Roundup: Media's Take
This is where we excerpt articles from the media that take a historical approach to events in the news.
Alexander Prescott-Couch: Why German neo-Nazis don't pose a threat
G. Pascal Zachary: The Perils of Escalation in Iraq: A Grim History Lesson
Wes Enzinna: The School of the Americas and Memory in Latin America
Morton Mintz: What the media left out in their obit on Milton Friedman
Steve Gilliard: Why the Draft is no solution to social inequality
Daniel Henninger: Twenty-five years later, Reagan’s tax cuts are a global tide
Joshua Spivak: Why have so many recent speakers of the house fallen?
Ivan Eland: Revisiting Iran-Contra: The Nomination of Robert Gates
George Melloan: Once upon a time, Democrats were supply-siders too
Andre Vltchek: Why Bush May Face Religious Wrath in Indonesia
Sidney Blumenthal: The American revolution of 2006 and beyond
National Security Archive: The Iran-Contra Scandal, 1991 Confirmation Hearings
Doug Troutman: On a Country Losing Its Humanity ... A Vet's Reflections
Jason Leopold: Gates Has History of Manipulating Intelligence
John Ellis: All that negative advertising is having an effect on our politics
Christopher Hitchens: What Algeria’s past can—and can’t—tell us about the present day
Norman Solomon: Saddam’s Unindicted Co-Conspirator: Donald Rumsfeld
Mark Thoma: How Much Do Election Shakeups Affect the National Economy?
Anne Applebaum: What have we learned from the Hungarian revolt of 1956?
Robert J. Samuelson: Public Opinion and Muddled Policies (what if we're to blame?)
Thursday, November 30, 2006
Alexander Prescott-Couch: Why German neo-Nazis don't pose a threat
Source: New Republic (11-29-06)
n Germany, the proliferation of neo-Nazi culture has created the perception of a growing national threat. Neo-Nazi rock concerts, soccer tournaments, clothing stores, and even Internet cafés have become increasingly common, particularly in the former East, where the struggling economy and high unemployment has bred discontent. The political consequences seemed to materialize in 2004, when the National Party of Germany (NPD), the political wing of the neo-Nazi movement, won 9.2 percent of the vote in the East German state of Sachsen, the first instance in nearly 40 years where the party stepped over the 5 percent mark required for representation in a state parliament. Then, in September, the NPD received 7.3 percent of the vote in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, a northeastern state on the Baltic Sea, a result showing that support for the NPD there had increased twofold since last year's national election and almost tenfold since the previous state election five years ago.
Germans were duly horrified. Chancellor Angela Merkel spoke of the "extraordinarily regrettable result of this Landtag election." The President of the Central Advisory Council for Jews in Germany, Charlotte Knobloch, described the outcome as "a declaration of political bankruptcy." And Mecklenburg-Vorpommern Parliament President Sylvia Bretschneider called it "the most difficult moment of my political life." The NPD leader, Udo Voigt, has said he wants to "sweep into the West," hopefully penetrating the Bavarian state government in 2008 and pushing through into the Bundestag in 2009. And the party's decision to hold its November convention in Berlin for the first time was seen as a symbol of amplified self-confidence, which led alarmed politicians to consider a renewed attempt to legally ban the party. Yet, for all the NPD's bluster and the panic it has engendered among Germans, these fascists don't pose much of a threat at all.
[Alexander Prescott-Couch is a German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) fellowship recipient in Berlin.]
The uproar over the NPD's recent electoral gains has obscured the fact that the party is actually incredibly fragile, as a quick look at its history reveals. Despite periodic popularity, it has never managed to maintain a significant presence at the state level, let alone enter the Bundestag. After its founding in 1964, the party enjoyed some initial success, especially in the conservative South. A sharp economic downturn following the boom of 1966-1967 drove workers and the lower middle-class away from the mainstream parties and toward the NPD, which had acquired a veneer of legitimacy from high profile members like Olympic gold medal rower Frank Schepke. The violent student protests of 1968 also played a role in making mainstream conservatives more receptive to the party's slogan of "security and order." As a result, the NPD won seats in seven state parliaments within four years; its strongest performance then (and since) was in Baden-Würrtemberg in 1968, where it won 9.8 percent of the vote. With its fortunes on the rise, it almost entered the Bundestag in 1969 with 4.3 percent of the national vote.
But the NPD's success was short-lived. As the economy began to turn upward in 1968, and as violent disputes with anti-NPD demonstrators undermined its law-and-order image, its popularity sank. ...
Wednesday, November 29, 2006
Henry Mark Holzer: Testing for Citizenship
Source: FrontpageMag.com (11-29-06)
[Henry Mark Holzer, Professor Emeritus at Brooklyn Law School, is an appellate lawyer who specializes in constitutional law. You can contact him via his website: www.henrymarkholzer.com.]
On August 9, 1994, former Texas Congresswoman Barbara Jordan, then Chair of the United States Commission on Immigration Reform, told the House Committee on Ways and Means, Subcommittee on Human Resources, that “[t]he Commission believes that legal immigration has been and can continue to be a strength of this country. Most legal immigrants are the spouses, children, parents, or siblings of a U.S. citizen or long-term permanent resident. A smaller number are sponsored by businesses that need their skills and talents. We take an affirmative decision to admit these individuals. It is with the expectation and desire that they will be integrated immediately into our social community and, eventually, through naturalization, into the political community as well. (Emphasis added.)
Regrettably, the Commission’s optimistic, even noble, expectation and desire has been unfulfilled.
As Victor Davis Hansen in Mexifornia, Patrick J. Buchanan in State of Emergency, and countless others in books, articles, blogs, and speeches have conclusively documented, assimilation of immigrants, illegal as well as legal, has mostly not occurred. In my review of Mr. Buchannan’s book (www.henrymarkholzer.com), I wrote: “Within our southwestern states, we have non-assimilated populations in ‘cities’ within cities, where one has no sense that he is in the United States of America. For example, Buchanan reports that ‘[t]hree million people of Mexican ancestry today call L.A. County home, and half of all its residents—54 percent—speak a language other than English in their homes, up from 49 percent in 1990. When more than half the people of so vast a county do not speak English at home, do not listen to the same radio and TV programs as the rest of us, do not read the same newspapers, magazines, or books, do not share the same heroes, history or holidays, how can we say that we are all still one nation and one people?’”
There are many reasons for this—among them ignorance, fear, illiteracy, criminality, poverty, cultural differences, native country chauvinism—and an oft-overlooked reason: the systemic weakness in our naturalization process.
We allow foreigners (for that’s what immigrants are) to become American citizens with virtually no proof that they understand (let alone believe in) our history, founding principles, animating political philosophy, and unique constitutional framework.
America’s history is rooted in the Enlightenment, not in the brutal mysticism of ancient cultures. Our founding principles, now implemented in law and culture, are eloquently expressed in the Declaration of Independence, and do not stem from the divine right of kings. Our political philosophy is that of limited government and individual rights, not collectivist/statist tyranny. Our constitutional framework rests on federalism, separation of powers, judicial review, and an explicit Bill of Rights, not on authoritarianism or unrestrained majority rule.
It is this, at the least, which those who would seek naturalization as Americans must understand.
Instead, the current examination for American citizenship asks few if any conceptual questions, and focuses almost entirely on facts: our flag’s colors, and the number of its stars and stripes; dates; the names of public officials; state capitals; location of the White House—and many other equally inane questions.
At long last, heeding the report issued by Jordan’s Clinton-era Commission— recognizing the importance of “effective Americanization of new immigrants, that is the cultivation of a shared commitment to the American values of liberty, democracy and equal opportunity”—and doubtless spurred by the recent immigration debate, officialdom has finally focused on the naturalization process in general, and on the citizenship examination in particular.
The result is that the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) intends to change the naturalization test. According to a USCIS spokesperson, “We want to focus more on the building blocks of democracy, rather than the colors of the flag.” He added that applicants for naturalization should know about, in his words, “freedoms guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights, such as freedom of speech and freedom of religion.”
Probably anticipating objections from the foreigner/immigration lobbies, the spokesman was quick to sound a reassuring note: “Our goal is not to make this test harder or easier for anyone, but to make it much more meaningful.”
Easier would not have been possible, except perhaps by asking the color of the White House. And heaven forbid that the test be harder—for example, by substituting for “What holiday was celebrated for the first time by American colonists?” a question like “What is separation of powers and why is it important to a functioning republic?”
Making the test “much more meaningful” is simply a nod to today’s touchy-feely political correctness, which dictates that all human experience be “meaningful.”
However, even the USCIS’s equivocation hasn’t satisfied the foreigner/immigration lobbies. Although the new test won’t be “harder or easier,” even though it will assuredly be “meaningful,” although it won’t be used until January 2008, although the 125 current questions will be reduced to 100 in a pilot program between now and then, and although a grade of 60 will be sufficient to pass, still, the foreigner/immigration lobbies quickly jumped the government.
According to the Washington Times, “More than 220 immigrant organizations, led by the Illinois Coalition of Immigrant and Refugee Rights, have signed a letter to USCIS Director Emilio Gonzalez denouncing the new test, which they worry will make it harder for ‘poorer legal immigrants with less English and less education’ to win U.S. Citizenship. ‘Already immigrants must pass a citizenship test that many native-born Americans could not pass,’ say groups that include the National Council of La Raza, National Immigration Forum, Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, the United Farm Workers of America and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters.”
Putting aside that most of the usual suspects are those who customarily oppose every measure that would inhibit porous borders and unchecked immigration, that there is not a necessary relationship between economic status and intelligence, and that there should be a necessary relationship between speaking English and becoming a citizen of our English-speaking country, two important points arise from such knee-jerk reactions to the new test.
While it’s true that, sadly, many current American citizens could not pass even the old naturalization test, let alone the new “meaningful” one, those folks are already here, they are already citizens, in all likelihood at least somewhat assimilated, and, unlike the naysayers’ constituencies, they are not knocking on our door asking to be granted what should be a precious privilege: American citizenship.
A wider point is that even the worst of the open borders, “everyone-gets-in” crowd pays lip service to the idea that American citizenship should be earned. If we are not to require, as the price of becoming an American citizen, service in our armed forces, contribution of essential skills to our society, or the conferring of other benefits to our country—as we could, and perhaps should—it is morally imperative that those who would walk through our “golden door” do us the honor of understanding America’s unique genesis and institutions.
To ask less of them is to devalue what we are, and what it has cost us to become the freest, most benevolent, and most moral nation ever to exist.
Max Boot: Iran and Syria aren't our friends in Iraq
Source: LAT (11-29-06)
FOR CERTAIN members of the foreign policy cognoscenti, there is no problem so intractable that it cannot be resolved through dialogue — preferably multilateral, except in those situations (North Korea, for example) in which bilateral talks are for some reason preferred. Thus, with Iraq sinking deeper into the blood-drenched waters of civil strife, we hear growing calls for an international conference to come to the rescue. The model is said to be the 1989 Taif Accord that ended Lebanon's civil war — reached, conveniently enough, when über troubleshooter James A. Baker III was secretary of State. This ignores two major differences between Lebanon then and Iraq today.
First, by 1989, all sides in Lebanon had been exhausted by 14 years of fighting that had claimed at least 150,000 lives. In Iraq, by contrast, the killing is still in its early stages, and there is no sign that Shiite or Sunni bloodlust will abate anytime soon.
Second, for all the exhaustion of the combatants, the Taif Accord worked largely because Syrian troops policed a cease-fire. Even if we negotiate such an accord in Iraq, who will play the role of peacekeeper? It is doubtful that any of Iraq's neighbors will volunteer. None of them wants to be caught in the crossfire. Nor would most Iraqis want to be occupied by Iranian or Syrian troops. That leaves as the only plausible candidate the American soldiers already there.
Even now, their success or failure in quelling Iraq's violence depends largely on the willingness of indigenous factions to strike a political bargain and stick by it. That process could perhaps be encouraged by neighboring states, but it could hardly be imposed from the outside.
The combatants in Iraq's civil war are much less dependent on external sponsors than many previous guerrilla groups, such as the Viet Cong or the Afghan mujahedin. A U.S. intelligence report leaked to the New York Times finds that the Iraq insurgents have become self-sustaining financially, making $70 million to $200 million a year from oil smuggling, kidnapping and other rackets.
Sure, Syria and Iran abet the violence, helping Sunni and Shiite extremists, respectively. But that does not mean they could end the killing, which has an internal logic of its own. And even if they could, why would they?
Proponents of "engaging" Iran and Syria argue that it's against their interests to see chaos next door. As opposed to what? They probably think they're better off today than they would be if they had a strong and potentially hostile Iraq on their border, especially one allied with the United States. They're happy to see the U.S. bled dry and Iraq immobilized as a regional player.
Given that mind-set, we would have to offer Syria and Iran some mighty enticing carrots to get them to cooperate in a U.S.-led rescue effort for Iraq. Tehran would most likely demand, at a minimum, a guarantee that we would do nothing to foster regime change in Iran or stop its nuclear program.
Syrian President Bashar Assad, for his part, would most likely seek an end to the international tribunal investigating the 2005 murder of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri because any trial would probably implicate Syrian officials. Naturally, Assad would also demand that no independent investigation be conducted into last week's assassination of Lebanese Cabinet minister Pierre Gemayel, which likewise has Syrian fingerprints all over it. In addition, he would seek to reestablish Syrian hegemony over Lebanon, which Syria refuses to admit is a separate country. Oh, and for dessert, he'd also like the Golan Heights back from Israel.
Are these wishes that Washington could or should accommodate? Do we want to betray the democratic revolution in Lebanon? Do we want to give Iran's loony president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, carte blanche to build nuclear weapons? And all in return for dubious promises that may not make any difference in Iraq?
Hard to believe, but those who advocate negotiations under such circumstances are known as "realists." A real realist would realize that Syria and Iran are only likely to accommodate the U.S. when they're afraid of us. Iran played a constructive role in Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban in 2001, and Syria scuttled out of Lebanon in 2005 under strong pressure. Now, however, we would be bargaining from a position of weakness, not strength.
We are on the verge of defeat in Iraq. Our enemies have no interest in bailing us out, unless the cost is prohibitive.
Tuesday, November 28, 2006
Martin Peretz: James Baker Who?
Source: New Republic (11-27-06)
The man who has come to rescue U.S. policy in Iraq is actually the man who rescued Saddam Hussein twice. The first time came early during the presidency of George Bush, Sr. It was James Baker who was in charge, tending Saddam's wounds and building up his arms. At that moment, the Baath dictatorship was still reeling from its brutal eight-year war with Iran, a conflict that presaged the uncivil strife occurring in Mesopotamia now. The second time was toward the close of the first Bush presidency, and Baker was still in charge.
Iraq had been forced back from the invasion of a country it had intended to annex. The logic of the victory should have suggested unseating the aggressor--a man at once reckless and conniving, hated by (most of) his countrymen and feared by (all of) his neighbors. But that logic never penetrated the victors, who maintained Saddam in Baghdad with the goal of keeping him on a tight rope and constraining his economy by a regime of sanctions. Such a regime has rarely worked. He turned out to be especially adept at manipulating it against his longtime domestic victims and for his sectarian, familial, and geographical allies. This suffering was neither here nor there for the especially visible members of the coalition that had defeated him. Arab solidarity does not cut across doctrinal lines. This was only one reason why pan-Arabism turned out to be a roaring tiger but one without teeth.
The primary consideration of Saudi Arabia, for example, was that a Sunni government of one sort or another--like the ones that had been in place since Gertrude Bell (the T.E. Lawrence of the north) installed the Emir Faisal as king in Baghdad 70 years earlier--not be displaced. This meant a permanent minority was to be in power. And, if history was an accurate predictor, it would be a brutal minority at that. A neighboring Shia state would be an enormous discomfort for the royals in Riyadh. I don't want to be cavalier about this, since, to say the least, nationhood is not a fully matured notion among the Arabs. And, if I were a responsible Saudi official, I, too, would worry greatly if adjacent Iraq became an official Shia state, especially given how the Shia minority fared under Sunni rule of the Arabian peninsula.
Almost uncannily, Baker's instincts and convictions meshed (and mesh still) with the House of Saud. Forgive me for appearing like a Marxist--a vulgar Marxist, no less. But the Carlyle Group of which Baker has been a top factotum is much at home with the Sunni princely and investor dynasty. Their compatibility is almost primordial--and also very practical.
Let's face it: The Baker-Hamilton Commission is a desperate rescue operation for the Iraqi Sunnis. George W. Bush has gotten us all into trouble, and he will now be taken to the woodshed by his father's faithful but resentful lieutenant. George W. never really liked Baker. (But who actually does?) The president might even muse to himself that, had Baker--and his dad--not saved Saddam 15 years ago, he would not have had the chore to do for himself. He probably wouldn't relish the irony of reading a speech by then-Senator Al Gore on September 29, 1992, lambasting the first Bush administration--and Baker, in particular--for leaving the despot-aggressor in power. ....
G. Pascal Zachary: The Perils of Escalation in Iraq: A Grim History Lesson
Source: AlterNet (11-27-06)
[G. Pascal Zachary, a frequent contributor to AlterNet, is the author of Endless Frontier: Vannevar Bush, Engineer of the American Century.]
The perils of escalation can be found in the pages of American history. These perils demand a greater appreciation as the nation ponders the option of escalating the war in Iraq.
Escalation is always a seductive option when war aims go unmet. After taking casualties and losing ground, an occupying army can look on the prospect of reinforcements with enthusiasm. For the political overlords of a war going badly, escalation carries an immediate appeal by raising hopes of ultimate victory, as the enemy collapses in the face of increased forces and firepower. Of course, talk of escalation can be abused by political cynics. One appeal of favoring escalation is prospective: critics of a failed war can always argue later that if only their side committed more forces, defeat would have turned into victory.
In the case of the Iraq war, the appeal of escalation is linked to the widespread, if erroneous, belief that the U.S. never committed adequate troop levels to pacify Iraq. Arizona Senator John McCain, the chief proponent of the escalation scenario, argues that only through an escalation of the war can Americans for the first time stand a decent chance to win. With U.S. forces facing defeat in Iraq, and with Iraqi civilians suffering even more terribly than the foreign occupiers, McCain's escalation scenario holds out the possibility of lowered American casualties (a consequence of "strength in numbers") and a safer Iraq safer for the locals. Escalations can backfire, however. Let's consider the escalations in the two wars that most resemble the Iraq war.
The first is the Korean War, waged by the U.S. on the Korean peninsula from 1950 to 1953. In the first half of the 20th century, Japan conquered Korea and, with Japan's defeat at the end of World War II, the Soviet Union and the U.S. -- allies during the war and now victorious -- split Korea between north and south. Under the sway of the Soviet Union, North Korea adopted communism as an ideology and in June 1950, without warning, attacked South Korea. U.S. forces intervened to save the south, evicting the North Koreans.
The U.S. then faced a momentous decision. Having restored the status of the two Koreas prior to the war, should the U.S. military now stand down. Or should the U.S. escalate the war in the hopes of forever ending any threat from the North. Under the leadership of Army general Douglas MacArthur, the U.S. invaded North Korea with the stated aim of "liberating" it.
The escalation tragically backfired when China sided with North Korea and sent their own battle-hardened troops against U.S. forces. For a brief time when China threatened to overwhelm the Americans, and MacArthur was famously fired for his over-reach (the episode has echoes of Donald Rumsfeld's recent humiliation as Secretary of Defense). The war then settled into a bloody stalemate, and even today, more than 50 years later, two Koreas remain, with military tensions high.
The escalation solved nothing and cost much. More than 60,000 Americans were killed in the Korean war, which finally ended through negotiations, not military action.
The Vietnam War saw two escalations. Like Korea, Vietnam was a small Asian nation divided in two as a consequence of decolonization fostered by the end of World War II. Also like Korea, Vietnam was invaded by the Japanese, who supplanted France as the colonial power. With Japan's defeat in 1945, France returned, only to find a nationalist leader, Ho Chi Minh, entrenched in the north of Vietnam. Minh was renown for his resistance to the Japanese invaders and would likely had united the southern part of the country under his common rule had not the French resisted.
When France tired of fighting in Vietnam, the U.S. took over the role of reinforcing the South Vietnamese government. By the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963, however, the so-called policy of "Vietnamization," or training the south Vietnamese to fight in their own defense against the northerners, was a failure.
Faced with the triumph of Ho Chi Minh, the new president Lyndon Johnson vowed, "I will not lose in Vietnam." In 1965, he tried to make good on his promise, vastly expanding the number of U.S. troops, which rose first to 300,000 (and then to 500,000 in 1968). Johnson also ordered a massive air bombing of North Vietnam so that within two years American planes had dropped more tonnage on the Vietnamese than they had during Germany, Japan and Italy during World War II.
With more troops and more bombing, Johnson confidently spoke of "light at the end of the tunnel" in Vietnam. In response, the North Vietnamese, and their supporters in the south, mounted a devastating Tet offensive in January 1968. Attackers even penetrated the U.S. embassy compound in Saigon.
Though American and South Vietnamese forces eventually turned back the Tet invaders, and even inflicted heavy losses on the North, the prospect of a quick end to the war was exposed as a delusion. The failure of Johnson's escalation of the war was a double tragedy since not only did his decision cost many American lives and much money, the failure of escalation undercut support for his campaigns against institutionalized racism and poverty in America.
Even worse, new evidence unearthed historian Fredrik Logevall, author of Choosing War: the Lost Chance for Peace and the Escalation of War in Vietnam, suggests that the south and the north could well have negotiated an end to the war and a government national unity as early as 1965, sparing all sides 10 years of deadly fighting....
Saturday, November 25, 2006
Peggy Noonan: Lincoln's advice on immigration
Source: WSJ (11-25-06)
It is July 10, 1858, a Saturday evening, and Lincoln is speaking in Chicago. The night before his opponent in their race for the U.S. Senate, Stephen Douglas, had referred to him graciously in his big speech, and invited him to take a good seat. Lincoln seized the opportunity and invited Douglas's audience to hear him the next night.
And so here he was, speaking, as usual, text and subtext, on slavery. But near the end, he turned to who populates America. Half or more of his audience, he suggested, could trace their personal ancestry back to the founding generation, "those iron men" who were "our fathers and grandfathers." Remembering their creation of the United States, thinking of "how it was done and who did it," has civic benefits. It leaves Americans feeling "more attached to one another, and more firmly bound to the country we inhabit."
What of those who could not trace their bloodlines back to the Revolution? The immigrants of Europe are "not descendents at all," Lincoln said, and "cannot carry themselves back into that glorious epoch and make themselves feel that they are part of us."
"But" he then said.
"But when they look through that old Declaration of Independence they find that those old men say that 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.'" And that "moral sentiment" connects groups and generations and tells America's immigrants "that they have a right to claim it as though they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh of the men who wrote that Declaration. And so they are."
"And so they are." With those four words he told the anti-immigrant Know Nothings that new Americans have an equal place. He was saying: Take That, haters of the Catholic Church, spoofers of foreign ways, nonsympathizers with the beset, bedraggled and be-brogued.
I love those words by Lincoln, and believe them. But it continues to amaze that 148 years after he said them, who populates America is still a matter of urgent argument.
Much of course has changed. Immigration in Lincoln's day was open and legal. Now it is open in effect because overwhelmingly illegal in practice. If you want to come across the border, you can, essentially, come. You make the decision about what is best for you; America does not make the decision as to what is best for it. Both Congress and the White House, our official deciders, will likely do in the next session what they did in the last: spend a lot of time trying to confuse people into thinking they're closing the borders without actually closing them. There will be talk again of fences, partial fences, fencelike entities and virtual fences. While they dither and mislead, towns and cities will continue to attempt to make their own immigration policy....
America has, since 1980, experienced the biggest wave of immigrants since the great wave of 1880-1920. And we have never stopped to absorb it. We have never stopped to digest what we've eaten. Is it any wonder we have indigestion?
We don't really have to solve the problem forever. We just have to solve it now. One wonders why we don't stop illegal immigration, now. Absorb, settle down, ease pressures -- for now. Why not be empirical, and find out what's true? Some say stopping illegal immigration will lead to an increase in wages for low-income workers. This is to be desired. Let's find out if it happens....
Friday, November 24, 2006
Jim Castagnera: Caught in the Draft
Source: News of Delaware County (11-29-06)
[Mr. Castagnera, a Philadelphia journalist and attorney, is the Associate Provost at Rider University and author of the weekly newspaper column Attorney at Large.]
Congressman Charlie Rangel has proposed reinstating the draft. The last time Representative Rangel raised the issue, at the onset of the present Iraqi War in 2003, the bill went down in flames on a vote of 402-2. Its chances are no better now.
Talk of reinstating the Selective Service system brought back memories, nonetheless. In the 1960s draft classifications were an alphabet soup that could spell life or death. Being 1-A meant that a likely lad, such as myself, was 100% available to serve Uncle Sammy. Almost every other letter in the regulatory alphabet provided some sort of shield against harm’s way.
The designation 1-A-O meant “conscientious objector.” This tag couldn’t keep you out uniform, but it did keep you out of combat. Not a very desirable designation in my book: the other guy got to shoot at you, while you declined to shoot back. I guess that’s what turning the other cheek is all about, isn’t it?
At the opposite end of the federal alphabet was 4-F, meaning “not qualified for any military service.” Now that seemed more like it to me. Unfortunately --- or so it seemed in 1969 --- I was healthy as a horse, a war horse at that. In April of that year I was still two months away from walking across the stage to collect my college diploma and the dean’s hearty handshake. No matter… the Carbon County (PA) draft board wasted no time informing me that my precious 2-S (student) deferment was about to evaporate.
Calling the board, I spoke to a little old lady, who cheerfully told me that I was on the list for July but could push induction back to August, if I cared to lodge an unsuccessful appeal. Armed with that graduation gift, I hauled myself up to a job fair at the University of Scranton, there to shop the military services for the best deal.
That deal came from Charlie Golf… the U.S. Coast Guard. For a mere four years of my life, the USCG gave me nine glorious weeks of basic training in sunny Cape May, New Jersey, followed by another 16 weeks of resort-style living at Officer Candidate School in Yorktown, Virginia. What was boot camp in Cape May like? Suffice to say it took my wife ten years to persuade me to even visit the town again, never mind vacationing there. OCS was a bit better. The drill instructors there called my comrades and me “gentlemen,” instead of “pukes,” as they put us through our paces. (During one of my nine weeks of basic training, a Congressional fact-finding team came to Cape May to investigate the death of a recruit who drowned in the base pool during drown-proofing exercises. Our DI advised us, “I’ve been told I cannot refer to you men as ‘pukes’ while the investigators are here. So this week, you are all ‘vomits.’”)
In between boot camp and OCS, Charlie Golf parked me on Governors Island in New York harbor. Assigned to Personnel Division, my job was discharging guys whose time was up. To maintain my sanity, I discharged myself once a week. My greatest fear was that old Captain Logan, who looked in profile like the American eagle, would discover my stash of discharge certificates and transfer me to one of the cutters bound weekly for Southeast Asia.
Some shipmates from Cape May had no such concerns about preserving their sanity. To the contrary, they did their best to express insanity. One comrade took to fishing in a large puddle after every rainstorm that swept Governors Island. After a few such fishing expeditions he was sent across the harbor to the VA hospital on Staten Island. From there he was eventually sent home. His new classification was “Section 8.”
One year after I enlisted, most of the alphabet soup was thrown into the garbage can of history, replaced by a numbers game. The draft lottery was the Power Ball of life and death for young men, who gathered around the hearth (read TV set) to see their fates determined by the numbers. Birthdays were randomly matched with numbers 1 through 365. Those fellas whose nativities matched one and two-digit designations knew they needed to enlist, abscond, or wait for the call that would almost certainly come. Those in the mid-range had to hold their breath for a year, until the next Superpower Ball was bounced. Those above 300 could sip champagne and get on with their lives.
Now forever classified a Vietnam-era Disabled Vet, I sometimes think some form of compulsory national service might rekindle our lost sense of citizenship. But while Representative Rangel has the right name to take this on, I fear the idea is 4-F from the get-go.
Robert Scheer: In the Shadow of Ho Chi Minh
Source: AlterNet (11-22-06)
[Robert Scheer is the co-author of The Five Biggest Lies Bush Told Us About Iraq. See more of Robert Scheer at TruthDig.]
Iraq and Vietnam are not the same country, yet both have long experience with imperial meddling and fiercely resist it.
President Bush has said many dumb things in defense of his Iraq policy. Citing the Vietnam War as a model, however, is perhaps his most ludicrous yet.
This past week found the president sitting before a bust of the victorious Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam, seemingly unaware that the United States lost its war with the Communist-led country. Having long and vehemently denied parallels between the invasions of Vietnam and Iraq, he nevertheless admitted now to seeing one.
"Yes," Bush said. "One lesson is that we tend to want there to be instant success in the world, and the task in Iraq is ... just going to take a long period of time to--for the ideology that is hopeful, and that's an ideology of freedom, to overcome an ideology of hate.... We'll succeed, unless we quit."
Bush seems not to have noticed that we succeeded in Vietnam precisely because we did quit the military occupation of that nation, permitting an ideology of freedom to overcome one of hate. Bush's rhetoric is frighteningly reminiscent of Richard Nixon's escalation and expansion of the Vietnam War in an attempt to buy an "honorable" exit with the blood of millions of Southeast Asians and thousands of American soldiers. In the end, a decade of bitter fighting did not prevent an ignominious U.S. departure from Saigon.
Now, however, Vietnam is at peace with its neighbors and poses no security threat to the United States. Many of the "boat people" have returned as investors, and successive American presidents have made visits to the second fastest-growing economy in Asia. While Vietnam is still run by its Communist Party, eventually postwar leaders on both sides have accepted that peace is practical....
Iraq and Vietnam are not the same country, yet both have long experience with imperial meddling and fiercely resist it. Bush has said Iraq "is in many ways, religious in nature, and I don't see the parallels" to Vietnam, but that is just another sign that he probably cut most of his history classes at Yale.
He--and apparently the mass media, as well--seems to have forgotten that the United States tried to stoke a religious war in Vietnam by intervening to install a Roman Catholic exile in power in this primarily Buddhist country. The struggle to overthrow that U.S. puppet dictator, Ngo Dinh Diem, began with Buddhist monks immolating themselves on the streets of Saigon....
Wednesday, November 22, 2006
Wes Enzinna: The School of the Americas and Memory in Latin America
Source: Counterpunch (11-22-06)
"Nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost for history. To be sure, only a redeemed mankind receives the fullness of its past--which is to say, only for a redeemed mankind has its past become citable in all its moments"
--Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History
This November 17-19, for the seventeenth annual time, an estimated 20,000 marchers will convene on Fort Benning, Georgia, home to the infamous school for Latin American military soldiers, the School of the America's (SOA). As part of their protest to shut down the SOA, the marchers will line up at the gate of what critics call the "School of Assassins," and will, as they do every year, perform a ritual: holding small white crosses, one for each of the more than 300,000 estimated victims of SOA-trained soldiers since the School's beginning in Panama in 1946, a march leader will call out the name of each victim (it takes several hours), to which the crowd will shout back, "Presente!" But this November, something will be different: the ghosts of Latin America's dictatorships past, as well as their living descendents, will also shout back, in unison with the voices of the marchers: "Presente!"
History of Brutality
43 year-old Gonzalo Guevara Cerritos looked like your average blue-collar janitor, working for his daily bread along with thousands of other recent Latino immigrants in Los Angeles. His constant nervousness and avoidance of social interaction could have been chalked up to his discomfort living in a foreign land, or to his less-than-perfect English. Or it could have been chalked up to the fact that in 1989, while sub-lieutenant in El Salvador's counterinsurgency Atlacatl Battalion, he had taken part in the massacre of six Jesuit priests, a housekeeper, and her 14-year-old daughter, and was wanted by Salvadoran authorities for these crimes. As it turns out, the latter was the case, and Guevara Cerritos was arrested this October 16 by Los Angeles Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, tipped off by another Salvadoran who had recognized Guevara Cerritos' face. He is currently awaiting deportation.
As part of Ronald Reagan's Cold War-era Central America policies, throughout the 1980's the White House supported an array of death squads and dictators - such as the Atlacatl Battalion - in the name of "rolling back" communist influence. The US infamously funneled money and guns to the Contras in Nicaragua, as well as to right-wing death squads in Honduras, Guatamala, and El Salvador. As historian Greg Grandin points out in is new book, Empire's Workshop, "U.S allies in Central America during Reagan's two terms killed over 300,000 people, tortured hundreds of thousands, and drove millions into exile." They also supplied Central American forces with instruction manuals in psychological torture, as well as tools such as cattle-prods for torture of the more corporeal kind.
In 1988, one of the instruction manuals, titled Human Resource Exploitation, surfaced during a Congressional hearing sparked by a New York Times allegation that the US had trained Honduran military officers involved in mass torture. It also came out that these manuals were based in part on SOA classroom lesson plans.
But it was the 1989 massacre of six priests, a housekeeper, and her daughter in El Salvador that galvanized US public opposition to the SOA--Gonzalo Guevara Cerritos was trained at the Fort Benning, Georgia School. Also bad for SOA's press was its connection to the 1980 rape and murder of four American Mary Knoll nuns in El Salvador, as well as to Panama's dictator Manuel Noriega and Salvadoran death-squad architect Roberto D'Aubuisson, in addition to the killers of beloved Salvadoran Archibishop Oscar Romero--all SOA graduates. In the end, it is estimated that the 64,000 Latin American troops trained at SOA since the 1960's have been involved in around 75,000 murders in El Salvador, 200,000 in Guatemala, and thousands more in other violence-torn countries such as Columbia....
Morton Mintz: What the media left out in their obit on Milton Friedman
Source: Nieman Watchdog (11-21-06)
[Mr. Mintz was a reporter for many years with the Washington Post.]
When the famous die, news reports and commentary, no matter the length, do not always recall some of the most memorable things they'd said or advocated. Milton Friedman and Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist are cases in point.
Consider what the famed economist said in a January 1970 article in The New York Times Magazine: A governmental system cannot be devised "which will not be taken over by vested economic "interests and exploited for the preservation and enhancement of their own wealth." It's hard to imagine a more accurate, more concise description of what the Bush administration has been doing for six years now: appointing to top regulatory posts corporate lobbyists and executives who had dedicated their careers to enfeebling and destroying the very safety and health regulations that on taking office they solemnly swear-perjuriously?-to enforce.
Mr. Friedman of course abhorred regulation, going so far as to insist that competition alone can be relied upon to protect the public. In a January 1973 Newsweek column, for example, he cited serious flaws in federal regulation of food and drugs as a basis for arguing that it should be abolished and replaced by "consumer sovereignty." It does not detract from Mr. Friedman's many brilliant insights and achievements to call this advice foolish and dangerous. A quick example: If all fast-food chains compete by using trans-fats to improve flavor, is competition protecting consumers ignorant of their terrible effects?
In any case, the advice having been neglected in articles recording his passing, it may well be prudent to examine it here before market-is-God, free-enterprise ideologues at corporate-funded think-tanks begin to propagate it anew as some kind of Holy Writ.
By the time Mr. Friedman had written the Newsweek column, it was anything but news that from the time our country was founded, the American people had relied on "consumer sovereignty" for protection. And it was also anything but news that after the industrial revolution in the late Nineteenth Century they had learned the hard way-from, for example, patent medicines that claimed to be cures for everything but that cured nothing-that their health, safety and pocketbooks demanded passage of the Pure Food and Drugs Act of 1906 (and of later laws such as those to protect consumers' and workers' safety and health and to guard against false and misleading advertising).
That abandoning regulation of food and drugs could needlessly threaten human safety, health and life on a massive scale was common knowledge long before Friedman invented "consumer sovereignty." A dramatic example involves thalidomide, a sedative/tranquilizer that a conscientious Food and Drug Administration medical officer declined to approve for sale. In 1962-11 years before the Newsweek column-the world learned that thousands of babies had been born armless, legless or limbless to women who had taken the drug during the first trimester of pregnancy. The mothers lived in countries where there was no drug regulation or where regulation was weak or had failed. Neither they nor the prescribing physicians on whom they had relied had the faintest inkling of thalidomide's dangers. "Consumer sovereignty"?
Unlike thalidomide, carcinogens are a continuing and ever-present threat. They occur in pesticides, foods, drugs, and the air we breathe. Importantly, the cancers they cause may not become apparent for 20 or 30 years. If the Environmental Protection Agency and the FDA did not exist, or if they did not devise and enforce regulations intended to keep carcinogens out of our foods, medicines, and air, or if the EPA and FDA are, in the professor's words, "taken over by vested economic interests and exploited for the preservation and enhancement of their own wealth," then what use to cancer victims would be the words "consumer sovereignty"?
Even the right to try to hold a manufacturer or a polluter liable after the fact is under constant relentless attack in Washington and state capitols by the politicians those vested interests bought and buy.
The late Senator Gaylord Nelson (D-Wis.) invited Milton Friedman to testify at hearings of his Senate Subcommittee on Monopoly on the economist's and other proposals to dismantle the FDA. He declined the invitation....
Steve Gilliard: Why the Draft is no solution to social inequality
Source: AlterNet (11-22-06)
... There's a temptation among progressives and liberals to view the draft as a potentially positive force, both in bringing about an end to the war and in evening the playing field in terms of whose children actually have to fight. Unfortunately, to the extent that it ever was true, this simply isn't the case anymore. The draft will only pull more unfortunate men and women from the ranks of the underprivileged and underrepresented.
They had been in classrooms only a few months ago, now they were tramping down some muddy road in a strange place, flinching from explosions. Annoyed by their flinching, someone would explain they were outgoing rounds, nothing to worry about.
Shipped overseas, sent to a replacement depot, greeted with indifference by their new platoon mates, expected to be dead or wounded in a few days, they were infantry and all their problems boiled down to surviving the German Army. Thousands would find themselves in Belgium, France, Italy, the Pacific, fighting on the front lines.
Casualties in Normandy had been higher than the Army planned for. Eisenhower was desperate for manpower. He sent one memo asking for 100,000 Marines. The Navy didn't have them, but the Army had two large untapped pools of men, the Army Specialized Training Program and the Air Cadets. Both were ended and their men sent to where the need was greatest, facing the Wehrmacht in France. The ASTP was designed to create a class of Army bureaucrats, the future administrators of ruined allied countries and the defeated Axis states, but too many had been trained. The same with the Air Cadets. The Army had overestimated the clerks they needed and underestimated the infantry required to win the war. Eisenhower was so desperate for bodies that soldiers facing court martial were often sent to front line units. Late in the war, they created black platoons to serve in white infantry units.
Most came home to start or resume educations under the GI bill, changing who ran America. Once, college was reserved for the rich and the lucky. Now, all that was required was an honorable discharge. So whether you were a Marine armorer (Art Buchwald), a sailor (Pat Moynihan), air crew (Howard Zinn, Joseph Heller) or an infantryman (Norman Mailer, Kurt Vonnegut, Mel Brooks, Malcolm Forbes), you had a radically different future ahead of you: college, a mortgage, a middle class life after a childhood of poverty. Even if you were wealthy, combat service was a key to social acceptance and political success among the masses.
When we talk about the draft, it is through the prism of World War II and the GI Bill. We see the mass armies of World War II as leveling -- one where people served without class distinction.
This is Hollywood's fantasy.
In reality, rich kids gravitated to the Navy and Air Corps, or the OSS, the Office of Strategic Services. They didn't sign up to be Rangers or Airborne, much less infantry.
It was the GI Bill, not the army, which made for a more equal America. ...
Max Boot: Cutting and running on our allies
Source: LAT (11-22-06)
MANY AMERICANS have been wondering why so many Iraqis are willing to fight for militias and terrorist groups but not for the American-backed government. Look at it from their perspective. Would you stake your life on a regime whose existence depends on Washington's continuing support? Given our long, shameful record of leaving allies in the lurch, that has never seemed to be a smart bet.
We have been betraying friends since our first overseas conflict, against the Barbary pirates who captured ships off the African coast and enslaved their crews. To defeat the pasha of Tripoli, the U.S. made common cause with his brother, Hamet Karamanli. In 1804, American envoy William Eaton led a motley force of mercenaries and Marines across North Africa to install Karamanli on the throne. The offensive was called off prematurely when President Jefferson's envoy reached a deal with the pasha to free his American captives in return for $60,000. Karamanli was evacuated to the U.S., but his family members were left as hostages. Eaton raged: "Our too credulous ally is sacrificed to a policy, at the recollection of which, honor recoils, and humanity bleeds."
Something similar could have been said about U.S. conduct after World War I. President Wilson was the leading champion of "national self-determination" at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, yet the U.S. did nothing to safeguard the states he helped midwife. We stood by, for instance, when Czechoslovakia and Poland were occupied by the Nazis. This callous indifference was repeated after World War II when we did too little to save the Eastern Europeans from Russian occupation.
Postwar U.S. administrations compounded this duplicity when they urged the "captive" peoples behind the Iron Curtain to seek their freedom and yet did nothing to help the East Germans in their 1953 uprising, the Hungarians in 1956 or the Czechs in 1968. No one is suggesting that Washington should have risked World War III, but we might have put more diplomatic and economic pressure on the Soviet Union to mitigate the worst of their crackdowns. If we weren't willing to do even that, we shouldn't have instigated the uprisings in the first place.
Cuban anti-communists fared just as poorly at American hands. On April 17, 1961, 1,500 exiles organized by the CIA landed at the Bay of Pigs. The Cuban army counterattacked, and the rebels were killed or captured. The outcome might have been different if the U.S. had been willing to provide air cover, but President Kennedy refused to do so because he wanted to hide U.S. complicity.
In the following years, the U.S. waged a massive war to stop a communist takeover of South Vietnam. By 1973, we had tired of the conflict, and the South Vietnamese were left to fend for themselves. Thousands were killed. Many others wound up in brutal reeducation camps or took to the seas in leaky boats.
The U.S. was equally inconstant in its support of the rebels battling the Sandinista government in Nicaragua in the 1980s. We went from backing the Contras to cutting them off, heedless of the cost to fighters who were risking their necks to fight an oppressive regime. And then there was the shah of Iran, installed by the CIA and Britain's MI6 in 1953 and then abandoned by the United States in 1979 — and, unlike Hamet Karamanli, not even given refuge on our shores.
But that was nothing compared to the betrayal of the Iraqi Kurds and Shiites in 1991. President George H.W. Bush urged Iraqis to "take matters into their own hands" and overthrow Saddam Hussein, yet stood by as Hussein's henchmen brutally put down the uprisings. The U.S. did not even shoot down Iraqi gunships, which could have been done at little risk to American forces.
This long trail of American treachery has grave consequences for our foreign policy. It emboldens our enemies (the Bay of Pigs led to the Cuban missile crisis, for example), dispirits our friends and makes it harder to achieve our objectives. Knowing our history, few Iraqi leaders are counting on American support in the future. They're making their deals with the devil, whether neighboring states or sectarian militias. And if we do scuttle out of Iraq prematurely, Afghans and others whose support we seek will get the message again: Don't trust Uncle Sam.
The least we can do is to assure those Iraqis who have worked closely with American forces — whether as janitors, translators, soldiers or bureaucrats — that, if we do leave, they and their families will receive asylum in the United States. We should not sacrifice another "too credulous ally" on the altar of a dishonorable and inhumane policy.
Tuesday, November 21, 2006
Mark Moyar: An Iraqi Solution, Vietnam Style
Source: NYT (11-21-06)
[Mark Moyar, an associate professor at the United States Marine Corps University, is the author of “Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954-1965.”]
IRAQ’S prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, is now saying that he wants the United States to stand back and let him use Iraqi forces to restore order. Within six months, he asserts, the bloodletting will cease. The United States must give this proposal very serious consideration. Critics of America’s current Iraq policy, particularly among the Congressional Democrats, have tended to concentrate on international diplomatic remedies. Experience, however, suggest that only the Iraqis themselves can end the chaos and violence.
The United States faced a very similar crisis a half-century ago. In 1955, the pro-American government of Ngo Dinh Diem sought to disband militias that belonged to religious sects, analogous to the Shiite militias in Iraq today. A self-interested faction controlled the South Vietnamese police, much as self-interested Shiites dominate the Iraqi police. In Vietnam as in Iraq, the only strong force not beholden to the sects was the army, and the army’s leadership was not entirely loyal to the national government.
When the South Vietnamese sects defied the authority of the Saigon government in the spring of 1955, the American special ambassador, Gen. J. Lawton Collins, urged Diem to compromise with them. Efforts to suppress the sects by force, Collins warned, would alienate the Vietnamese people, unhinge the army and lead to disastrous civil warfare. This advice was based on the mistaken premise that political solutions suitable in the United States would likewise be suitable in any other country.
Diem rejected Collins’s advice, and with good reason. In South Vietnam, as in other historically authoritarian countries, if the government failed to maintain a monopoly on power, it would lose prestige among its supporters and enemies. Only a strong national government could prevent the sects and other factions from tearing the country apart. While Diem was able to gain the submission of some groups by persuasion, others remained defiant.
In April 1955, fighting broke out between the South Vietnamese National Army and one of the militias. Diem sought to capitalize on the fighting to destroy the militia, which caused Collins to advocate Diem’s removal. Other Americans predicted chaos and wanted to abandon South Vietnam altogether.
President Dwight Eisenhower, however, decided that Diem should be allowed to use the army against the militias. In Eisenhower’s view, a leader who had the smarts and the strength to prevail on his own — even if it meant he discarded American advice — would be a better and more powerful ally than one who survived by doing whatever the United States recommended.
Through political acumen and force of personality, Diem gained the full cooperation of the National Army and used it to subdue the sects. Simultaneously, he seized control of the police by replacing its leaders with nationalists loyal to him. In a culture that respected the strong man for vanquishing his enemies, Diem’s suppression of the militias gained him many new followers....
Mark Danner: Iraq ... The War of the Imagination
Source: TomDispatch.com (11-21-06)
[This piece, which appears in the December 21, 2006 issue of the New York Review of Books, is posted here with the kind permission of the editors of that magazine.]
"Today, if we went into Iraq, like the president would like us to do, you know where you begin. You never know where you are going to end." -- George F. Kennan, September 26, 2002
"I ask you, sir, what is the American army doing inside Iraq?... Saddam's story has been finished for close to three years." -- President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran to Mike Wallace on Sixty Minutes, August 13, 2006
In the ruined city of Fallujah, its pale tan buildings pulverized by Marine artillery in the two great assaults of this long war (the aborted attack of March 2004 and then the bloody, triumphant al-Fajr (The Dawn) campaign of the following November), behind the lines of giant sandbags and concrete T-walls and barbed wire that surrounded the tiny beleaguered American outpost there, I sat in my body armor and Kevlar helmet and thought of George F. Kennan. Not the grand old man of American diplomacy, the ninety-eight-year-old Father of Containment who, listening to the war drums beat from a Washington nursing home in the fall of 2002, had uttered the prophetic words above. I was thinking of an earlier Kennan, the brilliant and ambitious young diplomat who during the late 1920s and 1930s had gazed out on the crumbling European order from Tallinn and Berlin and Prague and read the signs of the coming world conflict.
For there in the bunkered Civil-Military Operations Center (known as the C-Moc) in downtown Fallujah, where a few score Marines and a handful of civilians subsisted in a broken-down bunkered building without running water or fresh food, I met young Kennan's reincarnation in the person of a junior State Department official: a bright, aggressive young man who spent his twenty-hour days rumbling down the ruined streets in body armor and helmet with his reluctant Marine escorts, meeting with local Iraqi officials, and writing tart cables back to Baghdad or Washington telling his bosses the truth of what was happening on the ground, however reluctant they might be to hear it. This young diplomat was resourceful and brilliant and indefatigable, and as I watched him joking and arguing with the local sheikhs and politicos and technocrats -- who were meeting, as they were forced to do, in the American bunker -- I thought of the indomitable young Kennan of the interwar years, and of how, if the American effort in Iraq could ever be made to "work," only undaunted and farseeing young men like this one, his spiritual successor, could make it happen.
This was October 2005, on the eve of the nationwide referendum on Iraq's proposed constitution, and I had come to Fallujah, the heart of rebellious Anbar province, to see whether the Sunnis could gather the political strength to vote it down. In a provision originally insisted on by the Kurds, a provision that typified an American-designed political process that had been intended to unify the country but that instead had helped pull it inexorably apart, the proposed constitution could be rejected if, in three of Iraq's eighteen provinces, more than two in three Iraqis coming to the polls voted no. During the first post-Saddam election the previous January, the televised extravaganza of "waving purple fingers" which had become perhaps the most celebrated of the many promised "turning points" of this long war, the Sunnis had boycotted the polls. This time, after Herculean efforts of persuasion and negotiation by the American ambassador, most Sunnis were expected to vote. What would draw them, though -- or such anyway was the common wisdom -- was the chance not to affirm the constitution but to doom it, and the political process along with it.
And so as I sat after midnight on the eve of the vote, scribbling in my notebook in the dimly lit C-Moc bunker as the young diplomat explained to me the intricacies of the politics of the battered city, I was pleased to see him suddenly lean forward and, with quick glances to either side, offer me a confidence. "You know, tomorrow you are going to be surprised," he told me, speaking softly. "Everybody is going to be surprised. People here are not only going to vote. People here ? a great many people here -- are going to vote yes."
I was stunned. That the Sunnis would actually come out to support the constitution would be an astonishing turnabout and, for the American effort in Iraq, an enormously positive one; for it would mean that despite the escalating violence on the ground, especially here in Anbar, Iraq was in fact moving toward a rough political consensus. It would mean that beneath the bloody landscape of suicide bombings and assassinations and roadside bombs a common idea about politics and compromise was taking shape. It would mean that what had come to seem a misbegotten political process that charted and even worsened the growing divisions among Iraqis had actually become the avenue for bringing them together. It would mean there might be hope.
I took the young diplomat's words as an invaluable bit of inside wisdom from the American who knew this ground better than any other, and I kept them in mind a few hours later as I traveled from polling place to polling place in that city of rubble, listening as the Fallujans told me of their anger at the Americans and the "Iranians" (as they called the leading Shiite politicians) and of their hatred for the constitution that they believed was meant to divide and thus destroy Iraq. I pondered the diplomat's words that evening, when I realized that in a long day of interviews I'd not met a single Iraqi who would admit to voting for the constitution. And I thought of his words again several days later when it was confirmed that in Anbar province -- where the most knowledgeable, experienced, indefatigable American had confided to me what he had plainly ardently believed, that on the critical vote on the constitution "a great many people would vote yes" -- that in Anbar ninety-seven out of every hundred Iraqis who voted had voted no. With all his contacts and commitment, with all his energy and brilliance, on the most basic and critical issue of politics on the ground he had been entirely, catastrophically wrong.
1.
"You know where you begin. You never know where you are going to end."
The ninety-eight-year-old George F. Kennan, sitting in the Washington nursing home as the war came on, knew from eight decades of experience to focus first of all on the problem of what we know and what we don't know. You know, though you spend your endless, frustrating days speaking to Iraqis, lobbying them, arguing with them, that in a country torn by a brutal and complicated war those Iraqis perforce are drawn from a small and special subset of the population: Iraqis who are willing to risk their lives by meeting with and talking to Americans. Which is to say, very often, Iraqis who depend on the Americans not only for their livelihoods but for their survival.
You know that the information these Iraqis draw on is similarly limited, and that what they convey is itself selected, to a greater or lesser extent, to please their interlocutor. But though you know that much of your information comes from a thin, inherently biased slice of Iraqi politics and Iraqi life, hundreds of conversations during those grueling twenty-hour days eventually lead you to think, must lead you to think, that you are coming to understand what's happening in this immensely complicated, violent place. You come to believe you know. And so often, even about the largest things, you do not know.
As this precious stream of flickering knowledge travels "up the chain" from those on the shell-pocked, dangerous ground collecting it to those in Washington offices ultimately making decisions based upon it, the problem of what we really know intensifies, acquiring a fierce complexity. Policymakers, peering second-, third-, fourth-hand into a twilight world, must learn a patient, humble skepticism. Or else, confronted with an ambiguous reality they do not like, they turn away, ignoring the shadowy, shifting landscape and forcing their eyes stubbornly toward their own ideological light. Unable to find clarity, they impose it. Consider, for example, these words of Donald H. Rumsfeld, speaking about the Iraq war on November 9, two days after the election and the day after President Bush fired him:
"It is very clear that the major combat operations were an enormous success. It's clear that in Phase Two of this, it has not been going well enough or fast enough."
Such analyses are not uncommon from Pentagon civilians; thus Dov Zakheim, a former Rumsfeld aide, to a television interviewer later that evening:
"People will debate the second part, the second phase of what happened in Iraq. Very few are arguing that the military victory in the first phase was anything but an outright success."
Three years and eight months after the Iraq war began, the secretary of defense and his allies see in Iraq not one war but two. One is the Real Iraq War -- the "outright success" that only very few would deny, the war in which American forces were "greeted as liberators," according to the famous prediction of Dick Cheney which the Vice President doggedly insists was in fact proved true: "true within the context of the battle against the Saddam Hussein regime and his forces. That went very quickly."
It is "within this context" that the former secretary of defense and the Vice President see America's current war in Iraq as in fact comprising a brief, dramatic, and "enormously successful" war of a few weeks' duration leading to a decisive victory, and then...what? Well, whatever we are in now: a Phase Two, a "postwar phase" (as Bob Woodward sometimes calls it) which has lasted three and a half years and continues. In the first, successful, Real Iraq War, 140 Americans died. In the postwar phase 2,700 Americans have died -- and counting. What is happening now in Iraq is not in fact a war at all but a phase, a non-war, something unnamed, unconceptualized --unplanned.
Anyone seeking to understand what has become the central conundrum of the Iraq war -- how it is that so many highly accomplished, experienced, and intelligent officials came together to make such monumental, consequential, and, above all, obvious mistakes, mistakes that much of the government knew very well at the time were mistakes -- must see beyond what seems to be a simple rhetoric of self-justification and follow it where it leads: toward the War of Imagination that senior officials decided to fight in the spring and summer of 2002 and to whose image they clung long after reality had taken a sharply separate turn.
In that War of Imagination victory was to be decisive, overwhelming, evincing a terrible power -- enough to wipe out the disgrace of September 11 and remake the threatening world. In State of Denial, Woodward recounts how Michael Gerson, at the time Bush's chief speechwriter, asked Henry Kissinger why he had supported the Iraq war:
"Because Afghanistan wasn't enough," Kissinger answered. In the conflict with radical Islam, he said, they want to humiliate us. "And we need to humiliate them." The American response to 9/11 had essentially to be more than proportionate -- on a larger scale than simply invading Afghanistan and overthrowing the Taliban. Something else was essential. The Iraq war was essential to send a larger message, "in order to make a point that we're not going to live in this world that they want for us."
Though to anyone familiar with Kissinger's "realist" rhetoric of power and credibility his analysis will come as no surprise, Gerson, the deeply religious idealist who composed Bush's most soaring music about "ending tyranny" and "ridding the world of evil," seems mildly disappointed: Kissinger "viewed Iraq purely in the context of power politics. It was not idealism. He didn't seem to connect with Bush's goal of promoting democracy."
Gerson, of course, was author of what would come to be called the Bush Doctrine, a neoconservative paean to democracy that maintains that "the realistic interests of America would now be served by fidelity to American ideals, especially democracy." Others in the administration, however, plainly did "connect" with Kissinger's stark realism: Donald Rumsfeld, for example, who Ron Suskind depicts, in The One Percent Doctrine, struggling with other officials in spring 2002 to cope with various terrifying warnings of impending attacks on the United States:
"All these reports helped fuel Rumsfeld's sense of futility as to America's ability to stop the spread of destructive weapons and keep them from terrorists. That futility was the fuel that drove the plans to invade Iraq... as soon as possible."Cheney's ideas about how 'our reaction' would shape behavior -- whatever the evidence showed -- were expressed in an off-the-record meeting Rumsfeld had with NATO defense chiefs in Brussels on June 6. According to an outline for his speech, the secretary told those assembled that 'absolute proof cannot be a precondition for action.'
"The primary impetus for invading Iraq, according to those attending NSC briefings on the Gulf in this period, was to make an example of Hussein, to create a demonstration model to guide the behavior of anyone with the temerity to acquire destructive weapons or, in any way, flout the authority of the United States."
In the great, multicolored braid of reasons and justifications leading to the Iraq war one might call this "the realist strand," and though the shape of the reasoning might seem to Gerson to stand as far from "democracy building" and "ending tyranny" as "power politics" does from "idealism," the distance is wholly illusory, dependent on an ideological clarity that was never present. In fact, the two chains of reasoning looped and intersected, leading inexorably to a common desire for a particular action -- confronting Saddam Hussein and Iraq -- that had been the subject of the administration's first National Security Council meeting, in January 2001, and that had been pushed to the fore again by Defense Department officials in the first "war cabinet" meeting after the September 11 attacks.
Woodward describes a report commissioned by Paul Wolfowitz, then deputy secretary of defense, intended to produce "the kinds of ideas and strategy needed to deal with a crisis of the magnitude of 9/11." After the attacks, Wolfowitz talked to his friend Christopher DeMuth, president of the American Enterprise Institute, who gathered together a group of intellectuals and academics for a series of discussions that came to be known as "Bletchley II" (after the World War II think tank of mathematicians and cryptographers set up at Bletchley Park). Out of these discussions, Woodward tells us, DeMuth drafted an influential report, entitled "Delta of Terrorism," which concluded, in the author's paraphrase, that "the United States was in for a two-generation battle with radical Islam":
"'The general analysis was that Egypt and Saudi Arabia, where most of the hijackers came from, were the key, but the problems there are intractable. Iran is more important, where they were confident and successful in setting up a radical government.' But Iran was similarly difficult to envision dealing with, he said."But Saddam Hussein was different, weaker, more vulnerable. DeMuth said they had concluded that 'Baathism is an Arab form of fascism transplanted to Iraq'...
"'We concluded that a confrontation with Saddam was inevitable. He was a gathering threat -- the most menacing, active and unavoidable threat. We agreed that Saddam would have to leave the scene before the problem would be addressed.' That was the only way to transform the region.
According to Woodward, this report had "a strong impact on President Bush, causing him to focus on the ?malignancy' of the Middle East" -- and the need to act to excise it, beginning with an attack on Iraq that would not only serve, in its devastating rapidity and effectiveness, as a "demonstration model" to deter anyone thinking to threaten the United States but would begin a process of "democratic transformation" that would quickly spread throughout the region. The geopolitical thinking animating this "democratic domino theory" could be plainly discerned before the war, as I wrote five months before U.S. Army tanks crossed the border into Iraq:
"Behind the notion that an American intervention will make of Iraq ?the first Arab democracy,' as Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz put it, lies a project of great ambition. It envisions a post-Saddam Hussein Iraq -- secular, middle-class, urbanized, rich with oil -- that will replace the autocracy of Saudi Arabia as the key American ally in the Persian Gulf, allowing the withdrawal of United States troops from the kingdom. The presence of a victorious American Army in Iraq would then serve as a powerful boost to moderate elements in neighboring Iran, hastening that critical country's evolution away from the mullahs and toward a more moderate course. Such an evolution in Tehran would lead to a withdrawal of Iranian support for Hezbollah and other radical groups, thereby isolating Syria and reducing pressure on Israel."This undercutting of radicals on Israel's northern borders and within the West Bank and Gaza would spell the definitive end of Yasir Arafat and lead eventually to a favorable solution of the Arab-Israeli problem. This is a vision of great sweep and imagination: comprehensive, prophetic, evangelical. In its ambitions, it is wholly foreign to the modesty of containment, the ideology of a status-quo power that lay at the heart of American strategy for half a century. It means to remake the world, to offer to a political threat a political answer. It represents a great step on the road toward President Bush's ultimate vision of ?freedom's triumph over all its age-old foes.'"
It represented as well a breathtaking gamble, for if the victory in Iraq was to achieve what was expected -- which is to say, "humiliate" the forces of radical Islam and reestablish American prestige and credibility; serve as a "demonstration model" to ward off attacks from any rogue state that might threaten the United States, either directly or by supplying weapons of mass destruction to terrorists; and transform the Middle East by sending a "democratic tsunami" cascading from Tehran to Gaza -- if the Iraq war was to achieve this, victory must be rapid, decisive, overwhelming. Only Donald Rumsfeld's transformed military -- a light, quick, lean force dependent on overwhelming firepower directed precisely by high technology and with very few "boots on the ground" -- could make this happen, or so he and his planners thought. Victory would be quick and awe-inspiring; in a few months the Americans, all but a handful of them, would be gone: only the effect of the "demonstration model," and the cascading consequences in the neighboring states, would remain. The use of devastating military power would begin the process but once begun the transformation would roll forward, carried out by forces of the same thrilling "democratic revolution" that had erupted on the streets of Prague and Budapest and East Berlin more than a decade before, and indeed on the streets of Kabul the previous year. Here was an evangelical vision of geopolitical redemption.
2.
Thus the War of Imagination draped all the complications and contradictions of the history and politics of a war-torn, brutalized society in an ideologically driven vision of a perfect future. Small wonder that its creators, faced with grim reality, have been so loath to part with it. Since the first thrilling night of shock and awe, reported with breathless enthusiasm by the American television networks, the Iraq war has had at least two histories, that of the war itself and that of the American perception of it. As the months passed and the number of attacks in Iraq grew, the gap between those two histories opened wider and wider. And finally, for most Americans, the War of Imagination -- built of nationalistic excitement and ideological hubris and administration pronouncements about "spreading democracy" and "greetings with sweets and flowers," and then about "dead-enders" and "turning points," and finally about "staying the course" and refusing "to cut and run" -- began, under the pressure of nearly three thousand American dead and perhaps a hundred thousand or more dead Iraqis, to give way to grim reality.
The election of November 7, 2006, marks the moment when the War of Imagination decisively gave way to the war on the ground and when officials throughout the American government, not least the President himself, were forced to recognize and acknowledge a reality that much of the American public had discerned months or years before. The ideological canopy now has lifted. The study groups are at their work. Americans have come to know what they do not know. If confronted with that simple question the smiling President Ahmadinejad of Iran put to Mike Wallace last August -- "I ask you, sir, what is the American Army doing inside Iraq?" -- how many Americans could offer a clear and convincing answer?
As the war drags on and alternatives fall away and American and Iraqi deaths mount, we seem to know less and less, certainly about "where we are going to end." Thus we arrive at our present therapeutic moment -- the moment of "solutions," brought on by the recognition, three and a half years on, that we have no idea how to "end" Phase Two. This is now a matter for James A. Baker's Iraq Study Group and the military's "strategic review team" and the new Democratic committee chairmen who will offer, to a chastened president who admits he thought "we would do all right" in the elections, the "new ideas" he now professes to welcome. However quickly the discussion now moves to the geopolitical hydraulics, to weighing partition against partial withdrawal against regional conferences and contact groups and all the rest, the truth is that none of these proposals, alone or in combination, will end the war anytime soon.
It bears noticing that Kennan himself, having predicted that we will never know where we are going to end in Iraq, lived to see disproved, before his death at the age of 101 last March, what even he, no innocent, had taken as a given: that "you know where you begin." For as the war's presumed ending -- constructed from carefully crafted images of triumph, of dictators' statues cast down and presidents striding forcefully across aircraft carrier decks -- has flickered and vanished, receding into the just-out-of-grasp future ("a decision for the next president," the pre-election President Bush had said), the war's beginning has likewise melted away, the original rationale obscured in a darkening welter of shifting intelligence, ideological controversy, and conflicting claims, all of it hemmed in now on all sides by the mounting dead.
3.
Out of this maelstrom, how does one fix now on "how we began" in Iraq? One might do worse than the National Security Presidential Directive entitled "Iraq: Goals, Objectives and Strategy," the top-secret statement of American purpose intended to guide all the departments and agencies of the government, signed by President George W. Bush on August 29, 2002:
"US goal: Free Iraq in order to eliminate Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, their means of delivery and associated programs, to prevent Iraq from breaking out of containment and becoming a more dangerous threat to the region and beyond."End Iraqi threats to its neighbors, to stop the Iraqi government's tyrannizing of its own population, to cut Iraqi links to and sponsorship of international terrorism, to maintain Iraq's unity and territorial integrity. And liberate the Iraqi people from tyranny, and assist them in creating a society based on moderation, pluralism and democracy....
"Objectives: To conduct policy in a fashion that minimizes the chance of a WMD attack against the United States, US field forces, our allies and friends. To minimize the danger of regional instabilities. To deter Iran and Syria from helping Iraq. And to minimize disruption in international oil markets."
This secret document, disclosed by Bob Woodward, is presumably the plainest, least ideological statement of what American officials thought the country they led would be trying to achieve in the coming war. The words have now a sad and antique air, as if scrawled on yellowed parchment and decipherable only by a historian skilled in the customs and peculiarities of a far-off time and place. What can we say now, as we look at the Iraq of November 2006, about these official goals and objectives of the Iraq war?
The famous weapons of mass destruction are gone, most of them probably fifteen years gone, and their absence has likely damaged the United States and its power -- the power, deployed daily, that depends on the authority of words and pronouncements and not directly or solely on force of arms -- more severely than their presence ever could have. While no doubt convinced that Iraq had at least some chemical and biological weapons, Bush administration officials, like the cop framing a guilty man, vastly exaggerated the evidence and in so doing -- and even as they refused to allow UN inspectors to examine and weigh that evidence -- they severely undermined the credibility of the United States, the credibility of its intelligence agencies, and the support for the war and U.S. policy among Americans, among Muslims, and around the world.
The containment of Iraq, threatened only in the realm of policymakers' imaginations before the war, has been breached. The country's "threat to the region," with jihadis flowing from neighboring Sunni powers into Anbar and Baghdad and Iranian intelligence agents flowing into the Shia south, is growing daily, with the ultimate worst-case future, the confused and blackened landscape of a regional sectarian war, already standing clearly visible on the horizon as a possible consequence of an escalating conflict.
Though Saddam stands convicted of mass murder and condemned to death, and though an elected and ineffectual government deliberates within the Green Zone, it is hard to argue that the "tyrannizing" of the Iraqi population beyond its walls has not worsened. Every day on average a hundred or more Iraqis die from the violence of an increasingly complicated civil war. Sunnis attack Shia with bombs of every description -- suicide bombers and car bombs and bicycle bombs and motorcycle bombs -- and they maintain the pace of terror at an unprecedented, almost unimaginable rate. In the last six months alone Baghdad has endured 488 "terror-related bombings," an average of nearly three a day.
Shia leaders respond with death squads, whose members, drawn from party militias and often allied with the Ministry of Interior and the Iraqi police, have by now tortured and assassinated thousands of Sunnis. As Iraqis do their shopping or say their prayers they are blown to pieces by suicide bombers. As they drive through the cities in broad daylight they are pulled from their cars by armed men at roadblocks who behead them or shoot them in the back of the neck. As they sit at home at night they are kidnapped by men in police or army uniforms who load them in the trunks of their cars and carry them off to secret places to be tortured and executed, their bound and headless bodies to be found during the following days in fields or dumps or by the roadside. These bodies, examined by United Nations officials in the Baghdad morgue,
"often bear signs of severe torture including acid-induced injuries and burns caused by chemical substances, missing skin, broken bones (back, hands and legs), missing eyes, missing teeth and wounds caused by power drills or nails."
As Iraqis know well, the power drills and nails were a favorite of Saddam's torturers -- though now, according to a United Nations expert on torture, "the situation is so bad many people say it is worse than it has been in the times of Saddam Hussein." The level of carnage is difficult to comprehend. According to official figures published by the United Nations, which certainly understate the case, 6,599 Iraqis were murdered in July and August alone. Estimates of the number of Iraqi civilians killed during the war range from a conservative 52,000, by the Web site Iraq Body Count, to 655,000 by the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, with the Iraqi Health Minister recently announcing a cumulative total of 150,000.
As for the country's links to international terrorism, we might look to the official consensus of the American intelligence agencies issued in April 2006 that "the Iraq jihad is shaping a new generation of terrorist leaders and operatives" and that "the Iraq conflict has become the ?cause celebre' for jihadists, breeding a deep resentment of US involvement in the Muslim world and cultivating supporters for the global jihadist movement." The Bush administration's fears about Iraq's possible collaboration with terror groups, largely conjectural, have since Sadam's fall attained a terrible reality. Iraq's "unity and territorial integrity," meantime, has become the central issue, as the war becomes increasingly sectarian, cities and regions are "ethnically cleansed," and the Shia have pushed through a law, in the face of bitter Sunni opposition, making possible the autonomy of the South, the culmination of a political process that, beginning with the first vote boycotted by Sunnis, has served to worsen sectarian conflict.
The central question of how power and resources should be divided in Iraq and what the country should look like, a question that was going to be settled peacefully by the nascent political institutions of the "first Arab democracy," has become the critical political issue dividing Kurd from Sunni and Sunni from Shia, and also dividing the sectarian political coalitions themselves. Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, the leader of the "unity government," on whom President Bush repeatedly calls to "dismantle the militias," is in fact dependent for his own political survival on Moqtada al-Sadr, the creator and leader of the largest militia, the Mahdi Army. Indeed, the two most important militias are controlled by the two most powerful parties in parliament.Increasingly the "unity government" itself, quarreling vituperatively within the Green Zone, serves as an impotent echo of the savage warfare raging beyond the walls. The partitioning of Iraq is now openly advocated by many -- including such prominent American politicians as Senator Joseph Biden of Delaware, the incoming chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee -- desperate to find "a solution," however illusory, to the war, anything that will allow the Americans to withdraw, while avoiding any admission of defeat.
4.
Kennan's problem of knowing "where you are going to end" begins, as he knew well, on the ground; but it does not end there. Information obtained by dedicated but deeply fallible humans travels from places like Fallujah by cable and e-mail and word of mouth into the vast four-mile-square bunker of the Green Zone, with its half-dozen concentric layers of concrete blast walls and sandbags and barbed wire, and from there to the great sprawling labyrinth of the Washington national security bureaucracy, up through the thousands of competing staffers in the layers of bureaus and agencies and eventually to the highly driven people at the tops of the organizational pyramids: the people who, it is said, "make the decisions." In the best managed of administrations there exists, between those on the ground who listen and learn and those in the offices who debate and decide, a great deal of bureaucratic "noise." And this, alas, as so many accounts of decision-making on the war make all too clear, was not the best managed of administrations. Indeed, its top officials, talented and experienced as many of them were, seem to have willingly collaborated, for reasons of ego or ambition or ideological hubris, in making themselves collectively blind.
Consider, for example, this striking but typical discussion in the White House in April 2003 just as the Iraq occupation, the vital first step in President Bush's plan "to transform the Middle East," was getting underway. American forces are in Baghdad but the capital is engulfed by a wave of looting and disorder, with General Tommy Franks's troops standing by. The man in charge of the occupation, Lt. Gen. (ret.) Jay Garner, has just arrived "in-country." Secretary of State Colin Powell has come to the Oval Office to discuss the occupation with the President, who is joined by Condoleezza Rice, then his national security adviser. Powell began, writes Woodward, by raising "the question of unity of command" in Iraq:
"There are two chains of command, Powell told the president. Garner reports to Rumsfeld and Franks reports to Rumsfeld. The president looked surprised."'That's not right,' Rice said. ?That's not right.'
Powell thought Rice could at times be pretty sure of herself, but he was pretty sure he was right.
"?Yes, it is,' Powell insisted.
"?Wait a minute,' Bush interrupted, taking Rice's side. ?That doesn't sound right.'
"Rice got up and went to her office to check. When she came back, Powell thought she looked a little sheepish. ?That's right,' she said."
What might Kennan, the consummate diplomatic professional, have thought of such a discussion between president, secretary of state, and national security adviser, had he lived to read of it? He would have grasped its implications instantly, as the President and his national security adviser apparently did not. Which leads to Powell's patient -- too patient -- explanation to the President:
"You have to understand that when you have two chains of command and you don't have a common superior in the theater, it means that every little half-assed fight they have out there, if they can't work it out, comes out to one place to be resolved. And that's in the Pentagon. Not in the NSC or the State Department, but in the Pentagon."
The kernel of an answer to what is the most painful and intractable question about the Iraq war -- how could U.S. officials repeatedly and consistently make such ill-advised and improbably stupid decisions, beginning with their lack of planning for "the postwar" -- can be found in this little chamber play in the Oval Office, and in the fact that at least two thirds of the cast seem wholly incapable of comprehending the script. In Woodward's account, Rice, who was then the official responsible for coordinating the national security bureaucracies of the U.S. government, found what was being said "a rather theoretical discussion," somehow managing to miss the fact that she and the National Security Council she headed had been cut out of decision-making on the Iraq war -- and cut out, further, in favor of an official, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, who, if we are to believe Woodward, did not bother even to return her telephone calls.
The Iraq occupation would have all the weaknesses of two chains of command, weaknesses that would become all too apparent in a matter of days, when Lt. General Ricardo Sanchez, the junior three-star in the entire Army, replaced General Franks and L. Paul Bremer replaced Garner, leaving the occupation in the hands of two officials who despised one another and hardly spoke. And both chains would end not in the White House but in the Pentagon, a vast bureaucracy not known for the delicate political touch that would be needed to carry out an occupation of this degree of complexity. We hear again the patient explanation of Powell -- whose fate in the Bush administration seems to have been to play the role of Cassandra, uttering grim prophecies destined to be ignored as reliably as they were to be proved true -- letting Woodward (but this time not the President) know of his certainty that "the Pentagon wouldn't resolve the conflicts because Wolfowitz and Feith were running their own little games and had their own agenda to promote Chalabi."
The name of Ahmad Chalabi, the brilliant, charming, cunning impresario of the Iraqi exile community, evokes memories of disasters past and, from the Pentagon point of view, of dreams dashed: the king to be who was, alas, never crowned. He is an irresistible character and has served as the off-screen villain in the telling of many an Iraq war melodrama, with particular attention to his part in helping to supply intelligence to various willing recipients within the U.S. government, bolstering the case that Iraq had significant stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction. In fact, however, Chalabi had a much more consequential role, that of the Pentagon's ruler-to-be, the solution to that vexing question of what to do about "the postwar."
Inherent in the War of Imagination were certain rather obvious contradictions: Donald Rumsfeld's dream of a "demonstration model" war of quick, overwhelming victory did not foresee an extended occupation -- on the contrary, the defense secretary abjured, publicly and vociferously, any notion that his troops would be used for "nation-building." Rumsfeld's war envisioned rapid victory and rapid departure. Wolfowitz and the other Pentagon neoconservatives, on the other hand, imagined a "democratic transformation," a thoroughgoing social revolution that would take a Baathist Party?run autocracy, complete with a Baathist-led army and vast domestic spying and security services, and transform it into a functioning democratic polity -- without the participation of former Baathist officials.
How to resolve this contradiction? The answer, for the Pentagon, seems to have amounted to one word: Chalabi. "When it came to Iraq," James Risen writes in State of War, "the Pentagon believed it had the silver bullet it needed to avoid messy nation building -- a provisional government in exile, built around Chalabi, could be established and then brought in to Baghdad after the invasion."
This so-called "turnkey operation" seems to have appeared to be the perfect compromise plan: Chalabi was Shiite, as were most Iraqis, but he was also a secularist who had lived in the West for nearly fifty years and was close to many of the Pentagon civilians. Alas, there was one problem: the confirmed idealist in the White House "was adamant that the United States not be seen as putting its thumb on the scales" of the nascent Iraqi democracy. Chalabi, for all his immense popularity in the Pentagon and in the Vice President's office, would not be installed as president of Iraq. Though "Bush's commitment to democracy was laudable," as Risen observes, his awkward intervention "was not really the answer to the question of postwar planning." He goes on:
"Once Bush quashed the Pentagon's plans, the administration failed to develop any acceptable alternative.... Instead, once the Pentagon realized the president wasn't going to let them install Chalabi, the Pentagon leadership did virtually nothing. After Chalabi, there was no Plan B."
An unnamed White House official describes to Risen the Laurel-and-Hardy consequences within the government of the President's attachment to the idea of democratic elections in Iraq:
"Part of the reason the planning for post-Saddam Iraq was so nonexistent was that the State Department had been saying if you invade, you have to plan for the postwar. And DOD said, no you don't. You can set up a provisional government in exile around Chalabi. DOD had a stupid plan, but they had a plan. But if you don't do that plan, and you don't make the Pentagon work with State to develop something else, then you go to war with no plan."
5.
Anyone wanting to answer the question of "how we began" in Iraq has to confront the monumental fact that the United States, the most powerful country in the world, invaded Iraq with no particular and specific idea of what it was going to do there, and then must try to explain how this could have happened. In his account Woodward resists the lure of Chalabi but not the temptation of melodrama, instead choosing, with typically impeccable political timing, to place Donald Rumsfeld in the role of mustache-twirling villain, a choice that most of the country, in the wake of the elections and the secretary's instant fall from power, seems happy to embrace. And the secretary, truculent, arrogant, vain, has shown himself perfectly willing to play his part in this familiar Washington morality tale, setting himself up for the predictable fall by spending hours at the podium before fawning reporters and their television cameras during and after the invasion.
The Fall of Rumsfeld gives pace and drive to Woodward's narrative. No doubt this will please readers, who find themselves increasingly outraged at the almost unbelievable failures in planning and execution, rewarding them with a bracing wave of schadenfreude when the inevitable defenestration finally takes place -- outside the frame of the book but wholly predictable from its storyline. Indeed, the fact of State of Denial's publication a month before the election, complete with the usual national television interviews and other attendant publicity, was not the least of the signs that the knives were out and glinting and that the secretary's days were numbered.
Irresistible as Rumsfeld is, however, the story of the Iraq war disaster springs less from his brow than from that of an inexperienced and rigidly self-assured president who managed to fashion, with the help of a powerful vice-president, a strikingly disfigured process of governing. Woodward, much more interested in character and personal rivalry than government bureaus and hierarchies, refers to this process broadly as "the interagency," as in "Rice said the interagency was broken." He means the governing apparatus set up by the National Security Act of 1947, which gathered the government's major security officials -- secretaries of state, defense, and treasury, attorney general, director of national intelligence, among others -- into the National Security Council, and gave to the president a special assistant for national security affairs (commonly known as the national security adviser) and a staff to manage, coordinate, and control it. Through the national security council and the "deputies committee" and other subsidiary bodies linking the various government departments at lower levels, information and policy guidance are supposed to work their way up from bureaucracy to president, and his decisions to work their way down. Ron Suskind, who has been closely studying the inner workings of the Bush administration since his revealing piece about Karl Rove and John Dilulio in 2003 and his book on Paul O'Neill the following year, observes that "the interagency" not only serves to convey information and decisions but also is intended to perform a more basic function:
"Sober due diligence, with an eye for the way previous administrations have thought through a standard array of challenges facing the United States, creates, in fact, a kind of check on executive power and prerogative."
This is precisely what the President didn't want, particularly after September 11; deeply distrustful of the bureaucracy, desirous of quick, decisive action, impatient with bureaucrats and policy intellectuals, the President wanted to act. Suskind writes:
"For George W. Bush, there had been an evolution on such matters -- from the early, pre-9/11 President, who had little grasp of foreign affairs and made few major decisions in that realm; to the post- 9/11 President, who met America's foreign challenges with decisiveness born of a brand of preternatural, faith-based, self-generated certainty. The policy process, in fact, never changed much. Issues argued, often vociferously, at the level of deputies and principals rarely seemed to go upstream in their fullest form to the President's desk; and, if they did, it was often after Bush seemed to have already made up his mind based on what was so often cited as his ?instinct' or ?gut.'"
Woodward tends to blame "the broken policy process" on the relative strength of personalities gathered around the cabinet table: the power and ruthlessness of Rumsfeld, the legendary "bureaucratic infighter"; the weakness of Rice, the very function and purpose of whose job, to let the President both benefit from and control the bureaucracy, was in effect eviscerated. Suskind, more convincingly, argues that Bush and Cheney constructed precisely the government they wanted: centralized, highly secretive, its clean, direct lines of decision unencumbered by information or consultation. "There was never any policy process to break, by Condi or anyone else," Richard Armitage, the former deputy secretary of state, remarks to Suskind. "There was never one from the start. Bush didn't want one, for whatever reason." Suskind suggests why in an acute analysis of personality and leadership:
"Of the many reasons the President moved in this direction, the most telling may stem from George Bush's belief in his own certainty and, especially after 9/11, his need to protect the capacity to will such certainty in the face of daunting complexity. His view of right and wrong, and of righteous actions -- such as attacking evil or spreading "God's gift" of democracy -- were undercut by the kind of traditional, shades-of-gray analysis that has been a staple of most presidents' diets. This President's traditional day began with Bible reading at dawn, a workout, breakfast, and the briefings of foreign and domestic threats.... The hard, complex analysis, in this model, would often be a thin offering, passed through the filters of Cheney or Rice, or not presented at all."...This granted certain unique advantages to Bush. With fewer people privy to actual decisions, tighter confidentiality could be preserved, reducing leaks. Swift decisions -- either preempting detailed deliberation or ignoring it could move immediately to implementation, speeding the pace of execution and emphasizing the hows rather than the more complex whys. What Bush knew before, or during, a key decision remained largely a mystery. Only a tiny group -- Cheney, Rice, Card, Rove, Tenet, Rumsfeld -- could break this seal."
To the rest of the government, of course, this "mystery" must have been excruciating to endure; Suskind describes how many of those in the "foreign policy establishment" found themselves "befuddled" by the way the traditional policy process was viewed not only as unproductive but "perilous." Information, that is, could slow decision-making; indeed, when it had to do with a bold and risky venture like the Iraq war, information and discussion -- an airing, say, of the precise obstacles facing a "democratic transition" conducted with a handful of troops -- could paralyze it. If the sober consideration of history and facts stood in the way of bold action then it would be the history and the facts that would be discarded. The risk of doing nothing, the risk, that is, of the status quo, justified acting. Given the grim facts on the ground -- the likelihood of a future terrorist attack from the "malignant" Middle East, the impossibility of entirely protecting the country from it -- better to embrace the unknown. Better, that is, to act in the cause of "constructive instability" -- a wonderfully evocative phrase, which, as Suskind writes,
"was the term used by various senior officials in regard to Iraq -- a term with roots in pre-9/11 ideas among neoconservatives about the need for a new, muscular, unbounded American posture; and outgrowths that swiftly took shape after the attacks made everything prior to 9/11 easily relegated to dusty history."The past -- along with old-style deliberations based on cause and effect or on agreed-upon precedents -- didn't much matter; nor did those with knowledge and prevailing policy studies, of agreements between nations, or of long-standing arrangements defining the global landscape. What mattered, by default, was the President's "instinct" to guide America across the fresh, post-9/11 terrain -- a style of leadership that could be rendered within tiny, confidential circles. America, unbound, was duly led by a President, unbound.
It is that "duly led," of course, that is the question. Information, history, and all the other attributes of a deliberative policy may inhibit action but they do so by weighing and calculating risk. Dispensing with them has no consequences only if you accept the proposition that the Iraq war so clearly disproves: that bold action must always make us safer.
For Part 2 of Mark Danner's "Iraq: The War of the Imagination," click here.
This article appears in the December 21, 2006 issue of the New York Review of Books.
Copyright 2006 Mark Danner
Harlan Cleveland: Is Obama Ready?
Source: ILF Post (11-5-06)
[Harlan Cleveland, political scientist and public executive, a Princeton graduate and a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, is President Emeritus of the World Academy of Art and Science. In government he has been a high official of the Marshall Plan, Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization Affairs and U.S. Ambassador to NATO. In academia he has served as dean of two graduate schools of public affairs (the Maxwell School at Syracuse University and the Hubert H. Humphrey Institute at the University of Minnesota) and as President of the University of Hawaii. He has authored 12 books and hundreds of articles in journals and magazines, mostly on executive leadership and international affairs.]
To hear Senator Barack Obama say on “Meet the Press” that he was thinking about running for President was not a surprise. It would only have been surprising if he had said it hadn’t occurred to him. What intrigued me was the chorus of punditry that followed. Most commentators rubbed their beards, pursed their lips, and doubted that he is “ready.”
Nobody is “ready” to be President of the United States. Our best presidents – Washington, Madison, Lincoln, the two Roosevelts, and Harry Truman, are my favorite half dozen, but you are welcome to your own list – combined high intelligence with unusual endowments of common sense, and were thus “readier” than most. But except for Franklin D. Roosevelt, none of these had already had much experience as an executive.
Our instinct that favors governors over legislators for the American presidency is sound. It’s a huge executive job, requiring a sense of politics besides. Harry Truman had certainly been in politics. But his prime executive experience had been as a haberdasher. Coming to the vice-presidency from the Senate, he was cut out of most Executive Branch functions; he wasn’t even in on the secret of the atomic bomb he later became the first president to use.
But he was very bright, he had a most unusual endowment of common sense — and he took the U.S. Constitution seriously. Take one of many examples: When it came to General Douglas MacArthur’s act of insubordination, he both thought and acted as a chief executive officer, who was also Commander in Chief, should think and act.
The story is worth remembering. General MacArthur was frustrated by his instructions not to pursue the North Korean troops all the way to the Yalu River (North Korea’s northern border) – because that would likely provoke the Chinese to enter the Korean War in force. So he wrote a letter to the Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives, objecting to his military orders.
MacArthur didn’t send a copy of his letter to the Joint Chiefs or to the President, so Harry Truman first heard of it when his press secretary, Roger Tubby, tore a news bulletin off the AP wire in the White House press room and rushed to the Oval Office. Truman was there alone, and Tubby, without a word, laid the wire story on his desk.
According to Tubby, who told me this personally, Truman read the story, grunted, then came up with an instantly accurate constitutional interpretation – expressed, of course, in Trumanesque informality: “Well, the son-of-a-bitch can do that to Harry Truman, but he can’t do that to the President of the United States!”
The famous general was promptly removed. He came home to parades arranged by his many friends and admirers, spoke to a joint session of Congress, toyed with the idea of running for president — and soon disappeared from view.
When John F. Kennedy became president, he was younger than Senator Obama is now, and his last executive job had been skipper of a PT boat, the Navy’s tiniest warship.
Kennedy had to learn on the job that an executive with a wide span of control governs much more by asking questions than by giving orders. He didn’t, for example, press the Joint Chiefs of Staff for a professional judgment whether the plan to invade Cuba via the Bay of Pigs – the chief CIA planner was a brilliant economist – would work as a military operation. When it didn’t, he sensibly took full responsibility for the “mistake.”
Fortunately for the United States, he was a very quick study, and his learning curve was abnormally steep. When the Cuba Missile Crisis erupted eighteen months later, he participated personally in the staffwork, sifting the alternative responses through his own good mind. He knew by then that if the executive doesn’t thoroughly understand a plan of action he authorizes, he’s not making decisions but merely presiding while others decide.
So, although I have written much about the educational value of executive experience, it somehow doesn’t bother me that Barack Obama doesn’t yet count that among his blessings. He is only 45. He has at least two more years – or six, or ten or more — of pre-presidential learning. He already has much of what he would need in that unique job.
He is bright and studious. His public utterances exude common sense. He seems to have more natural charisma – the capacity to electrify people who are with him — than anyone else now in the field. And, as the conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer suggested the other day, the time is near when many Americans would welcome an African-American in our presidency.
Is he “ready”? No, but neither is anybody else.
Saturday, November 18, 2006
Sherry Colb: A Maryland State Court Rules that Women May Not Withdraw Consent After Penetration: The Perils of Relying on History
Source: Findlaw.com (11-14-06)
[Sherry F. Colb, a FindLaw columnist, is Professor and Frederick B. Lacey Scholar at Rutgers Law School in Newark. Her other columns may be found in the archive of her work on this site. ]
Late last month, in Maouloud Baby v. State of Maryland, the Court of Special Appeals of Maryland held that once a man has begun a consensual act of sexual intercourse with a woman, he may continue until he climaxes - even if she asks him to stop - without violating the law of rape.
In the State of Maryland, in other words, the law of rape presently does not authorize a woman to demand that her partner withdraw after penetration has already occurred.
This ruling and the precedent on which it relies rest on an explicitly anti-woman vision of what makes rape a harm to its victims....
Looking to History to Illuminate Modern Rape Laws
It is clear that historically, what made rape a crime had little to do with a woman's entitlement to bodily integrity and much to do with women's status as essentially the sexual property of men. As the Baby opinions suggests, "the cultural mores undergirding the notion that the crime of rape was complete upon penetration may be traced to Biblical and Middle, Assyrian Laws."
Such ancient laws viewed women as the chattel of "their" men - their fathers or husbands. To rape a woman was, then, to reduce the value of an asset held by her owner, a value that turned on whether the rapist had or had not achieved vaginal penetration.
For this reason, the Baby court emphasized that "[t]o be sure, it was the act of penetration that was the essence of the crime of rape; after this initial infringement upon the responsible male's interest in a woman's sexual and reproductive functions, any further injury was considered to be less consequential. The damage was done." (Emphases added).
It is doubtless very interesting to learn the history of the law of rape, in part because it helps educate us about how slave-like women's status relative to men used to be. There is, however, something distasteful about the citation of Biblical law as support for the proposition that in Twenty-First Century Maryland, the rape statute does not give a woman the right to change her mind after penetration.
The actual written law of Maryland, incidentally, does not specify any distinction between the giving of consent pre- and post-penetration. It simply states: "A person is guilty of rape in the first degree if the person engages in vaginal intercourse with another person by force against the will and without the consent of the other person."...
Friday, November 17, 2006
Daniel Henninger: Twenty-five years later, Reagan’s tax cuts are a global tide
Source: WSJ (11-17-06)
It was entirely appropriate that as its keynote speaker to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the 1981 Reagan tax cut, the Heritage Foundation in Washington this week should assign the job to Art Laffer. Mr. Laffer is surely the most irrepressibly ebullient practitioner of the dismal science of economics alive today, maybe ever. It is no surprise that more than a quarter century ago, then California Gov. Ronald Reagan, another genuinely cheerful soul in a dismal profession, would have found common cause with the young economist’s view that cutting taxes would produce a wealth of benefits for the American people.
Now, 25 years later and with the post-Reagan Republican Party in tatters over a confused political agenda, Mr. Laffer stood beaming at the Heritage podium to inform its audience that “illegal immigrants are the lifeblood of our society.” This produced a boo-burst from a distant corner, which Mr. Laffer seemed not to notice. When so informed over a nightcap at the Willard Hotel, he said with the famous smile, “What do I care? I’ve been booed at all my life.”
As, indeed, has Reaganomics over its 25-year life. On this night Mr. Laffer, famous in part for cutting down economists’ pretenses to ideas anyone can understand, had an answer for the boo-birds of Reaganomics: Almost alone, the United States since those tax cuts has managed to remain both a growth country and a developed nation.
Economic growth was always the sine qua non of supply-side tax theory, the belief that lower marginal rates would incentivize people to work, save and invest. Bob Bartley, the late editor of The Wall Street Journal editorial page, wanted nothing more than to focus this debate back then on the particulars of achieving growth in the economy. But for many garden-variety politicians and professional economists, the economy is an abstraction. Yes, they know something is going on out there in the workaday world, but it’s all a second-order effect of their policies and theories. So at its creation the supply-side idea instantly bogged down into an argument, alive to this day, over whether the tax cuts would “pay for themselves.” You know, the deficit, the budget, the “nonpartisan” economic models at the Congressional Budget Office, blah, blah, blah.
It was back about the time these arguments over fiscal policy were erupting in the late 1970s that this page began to propagate the phrase, “inside the Beltway.” This of course refers to Interstate 495, which rings Washington like the bright outline that surrounds protoplasm under a microscope. The unicellular protozoa inside the Beltway live life swimming from this side to that, bumping each other. They enjoy it. And so even today the debate over tax cuts “paying for themselves” lives on, reincarnated as a proposal called “paygo” which decrees that no tax cut may pass into law unless an “offset” is laid upon the altar of the budget gods.
But let’s return to the real world, where the object is growing an economy, not fertilizing Uncle Sam’s giant budget beanstalk. In the final months of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, something else happened that forced even Beltway accountants to look up from their ledgers: The Berlin Wall fell in 1989. Five years later this brought forth the second great wave of supply-side tax policy.
Communism had been running what might be called a 40-year demonstration study in life at one end of the Laffer Curve—what happens to economies when you tax away pretty much everything. Freed of this utopia, the peoples of Eastern Europe now had to devise new tax regimes appropriate to nations eager—for want of a better phase—to work, save and invest.
The first former Iron Curtain country to cut its taxes was Estonia in 1994, led by Prime Minister Mart Laar, who claimed then the only economics book he’d ever read was Milton Friedman’s “Free to Choose.” Estonia established a flat rate on personal incomes of 26%; two years earlier it had abolished all import tariffs. Estonia grew.
After Estonia, flat-tax regimes coursed across Eastern Europe, as listed below (bear in mind that the top rate in the U.S. is 35%): Lithuania, 33%; Latvia, 25%; Slovakia, 19% (the former sad sack of the region, Slovakia’s growing economy has become its envy); Romania, 16%; Ukraine, 13%; Russia, 13%; and Georgia, 12%....
Joshua Spivak: Why have so many recent speakers of the house fallen?
Source: Herald News (Chicago) (11-13-06)
[Joshua Spivak is a New York-based attorney and media consultant.]
Tuesday's crushing Republican defeat, prodded along by a series of scandals and cover-ups, signifies an embarrassing end to Speaker Dennis Hastert's political career. Hastert's fall from power is the latest in a destabilizing trend in the House of Representatives. For nearly all of the twentieth century, the position of the speaker of the House -- one of the most powerful political positions in the country -- was solid as a rock. It was only given up by death, voluntary retirement or when the party lost majority status.
However, starting at the end of the 1980s, each House speaker has met a grueling political end. The reason for this trend is not fully clear, but for Nancy Pelosi and future members of the House, it may signify the beginning of a more democratic, free-wheeling, and less organized House of Representatives, one that will not be able to pass legislation so easily.
The entire trend of fallen speakers is both recent and surprising, as the speaker is generally a popular, politically savvy and well connected member of the House's majority party. But since 1989, every speaker has left office under fire. Democrat Jim Wright was forced to resign after a financial scandal made his tenure untenable in 1989. His successor, Thomas Foley, became the first speaker in 134 years to lose an election to the House.
Newt Gingrich, the leader of the Republican Revolution of 1994 and the first GOP speaker in half a century, resigned after losing the support of his fellow congressional representatives. Additionally, the Republican's first choice as successor to Newt Gingrich as speaker, Appropriations Chair Robert Livingston, was out before he was even sworn in due to a brewing sex scandal. Now, Hastert, who had just set the record for the longest Republican speakership, will join his immediate predecessors in departing the speaker's chair in an embarrassing fashion.
Each of these collapses appeared to be due to exceptional circumstances:
A House page scandal; the Clinton impeachment and its fallout; Foley tossed out of office in a Republican tidal wave; Wright's resignation rooted in a series of difficult-to-understand financial scandals. However, they may point to a shift in the how the speaker will operate in the future.
Speakers have long been selected for a wide range of talents, including political foresight, interpersonal skills, bureaucratic swordsmanship, charisma, mastery of subject matter, ability to compromise and fundraising acumen. But throughout the late 19th and most of the 20th centuries, they all generally rose through the ranks of the House, following the famous maxim of the longest serving speaker in history, Sam Rayburn: "go along to get along." In fact, for over 70 years ending in 1998, and 13 straight handovers, the speaker had previously held the position of either majority or minority leader (or when the minority leader retired, minority whip). But these recent speaker collapses may show that the same talents and maneuvers that allow people to begin the rise to power in the House may also be planting the seeds for their destruction.
The talent for rising in the House involves serving the large, frequently static, membership body. To perform this task, an elected official must traverse a minefield of potentially damaging compromises. Speakers also have to be prepared to take a bullet for their fellow members, on issues such as raising Congressional pay, which can make the leader popular in the House chamber, but not particularly beloved in the nation. It is no surprise that the only speaker to ever serve as president was James K. Polk way back in 1844. What has changed is that these compromises that House leaders make now receive a great deal of public scrutiny. So whether it is the House check-bouncing shenanigans or the Foley page scandal, these failures are now embarrassing front-page fodder, one that the speakers, mostly justifiably, get blamed for.
At the same time, with the speakers blamed for these failures, individual representatives are not willing to saddle their own electoral prospects by supporting tainted leaders. Therefore, the speakers are more likely to be tossed overboard, as was the case with Gingrich, or cause themselves to be the personification of Congressional failure, such as Tom Foley....
Joshua Spivak: Why Bush didn't fire Rumsfeld earlier
Source: Seattle Times (11-15-06)
[Joshua Spivak is an attorney and media consultant based in New York and Berkeley, Calif.]
If there has been one consistent hallmark in George W. Bush's political career, it is his need to avoid the missteps of his father. From consciously mollifying his conservative base with a concentration on tax cuts and social policy to ousting Saddam Hussein, Bush has focused on not repeating the political errors of Bush the Elder.
Though many will interpret his latest action, firing Donald Rumsfeld ˜ his most controversial Cabinet member ˜ as finally adopting his father's philosophy, they would be mistaken. The timing of his firing of Rumsfeld is perfectly consistent with his drive to avoid the "sins of his father."
The way he dealt with Rumsfeld is exactly the opposite of the first Bush's behavior, which should be a warning to anyone expecting Bush to behave more like his father for the remainder of the second term. The big issue in the 2006 election campaign was the war in Iraq, with widespread voter criticism of Bush's insistence on "staying the course." The lightning rod for attacks was Bush's staunch backing of the much-criticized Rumsfeld.
Bush had already weathered one storm with Rumsfeld, holding off on removing him after the Abu Ghraib scandals put an early tarnish on his 2004 re-election campaign. For 2006, Bush apparently decided to stick with Rumsfeld through another election fight.
The problem Bush faced ˜ how to deal with an unpopular Cabinet member ˜ paralleled the one faced by George H.W. Bush in his 1992 re-election bid. The first Bush was fighting a different battle, one against the recession gripping the country. This downturn was causing his poll numbers to plummet from the record highs of the first Iraq war.
On the campaign trail in the waning days of the 1992 election, in an attempt to prove that he had seen the light of economic enlightenment, George H.W. Bush announced that if he were re-elected to a second term, he would remove Secretary of the Treasury Nick Brady and Budget Director Dick Darman.
Brady and Darman were blamed for Bush's retreat on his famous "no new taxes" pledge. Bush hoped these sacrificial lambs would be blamed by swing voters for the downturn. In addition, the elder Bush hoped to shore up his conservative base, as the economic policy of Brady and Darman was seen by the Republican right as a heretical violation of Ronald Reagan's supply-side philosophy.
This desperate gambit failed, as voters decided that the fault lay not with the employees, but with the boss.
Faced with a similar problem, the second Bush took a completely opposite tack. Rather than make a politically palatable concession by removing Rumsfeld, Bush publicly confirmed his support for the embattled secretary of defense. This might not have been the cause of the Republican electoral catastrophe, but it certainly showed voters that Bush and the Republican Party were not planning on changing their Iraq strategy.
From later accounts, George W. Bush blamed Brady and Darman for his father's failure. However, Bush the Second must have taken notice of the voters' underwhelming reaction to his father's electoral strategy of firing a subordinate, one that had failed a number of other presidents in the past....
Thursday, November 16, 2006
Nat Hentoff: Bush revives the Espionage Act
Source: Village Voice (11-16-06)
"Persons who come into unauthorized possession of classified information must abide by the law. That applies to academics, journalists, professors, whatever." —Federal District Judge T.S. Ellis III, who will preside over the case of United States of America v. Steven Rosen and Keith Weissman, charged with violating the Espionage Act of 1917.
"This is the first prosecution ever of private citizens for receiving and distributing classified information. "—Floyd Abrams, "The State of Free Speech," New York Law Journal, October 18.
These charges potentially eviscerate the primary function of journalism—to gather and publicize information of public concern—particularly where the most vulnerable information to the public . . . is what the government wants to conceal. —Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, with which this Voice columnist is affiliated.
Not many Americans know about this trial, slated for next January, that could result in future government suppression of news stories—based on classified information—suchas The Washington Post's reports by Dana Priest of CIA secret prisons in Europe and the James Risen–Eric Lichtblau New York Times revelations on the National Security Agency's secret, warrantless spying on Americans.
The defendants, Steven Rosen and Keith Weissman, are former and dismissed staff members of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the leading pro-Israel lobbying organization.
They are accused by the Justice Department of having received classified information from a Defense Department analyst, Lawrence Anthony Franklin, who has since pleaded guilty and been sentenced to prison. Rosen and Weissman are charged with giving the information to an Israeli diplomat—and to a journalist.
"There's little difference between what the defendants are charged with and what reporters and advocates do day-to-day," says Steven Aftergood, director of the Federation of American Scientists Project on Government Secrecy. Aftergood says a conviction would put this nation far along the path to having its own Open Secrets law, the British measure that bars public interest as a defense for revealing classified information. "That would mean a fundamental transformation of the American government," he continues. "Retreating from freedom of the press would mean surrender of the principles of self-rule as the best form of government."
Floyd Abrams, the John Bunyan of First Amendment lawyers, emphasizes: "Anyone who covers the CIA, the Department of Defense, or the Department of Homeland Security is routinely provided classified information by people in and out of government. Only this permits any serious discussion of the government's most important acts."...
John V. Walsh: The Korea, Vietnam, Iraq Syndrome
Source: Counterpunch (11-14-06)
[This article is prepared from unprepared remarks at a demonstration of the Antiwar League (AntiwarLeague.org) in Boston on Veterans Day.]
"Two, Three, Many Vietnams"! was Che Guevara's famous call to arms. Today we remain in the throes of our third Vietnam, Iraq. This is the third time since World War II that hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops have been sent abroad in a neo-colonialist war (1).
The first "Vietnam" was in fact Korea. And it was the first war to be televised to the relatively few TV sets then in existence. Americans saw the bloody battles in black and white with American soldiers killed day after day. At the end of it all about 50,000 Americans and a million Asians were dead, at the hands of Harry S. Truman who was deeply reviled as the result of the war. Truman was unexpectedly defeated in the first New Hampshire primary and withdrew from the presidential race, which Eisenhower won on the promise of "going to Korea" and ending the war--which he did, much to his credit. Today we do not hear much about Eisenhower; but the bloodthirsty Truman, the only human being to order the incineration of hundreds of thousands with nuclear weapons of mass destruction, is hailed by the likes of Democrat neocon Peter Beinart and other Democratic neocons as a model for Democrats today. However, at the time of Korea organized, antiwar sentiment was miniscule and there was little to no protest over the draft.
Next was Vietnam itself where our historical memory often seems to begin when most pundits discuss war, apparently because their knowledge of history only springs from their own personal memories. Kennedy and the rest of "the best and the brightest" Democrats started this war and by its ending another 50,000 Americans and two million Southeast Asians, by Robert McNamara's count, had been killed. Kennedy was another "tough" Democrat, decrying a supposed missile gap and promising to send troops anywhere in the world for "freedom." But this time a massive opposition grew, slowly at first and then gaining in speed. By 1968, Johnson had suffered the same fate as Truman in New Hampshire and he was driven from office. By 1964 there were sizable campus and street demonstrations against the war, driven by Old Left and New, and by 1969 the demonstrations had grown to hundreds of thousands. The draft became untenable and was abolished. From now on the empire builders would have to make do with an "all-volunteer" army recruited mainly from the ranks of those who were strapped for cash or mesmerized by the culture of war.
Now we have Iraq. And in this last election, the President who brought it upon us was handed a resounding defeat--just as were Truman and Johnson before him. But this time millions in the U.S. marched against the war before it started, and 23 Senators refused to rubber stamp Bush's call to arms. Even the military was reluctant, and it took enormous exertions of deception and manipulation, like calling for a vote a month before the 2002 elections, leading most politicians to vote their careers and ambitions instead of stopping the unnecessary slaughter that knew lay ahead. Once again the United States has left its signature in Iraq, killing around 500,000 so far and probably more than that due to the Clintonian sanctions leading up to the war. It seems that a consistent U.S. strategy, its signature, is to level any third world country and visit mass murder on its population if that country is considered an enemy. The hope is obviously that those who displease the American Empire will know that there is a great price to pay. Although American deaths have fallen far short of those in Korea and Vietnam, the tens of thousands of injuries would have been deaths in those earlier wars....
Norman Solomon: The New Media Offensive for the Iraq War
Source: Media Beat Column (11-16-06)
[Norman Solomon’s latest book, “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death,” is out in paperback. For information, go to: www.warmadeeasy.com]
The American media establishment has launched a major offensive against the option of withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq.
In the latest media assault, right-wing outfits like Fox News and the Wall Street Journal editorial page are secondary. The heaviest firepower is now coming from the most valuable square inches of media real estate in the USA -- the front page of the New York Times.
The present situation is grimly instructive for anyone who might wonder how the Vietnam War could continue for years while opinion polls showed that most Americans were against it. Now, in the wake of midterm elections widely seen as a rebuke to the Iraq war, powerful media institutions are feverishly spinning against a pullout of U.S. troops.
Under the headline “Get Out of Iraq Now? Not So Fast, Experts Say,” the Nov. 15 front page of the New York Times prominently featured a “Military Analysis” by Michael Gordon. The piece reported that -- while some congressional Democrats are saying withdrawal of U.S. troops “should begin within four to six months” -- “this argument is being challenged by a number of military officers, experts and former generals, including some who have been among the most vehement critics of the Bush administration’s Iraq policies.”
Reporter Gordon appeared hours later on Anderson Cooper’s CNN show, fully morphing into an unabashed pundit as he declared that withdrawal is “simply not realistic.” Sounding much like a Pentagon spokesman, Gordon went on to state in no uncertain terms that he opposes a pullout.
If a New York Times military-affairs reporter went on television to advocate for withdrawal of U.S. troops as unequivocally as Gordon advocated against any such withdrawal during his Nov. 15 appearance on CNN, he or she would be quickly reprimanded -- and probably would be taken off the beat -- by the Times hierarchy. But the paper’s news department eagerly fosters reporting that internalizes and promotes the basic worldviews of the country’s national security state.
That’s how and why the Times front page was so hospitable to the work of Judith Miller during the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq. That’s how and why the Times is now so hospitable to the work of Michael Gordon.
At this point, categories like “vehement critics of the Bush administration’s Iraq policies” are virtually meaningless. The bulk of the media’s favorite “vehement critics” are opposed to reduction of U.S. involvement in the Iraq carnage, and some of them are now openly urging an increase in U.S. troop levels for the occupation.
These days, media coverage of U.S. policy in Iraq often seems to be little more than a remake of how mainstream news outlets portrayed Washington’s options during the war in Vietnam. Routine deference to inside-the-Beltway conventional wisdom has turned many prominent journalists into co-producers of a “Groundhog Day” sequel that insists the U.S. war effort must go on.
During the years since the fall of Saddam, countless news stories and commentaries have compared the ongoing disaster in Iraq to the Vietnam War. But those comparisons have rarely illuminated the most troubling parallels between the U.S. media coverage of both wars.
Whether in 1968 or 2006, most of the Washington press corps has been at pains to portray withdrawal of U.S. troops as impractical and unrealistic. Contrary to myths about media coverage of the Vietnam War, the American press lagged way behind grassroots antiwar sentiment in seriously contemplating a U.S. pullout from Vietnam. The lag time amounted to several years -- and meant the additional deaths of tens of thousands of Americans and perhaps 1 million more Vietnamese people.
A survey by the Boston Globe, conducted in February 1968, found that out of 39 major daily newspapers in the United States, not one had editorialized for withdrawing American troops from Vietnam. Today -- despite the antiwar tilt of national opinion polls and the recent election -- advocacy of a U.S. pullout from Iraq seems almost as scarce among modern-day media elites.
The standard media evasions amount to kicking the bloody can down the road. Careful statements about benchmarks and getting tough with the Baghdad government (as with the Saigon government) are markers for a national media discourse that dodges instead of enlivens debate.
Many journalists are retreading the notion that the pullout option is not a real option at all. And the Democrats who’ll soon be running Congress, we’re told, wouldn’t -- and shouldn’t -- dare to go that far if they know what’s good for them.
Implicit in such media coverage is the idea that the real legitimacy for U.S. war policymaking rests with the president, not the Congress. When I ponder that assumption, I think about 42-year-old footage of the CBS program “Face the Nation.”
The show’s host on that 1964 telecast was the widely esteemed journalist Peter Lisagor, who told his guest: “Senator, the Constitution gives to the president of the United States the sole responsibility for the conduct of foreign policy.”
“Couldn’t be more wrong,” Sen. Wayne Morse broke in with his sandpapery voice. “You couldn’t make a more unsound legal statement than the one you have just made. This is the promulgation of an old fallacy that foreign policy belongs to the president of the United States. That’s nonsense.”
Lisagor was almost taunting as he asked, “To whom does it belong then, Senator?”
Morse did not miss a beat. “It belongs to the American people,” he shot back -- and “I am pleading that the American people be given the facts about foreign policy.”
The journalist persisted: “You know, Senator, that the American people cannot formulate and execute foreign policy.”
Morse’s response was indignant: “Why do you say that? ... I have complete faith in the ability of the American people to follow the facts if you’ll give them. And my charge against my government is, we’re not giving the American people the facts.”
Morse, the senior senator from Oregon, was passionate about the U.S. Constitution as well as international law. And, while rejecting the widely held notion that foreign policy belongs to the president, he spoke in unflinching terms about the Vietnam War. At a hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, on Feb. 27, 1968, Morse said that he did not “intend to put the blood of this war on my hands.”
And, prophetically, Morse added: “We’re going to become guilty, in my judgment, of being the greatest threat to the peace of the world. It’s an ugly reality, and we Americans don’t like to face up to it.”
Wednesday, November 15, 2006
Adam Brodsky: Iraq's a mess, but so what?
Source: New York Post (11-12-06)
'MANY Americans," President Bush said Wednesday, voted "to register their displeasure with the lack of progress" in Iraq. So did he - by dumping Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
But what exactly are people upset about? Is the situation in Iraq really so grim?
Certainly, the realities of Iraq don't justify the enormous resentment that some insist is the explanation for Tuesday's results.
Yes, Iraq is a mess. Sectarian violence has spiraled. Iraqi forces seem not only unprepared but unreliable - raising the question of whether they'll ever be ready to take over security. The political situation seems headed nowhere. Development of infrastructure is wholly inadequate. And America's exit seems nowhere in sight. (How did "exit" become the chief goal, anyway?)
Yet other parts of the world - say, Sudan - are as bad off as Iraq, or worse.
So maybe the rule is: Do nothing, and you're held harmless; intervene and fail to make things perfect, and you're out.
But where's the evidence that Americans are worse off, in any tangible way, because of Iraq?
Yes, families suffer enormously when a relative is killed or injured there. That's tragic. But the 3,000 U.S. military deaths over the past 31/2 years amounts to less than three ten-thousandths of a percent of the U.S. population per year. That many Americans die from drunk driving every 20 days.
Iraq is not World War II; in terms of casualties, it's not even Vietnam.
Yes, the war is costing tens, even hundreds, of billions of dollars. But America's gross domestic product is $13 trillion a year.
The fact is, any serious effort to confront terror will be costly.
The terrorists happen to be in the Middle East, particularly Iraq. We either fight them there - for 50 years, if need be - or we don't. And the chips will fall where they may.
The loss of Iraqi life? Well, sure, that's tragic, too. But if "sectarian violence" means anti-American Shiites killing anti-American Sunnis, and vice versa, how much sleep should Americans lose over Bush's "failure" to stop it?
That may sound cold, but the killers are free to end their violence whenever they like.
Really, the only thing Americans should worry about regarding Iraq is quitting prematurely and emboldening terrorists. That aside, the economy and other issues affect us far more....
Max Boot: Rumsfeld, the walking contradiction
Source: LAT (11-15-06)
DONALD RUMSFELD'S downfall is replete with sad ironies.
For a start, he is primarily associated with a cause — the democratization of Iraq — that he never gave much sign of believing in. Far from being a neocon, Rumsfeld remains a resolutely traditional Midwestern Republican who was happy to thrash Saddam Hussein but never evinced much enthusiasm for remaking the Middle East. It was no accident that he neglected the kind of post-invasion planning needed to implement the sweeping changes envisioned by his boss, George W. Bush, and his erstwhile deputy, Paul Wolfowitz.
From the day that U.S. troops arrived in Baghdad, Rumsfeld was plotting to pull them out. It was this very resistance to a prolonged and massive troop commitment that probably doomed the mission from the start. The problem, in other words, was that he was not enough of an ideologue — not, as so many now claim, too much of one.
Another irony: Rumsfeld was a micromanager who took a hands-off attitude on the most important issues. He became famous for showering subordinates with memos known as "snowflakes," and on the eve of the Iraq invasion, he was fiddling with deployment schedules down to the company level. Yet he never accepted responsibility for the biggest decisions made in Iraq. Disbanding the Iraqi army? Talk to Ambassador L. Paul Bremer III. Not sending more troops? See Gens. Tommy Franks and John Abizaid.
Rumsfeld won total responsibility for all facets of Operation Iraqi Freedom, but he never accepted the blame, except in the most perfunctory way, when everything went awry. On the other hand, he was happy to accept accolades for the toppling of the Taliban even though the basic strategy — using commandos backed by air power — came from the CIA, not Central Command.
A third irony: For a man with abundant experience running large organizations, he proved to be a surprisingly poor manager — one who needlessly alienated generals and congressmen alike with his in-your-face manner.
Given his track record, Rumsfeld's departure came at least two years too late. (I first called for his ouster on this page in May 2004.) Final irony: He might have been removed sooner if a group of retired generals hadn't called for his head, which seems to have led the stubborn president to keep him on as a symbol of civilian control of the Pentagon.
In fairness, Rumsfeld did make some positive changes: Canceling the Crusader howitzer and Comanche helicopter, both costly relics of the Cold War. Redeploying U.S. forces from Germany and South Korea to areas where they might be needed more. Giving the Special Operations Command greater leeway to chase terrorists around the world. Creating the Northern Command to coordinate homeland defense and empowering the Joint Forces Command to better integrate the services. Reorganizing the Army to make the brigade, rather than the more ponderous division, the "basic unit of action."
Yet there were sharp limits to his "transformation" agenda. It never touched our most expensive and most dubious weapons systems, such as the F-22 fighter jet and the Future Combat Systems family of armored vehicles. Rumsfeld was so devoted to preserving such programs that he refused to spend money to increase the size of the Army and the Marine Corps, despite mounting evidence that they were too small to handle all the missions thrown their way.
This was a reflection of Rumsfeld's biggest blind spot: his faith in technology. He came into office vowing to do more with less. Just as banks had replaced human tellers with ATMs, so Rumsfeld tried to replace soldiers with high-tech hardware. This wasn't a completely crazy conceit — it is possible to do more with less in a conventional conflict. It doesn't take that many American soldiers to defeat the Iraqi Republican Guard. The problem is what comes next. Cruise missiles and aircraft carriers can't pacify a country of 26 million people. That requires boots on the ground, and we never had enough.
By asking so much of so few, Rumsfeld brought our ground forces to the breaking point. Recruiting and retention requirements are being met only by lowering standards, raising signing bonuses and issuing "stop loss" orders to keep vital personnel in uniform. Equipment such as tanks and helicopters is getting so worn out that the Army will need an extra $17 billion this year and the Marine Corps an extra $12 billion for repair and replacement. These soaring costs imperil the "next generation" weapons systems that Rumsfeld championed. That will leave Bob Gates with some unpleasant choices as he grapples with his predecessor's bitter legacy.
Tuesday, November 14, 2006
Ivan Eland: Revisiting Iran-Contra: The Nomination of Robert Gates
Source: Independent Institute (11-10-06)
[Ivan Eland is Director of the Center on Peace & Liberty at The Independent Institute and Assistant Editor of The Independent Review. Dr. Eland is a graduate of Iowa State University and received an M.B.A. in applied economics and Ph.D. in national security policy from George Washington University.]
Most of official Washington has long believed that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld needed to be sacked. Unfortunately it took a major Republican loss at the polls to finally prompt George W. Bush to cut loose a key player from his inner circle.
The removal of Rumsfeld signals that Bush is listening to the voters and elected officials. However, the nomination of Robert Gates—a Bush family crony and former Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) under his father’s administration—to replace Rumsfeld will only create new problems for the president.
President Ronald Reagan had to withdraw Gates’ nomination for DCI in 1987 because of Gates’ involvement in the Iran-Contra scandal. By 1991, after the heat had died down on the whole affair, President George H.W. Bush re-nominated Gates for the post, and he was confirmed.
Contrary to the conventional wisdom, the Iran-Contra affair was worse for the republic than the Watergate scandal. The Nixon administration’s illegal spying and dirty tricks on political opponents and misuse of law enforcement and intelligence agencies were bad. But the Reagan administration’s evasion of a congressional ban on assisting the Nicaraguan Contras (the Boland Amendment) was a knife in the heart of the greatest power the Congress has under the checks and balances of the Constitution—the power of the purse. Illegal activities get more media and law enforcement attention than unconstitutional actions, but the unconstitutional ones are, by far, the most harmful to the country.
Although Gates was never indicted for the Iran-Contra affair, he was severely criticized for his actions by Judge Lawrence E. Walsh, the Republican Independent Counsel who investigated the Iran-Contra affair. In his report on the scandal, Walsh said that contrary to Gates’ sworn testimony before a grand jury and at a confirmation hearing, “evidence proves” that then-Deputy Director of Central Intelligence Gates knew about the unconstitutional diversion of profits from Iran-bound arms sales to the Contras sooner than he let on.
Lying to a grand jury and Congress is illegal. Furthermore, it is difficult to believe that the number two man at the CIA didn’t know all along about CIA’s efforts to support the Contras and malfeasance by government officials in a high-priority covert operation.
Walsh also concluded that the CIA continued to support Oliver North’s diversion of funds to the Contras without investigating or telling his bosses at the National Security Council. Finally, Walsh concluded that Gates participated in two briefings of congressional investigators which helped lull them into falsely believing the CIA was not involved in facilitating private flights to resupply the Contras.
Gates’ role in ignoring Congress’s specific ban on assisting the Contras—one of the most dangerous threats to constitutional government in American history—should not be dismissed as merely “old news.” Apparently, the media and the Democrats are so relieved about getting rid of Rumsfeld that they appear to be doing just that. In a November 9, 2006 article, the Washington Post touted Gates’ extensive government experience, brilliance, bipartisanship, and pragmatic, consensus-building management style, but included only one sentence in Gates’ biography about his role in the Iran-Contra affair. The newspaper also cites praise for Gates from retired Senator Sam Nunn, the former chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, whose questions led to the withdrawal of the first Gates CIA nomination in 1987. The Post quoted Nunn as complimenting Gates’ “ability to work closely with Congress on a bipartisan basis,” and noted that he “has a well-deserved reputation on both sides of the aisle for competency and integrity.”...
George Melloan: Once upon a time, Democrats were supply-siders too
Source: WSJ (11-14-06)
... To find a template for how the Democrats might conduct themselves profitably over the next two years, it is useful to go back 25 years to the signature achievement of the supply-side revolution, the Kemp-Roth tax bill. It was this sharp cut in tax rates, particularly in the highest income brackets, that set public policy on a new course under Ronald Reagan. Republicans celebrate this as solely their achievement -- or at least those do who haven't forgotten why their party started winning, instead of losing, elections. But the revolution could not have been launched without the aid of some thoughtful Democrats. Their party, after all, was in control of the House, which initiates tax legislation, in 1981 -- with a hearty 56% to 44% majority.
The Republicans had just elected Reagan, aided by Jimmy Carter's string of economic and foreign-policy disasters. But the party was hardly unified. Indeed, it looked a great deal like it has looked over the last two years, as a body trying to live up to its reputation as "the stupid party." As Irving Kristol wrote on this page on Nov. 20, 1981, the new Senate was in the hands of conservative Republicans who had "never learned nor forgotten any economics since the days of Herbert Hoover" and were thus wary of tax cuts.
Even the new administration was riddled with doubters, as the president learned to his dismay when his bright, young budget director, David Stockman (in the Atlantic magazine in November 1981) called Kemp-Roth -- signed by the president three months earlier -- a "Trojan horse" designed to lower taxes on high incomes, that would lead to large budget deficits.
But Rep. Jack Kemp of New York and Sen. William Roth of Delaware had established a supply-side beachhead in the Republican Party years earlier, with the help of the editorial page of this newspaper. The late Robert L. Bartley, who became editor of this page in 1972, spotted the merits of supply-side economics early in his tenure, drawing on the talents of editorial writers Jude Wanniski and Paul Craig Roberts and economists who were little known at the time, among them Arthur Laffer and Robert Mundell.
The 1970s were a time of economic-policy chaos, touched off when Richard Nixon abandoned the Bretton Woods monetary system and inflicted wage and price controls on the economy in August 1971. Among the results were fuel shortages and an inflation that could not be suppressed by government controls (something intelligent economists have always known).
On the intellectual front, however, something good happened. Events discredited Keynesian economic theory, which had dominated academic and political thought since the '30s. The U.S. economy lapsed into stagflation, something not possible if you believe, as most Keynesians did, that economic growth and moderate inflation are handmaidens. Politicians had flocked to Keynesianism because it gave them intellectual underpinning for something they love to do -- spend public funds -- by arguing that government can counter recession by writing more checks.
There was nothing complicated about supply-side theory. It was classical economics. Fundamentally, it held that you have to produce if you want to consume and that anything the government does to discourage production is damaging to economic growth. That includes not only excessive economic regulation (e.g., price and wage controls) but high tax rates on the marginal earnings of the most productive citizens. These are the people who earn surpluses above their immediate needs and thereby build the total pool of capital available to expand the capital stock and create new jobs.
Art Laffer, who was also a former hireling in the budget office, argued as well that static calculations of how much revenues would be lost by the tax cuts were wrong because they ignored the fact that the cuts would stimulate economic activity and draw funds hidden in tax shelters back into the revenue stream. He proved to be right.
Reagan -- who co-majored in economics at little Eureka College in Illinois back when they were still teaching classical economics -- had learned early in life that you have to work to eat, and understood all this well. Shortly after he took office, he put forward the Kemp-Roth bill, which called for a 30% reduction in tax rates.
The Democrats in the House also had been going through a learning process. Tip O'Neill, for all his rhetorical excesses, was a strong leader of the Democrat caucus and a practical politician. The Democrats knew that the nation's capital base had been dangerously eroded during the '70s inflation and that their party deserved some blame. So "capital formation" became the mantra of the Democrats and it was a very good one.
As Irving Kristol wrote in his 1981 piece, the Republican supply-siders and the Democrat capital formation crowd found a common purpose, overwhelming the troglodytes of both parties. Kemp-Roth passed, although congressional budget deficit worriers insisted on phasing it in over three years and reducing the size of the cuts to 25%. Meanwhile, Paul Volcker over at the Fed was slaughtering inflation, and quite a few unfortunates who had banked on its continuance, with a severe clampdown on money creation. The combination of congressional timidity and tight money provoked a sharp recession in 1982, one that sent even larger numbers of Republicans running for cover and brought jeers from their natural enemies.
But in January 1983, Bob Bartley opened the year with an editorial titled "At Last, a Tax Cut," making the point that, after all the hedges Congress had installed in Kemp-Roth, the year would finally bring a true reduction in tax rates that would benefit economic growth. He was right on the money. The economy soon leaped from the recession and the stagnation of the '70s. The growth rate exceeded the historically respectable 3% for the rest of the Reagan administration, and was the basis for the last 25 years of largely uninterrupted economic growth. Keynesian theory was finally dead and classical economics had been restored to its proper place.
Yet one point has been mostly overlooked. The Democrats who wanted policies to encourage capital formation were essentially on the same page as Reagan and the supply-siders. Capital formation is impossible without government policies that encourage work and investment. So the Democrats, if they had wanted to, could have taken some of the credit for the supply-side revolution. Not many have wanted to, apparently....
Andre Vltchek: Why Bush May Face Religious Wrath in Indonesia
Source: Japan Focus (11-14-06)
[Andre Vltchek filed this report for Japan Focus from Bogor and Jakarta. A novelist, journalist and filmmaker, Vltchek is co-founder of Mainstay Press, a publishing house for political fiction. His recent books include the novel Point of No Return and a book of political essays, Western Terror: From Potosi to Baghdad. He produced a 90-minute documentary film about Suharto’s dictatorship and its impact on present-day Indonesia called Terlena—Breaking of a Nation. A senior fellow at the Oakland Institute, he lives and works in Southeast Asia and the South Pacific. He can be reached at andre-wcn@usa.net.]
Two appalling concrete structures are sprouting from the lush grass of one of the finest botanic gardens in Southeast Asia. The stench of fresh asphalt is overpowering the gentle scent of tropical flowers; heavy mobile cranes are intruding where, just a few days ago, couples and families came to spend quiet days admiring giant water lilies, as well as varieties of orchids, palms and bamboos.
Construction at the Bogor Botanical Garden
President Bush is supposed to visit Bogor, West Java, Indonesia, on November 20, although the exact date and time have not been officially confirmed for security reasons. Dramatic choreography seems to be what matters to the Indonesian government: the president of the only world empire will descend from the sky to a tropical paradise in the middle of Bogor, a mountainous city 40 miles from the capital, Jakarta.
The historic Bogor Botanical Garden will be closed to the public, mobile communication in the area will be interrupted, and surrounding streets will be emptied and guarded by some 20,000 police and army personnel. Children from nearby schools will be ordered to stay home. After landing, President Bush will be rapidly transported to Bogor Presidential Palace, which lies within the Garden, for a top-level meeting with his Indonesian counterpart Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono.
Bogor Palace was a particular favorite of President Sukarno. Ironically, this is where Indonesia’s first president lived under house arrest from 1967 to his death in 1970, after the 1965 US-backed military coup brought General Suharto to power in a bloodbath that took the lives of between 500,000 and 3 million Communists, leftists, atheists, teachers and bystanders, crushing all progressive trends in Indonesia. Understandably, President Bush prefers not to stay the night at Bogor Palace: his visit is planned to last just ten hours.
A few minutes’ walk from the Palace, in front of the Bogor convention center, a large slogan depicts a skull and two crossed swords. “We wish that Bush will be possessed by spirits and fall victim to black magic.” Signed, the “Native Front.”
“Black magic” banner in Bogor
Edwin, an office worker passing by hand-in-hand with his girlfriend, frowns at the slogan, then approaches me and exclaims, “Those guys are crazy. They don’t think about our people. People need jobs, a good economy, and welfare. Indonesia might be able to get loans from the United States.”
I recall my meeting with John Perkins two years ago in New York. He reminisced about his life as an “economic hit man,” beginning right here in Indonesia. Using “money, sex and alcohol,” he convinced Indonesian officials and businessmen to accept large, unnecessary loans that could never be repaid. When the scheme succeeded, Indonesia fell under the control of US businesses and government. Edwin is not aware that despite “black magic” slogans, the Indonesian government will have no problem amassing new loans if it so desires.
Indonesian Islamic Movement chief Habib Abdurahman Assegaf has offered a more concrete warning than black magic: “We will form a human barricade to stop Bush from setting foot on our land,” he said, posing for a group of photojournalists.
President Bush is hardly a popular figure in Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim nation. Opinion polls show that the majority of Indonesians do not presently have a favorable opinion about the United States. Ma’ruf Amin, deputy chairman of the Indonesian Council of Ulamas (MUI), was recently quoted by the state Antara news agency as saying,
“We are aware of the tradition that guests should be honored and welcomed, but we would prefer if the government did not invite people who hurt Muslims around the world . . . The resentment is natural, given Bush’s actions, such as the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan and his support for Israel . . .”
Protesters in Bogor on November 11
Protests now regularly shake Bogor, with hundreds of Muslims demonstrating against the Bush visit. The protesters accuse him of terrorism and war crimes. Some banners read, “Bush is the real terrorist.” Often the language is more colorful.
Those presently protesting against US foreign policy are mainly members of Islamist groups and parties, although some students and leftists are expected to join as the visit nears. The Indonesian left was thoroughly destroyed in the post-1965 era. Indonesia’s PKI, one of the largest Communist Parties in the world, was banned and its members ruthlessly hunted down, killed or jailed. Also suppressed were words like “class” (in case someone were to mention “class struggle”) and “atheism.” In subsequent years, no political party has challenged the free-market economics associated with the Suharto regime or its successors.
History was fully manipulated, turned on its head, with the Communist Party blamed for the 1965 coup and the US role in reversing Sukarno’s course barely mentioned. Forty years after the pogrom, it is unthinkable to hear references to the slaughter of 1965–66 or the mass killings conducted by Indonesian forces in East Timor, Papua and Aceh in the classroom or in the media.
As a result of extreme free-market policies, unbridled corruption and feudal-style rule by local elites, Indonesia remains one of the poorest nations in Asia. Even according to understated government statistics, some 25% of the population lives on less than one dollar a day, the World Bank’s benchmark for poverty. In the latest UNDP Human Development Index (2006, with data available from 2004), Indonesia ranks 108th—just above Vietnam, which is still recovering from both the “American War” and the collapse of the Communist Bloc—and far below its Asian neighbors Singapore (25th), Malaysia (61st) and Thailand (74th).
Despite a consistently appalling human rights record, increasing intolerance and flexing of muscles by religious groups (including enforcement of unconstitutional religious sharia bylaws in several parts of the country), as well as an acute lack of democracy during the Suharto era and since, Indonesia is continuously hailed by the US as a modernizing country, a moderate Muslim state and a democratic society.
Soldiers at Bogor Botanical Garden
The US recently lifted its arms embargo against Indonesia, while describing this fourth most populous nation on earth as a key ally in Southeast Asia: an area designated by Washington as the second front in the war on terror, despite accusations that certain extremist groups are closely linked to security forces and the fact that Indonesian justice was surprisingly lenient towards Islamic radicals involved in Bali and other bombings.
Islamist groups and institutions are sometimes the only sources of support and help for the Indonesian poor. Madrasahs—religious schools—in many parts of the country provide the only relatively affordable education. For many, mosques are the only places of social and public gathering in a country where almost everything “public” has been liquidated or privatized. Similar trends can be observed in other nations where secular and progressive governments were destroyed and replaced by pro-business feudal ruling elites, often with direct intervention from outside.
The Indonesian public is increasingly turning to religion in the wake of the collapse of the social net, as justice is perceived to be corrupt and arbitrary. And some Muslim religious leaders are vocal in their outrage at the US invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as the pressure on Iran and what is seen here as blind and unconditional support for Israel. Once allies in the “war against Communism” in the 1960s, Muslim religious leaders, now enraged over US foreign policy, may actually help to break the old pro-business alliance between the US and Indonesian elites. What could emerge from the ruin of this “unholy alliance” is uncertain, but one may be confident that it will not be a socially responsive, democratic and secular state.
Bush will visit Indonesia on just a brief stopover, after attending the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting in Vietnam. No list of topics for discussion has been made public, but both governments are trying to emphasize the “goodwill” of the powerful if suddenly uncomfortable Indonesian ally.
The US Ambassador in Jakarta, Lynn Pascoe, recently proclaimed, “The US wants Indonesia to succeed. We are willing to help. For example, last week we announced the agreement on Millennium Challenge Cooperation that gives a grant of US$55 million to the Indonesian government.” Indonesian Foreign Minister Hassan Wirayuda said Mr. Bush and Mr. Yudhoyono would discuss social, education and health issues such as how to fight the spread of bird flu.
Both sides are desperately trying to downplay differences and the growing resentment that the Indonesian public feels towards US foreign policy. What is constantly highlighted is the sudden willingness of the United States to help Indonesia sort out its terrible social morass. For Indonesian government and elites, there is much at stake. A citizens’ challenge of US foreign policy could be just the beginning of something that could engulf the domestic order.
In the past, Indonesians were made to believe that the US was their natural ally. The nation fought Communism and defended the idea of free trade and free-market economics throughout the world. After killing or silencing opposition, Indonesian elites and military managed to scare the nation into believing that Communism (together with all other left-wing and progressive “isms”) was evil and that extreme pro-business policies were the only road to prosperity and development. The Indonesia of Suharto and his successors supported the US on those grounds. Palestine was always an issue, but never a crucial one. But after 9-11 and the American invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, and given the growing danger of confrontation between the US and Iran, as well as the recent Israeli incursion in Lebanon, the Middle East and American actions in the Muslim world have emerged as explosive issues for Indonesia’s increasingly religious citizens.
Social desperation, religious fervor and outrage over American actions in the Middle East could trigger events feared by both Indonesian and US elites. What could begin with questioning of US foreign policy, could end with challenging the entire dysfunctional and brutal social and economic system that has left the great majority of Indonesian citizens dirt poor and with almost no protection.
Protesters in Bogor on November 11
Bush can be expected to offer help, disperse funds, talk about fighting diseases. No sensitive issues will be discussed, at least not openly. Human rights violations, even military cooperation and the “war on terror” will all be secondary, at least in the public discourse. Dominant will be talk about “close ties,” goodwill and economic “aid.”
Indonesian politicians are aware that they will be skating on thin ice. Vice President Jusuf Kalla, a ruthless businessman from Sulawesi with close ties to several radical religious groups, has said that receiving Bush does not mean Indonesia has the same stance as the US on every issue.
Mr. Kalla offered this thought: “We have good relations, and that has been possible despite some differences we may have had on issues, such as the war in Iraq or the nuclear program of Iran.” (Jakarta Post, November 11).
For the poor, preparations for the Bush visit did not start well.
Didin, an old man who sells traditional sweets from a makeshift stall just a few blocks from the Palace, feels cheated: “It’s going to be a big event. We will have to relocate and nobody is going to give us any compensation.”
No compensation will be given to the owners of small telephone centers, street vendors, photographers offering touristy snapshots of the Botanic Garden, or to hundreds of poor men and women working along the streets and avenues surrounding the Palace.
After finishing his prayer at a nearby mosque, Aziz, a government employee, smiles through his decaying teeth. “There are pros and cons to the Bush visit. Personally I can only pray that Allah will open Bush’s heart so he can feel empathy with other people.”
The mosque is painted white. It is clean. Just a few feet away stands a bridge over a deteriorating railway track covered with garbage. A few rusty metal shacks are called home by several families. Two minutes’ drive from here, Mr. Bush will offer his speech, doubtless underlining strong friendship between his country and Indonesia and stressing Indonesia’s tremendous progress toward democracy.
His speech will make some people proud, and others will turn their heads in disbelief, wondering what country he is talking about. Then he will board his helicopter and ascend toward the sky. Below him, on the ground, will remain outrageously ugly helipads that will be more expensive to remove than they were to build. Nothing will change: Indonesia will be left to struggle without direction. The great majority will remain poor; a small group of those who rule will drive their German luxury cars past the shantytowns.
Of course there are other scenarios. One that many fear has already occurred several times in the last few years: howling ambulance sirens, screams, blood on the pavement, police barricades and bomb squads. To be sure, the security-driven agenda, choreographed to the second, may come off like clockwork. Still, anything is possible in the longer run. Desperately poor Indonesia is like a time bomb with no precise timing mechanism: no one can predict when it will go off.
Monday, November 13, 2006
Sidney Blumenthal: The American revolution of 2006 and beyond
Source: Guardian (11-9-06)
The concession by George Allen that confirms that James Webb has won in Virginia, a victory that gives the Democrats a majority in the Senate, completes the party's sweep of both houses of the Congress and ratifies the repudiation of President Bush and his policies, especially in the Iraq war.
Bush's radical presidency was the number one issue in the mid-term elections. Republican candidates lived in fear that they would receive calls from the White House suggesting that the president wanted to campaign for them. His last minute blitz in Montana on behalf of Senator Conrad Burns seemed momentarily to lift the beleaguered incumbent, but virtually the moment Air Force One departed the Republican sank once again, this time for good. In Florida, the Republican candidate for governor, Charles Crist, fled upon the president's arrival at a rally on his behalf in the state capital of Tallahassee. Crist's disloyalty and rudeness, leaving Bush in the lurch, was the better part of wisdom. Crist, like other Republicans caught in the storm, managed to survive only by avoiding him. The once eagerly sought presidential photo-op had become the kiss of death.
Before the spotlight turns to the repositioning of the president, the appointment of a new secretary of defense and the machinations of the new 110th Democratic Congress, it is worthwhile to sift through the extraordinary election returns, which contain the makings of a further realignment of American politics in the presidential election of 2008 and beyond.
Bush's radical presidency consolidated the grip of Southern conservatism over the Republican Party. He completed the "Southern Strategy" launched by Richard Nixon in 1968 in the aftermath of the civil rights movement, a strategy that assimilated the Dixiecrat George Wallace third party into the Republican ranks. Over time, the strategy that was supposed to be an add-on to the traditional GOP engulfed it. Bush finished the project that Nixon began. Karl Rove, his chief political aide, hypothesized a permanent national majority rooted in a Southern Strategy in which the rest of the country was an add-on. But in his quest for realignment Rove has left a rump regional party mired in the swamps of Dixie. What purpose does Rove with his scenarios of polarization now serve Bush?
After the mid-term elections, the GOP has become a regional party of the South. And, in the future, Republicans can only hold their base by asserting their conservatism, which alienates the rest of the country. More than ever, the Republicans are dependent upon white evangelical voters in the South and sparsely populated Rocky Mountain states. The Republican coalition, its much-touted "big tent," has nearly collapsed.
Republicans under Bush are beginning a downward spiral that parallels the decline of the Democrats. From 1968 through 1988, the story of the Democratic Party had been its internal disintegration and reduction to its base. Clinton's presidency served as an interregnum, which might have broken the Republicans had his vice president Al Gore been permitted to assume the office he won by a popular majority but was thwarted by the conservative bloc on the Supreme Court.
The 2006 elections have started to hollow out the Republican Party outside the South. Of the Democratic gains reported thus far (there are still races too close to call), 11 of 36 House seats held by Republicans in the Northeast were captured; that is, nearly one-third of the Republicans there were wiped out. In the Midwest, nine of 60 flipped, that is, 15 percent. These Republicans are not the more conservative members, but the most liberal and prominent moderates in their party. According to an unpublished post-election study by Thomas Schaller, a University of Maryland political scientist, 14 of 48 of the most "liberal" Republicans were defeated.
The Democrats who defeated them can be expected to hold these seats indefinitely. Historically Republican districts going back to the founding of the GOP in the Civil War are turning into Democratic bastions. After the failure of Reconstruction, the South became wholly Democratic, the Solid South, and the basis of a Democratic Party that was mostly out of power, unless the Republicans split, until the rise of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal during the Great Depression. The pre-FDR Republicans, after Reconstruction, gave up on ever building a two-party system in the South. Instead, in reaction to the Solid South, the Republicans consolidated national power in the Solid North.
This post-Civil War/pre-New Deal pattern is now turned on its head. Voting patterns today almost exactly resemble voting patterns of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but with the parties in reverse positions.
The Democratic Party that has advanced from the 2006 elections reasserts the Solid North, with inroads in the metropolitan states of the West, and, like the GOP of the past, challenges in the states of the peripheral South such as Arkansas, Tennessee and Virginia. This Democratic Party has never existed before. It is a center-left party with wings that can flap together. The party's opposition to the Republicans on economic equity and social tolerance are its defining characteristics.
The pace of this realignment is uncertain, but the underlying dynamics are not. That the Senate fell to the Democrats in Virginia is telling about the weakness of the Republicans and suggestive about the future. Senator George Allen represented the fulfillment of the Republican Southern Strategy. He intended to use his win in this contest as a platform for his presidential campaign in 2008. He had already assembled around him throngs of experienced and expensive Republican political consultants. James Webb, who had originally been a Democrat, but become a Republican long ago and rose to be Reagan's secretary of the navy, returned to his roots in response to Bush. His victory represents the emergence of a Democratic Party that even has a new appeal in the upper South.
Álvaro Vargas Llosa: What Ortega's victory doesn't mean
Source: NYT (11-13-06)
[Álvaro Vargas Llosa, the author of “Liberty for Latin America,” is the director of the Center on Global Prosperity at the Independent Institute in Washington.]
THE irony could not be more poignant. Twenty years ago today, Ronald Reagan went on national television and admitted his government’s involvement in an arms deal with Iran, the proceeds of which, we later found out, were diverted to the contra rebels fighting a Marxist regime in Central America. Now Daniel Ortega, the man those funds were aimed against, has just been elected president of Nicaragua.
And the irony does not stop there. A few days before last week’s elections, Oliver North, the face of the Iran-contra scandal, landed in Managua and asked Nicaraguans to vote for the right-wing Liberal Constitutionalist Party, which is made up in part of old contra sympathizers, and to stop Mr. Ortega.
Whatever else he might have been doing all these years, Mr. North has not been following Nicaraguan politics: for the last seven years, the Liberal Constitutionalists have been allied with Mr. Ortega’s Sandinistas, and they paved the way for Mr. Ortega’s victory by lowering the electoral bar for a first-round victory and by helping split the anti-Sandinista vote. The Gipper must be turning in his grave.
Some will be tempted to conclude that Mr. Ortega’s return amounts to a revival of the cold war dynamic in the Western Hemisphere and, in particular, to a retrospective impugning of Reagan’s policy in Central America. Some might also be inclined to see the vote as a confirmation that the radical left is sweeping Latin America and that the Venezuelan leader Hugo Chávez, who supported Mr. Ortega and provides municipalities under Sandinista governments with fertilizer and oil, has scored a strategic victory.
That would be giving too much credit to Nicaragua, which is today a political and economic pygmy in the region; to left-wing radicalism, which had little to do with Mr. Ortega’s comeback; and to Mr. Chávez, whose favored candidates were recently repudiated in Peru and in Mexico, the two countries where he concentrated most of his efforts.
Daniel Ortega’s comeback is the result of two factors. One is the power-sharing pact that the former President Arnoldo Alemán sealed with the Sandinistas in 1999, with a view to protecting himself and his Liberal Constitutionalist cronies from charges of corruption after leaving office. (It didn’t work out well for Mr. Alemán, who in 2003 was given a 20-year sentence.) The deal they came up with gave Mr. Ortega, who was politically moribund at the time, the kiss of life and gave the Sandinistas seats on the Supreme Court and control of some key institutions, including the election authority.
The other factor was Mr. Ortega’s betrayal of his own creed. The Sandinista leader shed his Marxist rhetoric and, conscious of the need to seduce a profoundly Catholic nation, mended fences with the Roman Catholic Church he had once persecuted. His old nemesis, Cardinal Miguel Obando, presided over the religious (should I say bourgeois?) ceremony in which Mr. Ortega married his longtime partner last year....
Friday, November 10, 2006
Daniel Henninger: Like Father, Like Son?
Source: WSJ (11-10-06)
[Mr. Henninger is deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page. His column appears Fridays in the Journal and on OpinionJournal.com.]
With the appointment of Robert Gates--CIA director from 1991 to 1993--to succeed Don Rumsfeld as secretary of defense, George W. Bush has brought upon himself much talk about sons in the shadow of their fathers. His presidency has turned Shakespearean, allowing all to tell sad stories about kings haunted by the ghosts they have deposed.
Alone, the Gates appointment might have passed as a necessary, post-election expedient. But it is not alone. Pressed for a new direction in Iraq, Mr. Bush routinely draws attention to the imminent post-Thanksgiving report of the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Survey Group. "Baker" is Jim Baker, who was his father's secretary of state from 1989 to 1992. The ISG's formal charge does not include finding a "way out" of Iraq for Mr. Bush, but all now assume this is what they intend to produce.
The village elders on the Iraq Survey Group who will perform this duty are Lee Hamilton, Vernon Jordan, Ed Meese, Sandra Day O'Connor, Leon Panetta, former Clinton Defense Secretary Bill Perry, former Sens. Chuck Robb and Alan Simpson, and the secretary of defense designate, Robert Gates.
George W. Bush has in no way been an Establishment President. On both taxes and foreign policy, he broke with them, and did so decisively. So he ought not underestimate, with the firing of Don Rumsfeld and the odd selection of his father's CIA director, how much visceral pleasure this brings to the displaced Establishment between Georgetown and Manhattan.
Some Beltway pundits are now writing with smug satisfaction--but not without reason--that this marks the end of the Bush Doctrine, the idea that the U.S. could create opportunities for democratic self-determination in a region such as the Middle East. It is expected that the ISG's recommendation will carry with it the implicit conclusion that this goal has been too ambitious. And that it must give way now to a restoration of realism associated with Bush 41's secretary of state, Mr. Baker; with his National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft and the former president's CIA director, Mr. Gates. And with the return of established foreign-policy wisdom, the "neocons" associated with Mr. Rumsfeld and Vice President Cheney and their "failed" ideas will be swept out to sea.
The post-Rumsfeld purge began yesterday. Sen. Joe Biden, now in the majority, announced that U.N. Ambassador John Bolton's stalled confirmation is "going nowhere."
The three or four men who are thinking of seeking the Republican presidential nomination had better focus now on the potential fall of the Bush Doctrine at the hands of the Iraq Survey Group. If they don't, one of them, on the first day of his presidency, will inherit a re-entrenched foreign policy--at State, the CIA and on Wall Street--with a vision of America's role in the world reduced to that of auto-shop fixit men. They "work" the world's problems.
Mr. Bush has joined this ascendant, if sclerotic, conventional wisdom by loading enormous expectations onto Mr. Baker's group. In doing so, he may be backing the country and his successor into a foreign-policy fait accompli that will be difficult to dislodge.
One may reasonably argue at this point about the Bush team's policy decisions in Iraq. Nearby Reuel Marc Gerecht draws attention to the underexamined policy role of Mr. Bush's generals, to whom he has shown remarkable deference. Our own editorials have repeatedly said that the decision in 2003 to replace Gen. Jay Garner with Paul Bremer and abandon the early formation of an Iraqi-led governing structure deprived the Iraqis of desperately needed political experience. Mr. Bush's repeated requests now for patience with the "five-month old" government of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki validates that point.
But what has distinguished Mr. Bush's foreign policy, more than the Bush Doctrine itself, was the sense and belief that he would not abandon an ally. You may not like that, and may have just voted against it, but this country's global reputation is as allied with the people of Iraq as it was with the left-behind people of Vietnam. Or in 1991, the Shiites in southern Iraq....
National Security Archive: The Iran-Contra Scandal, 1991 Confirmation Hearings
Source: National Security Archive (11-10-06)
Bush administration nominee for Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates had a long career in government which showed a notable combination of ambition and caution, according to a new book by Archive senior analyst John Prados ["Safe for Democracy: The Secret Wars of the CIA" (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2006)] which deals with Gates among its much wider coverage of the agency since its inception.
As Director of Central Intelligence in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War, Gates faced criticism for moving slowly with reforming the agency for the new era, and thus missing a moment of extraordinary opportunity that occurred at that time. In earlier posts at top levels of the CIA, Gates figured in the Iran-Contra affair, in which he engaged in sins of omission if not commission, hesitating to make inquiries and pass warnings that might have headed off this abuse of power. As the CIA's top manager for intelligence analysis in the early 1980s he was accused of slanting intelligence to suit the predilections of the Reagan administration and his boss, Director William J. Casey.
Excerpts from "Safe for Democracy" related to Mr. Gates were posted today on the Archive Web site. They are accompanied by the full three volumes of the extraordinary confirmation hearings of Gates for CIA Director which took place in 1991, and which at the time constituted the most detailed examination of U.S. intelligence practices carried out since the Church and Pike investigations of the 1970s. Also posted is the portion of the report by Iran-Contra special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh which concerns Mr. Gates, along with his response to those findings.
Doug Troutman: On a Country Losing Its Humanity ... A Vet's Reflections
Source: TomDispatch.com (11-10-06)
[Doug Troutman was with the First Cavalry Division in Vietnam in 1966/67. He was later a Park Ranger in Yosemite National Park and then a Wilderness Specialist and Outdoor Recreation Planner with the Bureau of Land Management. He lives in a small town in eastern Oregon away from the madding crowd.]
I've never dealt well with Veterans Day. Perhaps it's because I knew too many men whose names appear on a black wall in Washington D.C.
In Vietnam, letters often took weeks to arrive from home, but technology has changed much about war. My son could telephone or email me instantaneously from Baghdad.
When he came home on leave, we compared experiences, sometimes laughing about things that caused his mother to leave the room. When he came home, we sometimes spoke softly under a night sky, the Milky Way above, about how small and ignorant we humans really are.
I do not believe people should "play" war. I am upset by children with toy guns or sticks -- or adults with real guns and mock uniforms who "pretend."
I've looked out across the revetments at Yorktown and can visualize more than the parade and surrender there that marked the end of the Revolutionary War. I can see the smoke, fire, and death that preceded "victory."
I've looked out across a sagebrush and rock-covered landscape in a remote desert of eastern Oregon where "bad spirits" are still in residence, because 10,000 years ago this was a place where men killed each other.
I stood before the Alamo, where Mexican General Santa Ana gathered a huge army to wage war on a small band of "rebels", and wondered: What were those fools up to? I stood on Montebello Bluffs, where a man named Pio Pico kicked Santa Ana's butt. From those bluffs he waited for the general's army, just as Sitting Bull did for Custer's troopers, then fired down on them, bloodying the rock and sand of the riverbed below.
Custer's game plan was to ride into a trap, while "all the Indians in the world" rode down on him. Santa Ana made the same gross mistake. He did not "remember the Alamo"!
I've walked the trails around Fredericksburg, stood behind the very trees where Confederate sharpshooters picked off General Burnside's bluecoats. The contours of the land and the way the trees were scattered told me the story, which I would relive a century after those guns in Virginia fell silent in another, faraway land.
The "claymore" mine that worked so effectively as a booby trap in Vietnam was named not for a person, but for a sword that, back in sixteenth century Scotland, was designed and used literally to cut a man in half, top to bottom.
At Vietnam's Mang Yang Pass, I stood at the edge of a narrow, winding mountain road and looked down on those crosses in the jungle below that marked the spot where French soldiers died en masse in the war before mine. The military term was "defeat"; the reality was "slaughter."
Just a few kilometers away on the same road, I would barely escape a similar, smaller ambush. The times, they weren't a changin'.
We should not put crosses in cemeteries; we should scatter them -- just as they did at Little Big Horn and Mang Yang Pass -- on old battlefields where people actually fell.
The grassy fields at Gettysburg and Yorktown are too clean, too pure, too easy on the eye. An open meadow, brush field, forest, or jungle littered with crosses, or even simple white stones large enough to be seen, would tell the necessary story so much better. Maybe the crosses or the stones should be red. Blood red.
The most impressive "interpretive site" I ever saw was at Andersonville, Georgia, where the old Confederate prison (officially named Camp Sumter) once stood. There, a row of simple stakes marked the "dead line" inside its walls across which no prisoner could step without being shot down by the guards. Some POWs were pushed across that line as punishment by their peers. Others deliberately crossed to "escape" from the starvation and misery of prison life. The stockade was designed to hold 10,000 prisoners. At one time, maximum occupancy reached 32,899 and 12,919 men died there. The stench was so terrible that many prisoners began retching and vomiting as soon as they entered the gates.
Man's inhumanity to man does not end on the battlefield -- or with the battle.
America has lost its way. The proof of that lies in the Military Commissions Act of 2006. The United States has essentially declared that it will not honor the Geneva Conventions on the treatment of prisoners of war. The Act basically allows the President to decide for himself who is an "enemy" or "terrorist" and how they will be treated. That applies to both physical and psychological torture. My son has been through SERE (Survive Evade Resist Escape) school. He knows what waterboarding is like, when you're reasonably sure the "torturers" do not intend to kill you.
One does not want to be waterboarded when the captor is not concerned with your survival.
The brain is a terrible thing to waste -- or wash. I had personal experience with that in Vietnam where, despite the efforts of some troops to obey the Geneva Conventions. the rules weren't always followed. When that happens and we throw away even the limited constraints that the Conventions enforce, we are no longer human.
Our troops, including my son, travel to many counties with "blood chits" in their pockets. These small documents say that, if captured, their captors will be rewarded for their safe return. The Military Commissions Act may just have rendered those chits worthless.
Back in 2001, Congress began handing a rather insane little man proof that we had learned nothing from Yorktown, the Alamo, Montebello Bluffs, Fredericksburg, Andersonville, Mang Yang, or the "Hanoi Hilton." Once again, we rode blindly to our fate, like Santa Ana or Custer, overconfident that we held power, that we were "right." And our most recent ride hasn't ended yet.
Like me, my son is now a veteran. The men and women, who hate war most, are those who were good at it. Veterans -- combat veterans -- recognize something that no one without personal experience can ever begin to put a "handle" on.
We should neither repeat, nor reenact and glorify, error.
This article first appeared on www.tomdispatch.com, a weblog of the Nation Institute, which offers a steady flow of alternate sources, news and opinion from Tom Engelhardt, a long time editor in publishing, the author of The End of Victory Culture, and a fellow of the Nation Institute.
Thursday, November 9, 2006
Robert Parry: The Secret World of Robert Gates
Source: Consortium News (11-9-06)
[Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book is Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq.]
Robert Gates, George W. Bush's choice to replace Donald Rumsfeld as Defense Secretary, is a trusted figure within the Bush Family's inner circle, but there are lingering questions about whether Gates is a trustworthy public official.
The 63-year-old Gates has long faced accusations of collaborating with Islamic extremists in Iran, arming Saddam Hussein's dictatorship in Iraq, and politicizing U.S. intelligence to conform with the desires of policymakers - three key areas that relate to his future job.
Gates skated past some of these controversies during his 1991 confirmation hearings to be CIA director - and the current Bush administration is seeking to slip Gates through the congressional approval process again, this time by pressing for a quick confirmation by the end of the year, before the new Democratic-controlled Senate is seated.
If Bush's timetable is met, there will be no time for a serious investigation into Gates's past.
Fifteen years ago, Gates got a similar pass when leading Democrats agreed to put "bipartisanship" ahead of careful oversight when Gates was nominated for the CIA job by President George H.W. Bush.
In 1991, despite doubts about Gates's honesty over Iran-Contra and other scandals, the career intelligence officer brushed aside accusations that he played secret roles in arming both sides of the Iran-Iraq War. Since then, however, documents have surfaced that raise new questions about Gates's sweeping denials.
For instance, the Russian government sent an intelligence report to a House investigative task force in early 1993 stating that Gates participated in secret contacts with Iranian officials in 1980 to delay release of 52 U.S. hostages then held in Iran, a move to benefit the presidential campaign of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.
"R[obert] Gates, at that time a staffer of the National Security Council in the administration of Jimmy Carter, and former CIA Director George Bush also took part" in a meeting in Paris in October 1980, according to the Russian report, which meshed with information from witnesses who have alleged Gates's involvement in the Iranian gambit.
Once in office, the Reagan administration did permit weapons to flow to Iran via Israel. One of the planes carrying an arms shipment was shot down over the Soviet Union on July 18, 1981, after straying off course, but the incident drew little attention at the time....
Andrew Leonard: Too Much Is Being Made of How Conservative the New Southern Conservative Democrats Are
Source: Salon (11-8-06)
Florida Gator fans, among which proud group I count myself, have always been a little suspicious of Heath Shuler, the former quarterback for the University of Tennessee Volunteers, a hated Florida rival. But if one was to believe the talking heads from Tuesday night's election coverage, good old-fashioned liberals should be even more wary of the newly elected Democratic House representative from North Carolina. That's because, as was repeated ad infinitum by the likes of Candy Crowley and numerous others, Heath Shuler is the embodiment of the new, socially conservative Democrat. Anti-same-sex marriage, anti-choice, eager to drop the name of Jesus at every opportunity, the new socially conservative Democrats are being offered as proof that for the Democratic Party to win power, it had to become Republican. So don't you dare interpret these election results as some kind of ratification of meat-and-potatos Democratic liberalism. And you better watch out, because trouble's gonna start brewing when these new socially conservative Democrats arrive in Washington and start getting ordered around by Nancy Pelosi and her ilk....
White Southern Democrats, by and large, have always been conservative. Heath Shuler is the latest in a long tradition. But you want to know the real difference between Shuler and the likes of Zell Miller or the Dixiecrats of yore? Shuler was born in 1971, six years after the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. So unlike generations of Southern Democrats before him, he probably won't change his registration to Republican because his party forced through historic civil rights legislation.
This point, absolutely central to the history of modern politics in the United States, rarely gets mentioned by pundits blathering on about red and blue states. Instead the South's transformation from blue bastion to rock-ribbed red Republicanism has been painted as some kind of tactical failure by Democrats -- they "lost" the South because they weren't as smart or organized or respectful of "family values" as the Republicans. When, in point of fact, any student of political history understands that the Republican takeover of the South is the result of Lyndon Johnson's passage of the Voting Rights Act. The so-called conservative ascendancy did not begin in 1980, when Ronald Reagan was elected. It began in 1965.
Sometimes, you pay a price for being right. The price paid by Democrats for forcing through landmark civil rights legislation was the collapse of a big tent that held both Northern liberals and Southern conservatives -- an uneasy alliance at best, and one that only as masterly a politician as Johnson could manipulate into a unified force. Ever since, Democrats have faced a political landscape in which the electoral math hasn't worked in their favor.
But, as is abundantly clear from Tuesday's election results, many Southerners no longer feel that Republicans represent their interests. So now some new politicians like Heath Shuler are making the scene. The Democratic Party is big enough to handle it.
Wednesday, November 8, 2006
Jason Leopold: Gates Has History of Manipulating Intelligence
Source: Truthout (11-8-06)
[Jason Leopold is a former Los Angeles bureau chief for Dow Jones Newswire. He has written over 2,000 stories on the California energy crisis and received the Dow Jones Journalist of the Year Award in 2001 for his coverage on the issue as well as a Project Censored award in 2004. Leopold also reported extensively on Enron's downfall and was the first journalist to land an interview with former Enron president Jeffrey Skilling following Enron's bankruptcy filing in December 2001. Leopold has appeared on CNBC and National Public Radio as an expert on energy policy and has also been the keynote speaker at more than two dozen energy industry conferences around the country.]
Robert Gates, the former director of the CIA during the presidency of George H.W. Bush, and who was tapped Tuesday by the president to replace Donald Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense, is part of Texas's good ol' boy network. He may be best known for playing a role in arming Iraq's former dictator Saddam Hussein with American made weapons in the country's war against Iran in the 1980's.
Gates, who currently is president of Texas A&M University, came under intense fire during confirmation hearings in the early 1990's for being unaware of the explosive situation in Iraq in the 1980's, and the demise of the Soviet republic.
Gates joined the CIA in 1966, and spent eight years there as an analyst before moving over to the National Security Council in 1974. He returned to the CIA in 1980, and a year later was appointed by Ronald Reagan to serve as deputy director for intelligence. Five years later, he was named deputy director for the agency, the number two post in the agency. In 1989, he was appointed deputy director of the National Security Council and in 1991, when the first Bush administration was in office, he was named director of the spy shop.
During contentious Senate confirmation hearings in October 1991 - that are bound to come up again - Gates's role in cooking intelligence information during the Iran-contra scandal was revealed. It was during those hearings that senators found out about a December 2, 1986, 10-page classified memo written by Thomas Barksdale, the CIA analyst for Iran. That memo claimed that covert arms sales to the country demonstrated "a perversion of the intelligence process" that is staggering in its proportions.
The Barksdale memo was used by Gates's detractors to prove he played an active role in slanting intelligence information during his tenure at the agency under Reagan. Eerily reminiscent of the way CIA analysts were treated by Vice President Dick Cheney during the run-up to the Iraq war three years ago, when agents were forced to provide the Bush administration with intelligence showing Iraq being a nuclear threat, Barksdale said he and other Iran analysts "were never consulted or asked to provide an intelligence input to the covert actions and secret contacts that have occurred."
Barksdale added that Gates was the pipeline for providing "exclusive reports to the White House" intelligence that was "at odds with the overwhelming bulk of intelligence reporting, both from U.S. sources and foreign intelligence services."
In testimony before the Senate on October 1, 1991, Harold P. Ford, former vice chairman of the National Intelligence Council, described an aspect of Gates's personality that mirrors many of the top officials in the Bush administration today.
"Bob Gates has often depended too much on his own individual analytic judgments and has ignored or scorned the views of others whose assessments did not accord with his own. This would be okay if he were uniquely all-seeing. He has not been ...," Ford said.
At the hearing, other CIA analysts said Gates forced them to twist intelligence to exaggerate the threat posed by the former Soviet Union. Analysts alleged a report approved by Gates overstated Soviet influence in Iran that specifically led the late President Ronald Reagan into making policy decisions that turned into the Iran-contra scandal.
Jennifer Glaudemans, a former CIA analyst, said at the 1991 Gates confirmation hearings that she and her colleagues at the CIA believed "Mr Gates and his influence have led to a prostitution of (Soviet) analysis."
Melvin Goodman, Glaudemans former boss at the CIA, also said that under Gates, the CIA was "trying to provide the intelligence analysis ... that would support the operational decision to sell arms to Iran."
Gates testified at his confirmation hearing in October 1991 that he was aware the United States was selling arms to Iran in exchange for hostages. But he denied that he had any knowledge that Oliver North, the former National Security aide, was diverting money from arms sales to Iran to secretly aid the Nicaraguan contras.
But White House memos released at the time showed that North and John Poindexter, the national security adviser at the time, engaged in classified briefings with Gates on numerous occasions about Iran-contra. Poindexter testified that he discussed the situation with Gates, but Gates said at his Senate confirmation hearings he had "no recollection" about those conversations.
Alan Fiers, a former CIA officer who served as an agency liaison along with North and met weekly with Gates, testified at Gates's confirmation hearings that he discussed specific details of the covert operation with Gates.
"Bob Gates understood the universe, understood the structure, understood that there was an operational - that there was a support operation being run out of the White House," and "that Ollie North was the quarterback," Fiers said at Gate's confirmation hearing in 1991. "I had no reason to think he had great detail, but I do think there was a baseline knowledge there."
If confirmed, Gates would arguably be overseeing a war that removed a dictator he personally helped to prop up. Tom Harkin, a senator from Iowa, described Gates's role in intelligence sharing operations with Iraq during a time when the United States helped arm Saddam Hussein in Iraq's war against Iran.
"I also have doubts and questions about Mr. Gates's role in the secret intelligence sharing operation with Iraq," Harkin said during Gates's confirmation hearings on November 7, 1991. "Robert Gates served as assistant to the director of the CIA in 1981 and as deputy director for intelligence from 1982 to 1986. In that capacity, he helped develop options in dealing with the Iran-Iraq war, which eventually evolved into a secret intelligence liaison relationship with Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Gates was in charge of the directorate that prepared the intelligence information that was passed on to Iraq. He testified that he was also an active participant in the operation during 1986. The secret intelligence sharing operation with Iraq was not only a highly questionable and possibly illegal operation, but also may have jeopardized American lives and our national interests. The photo reconnaissance, highly sensitive electronic eavesdropping, and narrative texts provided to Saddam may not only have helped him in Iraq's war against Iran, but also in the recent gulf war."
John Ellis: All that negative advertising is having an effect on our politics
Source: WSJ (11-8-06)
[Mr. Ellis, a former columnist for the Boston Globe, is a partner in Sand Hill Partners, a venture-capital firm.]
Glad it's over? You're not the only one. Voters in six states with closely contested U.S. Senate races were recently asked by the Gallup Organization their opinion of the political advertising they'd seen this year. The vast majority, in every state surveyed, described it as either "somewhat negative," "very negative" or "extremely negative." Roughly a third of those surveyed in each state said "extremely negative."
According to Advertising Age magazine, the total amount spent this year on political advertising will reach $2 billion, a hefty increase over 2004. If one conservatively estimates that at least half of all political advertising can be fairly described as "negative," then 2006 will be the first year that negative political advertising expenditures reached the $1 billion mark. That's a dollar amount greater than all of the television, radio and print advertising buys done by Anheuser-Busch (estimated by Ad Age to be $919 million) in 2005....
One would think that the major parties would grasp the concept that they are destroying the very profession they purport to love, and act accordingly. In the midst of all these negative messages, one would expect to find a broad, thematic campaign that aspired to something bigger than "he voted for toxic waste dumps and against your unborn child." When the Labour Party in Britain finally got tired of losing elections to Maggie Thatcher's Tories, they hired the best advertising minds in that nation to relaunch the Labour Party brand. The results were impressive. Tony Blair rose to power and rules to this day.
But in America, the major parties don't ever think in broad, national terms. They're all tactics and no strategy. They don't advertise themselves at all. Instead, they spend the hundreds of millions of dollars they raise microtargeting supposedly single-issue voters and bombarding them with negative messages about the opposite party's alleged disdain for those concerns. Put more simply, they send you junk mail you don't open, and leave robo-calls on your answering machine that you immediately erase.
Ultimately, the reaction to this ceaseless negative barrage, if it continues unchecked, will be the rejection of both major political parties. As more and more people are repulsed by the political process, their number will at some point reach a critical mass. Americans share two overriding beliefs: Tomorrow will be a better day and the idea of America is fundamentally important. That critical mass will eventually embrace a party of hope and mission. The alternative, after all, is a new record every two years -- $2 billion of negative advertising, then $4 billion, then $8 billion. All slander all the time eventually collapses of its own foul weight.
Tuesday, November 7, 2006
Christopher Hitchens: What Algeria’s past can—and can’t—tell us about the present day
Source: Atlantic Monthly (Subscribers only) (11-1-06)
It was arguably fair, when André Maurois finished his Histoire de la France, to permit him a small allowance of la gloire and to agree with his conclusion that “The history of France, a permanent miracle, has the singular privilege of impassioning the peoples of the earth to the point where they all take part in French quarrels.” And it was certainly true, when Alistair Horne began his long study of the Algerian war (or the Algerian revolution), that no sentient person could fail to share his conviction that France in 1789, 1848, 1871 (the Paris Commune), 1916 (Verdun), and 1940 (the defeat and capitulation that led to Vichy) was in some sense both the mother and the daughter—and perhaps also the orphan—of modern history.
At all events, there is no doubt that the eight-year struggle for Algeria was momentous for le monde entier as well as for France herself. The intense and dramatic fighting marked the emergence of militant pan-Arab nationalism as well as, to some extent, the revival of Islam as a modern political force. It was one of the initial tests of the validity of the United Nations in bringing new states and countries to independence. It became an important early sideshow in the Cold War, with the United States this time attempting to play the role of an anticolonial power. And it was a reprise, at some remove, of the fratricide between Gaullist and Vichyite forces that had ceased only a decade before the hostilities in Algeria broke out.
A history so intricately filiated will soon disclose the lineaments of tragedy, and Horne’s achievement—in a book first published in 1977—was to speak with gruff respect of the might-have-beens without losing his concentration on the blunt and unavoidable facts. Had liberated France in 1945 begun to speak of the emancipation of its colonized peoples in the same tones that it demanded so peremptorily for itself (and had it realized that the world of European dominion was never coming back), the history of North Africa—and indeed, Indochina—might have been radically different. Horne’s title is taken from Rudyard Kipling’s poem “The White Man’s Burden,” which was originally addressed to Henry Cabot Lodge, Theodore Roosevelt, and other Americans who were pondering what to do with the Philippine Islands after shattering the Spanish empire in 1898. But Algeria in 1945 was a province of a foredoomed French empire, so no invocation of the old mission civilisatrice had even a prayer of working.
Least of all did the impossible scheme of keeping Algeria as an actual département of France have such a chance. Relatively sober steps had been taken, especially under the prime ministership of Pierre Mendès-France, to bring independence to Tunisia and Morocco, and to end the long misery and shame of France’s nostalgia for a renovated empire in Vietnam, which ended all in one day at the battle of Dien Bien Phu. When it came to Algeria, Mendès-France borrowed from an old plan, for modest autonomy, first evolved by his predecessor Léon Blum. It isn’t exaggerating by much to say that both of these Jewish Frenchmen—products of the campaign to vindicate Captain Dreyfus—were viciously thwarted by a white-settler movement whose allegiance was to Pétain and Poujade, and in some cases to Charles Maurras and the Action Française. Every move to reform Algeria even slightly was vetoed by a pied-noir lobby that was addicted to overplaying its own hand.
This grandiose primitivism was not shared, as Horne brilliantly and movingly demonstrates, by the military men upon whom the pieds-noirs depended. Many of these soldiers had fought against Vichy and its Nazi backers (in French Africa, in the Middle East, or in France itself), and they had a concept of republican virtue, as well as an esprit de corps, that commands respect even at this distance. The same can be said of Jacques Soustelle, the brilliant, passionate proconsul who was, in the end, almost driven mad by the feeling of having been betrayed from Paris. When the pied-noir coup took place in Algiers, and was proclaimed from the balcony, it was announced—in a sort of perverse hommage to a degenerated Jacobinism—by a “Committee of Public Safety.” In a comparable parody of anti-imperialism, the rightist mob in those days of May 1958 made one of its first acts the torching of the U.S. Cultural Center in Algiers....
In a much-too-brisk introduction to this new edition, Horne makes some rather facile comparisons with Iraq. The initial analogy does not hold at all: there is not a huge white-settler population in Mesopotamia; the United States does not consider Iraq to be a part of its metropole; the violence there is mainly between Arabs and Muslims, while the large Kurdish minority—loosely comparable perhaps to the Kabyle or Berber population of Algeria—fights stoutly on the American side. Moreover, it would be insulting to compare the forces of al-Qaeda and revanchiste Baathism to the FLN, which made consistent appeals to the discrepant ethnic groups in its country and which even asked for—and often got—support from the large Jewish community, whose members had suffered at the hands of the colonial right. Envoys from the al-Zarqawi school are furthermore unlikely to be received—as were the tough and often brilliant diplomats of the FLN—at the United Nations, whose headquarters and personnel in Baghdad they blew up. In Horne’s bare and scrupulous account, it is the nihilistic tactics and propaganda of the colonialist Organisation de l’Armée Secrète that put one in mind of the bin-Ladenists. He emphasizes the problem of torture, which has indeed been allowed to work its poison on American policy in Iraq, but his own very exhaustive discussion of the way that this horror influenced Algeria makes it plain that official cruelty was a stern principle as well as a universal practice, and that this was not even denied, let alone punished. It would have been far more absorbing had he devoted his considerable expertise to answering the question, How was it that Algeria in the 1990s became the first country to defeat a full-scale jihad and takfir rebellion, which had at one point threatened to overwhelm the entire state and society? In other words, this is no longer a question of the world being privileged to observe French quarrels, and perhaps allowed to participate vicariously in them; it is more a matter of understanding one of the many origins of a current and permanent crisis....
Alan Dershowitz: Was Saddam's Trial Fair?
Source: WSJ (11-7-06)
The Nuremberg trials it is not. But then again, Saddam Hussein is no Hitler or Goering. He was a regional tyrant whose invasion of Kuwait was turned back by the U.S., whose effort to develop nuclear weapons was thwarted by Israel, and whose war with Iran proved mutually destructive. He did succeed in murdering, torturing and terrorizing thousands of his own people, and for one small part of that -- the murder of 148 men and boys in the town of Dujail -- he was placed on trial, convicted of crimes against humanity and sentenced to hang.
The trial itself was repeatedly disrupted by in-court outbursts, out-of-court murders of lawyers, and frequent changes of court personnel. It did not go nearly as smoothly as Nuremberg: But those trials were conducted after World War II had been decisively won and all resistance ended. The trial of Saddam was conducted in the midst of continuing resistance and ongoing violence. Considering this important difference, the trial process was remarkably efficient.
But was it fair, or was it victors' justice, as Goering characterized Nuremberg? In a sense, all trials that follow military conflicts are victors' justice; the losers don't get to hold trials. No British generals were placed on trial for Dresden, nor were any Americans put in the dock for Nagasaki. But some victors' justice can be fairer than others. Nuremberg represents the epitome of fair victors' justice. The defendants were brilliantly represented by lawyers of their own choosing. The prosecutors were the brightest and fairest the victorious Allies could send. (Even the Soviet chief prosecutor was a distinguished lawyer, though he was clearly taking orders from Stalin.) The judges were, for the most part, highly regarded (the Soviet judges, though highly experienced, lacked the independence of the American, British and French). The verdicts were generally regarded as fair, with some death penalties, some terms of imprisonment (many quickly commuted) and not a few acquittals. These calibrated results satisfied the appearance of justice, as well as the reality in most cases.
The Baghdad trial also produced calibrated results: three death sentences, one sentence of life imprisonment, three sentences of many years behind bars, and one acquittal for lack of evidence. The fact that the conviction and death sentence of Saddam was a foregone conclusion does not necessarily undercut the trial's fairness. The verdict and sentence was predictable because the facts were clear and the evidence compelling. A defendant's obvious guilt does not necessarily make his trial unfair; nor does it necessarily make it fair. Even the most guilty and despicable are entitled to a trial before objective fact-finders (in this case judges, not jurors), with an opportunity to challenge the prosecution's evidence, to put on evidence of his own, and to have a fearless lawyer advocate on his behalf....
Tim Wise: Affirmative Action for Whites
Source: Rachel's Democracy & Health News (11-6-06)
[Tim Wise is an antiracist activist.]
Ask a fish what water is and you'll get no answer.
Even if fish were capable of speech, they would likely have no explanation for the element they swim in every minute of every day of their lives. Water simply is. Fish take it for granted.
So too with this thing we hear so much about, "racial preference." While many whites seem to think the notion originated with affirmative action programs, intended to expand opportunities for historically marginalized people of color, racial preference actually has had a long and very white history.
Affirmative action for whites was embodied in the abolition of European indentured servitude, which left black (and occasionally indigenous) slaves as the only unfree labor in the colonies that would become the U.S.
Affirmative action for whites was the essence of the 1790 Naturalization Act, which allowed virtually any European immigrant to become a full citizen, even while blacks, Asians and American Indians could not.
Affirmative action for whites was the guiding principle of segregation, Asian exclusion laws, and the theft of half of Mexico for the fulfillment of Manifest Destiny.
In recent history, affirmative action for whites motivated racially restrictive housing policies that helped 15 million white families procure homes with FHA loans from the 1930s to the '60s, while people of color were mostly excluded from the same programs. In other words, it is hardly an exaggeration to say that white America is the biggest collective recipient of racial preference in the history of the cosmos. It has skewed our laws, shaped our public policy and helped create the glaring inequalities with which we still live.
White families, on average, have a net worth that is 11 times the net worth of black families, according to a recent study; and this gap remains substantial even when only comparing families of like size, composition, education and income status.
A full-time black male worker in 2003 makes less in real dollar terms than similar white men were earning in 1967. Such realities are not merely indicative of the disadvantages faced by blacks, but indeed are evidence of the preferences afforded whites -- a demarcation of privilege that is the necessary flipside of discrimination.
Indeed, the value of preferences to whites over the years is so enormous that the current baby-boomer generation of whites is currently in the process of inheriting between $7 trillion and $10 trillion in assets from their parents and grandparents -- property handed down by those who were able to accumulate assets at a time when people of color by and large could not.
To place this in the proper perspective, we should note that this amount of money is more than all the outstanding mortgage debt, all the credit card debt, all the savings account assets, all the money in IRAs and 401k retirement plans, all the annual profits for U.S. manufacturers, and our entire merchandise trade deficit combined.
Yet few whites have ever thought of our position as resulting from racial preferences. Indeed, we pride ourselves on our hard work and ambition, as if somehow we invented the concepts.
As if we have worked harder than the folks who were forced to pick cotton and build levies for free; harder than the Latino immigrants who spend 10 hours a day in fields picking strawberries or tomatoes; harder than the (mostly) women of color who clean hotel rooms or change bedpans in hospitals, or the (mostly) men of color who collect our garbage.
We strike the pose of self-sufficiency while ignoring the advantages we have been afforded in every realm of activity: housing, education, employment, criminal justice, politics, banking and business.
We ignore the fact that at almost every turn, our hard work has been met with access to an opportunity structure denied to millions of others. Privilege, to us, is like water to the fish: invisible precisely because we cannot imagine life without it.
The point of points It is that context that best explains the duplicity of President Bush's recent criticisms of affirmative action at the University of Michigan. President Bush, himself a lifelong recipient of affirmative action -- the kind set aside for the mediocre rich -- recently proclaimed that the school's policies were examples of unfair racial preference. Yet in doing so he not only showed a profound ignorance of the Michigan policy but also made clear the inability of yet another white person to grasp the magnitude of white privilege still in operation....
Monday, November 6, 2006
Jacob Laksin: Saddam gets what he deserves
Source: FrontpageMag.com (11-6-06)
[Jacob Laksin is a senior editor for FrontPage Magazine.]
Last December, in the course of one of his inveterate harangues to the Iraqi tribunal adjudicating his fate, Saddam Hussein haughtily demanded, “Why don't you just execute us?” Twelve months, much agonizing deliberation, and countless courtroom theatrics later, the toppled tyrant may finally get his wish.
The same tribunal whose authority he defied at every turn yesterday sentenced Saddam and his co-defendants -- Barzam Ibrahim, his half-brother and former intelligence chief, and Awad Hamed al-Bandar, the former head of Iraq's Revolutionary Court, a body that targeted Saddam’s political opponents and other “enemies of the people” -- to death by hanging.
The sentence caps Saddam’s conviction for ordering the execution-style killings of 148 men and boys from the village of Dujail, just outside of Baghdad, in the wake of an ill-fated assassination attempt against him in 1982. Provided an appellate court upholds the tribunal’s sentence, Saddam will meet the justice he denied untold thousands throughout his 24-year reign of terror.
One can only hope that the execution of the sentence will be more efficient than the trial that produced it. While the Iraqi tribunal proved more capable than critics alleged, it clearly has yet to absorb the ancient legal wisdom that justice must be swift as well as certain. From the minute the dictator strode into the courtroom, denouncing the judges as American and "Zionist" stooges and demanding deference as the “President of Iraq,” the trial was held hostage to his megalomaniacal whims.
As during his days in power, Saddam’s arrogance knew no bounds. He derided and intimidated witnesses. He delivered political speeches urging attacks on American troops. He instructed his defense team to boycott the trial. A particularly obscene moment came when Saddam, after listening to Dujail residents describe in harrowing detail their sufferings at the hands of his henchmen, complained that the court was devoting insufficient attention to his own deprivation in a prison cell. His victims get their say, Saddam sniffed, “but does anyone ask Saddam Hussein whether he was tortured? Whether he was hit?”
Such humanitarian concerns where conspicuously absent when Saddam green-lighted the massacre at Dujail, an atrocity that serves as powerful testimony to the brutality that marked his rule. After narrowly escaping an ambush by Shiite insurgents, Saddam retaliated by ordering the entire village bulldozed to the ground. Women and children were reportedly jailed, with men and younger boys rounded up for summary execution. Deeming ten of these boys, some as young as 11, too young to be slaughtered there and then, Saddam allowed them to rot in prison until they turned 18, the proper age of torment. Then he hanged them. Notably, Saddam made no effort to conceal his role in the mass executions. Asked during the trial to account for his actions, he coldly retorted, “Where is the crime?”
Iraqi jurors did not struggle with the answer. As for the prosecutors, in making Dujail the center of their case, they wisely calculated that they would have an easier time winning a conviction. But the strategy had a downside. By isolating this single (if by no means trivial) instance of the dictator’s brutality, they diverted to the margins the myriad crimes that made him a danger to the entire region, as well as his people, and shifted attention away from the more sinister ambitions that made the U.S.-led military action necessary in 2003.
Looming large in the former category are Saddam’s genocidal pogroms against the Kurds. Of these, the most shockingly brutal, the Anfal campaign of 1987 and 1988, is currently the subject of another trial against Saddam, in which he stands accused of crimes against humanity for the murder of over 100,000 Kurds. Although the campaign is remembered mainly for Saddam’s willingness to employ chemical weapons -- something that opponents of the Iraq war have assured us would be unfathomable for the supposedly pragmatic-minded dictator -- it also illustrates how casually he claimed human life: thousands of Kurds perished under firing squads, promptly to be dumped in pre-dug mass graves. It is thus an injustice, if primarily against the historical record, that Saddam may be executed before the verdict is handed down in the second trial.
Then, too, there remains Saddam’s unexplored role at the head of the Mukhabarat, his famously ruthless secret police. From what is already known about the Mukhabarat’s practices, especially their administration of Iraqi prisons, it can be stated definitively that the cruelties perpetrated by American soldiers at Abu Ghraib were a vast improvement on prison life under the Mukhabarat. In one sense, then, Saddam’s looming execution is too charitable: no more will he be held accountable for his dark reign.
Nor will Saddam have to answer for the threat he posed to the West. To be sure, that the threat was indeed real has already been confirmed by other sources. As the widespread corruption at the heart of the Oil-for-Food program made apparent, UN sanctions failed to dampen Saddam’s dreams of regional dominance while allowing his regime to profit at the Iraqi peoples’ expense: Saddam did $21.3 billion in illicit business by smuggling oil to neighboring nations and directing the revenue to, among other dubious channels, his undisclosed weapons programs. (The UN insists that it “had neither the authority nor the resources to prevent smuggling” -- this in its own defense.)
Scientists who defected from Saddam’s republic of fear, meanwhile, have confirmed that he was seeking to reconstitute his nuclear weapons program. In his book, Saddam's Bombmaker, the Iraqi nuclear scientist Khidhir Hamza has detailed how he “worked to build Saddam’s bomb,” before escaping in 1993. Finally, Iraq’s repeated refusal to allow international inspectors unrestricted access to weapons depots only confirmed the impression that the regime had something to hide. Nothing concentrates the mind so wonderfully as the prospect of being hanged, Dr. Johnson once observed, and it is a pity that Saddam may now take his secrets to his grave.
This is not to say that yesterday’s sentence is unwelcome. On the contrary, beyond delivering the consolation of justice to his Iraqi victims, the conclusion of the trial heralds several positive developments. First, at a time when Iraqi government ministries have become cesspools of corruption and sectarian combat, Iraq’s criminal justice system has proved itself above the fray. If anything, the presiding judges were unduly indulgent of Saddam’s histrionics, allowing him to carry on longer than any self-respecting court ought to have countenanced. At the same time, however, the judges have been committed to transparency. They have already promised to make public all the documents they used to determine Saddam’s sentence. What a far cry from the previous era, when handpicked judges ruled in accordance with Saddam’s declared legal philosophy: “The law is anything I write on a scrap of paper.”
Further proof of the tribunal's enlightenment: After Ramsey Clark, the radical former U.S. attorney general and current defense attorney for Saddam submitted a memo to Chief Judge Abdel-Rahman, in which he un-ironically denounced the proceedings as “a mockery of justice,” the judge noted that Clark had succeeded mainly in “ridiculing himself” and dismissed him as a “laughing stock,” before expelling him from the courtroom -- a fittingly shameful exit for the man who has rallied to the cause of dictators from Muammar Gaddafi to Slobodan Milosevic and who has richly earned the title of “war criminal's best friend.”
While Iraqis can derive satisfaction from the integrity of the court, the trial has also given the troops and their supporters something to celebrate. It is hardly surprising that Gold Star Families, a coalition of military families who have lost children in Iraq, joyfully embraced the verdict. A delegation of these families is now making a 10-day survey tour of the country. Among their number is Janet and Joseph Johnson, whose son, Army Spc. Justin Johnson, was killed outside of Baghdad in 2004. Johnson’s close friend was Casey Sheehan, son of protest-happy prima donna Cindy Sheehan. Absent their efforts, Saddam might be forging ahead with his nuclear program, instead of counting down his final days. Who better than a deposed dictator to remind us that these fine soldiers did not die in vain?
It may be too much to hope that Saddam’s death will deal a blow to the violence now rending the country. Yet few would dispute that his imminent end provides an opportunity for Iraq to look forward. Saddam was not given a choice in his fate -- he preferred a symbolic death by firing squad to being strung from the gallows “like a common criminal.” But Iraq, once again, is presented with a choice about its future.
Norman Solomon: Saddam’s Unindicted Co-Conspirator: Donald Rumsfeld
Source: Media Beat Column (11-6-06)
[Norman Solomon’s latest book, “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death,” is out in paperback. For information, go to: www.warmadeeasy.com]
Saddam Hussein has received a death sentence for crimes he committed more than a year before Donald Rumsfeld shook his hand in Baghdad. Let’s reach back into history and extract these facts:
* On Dec. 20, 1983, the Washington Post reported that Rumsfeld “visited Iraq in what U.S. officials said was an attempt to bolster the already improving U.S. relations with that country.”
* Two days later, the New York Times cited a “senior American official” who “said that the United States remained ready to establish full diplomatic relations with Iraq and that it was up to the Iraqis.”
* On March 29, 1984, the Times reported: “American diplomats pronounce themselves satisfied with relations between Iraq and the United States and suggest that normal diplomatic ties have been restored in all but name.” Washington had some goodies for Saddam’s regime, the Times account noted, including “agricultural-commodity credits totaling $840 million.” And while “no results of the talks have been announced” after the Rumsfeld visit to Baghdad three months earlier, “Western European diplomats assume that the United States now exchanges some intelligence on Iran with Iraq.”
* A few months later, on July 17, 1984, a New York Times article with a Baghdad dateline sketchily filled in a bit more information, saying that the U.S. government “granted Iraq about $2 billion in commodity credits to buy food over the last two years.” The story recalled that “Donald Rumsfeld, the former Middle East special envoy, held two private meetings with the Iraqi president here,” and the dispatch mentioned in passing that “State Department human rights reports have been uniformly critical of the Iraqi President, contending that he ran a police state.”
* Full diplomatic relations between Washington and Baghdad were restored 11 months after Rumsfeld’s December 1983 visit with Saddam -- who went on to use poison gas later in the decade, actions which scarcely harmed relations with the Reagan administration.
* As the most senior U.S. official to visit Iraq in six years, Rumsfeld had served as Reagan’s point man for warming relations with Saddam. In 1984, the administration engineered the sale to Baghdad of 45 ostensibly civilian-use Bell 214ST helicopters. Saddam’s military found them quite useful for attacking Kurdish civilians with poison gas in 1988, according to U.S. intelligence sources. “In response to the gassing,” journalist Jeremy Scahill has pointed out, “sweeping sanctions were unanimously passed by the U.S. Senate that would have denied Iraq access to most U.S. technology. The measure was killed by the White House.”
These are facts that the public should know about the current defense secretary of the United States.
Friday, November 3, 2006
Jack Beatty: War and the American Voter
Source: Atlantic Monthly (11-1-06)
In the five wartime congressional elections since 1860, the "war party" has always taken a shellacking.
Discussing plans for the Allied invasion of North Africa, President Franklin D. Roosevelt put his hands together as if in prayer and pleaded with Army chief of staff George C. Marshall, "Please make it before the election." Alas for the Democratic party, as David M. Kennedy writes in Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945, "On Election Day, November 3, 1942…the transports bearing American troops to North Africa were still at sea." The result: "Democrats took a shellacking"—losing forty-seven seats in the House and seven in the Senate.
In the five wartime congressional elections since 1860, the "war party"—the party of the president—has always taken a shellacking, averaging a loss of thirty-six House and five Senate seats. This year, the GOP is fighting that rooted electoral trend; more than the Mark Foley scandal, more even than Republican corruption in the era of Jack Abramoff, Tom Delay, Bob Ney, Randy "Duke" Cunningham, Dennis Hastert, and Curt Weldon, if the Republicans lose on November 7, Iraq will be why. If, as seems increasingly unlikely, the GOP hangs on to the House in the face of public opinion about the war, as well as the Democrats’ twenty-three point lead on the "generic ballot" question (which party do you want to lead the next Congress?), then incumbency, gerrymandering, and money will have aborted the self-correcting mechanism of democracy.
On C-SPAN’s invaluable Washington Journal, patriotic callers frequently despair that Americans won’t rally behind their president in a time of war. But Americans don’t do that. They don’t suspend politics "for the duration." They punish the war party for war—for getting the country into it, for its objectives, conduct, duration, inconveniences, and cost.....
Mark Thoma: How Much Do Election Shakeups Affect the National Economy?
Source: WSJ (11-3-06)
[Mr. Thoma is associate professor of economics at the University of Oregon and an economics blogger.]
In the last 30 years, a considerable amount of work has been devoted to an area of economics known as "political business cycles." Researchers in this area look at the relationship between electoral outcomes -- the outcome of elections and the economic policies of the party in power -- and the subsequent performance of the economy.
Broadly stated, there are two kinds of research on political business cycles. One type watches how the parties that win elections -- or are in control -- affect the performance of the economy. (For an overview of seminal work in this area see this paper by Allan Drazen. Also, see more recent papers here, here and here.)
The other class of research looks at the question from the opposite side. These researchers study how the performance of the economy helps decide which party wins an election. (For a good grounding in this type of work, see some important papers here and here.)
Here are some large research findings as summed up by Drazen:
• Inflation -- In the U.S., there is evidence of a post-electoral increase in inflation prior to 1979, but no evidence thereafter.
• Monetary Policy -- There is evidence of a pre-electoral increase in money growth rates from 1960 to 1980, but none thereafter. Money growth, or the percentage change in money supply, is an important measure of monetary policy prior to 1980, when the Fed started to focus on the federal-funds rate as the main monetary policy tool. There is no evidence for the U.S. of an electoral cycle in the federal-funds rate.
• Spending on Programs -- There is evidence of pre-electoral increases in government transfers (such as food stamps, Social Security and other cash payments) and other fiscal policy spending. This appears strongest before 1980.
• Output -- There is a clear partisan effect on economic activity, with real GDP being significantly higher under Democrats than Republicans in the first half of their terms. There is no significant pre-electoral increase in aggregate economic activity, meaning there is no evidence for pre-election manipulation of the economy.
Drazen also summarizes empirical work on the second kind of research, focusing on how the performance of the economy helps to determine who wins an election. Aggregate economic conditions before an election, specifically per capita output or income growth (and to a lesser extent inflation), have a significant effect on voting patterns.
A robust finding in the political business cycle literature is the last item on the first list, stating that output tends to be higher in the first half of Democratic administrations. If this is true, then it might be expected that the stock market performs better when Democrats are in power. Evidence in favor of this hypothesis comes from this 2003 paper by Pedro Santa-Clara and Rossen Valkanov, "The Presidential Puzzle: Political Cycles and the Stock Market." In the paper, the authors look at excess returns, i.e. returns over and above the returns on Treasury bills, using data from 1927 through 1998. Their estimates show that returns are, on average, 9% higher when Democrats are in power. (See this chart of returns by political party from University of California, Berkeley professor Hal Varian's description of the paper). They note that much of the difference in returns arises from smaller firms performing much better under Democratic administrations.
Precisely why this is the case is difficult to answer. And the paper doesn't come to any strong conclusions about the driving force behind the difference in returns. Nor does it explain why the difference persists, though it does rule out a few plausible reasons for these findings. Whatever the reason for the difference in returns, the evidence suggests that returns are distinctly higher under Democratic administrations. Therefore, if you are an investor, you may want to hope for the continued reemergence of the political left and for a Democrat to win the next presidential election.
Thursday, November 2, 2006
Ryan Lizza: James Baker Returns
Source: New Republic (11-2-06)
He has met with every significant figure in the Iraqi government and even with members of anti-occupation militias. He has quietly reached out to representatives from both Syria and Iran. He has begun discussions with Jordan, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia to lay the groundwork for internationalizing the Iraq crisis. According to The New York Times, he meets regularly with President Bush. It's widely expected that, after the election, he will offer the definitive blueprint for how to move forward on Iraq. Dick Cheney? Donald Rumsfeld? Stephen Hadley? No, the person who is poised to emerge as perhaps the most important figure in the Iraq debate is graying eminence James Baker.
These days, the diplomatic energy spent on Iraq isn't coming from Foggy Bottom or the Pentagon, but from an office building near Dupont Circle, where the 76-year-old Baker and nine other Washington establishmentarians have spent the last eight months working on Iraq policy options to be presented sometime before February. Technically, Baker is merely the co-chairman of the commission, which is officially known as the Iraq Study Group. (The Democratic co-chairman is Lee Hamilton.) But there's a reason almost everyone calls it "the Baker Commission." With little fanfare, Baker has become America's shadow secretary of state, boasting an Iraq portfolio broader than that of anyone actually serving in the administration.
If the war in Iraq sometimes seems like the tragic consequence of the psychodrama starring Bush 41 and Bush 43, Baker's imminent return to center stage will move the plot along nicely. Ever since 1970, when the 40-year-old Baker abandoned his Democratic Party registration and signed on to help manage the (losing) Senate campaign of the elder Bush, Baker's life has been deeply entwined with those of the Bushes--a fact that is already raising suspicions about his commission's looming proposals.
On the left, the conventional wisdom about Baker's return is that the Bush family loyalist will craft his recommendations to provide a face-saving cover for Bush's own modest course corrections in Iraq. On the right, Baker's ascent is eyed warily as an ideological rebuke to the neocons from the realist foreign policy establishment they sought to overthrow. But loyalty and ideology are only part of the Baker DNA. What he really craves is respect. The Bushes set Baker on his path to power, helping him become White House chief of staff, secretary of the Treasury, and secretary of state; but they have, at other times, undercut Baker's vainglorious self-image by dragging him into what he regarded as gutter-level political assignments--most recently, during the 2000 Florida recount, in which he successfully managed Bush's victory.
Those who know Baker insist that his vanity will ultimately triumph. "What's important about the psychology of James Baker is that he wants to be remembered as a statesman, not a political hack," says a former aide who worked closely with Baker for several years. "That's why the Iraq Study Group is perfect for him. ... He does not want the first line written about him in his obituary to be, 'James Baker, the man who delivered the contested election to George W. Bush.'" If the Bush 41-Bush 43 psychodrama got us into Iraq, it may be the Bush-Baker psychodrama that gets us out. ...
If Baker had an inflated view of himself vis-à-vis Bush 41--"Every morning, Jim Baker looks in the mirror and says, 'You're better looking than George Bush. You're smarter. Why aren't you president?'" a Republican consultant told The New Republic in 1992--one can only imagine his view of 43. Actually, a flip through Baker's new memoir, Work Hard, Study ... and Keep Out of Politics!, gives a pretty clear indication. There's George W. Bush on page 10, remembered as an "office boy" at Baker's Texas law firm. Later, while Baker negotiates the 1981 budget deal with a Democratic House member from Texas, there's a drive-by reference to Bush as the guy whom the congressman had beaten to win reelection. Bush pops up again in 1988 as "the ever-playful presidential son." At another point, Baker confides, "I always liked him, but I wouldn't have taken a bet in the late '50s or early '60s that he might ever be a governor, much less a candidate for president." ...
Sidney Blumenthal: It's Rove's midterm to lose
Source: Guardian & Salon (11-2-06)
Karl Rove remains supremely confident, assuring fretful party leaders that Congress will continue to be under their control despite the stream of new polls revealing previously impregnable Republican incumbents suddenly vulnerable. "I believe Karl Rove," President Bush's chief of staff, Joshua Bolten, proclaimed in a faith-based confessional. While hardly any Republican candidates are running on the Bush record, many are airing TV commercials separating themselves from Bush, and few will even appear on a public platform with him, Republicans cling to Rove's Svengali-like reputation like a life raft. Only Rove stands between the president and the deep blue sea.
Now, however, it is apparent that Rove's short-term ploys have undermined long-term Republican possibilities. His tactical successes have laid the groundwork for strategic failure. His polarizing and paranoid politics have been an intrinsic aspect of Bush's consistently radical presidency, which may be checked and balanced for the first time with the election of the 110th Congress. Rove's legacy may be to leave Republicans with a regional Southern party whose constrictive conservatism fosters a solid Democratic North.
Rove's dismissal of the very notion of a political center was enabled by Sept. 11, which provided him with dramatic material to stigmatize the opposition as dangerously soft and to turbo-charge inflammatory social issues such as gay marriage. By defending hearth and home from enemies at the door and behind closed doors, Rove maximized turnout of the galvanized hardcore.
Yet Rove did not achieve his ambition of a grand realignment of American politics. In Bush's second term, Rove attempted to force privatization of Social Security, but Bush's plan never received even a single committee hearing in Congress. Hurricane Katrina exposed the corrupt political swamp of his government. And Iraq corroded the thin mandate Bush had left.
After having set the theme of the midterm elections campaign as "staying the course" in Iraq, Bush declared a week ago that he had never uttered the phrase he had used dozens of times. Nonetheless, on the stump, he follows the Rove script of politicizing terror, claiming that the opposition is unwilling to defend the country and is un-American. Speaking in the heavily Republican small towns where he is welcome to campaign, Bush turns torture and warrantless domestic surveillance into rhetorical points proving the Democrats' betrayal, whipping up crowds to shout, "Just say no." Bush: "When it comes to questioning terrorists, what's the Democrat answer?" "Just say no!" Bush: "Their approach comes down to this: The terrorists win and America loses!"
Though Bush has abandoned his "staying the course" slogan, Rove explains that the administration's Iraq war policy is clear and simple: "The real plan is this: Fight, beat 'em, win." His formulation, in the spirit of the cheerleading squad at the University of Utah, which he attended, is aimed less at the Shiite-dominated government of Iraq, recalcitrant about disbanding murderous militias, than at the disillusioned Republican base, especially white evangelicals, whose support in recent polls has fallen one-third from what it was in 2004.
Frantic Republicans are reduced to raising the specters of racial and sexual panic. In Tennessee, where Harold Ford Jr., an African-American, is running even with the Republican candidate, a Republican National Committee TV ad produced by a Rove protégé features a blonde vixen beckoning in a sultry voice, "Call me, Harold." In Virginia, former Reagan Secretary of the Navy turned Democratic candidate James Webb, who is also an acclaimed novelist, is being attacked for sexually explicit passages in his books written decades ago based on his experiences as a soldier in Vietnam. On these time-honored tactics in the South that inevitably alienate the North, the balance of power in the Senate rests.
It is conjectural but conceivable that had Bush governed after Sept. 11 as he had campaigned in 2000, as a "uniter, not a divider," he might have been able to forge a durable center-right consensus. That would have required appointing prominent Democrats to his Cabinet, reining in his power-mad vice president and secretary of defense, making moderate court nominations, and listening to the voices of skeptical realism on invading Iraq. Imagining this parallel universe underscores how Rove's victories helped pave the way to losing the potential for a lasting majority.
Few people foresaw the consequences of Bush's radicalism, perhaps least of all Bush himself. Last week, I was in Austin for the Texas Book Festival, where I met a woman who had encountered then Gov. Bush immediately after the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Bush v. Gore. "Can you believe I'm going to be the fucking president?" he said.
David Brooks: Iraq's always been a violent place
Source: NYT (11-2-06)
Policy makers are again considering fundamental changes in our Iraq policy, but as they do I hope they read Elie Kedourie’s essay, “The Kingdom of Iraq: A Retrospect.”
Kedourie, a Baghdad-born Jew, published the essay in 1970. It’s a history of the regime the British helped establish over 80 years ago, but it captures an idea that is truer now than ever: Disorder is endemic to Iraq. Today’s crisis is not three years old. It’s worse now, but the crisis is perpetual. This is a bomb of a nation.
“Brief as it is, the record of the kingdom of Iraq is full of bloodshed, treason and rapine,” Kedourie wrote.
And his is a Gibbonesque tale of horror. There is the endless Shiite-Sunni fighting. There is a massacre of the Assyrians, which is celebrated rapturously in downtown Baghdad. Children are gunned down from airplanes. Tribal wars flare and families are destroyed. A Sunni writer insults the Shiites and the subsequent rioters murder students and policemen. A former prime minister is found on the street by a mob, killed, and his body is reduced to pulp as cars run him over in joyous retribution.
Kedourie described “a country riven by obscure and malevolent factions, unsettled by the war and its aftermath.” He observed, “The collapse of the old order had awakened vast cupidities and revived venomous hatreds.”
In 1927, a British officer asked a tribal leader: “You now have a government, a constitution, a parliament, ministers and officials — what more can you want?” The tribal leader replied, “Yes, but they speak with a foreign accent.”
The British tried to encourage responsible Iraqi self-government, to no avail. “The political ambitions of the Shia religious headquarters have always lain in the direction of theocratic domination,” a British official reported in 1923. They “have no motive for refraining from sacrificing the interests of Iraq to those which they conceive to be their own.”
At one point, the British high commissioner, Sir Henry Dobbs, argued that if Britain threatened to withdraw its troops, Iraqis would behave more responsibly. It didn’t work. Iraqis figured the Brits were bugging out. They concluded it was profitless to cultivate British friendship. Everything the British said became irrelevant.
The Iraq of his youth, Kedourie concluded, “was a make-believe kingdom built on false pretenses.” He quoted a British report from 1936, which noted that the Iraqi government would never be a machine based on law that treated citizens impartially, but would always be based on tribal favoritism and personal relationships. Iraq, Kedourie said, faced two alternatives: “Either the country would be plunged into chaos or its population should become universally the clients and dependents of an omnipotent but capricious and unstable government.” There is, he wrote, no third option....
Wednesday, November 1, 2006
Anne Applebaum: What have we learned from the Hungarian revolt of 1956?
Source: WSJ (11-1-06)
... as the anniversary [of the Hungarian Revolt of 1956] moves into its second week, I'd like to ask what, if anything, we in the West have learned since 1956. As many have observed, the U.S. role in the Hungarian Revolution was hardly admirable. Although U.S. governments had spent much of the previous decade encouraging Hungary and other Soviet satellite states to rebel, no one was prepared for the real thing. As late as June 1956 a clueless CIA (sound familiar?) published an internal document declaring that "there really is no underground movement" in Hungary at all.
As a result, the initial U.S. reaction was confused, to be polite about it. The White House first dithered about whether to call a "day of prayer" or call on the Red Cross or get the United Nations to do something. Only after four days of street fighting did the U.S. secretary of state, John Foster Dulles -- who had spoken often of liberating the "captive nations" of Eastern Europe -- declare that the U.S. government did not consider the Hungarians "potential allies." The message was clear: The West would not intervene....
The Hungarians kept fighting even after Soviet tanks arrived, believing help was on the way. Hundreds died. And Western policy in the region suffered a setback from which it took nearly 40 years to recover.
Has anything really changed since then? Once again an American president speaks openly and no doubt sincerely about human rights and democracy in the Middle East and around the world. He's supported by Congress, the media and even whole fiefdoms of the State Department that dedicate themselves to democracy promotion. Nongovernmental organizations, sometimes with U.S. government funding, have emerged around the world to do the same. It would hardly be surprising, then, if a group of Arab democrats came to assume that America would support a rebellion in their country today.
And yet try to imagine what would happen if an imaginary group of pro-democracy Saudis staged a street rebellion in Riyadh. No one would be prepared. No one would have ever heard of any of the rebels before. Some in the administration, Congress and the media would hail the "new democrats," just as in 1956. Arab-language radio stations might broadcast messages of encouragement to the rebels, just as in 1956.
Meanwhile, others in the administration -- alarmed by the potential for a Middle Eastern war, worried about oil supplies, horrified by the unknown rebels -- would call for maintaining the status quo, just as in 1956. The White House would mutter something about humanitarian aid, call on the U.N. -- and wind up supporting the old regime, just as in 1956.
Scholars always bang on about the debate between "realism" and "idealism" in U.S. foreign policy, but the truth is that for most of the past century Americans have been simultaneously realistic and idealistic -- in favor of democratic change and deeply wedded to status quo stability -- much to the confusion of everyone else.
Robert J. Samuelson: Public Opinion and Muddled Policies (what if we're to blame?)
Source: WaPo (11-1-06)
"Towering over Presidents and [Congress] . . . public opinion stands out, in the United States, as the great source of power, the master of servants who tremble before it."
-- James Bryce, "The American Commonwealth," 1888
The problem of American democracy is (of course) democracy. We are on the cusp of an election that commentators have already imbued with vast significance if Democrats recapture part or all of Congress -- or if they don't. But here's something that no one's saying: Regardless of who wins, it won't make much difference for most of our pressing problems. We won't have a major new budget policy, energy policy or immigration policy. The election might not even much affect the Iraq war.
In many ways, the election doesn't matter, and all the hoopla is an exercise in delusional hype. We could blame the prospect of divided government or a bipartisan leadership vacuum; both might promote paralysis. But the deeper cause is public opinion. As Bryce saw, our politicians are slaves to public opinion. Superficially, this should be reassuring. Democracy is working, because public attitudes remain the dominant influence -- not "big money" or "special interests," as many believe.
But it is not reassuring. The trouble is that public opinion is often ignorant, confused and contradictory; and so the policies it produces are often ignorant, confused and contradictory -- which means they're ineffective. The Catch-22 of American democracy is this: A government that mirrors public opinion offends public opinion by failing to do what it promises. People then conclude that the system has "failed."
The election is rightly seen as a referendum on the war. In late 2003, 67 percent of Americans thought that President Bush's invasion was the "right decision," reports the Pew Research Center; only 26 percent thought it the "wrong decision." Now views are split, 43 percent "right" and 47 percent "wrong." But it's public opinion, not the election outcome, that matters for policy. Indeed, it explains why the Democrats lack a unified position on Iraq.
Suppose that the Democrats retook Congress but that the situation in Iraq -- and public opinion -- improved. Then, Democrats would look foolish if they'd promoted a quick withdrawal. Now suppose that the Republicans kept control of Congress and that the situation in Iraq -- and public opinion -- worsened. Then, the pressure on Bush from Republicans to pull back would intensify. Either way, public opinion governs.
Aside from being fickle, public opinion also marches in many directions at once....
Facing such inconsistencies, how can government make sensible policy? Not easily.
Occasionally presidents and congresses get a free pass -- some crisis or event fosters national unity. Bush had such a moment after Sept. 11; Lyndon Johnson had one after John F. Kennedy's assassination; Franklin Roosevelt had one in his first 100 days. Otherwise, politicians can deal with public opinion in three ways: Ignore it, change it or pander to it. Politicians who choose the first often become ex-politicians. The second is hard; among recent presidents, Ronald Reagan did it best. The easiest course is to pander....
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