Month: December 2006

On Not Leaving Well Enough Alone

by tristero

A lot of folks got annoyed that I poked fun at Josh Marshall and worse, that the fun I was poking wasn’t funny at all, just mean. So let me be clear what my point was.

What I was trying to say was that Josh now sounds as shrill on the subject of the corrupt DC punditry as the rest of us. That’s all. Of course, I wasn’t disparaging Josh’s yeoman’s work on Social Security and the just as important community building among at least some liberal public intellectuals and journalists. I was merely expressing bemusement at Josh’s change in attitude. Yes, indeed, Josh, Somerby has been right for years. The discourse is so bad it truly boggles the mind. For Josh to catch on now is, how can I put it? both welcome and extremely odd. It’s not that the meme du jour of the pundit class – blaming the American people for the atrocities in Iraq – is such an escalation of stupidity in their rhetorical defense of Crawford’s Own Churchill. It’s just more of the same crap that the rest of us have been shrieking about for years now.

And there I probably should leave it. But I won’t. Not when Josh insists that “For what it’s worth, I think substantially more troops would have made a big difference earlier on.” They wouldn’t have.

Bush/Iraq was a stupid, immoral idea with no chance – except in the technical, mathematical sense – of success. The failure of people as intelligent and right on as Josh Marshall to recognize this, coupled with the inability of those of us who were right from the start to gain anything close to a respected public voice in the media all but dooms this country to repeat the Bush/Iraq war. And soon.

And that is something I am 100 percent certain I have no intention of sitting idly by and have happen again. It is my strong belief that one important component that led to the political environment that allowed Bush to start this crazy war was that well-intentioned, smart people refused to speak up when they could have. Perhaps Atrios is right, that only Powell could have prevented Bush/Iraq, but the list of people who didn’t bother trying is long. Had more people like Josh been as forceful in opposing the war as Josh has been in opposing Social Security destruction…well, who knows, but I for one would have liked to see it happen.

Josh makes his fundamental error even clearer:

I know there are a lot of people who either think that Iraq was a doable proposition that was botched or a project destined for failure no matter how it was handled. There are, needless to say, fewer and fewer in the former category. And I’d basically class myself in the latter one, if pushed. But both strike me as needlessly dogmatic viewpoints which make it harder to learn from the myriad mistakes that were made while telling us little about how we extricate ourselves from the mess.

In other words, it is counter-productive, he says, to assert dogmatically that Bush/Iraq was doomed from the start or coulda been a smashing success with more competent leadership (but he reluctantly belongs in the “impossible” category ).

Not so. As I have argued on many occasions, the failure of Bush/Iraq was a spectacular intellectual failure. From the standpoint of those who were not far-right ideologues, it was a failure to recognize immediately an absolutely crazy idea and label it as crazy before it had the chance to be taken seriously. These were no trivial, excusable blunders, but some of the worst, most easily avoidable errors of judgment in American history.

It is not dogmatic to state that there was no genuine moral justification for Bush/Iraq, and that people as sensitive as Josh and far more influential failed to realize that, or did realize it, and failed to speak out. It is not dogmatic to state that even a cursory glance at the history of democracy demonstrates that it is nearly impossible (as well as immoral) to impose democracy by force of arms and that the specific factors that enabled the rare successes were conspicuously missing in Iraq. Finally, it is not dogmatic to state that it is totally absurd to think that “better leadership” would have led to a “better result” for Bush/Iraq. Better leadership would never have seriously considered invading and conquering Iraq in the first place.

Perhaps if there was even some hint of sanity in the mainstream American discourse about foreign policy I would be less insistent on this. But the truth is that the only people who have seriously good microphones are all those people who were wrong about Bush/Iraq from the start. Until there is, at the very least, some sense that this country’s opinion leaders are prepared to listen carefully to those who got it right, I will continue to give those who got it wrong, and persist in getting matters of war and death wrong, a very hard time.

I never want to live through a repeat of 2002/03, ever, not to mention the ghastly aftermath we must now watch get far worse for at least two more years.The way I see it, one of the best ways I can help make sure that doesn’t happen is to terminate, with extreme prejudice, any attempt to let those who were wrong get off the hook, especially if they persist in continuing to misapprehend their contributing role. I’m glad that Josh is now so disgusted at the repellent fluffers in Washington that he has let himself write truthfully, even at the risk of seeming shrill. However, I am not glad that Josh still doesn’t grasp fully the deep and extremely dangerous failure of intellectual judgment that lies behind the opinion that more troops or a better president would have led to a more “desirable” outcome. After being so wrong on Bush/Iraq, a reluctant admission that if you want to be dogmatic about it then I side with the ‘impossible’ dogmatists, makes me fear that when Cheney and Bush start up in earnest over Iran, the same misjudgment will doom any attempt to oppose it.

So I will continue to call him, and others far more influential than he, on their failure of intellectual judgment until I am confident that those of us who know better are fairly represented in the Amercian public discourse.

Keeping Score

by tristero

This is something so bizarre it could come straight out of the most paranoid passages of a Thomas Pynchon novel:

Without their knowledge, millions of Americans and foreigners crossing U.S. borders in the past four years have been assigned scores generated by U.S. government computers rating the risk that the travelers are terrorists or criminals.

The travelers are not allowed to see or directly challenge these risk assessments, which the government intends to keep on file for 40 years.

The government calls the system critical to national security following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Some privacy advocates call it one of the most intrusive and risky schemes yet mounted in the name of anti-terrorism efforts.

Virtually every person entering and leaving the United States by air, sea or land is scored by the Homeland Security Department’s Automated Targeting System, or ATS. The scores are based on ATS’ analysis of their travel records and other data, including items such as where they are from, how they paid for tickets, their motor vehicle records, past one-way travel, seating preference and what kind of meal they ordered…

The Homeland Security Department called the program ”one of the most advanced targeting systems in the world” and said the nation’s ability to spot criminals and other security threats ”would be critically impaired without access to this data…”

Government officials could not say whether ATS has apprehended any terrorists…

The government notice says some or all of the ATS data about an individual may be shared with state, local and foreign governments for use in hiring decisions and in granting licenses, security clearances, contracts or other benefits. In some cases, the data may be shared with courts, Congress and even private contractors.

”Everybody else can see it, but you can’t,” Stephen Yale-Loehr, an immigration lawyer who teaches at Cornell Law school, said in an interview…

In a privacy impact assessment posted on its Web site this week, Homeland Security said ATS is aimed at discovering high-risk individuals who ”may not have been previously associated with a law enforcement action or otherwise be noted as a person of concern to law enforcement.”

Ahern said ATS does this by applying rules derived from the government’s knowledge of terrorists and criminals to the passenger’s travel records.

Ahern declined to disclose any of the rules…

The Homeland Security privacy impact statement added that ”an individual might not be aware of the reason additional scrutiny is taking place, nor should he or she” because that might compromise the ATS’ methods.

Nevertheless, Ahern said any traveler who objected to additional searches or interviews could ask to speak to a supervisor to complain. Homeland Security’s privacy impact statement said that if asked, border agents would hand complaining passengers a one-page document that describes some, but not all, of the records that agents check and refers complaints to Custom and Border Protection’s Customer Satisfaction Unit.

Homeland Security’s statement said travelers can use this office to obtain corrections to the underlying data sources that the risk assessment is based on, but not to the risk assessment itself. The risk assessment changes automatically if the source data changes, the statement explained.

”I don’t buy that at all,” said Jim Malmberg, executive director of American Consumer Credit Education Support Services, a private credit education group. Malmberg said it has been hard for citizens, including members of Congress and even infants, to stop being misidentified as terrorists because their names match those on anti-terrorism watch lists. He noted that while the government plans to keep the risk assessments for 40 years, it doesn’t intend to keep all the underlying data they are based on for that long.

I can’t help imagining the conversation between Keith and Mick after they heard about ATS, as to who has the higher score. I wouldn’t be surprised if it came to blows.

But seriously, folks, this is serious. For forty years – forty years! – your terrorist risk score will be kept on file, but not apparently the underlying data. And you have no right to see or “directly challenge” them. And it can be used in job assessments.

And did you notice – it’s easy to miss – that this program’s not only being used to identify existential threats to the country, but also for criminal activity. Like, say, getting arrested for wearing a “Bush=Terrorist” t-shirt at a shopping mall, perhaps.

Forty years.

Political Constraints

by digby

Josh Marshall is chronicling the rapidly emerging rightwing “stab in the back” meme in which George W. Churchill was betrayed by both the American and Iraqi people. Big surprise. It’s an interesting series of posts and I urge you to read them all. Here’s an excerpt from one:

Stanley Kurtz’s excuse: “The underlying problem with this war is that, from the outset, it has been waged under severe domestic political constraints. From the start, the administration has made an assessment of how large a military the public would support, and how much time the public would allow us to build democracy and then get out of Iraq. We then shaped our military and “nation building” plans around those political constraints, crafting a “light footprint” military strategy linked to rapid elections and a quick handover of power. Unfortunately, the constraints of domestic American public opinion do not match up to what is actually needed to bring stability and democracy to a country like Iraq.”

It may be a form of literary grade or concept inflation to call it irony. But the irony of this ludicrous statement is that from the outset it has been the American political opposition (the Democrats) and the internal bureaucratic opposition (sane people in the US government and military, not appointed by George W. Bush) who’ve pushed for a much larger military footprint in Iraq and much more real nation-building. These weren’t ‘domesic political constraints’. These were ideological constraints the adminstration placed on itself.

That’s true enough for those who thought the war was even feasible from the get — and there were plenty of us who didn’t think so, which Josh acknowledges. But to the extent Democrats supported the war they certainly believed that Bush should have gotten UN backing, created a large coalition, put more boots on the ground and hired smart people who knew something about nation building, none of which he did.

I had actually assumed during the run-up that Bush thought he could get a large international coalition to join him simply because he was the president of the United States and when he told countries to join us, he meant it — and they would be so impressed with his mighty codpiece and magnificent “gut” they would do as they were told. I had long believed that it was when that failed that the large scale occupation force was no longer possible. That turned out to be wrong. Bush never gave a damn about a coalition, he wanted to use Rummy’s light force and he thought that democracy would magically happen because people everywhere just wanna be free. He has been revealed to be even more of an idiot than we previously thought.

But if the current stab-in-the-back argument is that the American people should have supported the war more, perhaps the people who are making that argument should go back and look at what the American people actually thought at the time we went in. It’s not something that couldn’t have been anticipated. A majority backed the war if the US could get an international coalition together. Throughout the run-up polls said over and over again that Americans expected Bush to get UN backing. He did not feel he needed to do that, he lied repeatedly, invaded anyway and once the invasion began most Americans rallied because they felt they had no choice. They hung in longer than they had any reason to.

So Kurtz is essentially right. The public had never fully approved of the war in the first place. But I don’t know why this translates to some sort of failure on the part of the public. It’s Bush’s fault for going ahead anyway and then making the whole mid-east FUBAR. His job — and the job of his followers — was to get the public on-board. They didn’t make an honest case and now they have to deal with the consequences.

I’m sorry that these starry-eyed neocons who looked at George Bush and saw a genius are disappointed that the rest of the country didn’t support their vision. They were given more of a chance to prove themselves than dreamers and fools usually are — and they failed on a grand scale. This is what the Bushites deserve and what they should expect for ram-rodding through a war without real public support and then screwing it up royally. The families of all these dead and wounded soldiers, unfortunately, didn’t deserve this and neither did the poor Iraqis who didn’t know they were going to be guinea pigs in a 7th grade neocon thought experiment based on cartoons and psycho-babble.

Blaming the American people is an excellent political strategy, however, and I hope these conservatives keep it up. There’s nothing that betrayed voters like more than to be called stupid, cowardly and traitorous. (I know I’ve been enjoying it for the last couple of decades.) I’m sure all those independents and moderates who now see through Bush and the Republicans are going to love it too. It really clarifies your thinking.

This isn’t the 1970’s. They aren’t going to get away with blaming the cowardly public this time. There are no hippies to hate —- just millions of average, taxpaying, middle class Americans who know damned well when they’ve been lied to. And if they don’t, there are many of us out here who will remind them.

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Gooble Gobble, Gooble Gobble, We Accept Him, We Accept Him, One Of Us, One Of Us!

by tristero

Recent photo of Joshua M. Marshall courtesy T. Browning.

The scales have fallen yet farther from Josh Marshall’s eyes:

It really does seem as though the cardinals of DC punditry are constitutionally incapable of believing that George W. Bush has ever — in the real sense — gotten anything wrong or that they, the Washington establishment, has gotten anything wrong over the last six years.

I don’t like to use such words but I can only think to call the denial and buck-passing sickening. I can’t think of another word that captures the gut reaction…

…Let’s first take note that the ‘blame the American people for Bush’s screw-ups’ meme has definitely hit the big time. It’s not Bush who bit off more than he could chew or did something incredibly stupid or screwed things up in a way that defies all imagining [assert the DC punditocracy]. Bush’s ‘error’ here is not realizing in advance that the American people would betray him as he was marching into history. The ‘tragedy’ is that Bush “bit off more than the American people were willing to chew.” That just takes my breath away…

…This is noxious, risible, fetid thinking. But there it is. That’s the story they want to tell. The whole place is rotten down to the very core.

Indeed it is. And many us found DC conventional wisdom sickeningly corrupt long before nearly 3,000 American troops died and countless tens if not hundreds of thousands of Iraqis died. Had Josh truly comprehended, say, what Somerby’s been writing for years and years and years, it wouldn’t have taken Josh 1/10th so long to join us reality-based freaks. Still, welcome to the club.