Off
Topic: Photos
Nothing today, it's just too hot -
Of course the wall at the LA Weekly down on Sunset Boulevard would make anyone feel guilty for taking the day off. Not today.

LA weekly headquarters, Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood


Posted by Alan at 20:14 PDT | Post Comment | Permalink
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Friday, 14 July 2006
That Pig Thing
Topic: Couldn't be so...
That Pig Thing
Friday, July 14, Bastille Day, the week ending with the third day of Israel bombing Lebanon - after the airport the main roads and fuel depots, then the bridges, and then the naval blockade of all shipping in and out - and that war widening, and the third day of massive losses on Wall Street, as oil moved over seventy-eight dollars a barrel and many are saying it looks like it will hit one hundred dollars come election time here in the states. Hezbollah managed to nearly sink an Israeli frigate with a drone filled with explosives, and things just aren't looking good. War everywhere, and the economy tanking. Bad times.

As for the new war, Rami G. Khouri calls it The Mideast Death Dance -
You need to understand the relationship among four pairs of actors to grasp the meaning of the escalating attacks by Hamas, Hezbollah and Israel in recent days. The four pairs are Hamas and Hezbollah; the Palestinian and Lebanese governments; Syria and Iran; and Israel and the United States.

Simplistically, President George W. Bush has depicted this latest round of war as a clash between good and evil, while the Israeli government has tried to blame Palestinians and Lebanese who only want to make war against a peace-loving Israel. The more nuanced and complex reality is that, collectively, these four pairs of actors play roles in the ongoing fighting, as we witness the culmination of four decades of failed policies that have kept the Middle East tense, angry and violent.

Hezbollah and Hamas emerged in the past decade as the main Arab political forces that resist the Israeli occupations in Lebanon and Palestine. They enjoy substantial popular support in their respective countries, while at the same time eliciting criticisms for their militant policies that inevitably draw harsh Israeli responses. We see this in Lebanon today as the Lebanese people broadly direct their anger at Israel for its brutal attacks against Lebanese civilian installations and fault Palestinians, other Arabs, Syria and Iran for perpetually making Lebanon the battleground for other conflicts - but more softly question Hezbollah's decision to trigger this latest calamity.

It is no coincidence that Israel is now simultaneously bombing and destroying the civilian infrastructure in Palestine and Lebanon, including airports, bridges, roads, power plants, and government offices. It claims to do this in order to stop terror attacks against Israelis, but in fact the past four decades have shown that its policies generate exactly the opposite effect: They have given birth, power, credibility and now political incumbency to the Hamas and Hezbollah groups whose raison d'être has been to fight the Israeli occupation of their lands. Israeli destruction of normal life for Palestinians and Lebanese also results in the destruction of the credibility, efficacy and, in some cases, the legitimacy of routine government systems, making the Lebanese and Palestinian governments key actors in current events - or non-actors in most cases.
And so on and so forth. The detailed analysis is depressing. You might want to read it, or not.

And as for the fourth pair of actors, the United States and Israel, they "find themselves in the bizarre position of repeating policies that have consistently failed for the past forty years" -
Israel has this to show for its track record of being tough: It is now surrounded by two robust Islamist resistance movements with greater striking power and popular support; Arab populations around the region that increasingly vote for Islamist political movements whenever elections are held; immobilized and virtually irrelevant Arab governments in many nearby lands; and determined, increasingly defiant, ideological foes in Tehran and Damascus who do not hesitate to use all weapons at their means however damaging these may be to civilians and sovereignty in Lebanon and Palestine.

The United States for its part is strangely marginal. Its chosen policies have lined it up squarely with Israel. It has sanctioned and thus cannot even talk to Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas, and it has pressured and threatened Syria for years without any real success. The world's sole superpower is peculiarly powerless in the current crisis in the Middle East.
Other than that, things are fine.

Tim Grieve in Salon here summarizes the sense of urgency at the White House -
George W. Bush is apparently open to scaling back his usual summer vacation in Crawford, Texas, in order to look more engaged with his job, but it seems that he'll take this whole hands-on presidency idea only so far. On a day on which Israeli airplanes hit the home and office of Hezbollah's leader, White House press secretary Tony Snow revealed that the president hasn't actually, you know, talked to anyone in the Israeli government about its widening military campaign in Lebanon.

Asked whether Bush has any plans to speak to Israeli officials, Snow said: "At this point - look, I think - the Israeli leaders have been consulted, and they've been consulted by the secretary of state and the national security advisor. And they'll continue their conversations, and there is no - I don't want to say there's no need, I'd just say the president has not expressed any plans to speak with the prime minister, but should it become necessary, he will." And with that, a member of the White House press corps asked Snow about the president's plans for a bike ride this afternoon.

Of course, this isn't the usual case of Bushian inattention. We assume that the president wasn't hoping for an attack on the United States when he brushed off a warning about Osama bin Laden in August 2001. And we'll presume that he wasn't looking forward to a disaster in New Orleans when he fiddled away the early days of Hurricane Katrina. But Bush hasn't picked up the phone to call Ehud Olmert precisely because he has nothing to tell him - or, at least, nothing he wants to be seen telling him. Bush approves of what Israel is doing in Lebanon, but the White House must know that Americans find new violence in the Middle East deeply unsettling. The best way to walk that line: Stay away from it entirely.
We vetoed the UN resolution condemning Israel for overreacting. That's something. We refused to call for a cease fire, but said the Israelis should be careful about not killing too many civilians. And that's something. And we said that since we engineered the Syrians leaving Jordan and say they have a real democracy there now, it would be a shame if the new shaky government there fell. That's something, and we had spent a lot of effort setting it up. So it's not exactly inattention, but something more like indifference, or frustration that it's all so complicated.

And that leads to the pig, as summarized here -
With the world's most perplexing problems weighing on him, President Bush has sought comic relief in a certain pig.

This is the wild game boar that German chef Olaf Micheel bagged for Bush and served Thursday evening at a barbecue in Trinwillershagen, a tiny town on the Baltic Sea.

"I understand I may have the honor of slicing the pig," Bush said at a news conference earlier in the day punctuated with questions about spreading violence in the Middle East and an intensifying standoff with Iran about nuclear power.

The president's host, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, started a serious ball rolling at this news conference in the 13th-century town hall on the cobblestone square of Stralsund. But Bush seemed more focused on "the feast" promised later.

"Thanks for having me," Bush told the chancellor. "I'm looking forward to that pig tonight."

This 13th-century setting and formal news conference may seem an odd stage for presidential banter. The 21st-century problems that Bush confronts often prompt him to attempt to defuse the tension in the room with a dose of humor.

Reporters from Germany and the U.S. peppered him with questions about the standoff in Iran, violence in the Middle East and flagging democracy in Russia. He answered all in earnest but leavened it all with pig talk.

"Apart from the pig, Mr. President, what sort of insights have you been able to gain as regards East Germany?" a German reporter asked.

"I haven't seen the pig yet," Bush said, sidestepping the question about insights gained from his two-day visit to this rural seaside region that once rested behind the Iron Curtain.

And when an American reporter asked whether Bush is concerned about the Israeli bombing of the Beirut airport and about Iran's failure to respond to an offer for negotiations, Bush replied with more boar jokes before delving into the substance of the questions.

"I thought you were going to ask about the pig," said the president. "I'll tell you about the pig tomorrow."
Ah, he was just diffusing tension with humor. You cannot take this regional war and clash of civilizations too very seriously. Neither side there eats pork. They should loosen up. This is supposed to be reassuring. You don't have to answer questions. That's for people who worry too much.

So we should relax. It's just potential world war among the major religions on the planet. See Jon Stewart being amazed at this "no big deal, let's eat pork" approach here (Windows Media) or here (QuickTime) - this just can't be so and all that. Satire gets harder every day, or easier.

Digby over at Hullabaloo here calls the man a middle-ages delinquent and asks an interesting question. Can't somebody medicate him?

It's a thought. And Digby is reminded of that presidential photo-op a few years ago, that testy one where the humor put the reporters in their place. The president visited a rib joint and got behind the counter to play at being a real working person. And it went like this -
THE PRESIDENT: I need some ribs.

Q Mr. President, how are you?

THE PRESIDENT: I'm hungry and I'm going to order some ribs.

Q What would you like?

THE PRESIDENT: Whatever you think I'd like.

Q Sir, on homeland security, critics would say you simply haven't spent enough to keep the country secure.

THE PRESIDENT: My job is to secure the homeland and that's exactly what we're going to do. But I'm here to take somebody's order. That would be you, Stretch - what would you like? Put some of your high-priced money right here to try to help the local economy. You get paid a lot of money, you ought to be buying some food here. It's part of how the economy grows. You've got plenty of money in your pocket, and when you spend it, it drives the economy forward. So what would you like to eat?

Q Right behind you, whatever you order.

THE PRESIDENT: I'm ordering ribs. David, do you need a rib?

Q But Mr. President -

THE PRESIDENT: Stretch, thank you, this is not a press conference. This is my chance to help this lady put some money in her pocket. Let me explain how the economy works. When you spend money to buy food it helps this lady's business. It makes it more likely somebody is going to find work. So instead of asking questions, answer mine: are you going to buy some food?

Q Yes.

THE PRESIDENT: Okay, good. What would you like?

Q Ribs.

THE PRESIDENT: Ribs? Good. Let's order up some ribs.

Q What do you think of the democratic field, sir?

THE PRESIDENT: See, his job is to ask questions, he thinks my job is to answer every question he asks. I'm here to help this restaurant by buying some food. Terry, would you like something?

Q An answer.

Q Can we buy some questions?

THE PRESIDENT: Obviously these people - they make a lot of money and they're not going to spend much. I'm not saying they're overpaid, they're just not spending any money.

Q Do you think it's all going to come down to national security, sir, this election?

THE PRESIDENT: One of the things David does, he asks a lot of questions, and they're good, generally.
Digby's comment -
It's not humor - it's inappropriate, sophomoric diversion designed to intimidate the reporters. It works. They are unwilling to come right out and say that Junior is an ill mannered, tasteless, middle aged delinquent.

How I long for the day when we might once again have a president with the maturity of someone who has already passed through puberty.
Who? Al Gore? That was decided long ago.

And Digby notes this news from Iraq, Friday, July 14 -
Bombs and mortars struck Shiite and Sunni mosques in the Baghdad area Friday, the latest in a week of tit-for-tat sectarian attacks that have killed more than 250 people.

The deadliest explosion came as worshippers left services at a Sunni mosque in northern Baghdad, killing 14 people and wounding five, police said.

The bomb, planted near the door of the mosque, exploded during a four-hour driving ban starting at 11 a.m. Fridays in the capital, aimed at preventing car bombs that have frequently targeted weekly prayers.

Earlier Friday, five mortar rounds fell near the Shiite Imam al-Hussein mosque in Balad Ruz, 45 miles northeast of Baghdad, killing two people and wounding six, provincial police said.

Shiite clerics, meanwhile, denounced Israel's attacks on Lebanon during Friday prayers, and hundreds of Iraqis demonstrated to show solidarity with the Lebanese. Israel began its assault after guerrillas from the Shiite group Hezbollah captured two Israeli soldiers in a raid inside Israel.

Thousands of Iraqis also demonstrated in the Shiite district of Sadr City in Baghdad and the southeastern cities of Kut and Amarah, praising the leader of Hezbollah and denouncing Israel and the United States. Some protesters said they were ready to fight the Israelis.

"No, no to Israel! No, no to America!" demonstrators chanted in Sadr City.

"Let everyone understand that we will not stand idle," read one of the banners carried by the demonstrators. "Iraq and Lebanon are calling. Enough silence, Arabs," read another.
Oh crap. Don't tell the president.

And there's this from two years ago, Tomas Freidman in the New York Times -
I was speaking the other day with Scott Pelley of CBS News's ''60 Minutes'' about the mood in Iraq. He had just returned from filming a piece there and he told me something disturbing. Scott had gone around and asked Iraqis on the streets what they called American troops - wondering if they had nicknames for us in the way we used to call the Nazis ''Krauts'' or the Vietcong ''Charlie.'' And what did he find? ''Many Iraqis have so much distrust for U.S. forces we found they've come up with a nickname for our troops,'' Scott said. ''They call American soldiers 'The Jews,' as in, 'Don't go down that street, the Jews set up a roadblock.'''
This war is getting very wide. It's all the same war.

Of course, some are happy about it all. That would be the Rapture crowd - End Times, Armageddon and the antichrist, and then Jesus returns. Everyone is quoting what's being said on that side, like this -
Is it time to get excited? I can't help the way I feel. For the first time in my Christian walk, I have no doubts that the day of the Lord's appearing is upon us. I have never felt this way before, I have a joy that bubbles up every-time I think of him, for I know this is truly the time I have waited for so long. Am I alone in feeling guilty about the human suffering like my joy at his appearing some how fuels the evil I see everywhere. If it were not for the souls that hang in the balance and the horror that stalks man daily on this earth, my joy would be complete. For those of us who await his arrival know, somehow we just know it won't be long now, the Bridegroom cometh rather man is ready are not.

... If He tarries, I will just have time to get my hair and nails done (you know let all I come into contact with know of my Bridegroom and what He has/will do). So I am all spiffied up for Him when He does arrive to take me home. No disappointment, just a few last minute details to take care of to be more pleasing to look at.

... I too am soooo excited!! I get goose bumps, literally, when I watch what's going on in the M.E.!! And Watcherboy, you were so right when saying it was quite a day yesterday, in the world news, and I add in local news here in the Boston area!! Tunnel ceiling collapsed on a car and killed a woman of faith, and we had the most terrifying storms I have ever seen here!! But, yes, Ohappyday, like in your screen name, it is most indeed a time to be happy and excited, right there with ya!!
Okay then. It's the end of everything and Jesus is coming.

Digby comments here -
Ok fine. Religious fundamentalists are nutty.

But what do you make of someone who writes this: "Can you imagine being a hate-filled person that 'preaches' tolerance but really, really hates Christians when the rapture does happen. It must be sad to live like that. I feel sorry for them and feel we should pray for them. Their tolerance doesn't include anyone but themselves, and all they preach is hate."

Hey, I'm one of the tolerant haters. These folks can believe whatever kooky nonsense they choose. The world is full of fruitcakes. I do wonder, however, if Uncle Karl is calculating that George the Pig Slicer will cause the GOP to lose seats in the fall if he doesn't appear to be helping his base achieve the Rapture. That's got me a little bit worried.
Why worry? Have some baby-back pork ribs. Things will be fine.

But the war with Israel, Hamas to the south, Hezbollah to the north, and the major powers lining up, continues or grow.

Here's some interesting comment from Bill Montgomery, who always is thoughtful (an economist by training, so maybe he's just "dismal").

First there's this -
Three days in, and it looks like Israel is losing the war.

Not militarily, of course - The IDF could turn Lebanon into a parking lot if it wanted to, and if it's willing to take enough casualties it can probably push Hezbollah away from the Israeli border and suppress the rocket attacks (or at least most of them.)

No, Israel is losing this war the same way it "lost" the October 1973 War - by not crushing its enemies swiftly and completely, and then rubbing their faces in their own impotence and humiliation.

Just the opposite: Today it was Israel that suffered the humiliation of nearly losing one of its missile frigates to a warhead-carrying Hezbollah drone - a threat the IDF apparently didn't even know existed.

... This should give an enormous boost to Hezbollah's prestige and popularity in the Arab world - just as the initial success of the Egyptian attack across the Suez Canal in '73 helped erase the humiliation of the Six Day War and made Sadat, for a time, a regional hero. That prestige, in turn, could make it more dangerous for "moderate" (i.e. U.S. dominated) Arab countries to move against the group or criticize it publicly. The same goes for Hezbollah's domestic enemies inside Lebanon.

... For the Israelis, all this only increases the urgency of delivering a knock out blow quickly - lest the voices of caution inside the Cheney administration prevail and Washington steps in and imposes a cease fire. It's possible, of course, that the opposite will happen: The Cheneyites may be just as rattled by Hezbollah's resilience as the Israelis, and may insist that the IDF finish the job, no matter how much time and blood it takes. After all, whatever raises Hezbollah's prestige also raises Iran's, and whatever raises Iran's lowers Cheney's. That may be more than the gang can stand.

... If I were the IDF general staff, I wouldn't count on having more than a few weeks to complete the operation - whatever it is.

But given how well Hezbollah is doing so far, it doesn't look the Israelis can deliver a knock out blow - not in a few weeks, or a few months and probably not even in a few years. And a Hezbollah that takes whatever Israel dishes out, and emerges not just intact, but with a few notches in its own gun, would be a Hezbollah that looks like a real winner.
Earlier he had written this -
There is something qualitatively different about the latest cycle of violence in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, although I'm having trouble in my own mind hanging a label on it.

Maybe it's the fact that the Israelis have more or less abandoned the pretense that they're fighting specific "terrorist" groups like Hamas and Hezbollah, and are openly waging war on the Palestinian people (and now the Lebanese people) as a whole.

Maybe it's because the proximate triggers for the current fighting – the Palestinian raid on an Israeli outpost on the Gaza frontier and Hezbollah's ambush of an Israeli patrol just inside the Israeli border -- were both military attacks against legitimate military targets, instead of explicit acts of terrorism, like the 2000-2001 Palestinian suicide bomb offensive. This suggests a major change in both tactics and capabilities (although terrorism, in the form of rockets randomly shot into Israeli towns and cities, obviously remains a key part of the Hezbollah and Hamas arsenals)

Maybe it's simply the speed and scale of the escalation, which has progressed from a limited incursion in the Gaza Strip to the wholesale dismantling of the Hamas government to a full-scale blockade of Lebanon in just two weeks. If the Israeli expectation was that an initial display of overwhelming force would send a message to the other side that there are red lines that must not be crossed, then the operation has already failed. Indeed, the other side has sent some surprising messages of its own - one of which landed yesterday in downtown Haifa.

If I had to pin it down, I would say the big difference between this crisis and similar past episodes is how completely off balance the Israelis seem to be – lurching from reaction to reaction without any clear plan or strategy. The Gaza incursion was thrown together, more or less on the fly, which led to some embarrassing public squabbling within the Israeli cabinet. The attempt to decapitate Hamas's civilian leadership by arresting the entire Palestinian cabinet smacked of improvisation, and largely failed. Hezbollah's intervention clearly took Jerusalem by surprise, which is probably why the response has been so disproportionate: the Israelis are rather desperately trying to regain the initiative.

... I'm not passing moral judgments here. I've never been able to turn a blind eye to the war crimes of one side or the other – rationalizing the suicide bomb that blows a bus full of Israeli civilians to bloody bits while crying tears of outrage over the destruction of a power plant that provides clean water to tens of thousands of Palestinian mothers and infants, or vice versa. To me, the conflict has long since come to resemble a war between lunatics, and one doesn't pass moral judgments on the behavior of the insane, not even the criminally insane.

But it is clear to me that the Israelis, through their own actions (plus some help from their clueless allies in the Cheney administration) have put themselves in trap they can't escape. They've reached a strategic dead end, one that doesn't even leave them enough maneuvering room to turn and go back. A return to the pre-Oslo status quo – full military reoccupation of the territories – is out of the question. The peace process (a pointless squirrel wheel, but one that at least kept the squirrels, both Palestinian and Israeli, busy going through their paces) is dead. The Palestinian Authority is shattered; Fatah's legitimacy and President Abbas's credibility flushed down the toilet. And Hamas - the only viable alternative - has been officially defined as Public Enemy Number One by the Israelis, the Americans and the Europeans.

... In a sense, the crisis has been coming down the pike since last year's Palestinian elections unexpectedly put Hamas in charge of the PA. The Israelis never wanted the election, and only agreed to it because the Americans insisted. The Americans, in turn, relied on assurances from Abbas (underwritten by the Egyptians and the Jordanians) that the results were in the bag – or could be put there, if need be. Democracy boy, in other words, only embraced democracy for the Palestinians because he was sure the "right" guys would win, and I know what a shock that must be to the reader. But Fatah, being Fatah, couldn't stop its candidates from running against each other and splitting the non-Hamas vote, while Hamas smartly ran on a platform of honest government instead of endless holy war. In the end, the fix could only deprive Hamas of the even bigger majority it was probably entitled to.

If the Israelis had fully thought things through, I have to believe they would have defied democracy boy and vetoed the election. Why didn't they? In addition to the traditional desire to stay on the hegemon's good side, my guess is the Israelis in general and Prime Minister Olmert in particular were still too captivated by the dream of unilateralism. The whole point of disengagement was that it was supposed to make the other side irrelevant. Israel would decide what land and settlements it wanted to keep, build fences around the rest and let the Palestinians stew in their own poverty and rage. With that as the plan, the risk of a Hamas victory, while undesirable, may not have seemed catastrophic.

... In the past, no matter how bad things got in territories, Israeli governments always have had the option of backing off and leaving bad enough alone - relying on the Army or, post-Oslo, the PA to keep a lid on the situation. That was fine as long as the objective was to grow the settlements and quietly tighten Israel's control over the land and all its resources. But now that the goal is essentially a second partition, Israeli politicians are finding out the hard way that they no longer have the luxury of malign neglect. After six years of pretending they don't need a Palestinian negotiating partner, they've suddenly discovered, much to their horror, that they need one desperately - but have managed to eliminate all the possible candidates.
And that's only part of it. But then, he's a worrier. The Rapture folks think his sort should welcome Jesus, or die. The president wants to hand him a pork chop, or sell him some ribs.

It's all in how you look at things. "Thanks for having me," Bush told the chancellor. "I'm looking forward to that pig tonight."

Posted by Alan at 22:56 PDT | Post Comment | Permalink
Updated: Friday, 14 July 2006 23:12 PDT home

Thursday, 13 July 2006
Firemen's Ball
Topic: Couldn't be so...
Fireman's Ball
Thursday, July 13, the Firemen's Balls are on in Paris - these Bals des Sapeurs-Pompiers are held each year on the eve of Bastille Day in every arrondissement. Drop by any caserne (fire station) in Paris and dance to live music and eat a lot of good stuff - odd sausages on the grill in some places, odder stuff in the Marais and there's something or other on a barge on the Seine. These can go on all night, and you might miss the parade on the Champs Elysées the next day - tanks rumbling by and Mirage fighter jets flying over trailing their red, white and blue (yep, same colors in their flag), and every military branch marching in rank. It's very impressive, even with a hangover. The Bastille Day after the events in America on September 11, 2001, the parade included units from the New York Fire Department. Ah, those were the days.

But the world has changed since then. We got mad at the French for opposing our invasion and occupation of Iraq, and are even more angry now that it seems that de Villepin was right about everything back in March of 2003. You can read exactly what he said
here, with this comment -
This speech shows the remarkably accurate observations made by someone able to detach from the emotional context of a tense situation, which is what a skilled chief executive is able to do. Our friend, Mr. De Villepin, was calm and reserved, and able to think with disciplined restraint. The American chief executive, on the other hand, was, for whatever reason, unable to grasp the same evidence seen by others. The results speak for themselves. The point now is not to ask how anyone could have missed the evidence that others could see, nor is it to insist that America should have known. The point is, how can anyone today, with the advantage of retrospection, still deny what was evident on March 7, 2003?
Not that it matters now. There are other fires to put out now, real ones. The French have nothing to do to with what we have gotten ourselves into now, as in this exclusive from the online "magazine" SALON -
Congress has demanded that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld hand over a raft of documents to Congress that could substantiate allegations that U.S. forces have tried to break terror suspects by kidnapping and mistreating their family members. Rumsfeld has until 5 p.m. Friday to comply.

It now appears that kidnapping, scarcely covered by the media, and absent in the major military investigations of detainee abuse, may have been systematically employed by U.S. troops. Salon has obtained Army documents that show several cases where U.S. forces abducted terror suspects' families. After he was thrown in prison, Cpl. Charles Graner, the alleged ringleader at Abu Ghraib, told investigators the military routinely kidnapped family members to force suspects to turn themselves in.

A House subcommittee led by Connecticut Republican Christopher Shays took the unusual step last month of issuing Rumsfeld a subpoena for the documents after months of stonewalling by the Pentagon. Shays had requested the documents in a March 7 letter. "There was no response" to the letter, a frustrated Shays told Salon. "We are not going to back off this."
This is followed by the rather disheartening documents that these folks got their journalistic hands on - cooperate or the wife and kids die and such. There's lots of detail, with names. And it ends with this -
... There is no paper trail that shows that kidnapping or abusing the family of suspects might have been official Department of Justice or Pentagon policy. It is not mentioned in any of the Bush administration interrogation memos that have so far surfaced in the press. In late 2002, commanders at the military prison at Guantanamo Bay did request authority, during interrogations, for "the use of scenarios designed to convince the detainee that death or severely painful consequence are imminent for him and/or his family."

In a December 2002 memorandum, Rumsfeld rejected a "blanket approval" of that interrogation technique, but did not rule it out completely.
Yeah, this would be recognized as one of those war crimes - you don't go after family members for leverage. That sort of thing - kidnapping the wife and kids -is for Tony Soprano and the like. And we agreed to the rules - we signed the treaty and everything.

It doesn't matter. The documents will be classified a few steps higher. And that's that. And that's really a minor fire. Tim Grieve
here provides a nice, compact summary of all the fires raging as the Bals des Sapeurs-Pompiers began -
What the hell is happening here?

When we were in grade school, we were taught that the assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand led to the start of World War I. It wasn't quite as simple as that, but how did it feel when events were unfolding then? Did people know what was coming? Did it feel like it does this morning - like too many things are going too wrong in too many places for something worse not to happen?

In Lebanon overnight, Israeli aircraft attacked the runways at the Beirut airport and imposed an air and naval blockade. Israel increased pressure on Hezbollah to free two of its soldiers captured in a cross-border raid earlier this week. The chief of Israel's army, Brig. Gen. Dan Halutz, warns that "nothing is safe" in Lebanon until the soldiers are returned and Hezbollah stops attacking northern Israel. "We are not at war, but we are in a very high volume crisis," he says.

In Iran, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad responded to news that his nation has been referred to the U.N. Security Council by making threats against Europe. "The people of Iran will not give up their right to exploit peaceful nuclear technology," Ahmadinejad said. "We are interested in seeing this issue resolved peacefully. But if they (the West) create tension, then the outcome would affect the Europeans. The tension would primarily harm them."

In India, officials have detained as many as 350 "known thugs, gangsters and troublemakers who might have information" about this week's train bombings. A man claiming to speak for al-Qaida in Kashmir has praised the attacks - a sign that the terrorist group may have spread to India, the Associated Press says.

The U.N. seems headed for a confrontation over North Korea's nuclear program as the U.S. says that China is running out of time to make its own diplomatic efforts work. U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill said the North Koreans, who fired a test missile in the direction of the United States earlier this month, "don't seem to be interested in listening, much less doing anything to address the situation."

In Iraq, British and Australian troops handed over control of the Muthanna province to Iraqi forces, but violence continued elsewhere, claiming the lives of at least 18 Iraqis. In a village near Baquba, a bicycle bomber - that's a new one for us - blew up a government building, killing at least four members of the local town council. The top U.S. commander in Iraq says he may need to move more U.S. troops into Baghdad to quell sectarian fighting there.

In Sudan, a top U.N. official said that rapes, murders and other crimes are on the rise as tribal tensions increase in Darfur. Describing reports of a recent attack on a group of female refugees, U.N. envoy Jan Pronk said: "They were tied to a tree, beaten, forced to eat donkey dung, raped in turn for three days by 30 men who had accused the women of espionage because they were married to Zaghawa men."

At a joint press conference in Germany this morning, George W. Bush and German Chancellor Angela Merkel said that the "disturbing situation" in the Middle East "fills us with concern," and they appealed to "the powers in the region to see to it that further escalation is warded off." But as Merkel acknowledged, it's more than just the Middle East now. "Just now, in our talks, we talked at great length about international issues," Merkel said. "Unfortunately, there are quite a lot of problems that we need to deal with and for whose solution we feel responsible."
So do you think we now have a regional war, with Hamas and Hezbollah representing Iran and Israel as our proxy? We've been saying Iran stirred all this up, and have been setting things up diplomatically so that they are given conditions they just cannot meet on the enriched uranium business This may be the start of the war we want, to remove them from the Axis of Evil. The American public has no great desire for another war, but this is about the survival of our ally Israel. It's kind of a back door to get there.

And Iran, and Syria, want this - they may have engineered the capture of the Israeli soldiers. Let's see what happens when Israel and its sole ally, the United States, leads a grand war again the Shiite Hamas and Hezbollah folks. Kill a few Shiite leaders and that will drive a wedge between the United States and the new Shiite government in our new Iraq. It's very clever.

You want a war? You've got one. But it will be you and Israel against the Shiites - Iran, Syria, Hamas in Palestine and Hezbollah in Jordan - and not some dispute about having enough uranium to make a nuclear weapon in 2011 or so. They've done it. The war is on, and they've defined the terms. At least that what David Twersky, director of international affairs at the American Jewish Congress, says
here in the New York Sun, writing from Tel-Aviv -
The war with Iran has begun.

Just last Friday, Iranian President Ahmadinejad warned that Israel's return to Gaza could lead to an "explosion" in the Islamic world that would target Israel and its supporters in the West. "They should not let things reach a point where an explosion occurs in the Islamic world," he said.

"If an explosion occurs, then it won't be limited to geographical boundaries. It will also burn all those who created [Israel] over the past 60 years," he said, implicitly referring to America and other Western nations who support Israel.

Years from now, the kidnapping of Corporal Gilad Shalit will be regarded like the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand. Against the backdrop of Kassam rocket fire on Israelis living within range of the Gaza Strip, it was the fate of Corporal Shalit that triggered the Israeli return to Gaza, which in turn brought the Hezbollah forces into the game.

Israel is fighting two Iranian proxies on two fronts. It may, or may not, open a third front against a third Iranian proxy, Syria.
Why does that business in Sarajevo so long ago keep coming up? Archduke Ferdinand is long gone. But there is that air of something familiar here. And there's this editorial in the Boston Globe -
... by having Hezbollah strike now at Israel, the Iranian regime clearly means to neutralize Arab regimes that are fearful of Iran's spreading influence in Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon.

President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt had just disclosed publicly that he had worked out a prisoner swap with Israel and Hamas, but that "other parties" he would not name forced Hamas to sabotage the deal. It can be assumed that Syria and Iran are the other parties, the two countries having signed a military cooperation agreement last month that Syria's defense minister described as establishing "a joint front against Israel."

Knowing that Iran is behind Hezbollah's act of war, Israeli leaders - who are openly warning of devastating strikes on Lebanon's infrastructure - would be well advised to avoid a reflexive military response that lands Israel in an Iranian trap. If the regime in Tehran wants to provoke Israel to bomb Lebanese power plants, roads, and bridges, maybe this kind of military retaliation is not such a good idea.
Well, it's too late now. That's underway. Arthur Silber, often quoted here, has been saying forever that the administration is really serous about attacking Iran in some massive way - the same thing Seymour Hersh has been reporting in the New Yorker - the guys in the White House are serious about this. And on the 13th Matt Drudge reported this - "Israel has information that Lebanese guerrillas who captured two Israeli soldiers are trying to transfer them to Iran, the Foreign Ministry spokesman said. Spokesman Mark Regev did not disclose the source of his information."

Silber says
this -
I do not have adequate tin foil today to comprehend the full spectrum of issues. But let me just say that I would not find it surprising for the Bush administration hard liners to work in concert with the Israeli hard-liners to gin up a crisis that ends up "requiring" action against Iran. It is to the political advantage of both groups to do so. I certainly don't know that this has happened but from watching this administration operate for the past six years I do know that it could happen. And that's scary enough.
So they want war, and so do we. Everything falls in place. We seem to be sitting on the sidelines just saying "this is regrettable" when we've set it up too. Maybe. But note this -
"The combination of our own diplomatic disengagement, our blaming Syria and Iran, and our giving the Israelis a green light [for their military campaign] has inflamed the entire region," according to Clay Swisher, a former State Department Middle East expert and author of the Truth About Camp David, who just returned from Lebanon last week.
And Digby at Hullabaloo adds - "It's always likely that this sort of thing is just typical Bushian incompetence. But I would never discount the idea that there is a wrongheaded Cheneyesque plot behind it as well. There often is." And here Matthew Yglesias cites a Yossi Klein Halevi essay that claims this is all part of a plan for Israel to finally destroy Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran. Yglesias comments - "Let me just go on the record as saying that as bad an idea as bombing Iran may be, doing so as part of a wildly impractical scheme for Israel to launch a general Middle Eastern war is significantly less appealing."

But that's what's up. James Wolcott explains
why - "One of the tragic follies of the age is the unexamined, bedrock consensus of our political and media establishment that the interests of the US and Israel aren't merely conjoined, but identical. That Israel is such an intimate extension of American influence, muscle, and will that they share the same nervous system and optic view." And he cites Ray Close, a former CIA analyst who writes at No Quarter, saying we're getting sucked in "while Bush autopilots the same monotonal clichés about terrorism, peace-loving people, and Israel's right to defend itself (which no one disputes--it's the scale of the retaliation that's at issue)." Close says this -
The interests of my country, the United States, do not coincide with those of Israel in many important respects today. Let me mention just two of those ways. It is very important to the United States that the independence and national sovereignty of a democratic Lebanon be preserved. That means absolutely nothing to the Government of Israel, despite what they may say to the contrary. Israeli actions going back many years, demonstrated most graphically in the 1980's, clearly prove that point. Current Israeli actions in Lebanon are belligerently challenging the continued viability of the fragile coalition government that is struggling to achieve credibility and legitimacy at a critical period in Lebanon's history. Israeli actions are, even more importantly, threatening to revive the deep sectarian divisions and inter-communal tensions that led to fifteen years of tragic civil war from 1975-1980. American national interests will suffer much more than Israel's if chaos results. Secondly, we Americans have other critical interests to worry about. If we take a position supporting Israel's demand that Hezbollah must be totally defeated and disarmed (a futile objective in any case), and especially if Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, the revered spiritual leader of Hezbollah, is physically harmed, the Shiite populations of Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East will be inflamed - greatly undermining American prospects of working cooperatively and constructively with the Shiite religious parties in Iraq that control the overwhelmingly majority of political power in that country.

Open confrontation of Hezbollah by the United States, allied with Israel, will have a powerful impact on the Iranian people, as well. Argue, if you will, that Iran is a known supporter of Hezbollah and Hamas, and thus of international terrorism. That is a reality that none can deny. But let's prioritize our national interests here. It is the people of Iraq and Iran on whom we depend not just for "regime change" in the short term, but for peace and stability (and resistance to terrorism) throughout the region in the decades ahead. It is the people of those countries whose trust and respect we must win. It is the trust and respect of those people that we have lost to a significant extent because we are identified in their minds with the narrow interests of Israel. Why is that so difficult for Americans to understand?

Encouraging and supporting Israel in a bloody confrontation with Hezbollah in Lebanon may seem to be a justified and reasonable action in the shortest of terms and from the narrowest of perspectives, but the United States of America is not Israel, and we have regional and global interests and responsibilities that far surpass those of this one small ally. Just for once, let's think first of what's best for America.
But what if what is best for American is one final war in the Middle East, Armageddon and the End Times, with some time with the antichrist followed by The Rapture, where the good guys rise and Jesus has returned? No, even Cheney isn't that nutty, or devout, if you prefer. This is more like bullies making it up as the go along, bullies on all sides. The fireman in Paris shouldn't be hosting balls. They should be putting out fires. Someone should. Too many people in power rather like fires.

Posted by Alan at 22:33 PDT | Post Comment | Permalink
Updated: Friday, 14 July 2006 08:21 PDT home

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

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