Bad Arguments 101
by digby
I just heard someone say “they’ve been calling it a quagmire for years!”
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"what digby sez..."
Bad Arguments 101
by digby
I just heard someone say “they’ve been calling it a quagmire for years!”
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Hoisting The Sail
by digby
There is no more reliable arbiter of beltway conventional wisdom than Cokie Roberts. Her entire career has been built on the idea that she knows what the establishment is thinking (which the establishment then inexplicably twists into what “the people” are thinking.) She has spent her life in Washington DC and is as much a part of the firmament as the Arlington cemetary. When she speaks, the poobahs have issued an verdict. This morning on NPR she said this:
Democrats are enjoying their miseries. Jack Reed of Rhode Island said to me this week-end “we have a strong wind at our back and all we have to do is get a sail up, any sail, some sail” but they haven’t managed to do that yet.
They were interested to see how Senator Russ Feingold’s call for censure worked with the blogosphere, mainly, and also in polls. Because Democrats backed away from his call just dramatically, even Democrats like Nancy Pelosi of California didn’t want anything to do with it. But a Newsweek poll out today shows 42% of the people supporting censure including 20% of Republicans. So Democrats are feeling pretty good about where they are in all this.
Apparently the establishment needed some numbers in order to know what to think. OK. As I wrote earlier, I think some of our leaders’ natural political instincts have been hobbled by an over-reliance on strategists and pundits. But I would remind the courtier class who are advising the Democrats of what Bill Kristol said this week-end: politics is not just about running on issues people already agree with, it is trying to change public opinion. Somebody had to jump start the debate about the president’s theory of presidential infallibility and abuse of power. It’s a huge issue to millions of Americans and it’s vital that politicians of both parties recognize this.
The Newsweek poll says that 53% of the people believe it is a political ploy, but I suspect that there are more than a few Democrats within that number who are vastly relieved to see a Democrat with enough imagination to try to seize the debate and change public opinion. One can call it a political ploy (although Fiengold is one of the few guys in the congress with a real reputation for integrity) but to the base it’s a political ploy in service of bedrock principle. Democrats cannot pass legislation. They cannot force the president to change his Iraq policy. They don’t have the power to call hearings or subpeona witnesses. Even when they have hearings, the Republican chairmen refuse to put the witnesses under oath.
Political ploys are the only way the minority can make its voice heard. I have the cable blathering on in the backround most days, much of the time tuned to C-Span. There are dozens of press conferences held each week on both sides of the aisle. It’s is a very rare one that anybody sees or hears. This is no way to get your message out.
I have no idea how many people might have favored censure before Feingold put it out there. But it’s amazing that without any prior discussion at all, this large minority, including a large chunk of Republicans, were ready to agree with his motion. Or perhaps it isn’t so amazing. Kos reminds us this morning:
The Alito filibuster was supposed to be a disaster for Democrats. Somehow, their numbers didn’t suffer. Murtha was going to kill Dems by making them “look weak on defense”. But somehow, people seem to agree with him. Now, Feingold’s censure resolution is supposed to be a disaster for Democrats. Yet if that was the case, why are Republicans reacting so virulently against it? Bill Kristol admits the censure motion is hurting Bush. Meanwhile, Brit Hume’s head exploded at the resolution. Not the action of a man confident that Feingold is hurting the Democratic Party.
That’s because they know that these things aren’t hurting the Democratic party. The only party hurting right now is the Republican party.
People want to know what Democratic base really stands for? The same thing that the majority of the country stands for. We believe in the rule of law, civil liberties, civil rights and supporting the troops — all of those things are embodied in the Alito filibuster motion, the Feingold NSA wiretapping resolution and the Murtha plan. None of them were done out of an expectation that they would win passage in the congress or force the president to change course. These actions, regardless of motive, have laid down the stakes in the next election, which is why Brit Hume had an aneurysm about the proposition that the NSA wiretapping issue might actually play to the benefit of Democrats.
If that’s so, then it’s true that Republicans are going to be in for a tough time under a Democratic congress. People need to prepare for the fact that accountability is going to be on the menu. Nobody is going to be impeached over silly blow-jobs but there are some very serious matters that the Republican congress has refused to deal with. If that stirs up the GOP base, then fine. It stirs up the Democratic base too.
In any case, the Republicans are going to move their base anyway, so there’s no margin in worrying about it. (Via Joe Gandelman) I see that Fred Barnes reports that aside from the usual labeling of Democrats as traitors and cowards, the Republicans are planning to begin another assault on civil liberties in order to turn out their conservative Christian voters.
There’s another part of the 2006 Republican strategy. This spring and summer, Republican leaders in the Senate and House plan to bring up a series of issues that are popular with the Republican base of voters. The aim is to stir conservative voters and spur turnout in the November election. Just last week, House Majority Leader John Boehner and Whip Roy Blunt met with leaders of conservative groups to talk about these issues.
House Republicans, for their part, intend to seek votes on measures such as the Bush-backed constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, a bill allowing more public expression of religion, another requiring parental consent for women under 18 to get an abortion, legislation to bar all federal courts except the Supreme Court from ruling on the constitutionality of the Pledge of Allegiance, a bill to outlaw human cloning, and another that would require doctors to consider fetal pain before performing an abortion.
I assume that it will be successful with those voters, too. They tend to be very supportive of the party that articulates their views, and everyone agrees that they form an important component of the Republican base. The Republicans know what they are doing with this. They have a very sophisticated GOTV effort that significantly outperformed the Democrats in 2004:
It is … particularly disturbing that while both Republican and Independent turnout increased sizably from 2000 to 2004, Democratic turnout remained flat. We may have helped move a lot of unlikely voters, but we did not mobilize our base nearly as well as Republicans did.
Mid-terms are turn-out elections. It’s always lower than the presidential years. The Alito filibuster motion, the Murtha withdrawal plan and the Feingold resolution all serve to shake up the establishment and public opinion. But they also send a message to the base of the Democratic party that the party hears their concerns. The establishment at large can take them for granted if they choose. The Republicans won’t take their base for granted. They never do.
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The Moussaoui Memo
by tristero
Here’s a reminder in case the Bush epoch has caused you to forget why you need a competent, knowledgeable administration and not a bunch of ignorant fools and top officials who value faith over facts. Someone has to make sure the right dots are getting connected. During the spring/summer of 2001, that did not happen:
“Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, Clarke wrote, scowled and asked, ‘why we are beginning by talking about this one man, bin Laden.’ When Clarke told him no foe but al Qaeda ‘poses an immediate and serious threat to the United States,’ Wolfowitz is said to have replied that Iraqi terrorism posed ‘at least as much’ of a danger. FBI and CIA representatives backed Clarke in saying they had no such evidence.
‘I could hardly believe,’ Clarke writes, that Wolfowitz pressed the ‘totally discredited’ theory that Iraq was behind the 1993 truck bomb at the World Trade Center, ‘a theory that had been investigated for years and found to be totally untrue.'”
And sure enough, when your leaders are total morons, that leads to a clear pattern of inexcusable neglect and wasted effort:
The FBI agent who arrested Zacarias Moussaoui in August 2001 accused headquarters of criminal negligence for its refusal to investigate Moussaoui aggressively after his arrest, according to court testimony Monday.
Agent Harry Samit testified under cross-examination at Moussaoui’s trial that FBI headquarters’ refusal to follow up “prevented a serious opportunity to stop the 9/11 attacks” that killed nearly 3,000 people.
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Under cross-examination by defense attorney Edward MacMahon, Samit acknowledged that he predicted in an Aug. 18, 2001, memo that Moussaoui was a radical Islamic terrorist in a criminal conspiracy to hijack aircraft. Moussaoui ended up pleading guilty to two specific counts that Samit had explicitly predicted in his Aug. 18 memo.
Despite Samit’s urgent pleadings, FBI headquarters refused to open a criminal investigation and refused Samit’s entreaties to obtain a search warrant.
“You needed people in Washington to help you out?” MacMahon asked.
“Yes,” Samit said.
“They didn’t do that, did they?”
Samit said no.
He confirmed under questioning that he had attributed FBI inaction to “obstructionism, criminal negligence and careerism” in an earlier report.
It makes me sick to read about this. How do these people sleep at night?
update below
He Takes Questions
by digby
Someone finally asked George W. Bush the one question I’ve been wanting someone to ask since 9/11:
“Do you believe terrorism and the war in Iraq are signs of Armageddon?”
He sputtered and blinked, the audience laughed and he said: “I’ve never really thought about it that way” and “this is the first of heard of that, by the way.” And then he blathered on with his usual incoherent boilerplate, making no further reference to it openly or in religious codes speak, except to the extent he said we would militarily defend our ally Israel. I wonder how the Bosh loving legions of the Christian Right feel about that?
The questioning was quite pointed and he didn’t much like it, practically begging part of the way through for it to be over. (“How long do you people do questions around here?” and “Doesn’t anybody work in this town?”)
He claimed that he’d never said that Saddam Hussein was involved in 9/11. Where did people get the idea that it was, do you suppose?
Posted 9/6/2003
I believe that he majored in history at Yale, which is something that Yale should be very concerned with in terms of recruitment. His understanding of 20th century European history comes in at about fifth grade level.
He has said that his job is “to protect you” about 50 times. Does anyone find this paternalistic “I will protect you” stuff as creepy as I do? I thought Americans were supposed to be self reliant. I think Democrats ought to consider saying that “the president doesn’t protect the American people all by himself. He isn’t our father or our nanny. The American people, working together, protect our country.”
What’s the difference between Iraq and Iran? With Iraq there were 16 UN resolutions. (Of course, the invasion resolution to actually invade didn’t pass, but who’s counting?) Apparently, invading Iran is just a matter of getting the paperwork in order.
I did enjoy the question about domestic policy in which the questioner said that American children were facing “terrorists” in the streets every day. And then mentioned the images from Katrina and poverty and wondered what Bush was going to do about it? What do you suppose he was talking about?
His adolescent sense of humor seems more and more out of place considering the state of the world — and his presidency. People still laugh, but it is awkward now.
When it was over he looked like he really, really needed a drink.
Oh and in case you haven’t heard, we’re fighting them over there so we don’t have to fight them over here, the oceans don’t protect us anymore, we have an enemy that hides in cave and 9/11 changed everything. And his job is to make decisions and protect us.
Update: Jonathan Schwartz at A Tiny Revolution noticed a few months ago that Bush’s desire to protect us is very similar to Saddam’s professed desire to protect the Iraqi people. It’s one of those “I’m doing this for your own good, it hurts me more than it hurts you” kind of deals. no wonder I find it so creepy.
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Paint It Black
by tristero
Welcome to another Monday in Bushland. Let’s catch up on two recent minor little incidents you may have missed celebrating three years of success in Iraq. What prevents either of them from being characterized a scandal of nation-shaking proportions should be patently obvious by now: neither involved, as far as we know, coitus per os.
The new account reveals the extent to which the unit members mistreated prisoners months before and after the photographs of abuse from Abu Ghraib were made public in April 2004, and it helps belie the original Pentagon assertions that abuse was confined to a small number of rogue reservists at Abu Ghraib.
And Black Bag Jobs:
n December, the New York Times disclosed the NSA’s warrantless electronic surveillance program, resulting in an angry reaction from President Bush. It has not previously been disclosed, however, that administration lawyers had cited the same legal authority to justify warrantless physical searches. But in a little-noticed white paper submitted by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to Congress on January 19 justifying the legality of the NSA eavesdropping, Justice Department lawyers made a tacit case that President Bush also has the inherent authority to order such physical searches. In order to fulfill his duties as commander in chief, the 42-page white paper says, “a consistent understanding has developed that the president has inherent constitutional authority to conduct warrantless searches and surveillance within the United States for foreign intelligence purposes.”
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It could not be learned whether the Bush administration has cited the legal authority to carry out such searches. A former marine, Mueller has waged a quiet, behind-the-scenes battle since 9/11 to protect his special agents from legal jeopardy as a result of aggressive new investigative tactics backed by the White House and the Justice Department, government officials say. During Senate testimony about the NSA surveillance program, however, Gonzales was at pains to avoid answering questions about any warrantless physical surveillance activity that may have been authorized by the Justice Department.
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At least one defense attorney representing a subject of a terrorism investigation believes he was the target of warrantless clandestine searches. On Sept. 23, 2005–nearly three months before the Times broke the NSA story–Thomas Nelson wrote to U.S. Attorney Karin Immergut in Oregon that in the previous nine months, “I and others have seen strong indications that my office and my home have been the target of clandestine searches.” In an interview, Nelson said he believes that the searches resulted from the fact that FBI agents accidentally gave his client classified documents and were trying to retrieve them. Nelson’s client is Soliman al-Buthe, codirector of a now defunct charity named al-Haramain, who was indicted in 2004 for illegally taking charitable donations out of the country. The feds also froze the charity’s assets, alleging ties to Osama bin Laden. The documents that were given to him, Nelson says, may prove that al-Buthe was the target of the NSA surveillance program.
The searches, if they occurred, were anything but deft. Late at night on two occasions, Nelson’s colleague Jonathan Norling noticed a heavyset, middle-aged, non-Hispanic white man claiming to be a member of an otherwise all-Hispanic cleaning crew, wearing an apron and a badge and toting a vacuum. But, says Norling, “it was clear the vacuum was not moving.” Three months later, the same man, waving a brillo pad, spent some time trying to open Nelson’s locked office door, Norling says. Nelson’s wife and son, meanwhile, repeatedly called their home security company asking why their alarm system seemed to keep malfunctioning. The company could find no fault with the system.In October, Immergut wrote to Nelson reassuring him that the FBI would not target terrorism suspects’ lawyers without warrants and, even then, only “under the most exceptional circumstances,” because the government takes attorney-client relationships “extremely seriously.” Nelson nevertheless filed requests, under the Freedom of Information Act, with the NSA. The agency’s director of policy, Louis Giles, wrote back, saying, “The fact of the existence or nonexistence of responsive records is a currently and properly classified matter.”
Liberal Bias In The Washington Post
by tristero
Propagating secularist creation myths:.
Scientists said yesterday they have found the best evidence yet supporting the theory that about 13.7 billion years ago, the universe suddenly expanded from the size of a marble to the size of the cosmos in less than a trillionth of a second.
And not a word of balance from the other side, as if the sincere faith of millions of Americans in a Christian God didn’t matter at all to the Post’s editors.
I just hate it when the media reports carefully vetted scientific data as fact and not as just one of many valid points of view. I’m not asking for them to ignore the opinions of these so-called scientists, but they really should report the fact there’s a lot of controversy about whether this kind of evidence is valid. LIke, were you there, huh, Mr. Hotshot Washington Post? As if this ludicrous nonsense – a marble blows up like a baloon to become the entire universe in a trillionth of a second – is more plausible than Genesis? Give me a break!
Have some scepticism, people!
Changing Public Opinion
by digby
John Amato has the video up of Brit Hume having a hyperventilating hissy fit this morning on Fox news at Bill Kristol’s assertion that Feingold’s motion is good for Democrats. Wow.
Brit seemed unusually concerned that Mara Liasson, Bill Kristol and Juan Williams all indicated that Feingold’s move was either principled or good politics (or both) didn’t he? And then he went completely ballistic when Juan Williams challenged his misleading assertion that the public is “surprisingly” “astonishingly” “overwhelmingly” in favor when asked “should we listen in on al Qaeda communications in the U.S.” — by pointing out that it’s the illegality of the program that concerns people.
Hmmm. Brit’s a bit emotional on this issue. In fact, he sounded downright defensive about it, which is very puzzling. The last I heard, this was great for Republicans, Democrats look silly, they’re rallying the GOP base and alienating the middle. Just yesterday it seems I’d heard that Feingold is going to cost the Democrats the election. Why get so upset when everyone who’s anyone agrees that this is NSA wiretapping is such a winner for the Republicans?
Now, you don’t suppose that the Republicans have been bluffing about this issue, do you? It’s a coincidence, I’m sure that they cracked the whip on Lincoln Chafee who’s running in an extremely anti-Bush state. They can’t worried that those numbers that show 25% percent of Republicans favor censure mean that this thing could actually motivate Democrats more than Republicans in the fall, can they?
Nah. He just had a little too much coffee this morning.
I think it’s worthwhile to note what Bill Kristol said after Brit’s little tirade:
This is smart for the Democratic Party. It is going straight at a strength of president Bush. You don’t get into politics only to play at issues where you already have public opinion on your side. He’s trying to change public opinion. I disagree with it, and I hope he doesn’t succeed, but he’s making the case that it’s illegal, he’s going to have editorial pages backing him up, and the Republicans are just whining that “oooh he’s just trying to censure the president.” They aren’t making a substantive defense of the program.
It’s a tough defense to make, once you start getting into the legality of it, as Hume’s sputtering anger showed.
When one party is as unpopular as the president the the Republicans are now, the public is open to hearing things they haven’t been willing to hear in a long time. Our polarized electorate suddenly isn’t so polarized anymore, even though the gasbags refuse to admit it. For the first time in a long time, some people are willing to give our side a listen. It is vitally important that the Democrats use this opportunity to draw the country back from the hysteria that overtook it after 9/11, an emotional conflagration stoked by an opportunistic administration and a slavering media. That hysteria permitted them to normalize preventive war, torture and kidnapping — and assert a radical, unconstitutional view of the role of the president in our government, none of which the country signed on to because it was all done in secret. This simply has to stop, and people need to start seeing Democrats stand up and declare “enough is enough.”
There has never been a greater time or a greater hunger for our political leadershihp to offer a straightforward, principled way back from the feeling that the country is hurtling out of control. The censure motion puts out a marker that the end of this wild ride is almost over.
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Please Steal From MORE Of My Posts! I Don’t Mind In The Slightest!
by tristero
Sorry, folks. I just can’t resist. Jennifer Loven of AP today (March 19, 2006):
“Some look at the challenges in Iraq and conclude that the war is lost and not worth another dime or another day,” President Bush said recently.
Another time he said, “Some say that if you’re Muslim you can’t be free.”
“There are some really decent people,” the president said earlier this year, “who believe that the federal government ought to be the decider of health care … for all people.”
Of course, hardly anyone in mainstream political debate has made such assertions.
When the president starts a sentence with “some say” or offers up what “some in Washington” believe, as he is doing more often these days, a rhetorical retort almost assuredly follows.
The device usually is code for Democrats or other White House opponents. In describing what they advocate, Bush often omits an important nuance or substitutes an extreme stance that bears little resemblance to their actual position.
He typically then says he “strongly disagrees” — conveniently knocking down a straw man of his own making.
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Because the “some” often go unnamed, Bush can argue that his statements are true in an era of blogs and talk radio. Even so, “‘some’ suggests a number much larger than is actually out there,” said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania.
A specialist in presidential rhetoric, Wayne Fields of Washington University in St. Louis, views it as “a bizarre kind of double talk” that abuses the rules of legitimate discussion.
Here is a three sentence excerpt of what he [Bush] actually said in that speech:
[T]here are some who would like to rewrite history — revisionist historians is what I like to call them. Saddam Hussein was a threat to America and the free world in ’91, in ’98, in 2003. He continually ignored the demands of the free world, so the United States and friends and allies acted.
This short phrase is packed with a breathtaking array of logical fallacies, grammatical errors, lies by omission, distortions, and grotesquely unfair attacks. The most egregious tactic is, of course, projection . As Bush rewrites the WMD search out of history, he has the unmitigated gall to accuse his opponents of rewriting history.
Bush also uses personalization here: ‘revisionist historians is what I like to call them.’ In a very interesting article in The Nation this week, Renana Brooks discusses the extraordinary amount that Bush personalizes. While The Nation article is not available online, a similar article on Brooks’s website notes that personalization is the ‘hallmark’ of an abusive personality. And, Brooks notes, Bush uses personalization all the time, for example in his speech to Congress immediately post 9/11: ‘I will not falter, I will not tire, I will not fail.’
In addtion, Bush employs one of his favorite constructions in the above quote: ‘There are some who…’ Usually, Bush uses the ‘some who’ technique merely to exaggerate an opponent’s position (the straw man) as ,for example, here, regarding tax cuts: ‘Some members of Congress support tax relief but say my proposal is too big’ . It is rather rare for Bush to combine the straw man with projection, and for good reason. The purpose of a straw man is to create an easily refuted argument. If that straw man is, in fact, a projection of your own position, you are saying that your argument is incredibly weak.
Also, Tristero, June 1, 2003:
And did you catch that straw man towards the end? “Some on the left, I guess are saying force in Iran…” Common Bush construction.
I’m quite serious: if you can use something I wrote in a blog, steal it. Make it your own; don’t bother crediting me if you don’t want to. I’m perfectly delighted! And you don’t have to wait three plus years, you know.
Hat tip to Jeff at Protein Wisdom who really is exactly as Atrios describes him.
[Update: Needlenose notes that when you have arguments with non-existent people, there are some (hah hah!) who will rightly question your sanity.]
[Update: There are some – I just love it! – who think I was seriously accusing an AP reporter of slogging through my three-year-old blogposts looking for story ideas to rip off. To clarify (I hope): I’m sure she wasn’t; obviously I was joking around about that. What’s no joke is that, apparently, it took more than three years before someone in the MSM noticed this obsessive rhetorical tic of Bush’s. If anyone knows of an earlier discussion of the “there are some who” construction, by all means lemme know. When I wrote my posts, I knew of none. I don’t think even Renanna Brooks pointed to them in the Nation article I mentioned.]
For Republicans, Bad News Is Good News. And Good News Is Good News.
by tristero
It’s been blogged around, but it’s too great to pass up. Jamison Foser::
…NBC’s Matt Lauer made an extraordinary claim this week. Referring to Bush’s approval ratings — which seem to reach a new low every day — Lauer asked Tim Russert:
LAUER: These approval numbers, Tim, are they in some ways a blessing in disguise for Republicans in these midterm elections? Because, basically, they can look and say, ‘Look, I don’t have a popular president here. I can turn my back on that president, or even oppose that president going into these elections and stem the tide of this voter anger.’
Think about that for a moment: Lauer suggests that Bush’s low approval rating is a good thing for Republican candidates, because now, they can run away from him. We assume Lauer would agree that it would be a positive for Republican candidates if Bush had a high approval rating. What, then, is left? Can anything be bad news for Republicans?
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It’s about time media stop portraying every new controversy as a danger to Democrats, and start recognizing that these things are threats to Republicans: they’re the people in charge of a government widely seen as incompetent and corrupt; they’re the party led by a horribly unpopular president; and they’re the people who pushed a soundly rejected Social Security privatization scheme. And yet, media see everything as an opportunity for them, and a danger for Democrats. Osama bin Laden may be dead? Good news for Republicans: They got bin Laden! New tapes prove bin Laden is still alive? Good news for Republicans: It reminds people of the threat of terrorism! Democrats don’t criticize Bush? Good news for Republicans: Democrats are timid! Democrats do criticize Bush? Good news for Republicans: Democrats are shrill!
Enough.
The Boundries Of Our Power
by digby
I’m glad to see Steve Clemons being quoted saying this in today’s harsh Philadelphia Inquirer editorial:
Before Iraq, said Steven C. Clemons, a useful mystique surrounded the strength of the United States. Clemons heads foreign policy studies at the New America Foundation.
Rogue nations such as Iran didn’t know the boundaries of our power. This blundering war of choice in Iraq has revealed them.
I’ve been saying this for a long time and it still seems to me to be the most salient strategic argument for not going into Iraq after 9/11. Back in February 2004 I wrote:
I get the impression from casual conversation and reading the papers that a lot of Americans understand that Junior lied to get us into Iraq, but they don’t think it really hurt anything. In fact, since Saddam was a prick and it didn’t really cost us much to take him out (well, except for the loss of life and the billions spent), it was a pretty good thing to do, on balance. Kicking a little butt after 9/11 probably sent a message we needed to send.
The problem with this is that they don’t understand what a huge error in judgment the Iraq operation was in terms of our long term security and readiness. Nor do they understand the extent to which we damaged our alliances and how dangerous it was to blow our credibility at a time like this.
[…]
… Wes Clark and others made the argument some time ago that Iraq was a distraction from the real threat and it has been said by many that the invasion would lead to more recruitment of terrorists. And, there have been other discussions about the effects of a stretched thin military of reserves and national guard troops. But, I haven’t heard any talk about what an enormous amount of damage has been done by the conscious exposure of our intelligence services as paper tigers.
Regardless of whether they hyped, sexed up or pimped out the intelligence on Iraq, the fact is that by invading Iraq the way we did and being proved complete asses now that no WMD have been discovered, one of our best defenses has been completely destroyed. It may have always been nothing but a pretense that we had hi-tech, super duper satellites with x-ray vision and all-knowing eavesdropping devices that can hear a pin drop half a world away but it was a very useful pretense. Nobody knew exactly what we were capable of. Now they do. It appears to everyone on the planet that our vaunted intelligence services couldn’t find water even if they fell off of a fucking aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf.
It’s this kind of thing that makes really crazy wackos like Kim Jong Il make mistakes. When a hugely powerful country like the United States proves to the entire world that it is not as powerful as everyone thought, petty tyrants and ambitious generals tend to get excited. This is why mighty nations should never fight wars unless they absolutely have to. It is always better to have enemies wonder whether they are as omnipotent as they appear. They should not risk proving otherwise unless they have no choice.
The Bush administration (and frankly, many in the country) believed that it was necessary to make a strong show of force in order to deter more terrorist attacks.It didn’t matter where, just that it was done. But Rumsfeld and Cheney and Wolfowitz and others who had been nurturing ever more bizarre, ivory tower theories of American power over two decades believed that it would be better to do it with fewer troops than the professionals considered necessary. Not finding WMD was never considered a serious problem, because they had never really felt it would make a difference one way or the other. Indeed, on some levels, it was better if they didn’t. To prove to our enemies that even if we lie, even if we send in a handful of troops, even if we don’t prepare and even if we go it alone with only Great Britain and Poland as our allies, we still win — well, that’s power.
(They have used this theory of power quite effectively in domestic politics. They prefer to win with a slight majority and then declare a great victory, rub the other side’s nose in it, because it creates a sense of helplessness to constantly lose narrowly.)
Take another look at that famous comment by the anonymous Bush aide in the New York Times magazine article by Ron Susskind:
The aide said that guys like me were ”in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who ”believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ”That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. ”We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
This was not metaphorical. They literally believed that they could create their own reality. I don’t think people really understand that. And why wouldn’t they? It’s what they had done for some years with great success in this country.
It’s their worldview. They believe that if the act like victors, if they say they are strong, if they procalim victory — then it’s true.
The mantra on the right remains that everything changed after 9/11. (Dick Cheney said it again today.) Let’s assume that’s correct. If so, then undertaking this war was a recklessly dangerous experiment in psychological warfare that failed and left this country much weaker than it was before 9/11. All this money spent, all this fighting, all this messianic freedom rhetoric has actually made this country weaker than it has been at any time since the end of WWII. We have proven that we are a befuddled, undisciplined giant that allowed a radical political faction with half-baked delusions of grandeur to hijack the country. Either we make a precipitous course correction pretty soon, or the rest of the world will start banding together to get us under control.
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