Month: January 2007

Learning Too Much

by digby

Jonathan Chait misses the point with this article today in TNR:

I don’t want to accuse American doves of rooting for the United States to lose in Iraq, because I know they love their country and understand the dire consequences of defeat. But the urge to gloat is powerful, and some of them do seem to be having a grand time in the wake of being vindicated.

Radar magazine recently published an article bemoaning the fact that pro-war liberal pundits have not been drummed out of the profession for their error. In it, lefty foreign policy guru Jonathan Schell sniffs, “There doesn’t seem to be a rush to find the people who were right about Iraq and install them in the mainstream media.”

Being right about something is a fairly novel experience for Schell, and he’s obviously enjoying it immensely. But before we genuflect to Schell’s wisdom, it’s worth recalling that his own record of prognostication is not exactly perfect.

He goes on to discuss how many times he thinks Schell has been wrong, which is supposed to somehow prove his point. But the Radar article shows something else. It’s not just that war war hawks have been richly rewarded for being wrong — war critics have in many cases been punished. Chait himself is a good example of one who benefitted at the expense of someone who was right — he’s taken the op-ed slot at the LA Times that was held for years by Robert Sheer, who was a fierce critic of the administration and the war.

Chait uses the example of the Democrats in 1992 to further make his point:

Or go back to the last war we fought with Iraq. Schell insisted that we could force Iraq to leave Kuwait with sanctions alone, rather than by using military force. But the years that followed that war made it clear just how impotent that tool was. Saddam Hussein endured more than a decade of sanctions rather than give up a weapons of mass destruction program that turned out to be nonexistent. If sanctions weren’t enough to make him surrender his imaginary weapons, I think we can safely say they wouldn’t have been enough to make him surrender a prized, oil-rich conquest.

Most liberals made the same argument as Schell in 1990, and as subsequent years exposed the silliness of the claim, many of them were humbled. Indeed, most Democrats in the Senate voted against the Persian Gulf War, and that vote disqualified many of them from running for president in 1992. The presidential nomination went to a governor, Bill Clinton, who didn’t have to vote on the war, and he selected as his running mate then-Senator Al Gore, one of a handful of Democrats who supported it.

This was why so many of the presidential aspirants (and pundits?) voted for the Iraq war. They were fighting the last one and that most certainly was a mistake. And it will continue to be a mistake if reflexively supporting a war is considered the smart move. Despite Chait’s glib description of Saddam’s imaginary nucelar arsenal, it’s impossible to prove a negative. We will never know if sanctions might have worked in 1991, all we know is that the limited war we opted for instead was successful. (Unfortunately it also resulted in a bunch of Iraq obsessives who finally got their chance to “finish the job” — and here we are.) Which is where Chait’s argument really breaks down. He entitles his piece “Were you right about the last war? Who cares.”

Who cares indeed? But we aren’t talking about the last war, are we? We are talking about the current war, the one which these war hawks supported and for which they continue to set forth absurd solutions to the mess its become (like reinstalling Saddam Hussein.) As much as these guys want to say that it doesn’t matter how we got here — it does. In his opening sentence, Chait cutely suggests that people who were against the war are rooting for defeat, but doesn’t seem to see the corollary — those who supported the war refuse to admit that it’s hopeless.

Certainly nobody expects someone to be right all the time and nobody says that someone who was wrong about the war cannot ever speak in public again. But why they should be rewarded with big book contracts about foreign policy and op-ed columns where they continue, day after day, to kick the ball down the field, give it a surge or one more Friedman Unit is the question. Iraq is the biggest issue of our time. It’s happening right this minute. At what point does credibility become an issue in the here and now?

Nobody’s perfect, but in the perverse incentive structure that exists in the punditocrisy, it’s clear you are always better off being a war hawk and being wrong than being a war critic and being right. That’s a problem and it’s one of the reasons why we are in this mess today.

Chait ends his piece saying that he hopes we’ll learn lessons from Iraq but he’s afraid we’ll learn too much. That seems unlikely.

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The Decider Decides

by digby

President Bush, facing opposition from both parties over his plan to send more troops to Iraq, said he has the authority to act no matter what Congress wants.

“I fully understand they could try to stop me from doing it. But I’ve made my decision. And we’re going forward,” Bush told CBS'”60 Minutes” in an interview to air Sunday night.

Vice President Dick Cheney asserted that lawmakers’ criticism will not influence Bush’s plans and he dismissed any effort to “run a war by committee.”

“The president is the commander in chief. He’s the one who has to make these tough decisions,” Cheney said.

[…]

“This is an existential conflict,” Cheney said. “It is the kind of conflict that’s going to drive our policy and our government for the next 20 or 30 or 40 years. We have to prevail and we have to have the stomach for the fight long term.”

The White House also said Sunday that Iranians are aiding the insurgency in Iraq and the U.S. has the authority to pursue them because they “put our people at risk.”

“We are going to need to deal with what Iran is doing inside Iraq,” national security adviser Stephen Hadley said.

Added Cheney: “Iran is fishing in troubled waters inside Iraq.”

The U.S. military in Baghdad said five Iranians arrested in northern Iraq last week were connected to an Iranian Revolutionary Guard faction that funds and arms insurgents in Iraq.

“We do not want them doing what they can to destabilize the situation inside Iraq,” Cheney said.

Bush’s revised war strategy seeks to isolate Iran and Syria, which the U.S. has accused of fueling attacks in Iraq. The president also says Iran and Syria have not done enough to block terrorists from entering Iraq over their borders.

“We know there are jihadists moving from Syria into Iraq. … We know also that Iran is supplying elements in Iraq that are attacking Iraqis and attacking our forces,” Hadley said.

“What the president made very clear is these are activities that are going on in Iraq that are unacceptable. They put our people at risk. He said very clearly that we will take action against those. We will interdict their operations, we will disrupt their supply lines, we will disrupt these attacks,” Hadley said.

“We are going to need to deal with what Iran is doing inside Iraq.”

Iran’s government denied the five detainees were involved in financing and arming insurgents and said they should be released.

Hadley asserted that if Iranians in Iraq “are doing things that are putting are people at risk, of course we have the authority to go after them and protect our people.”

So the Iranians are after our troops. Condi said so last week. Cheney and Hadley are saying it today. Sounds like CB (cassus belli) talk to me. We can’t wait for the Iranians to shoot the American troops with smoking mushrooms. Or something.

I have long said that the Republicans are undemocratic, but now they’re just coming right out and saying it: democracy is all well and good until the people and their representatives object to what the president is doing at which point the people and their representatives become a superfluous “committee.” They have interpreted the words “commander in chief” to mean that the constitution gives the president dictatorial powers during “wartime” (which the president defines.)

These are two dangerous and selfish men who aren’t running for office and so have no political constraints. Not even a 30% approval rating or 12% support for this decision has made them think twice. They are completely confident that history will vindicate them.

They are what impeachment was designed for, I’m afraid, although I doubt there’s time to build a case, what with the endless executive privilege claims and stonewalling. (I don’t rule it out, naturally — let a thousand oversight hearings bloom and follow the evidence where it leads.) But whether they are ultimately impeached or not, it’s clear that they are rogue executives who are impervious to the normal limits that inhibit decent men and political animals. This can’t just be swept under the rug.

Bush made it clear a long time ago when he said to a citizen on a rope line: “Who cares what you think?” And when he quipped “A dictatorship would be a lot easier, as long as I’m the dictator,” he wasn’t really joking.

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No Progress

And now for some even better news:

Intel director John Negroponte gave Congress a sobering assessment last week of the continued threats from groups like Al Qaeda and Hizbullah. But even gloomier comments came from Henry Crumpton, the outgoing State Department terror coordinator. An ex-CIA operative, Crumpton told NEWSWEEK that a worldwide surge in Islamic radicalism has worsened recently, increasing the number of potential terrorists and setting back U.S. efforts in the terror war. “Certainly, we haven’t made any progress,” said Crumpton. “In fact, we’ve lost ground.” He cites Iraq as a factor; the war has fueled resentment against the United States.

Wow. Who could have seen that one coming?

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Pick Up A Paper, Bozo

by digby

President Bush on Saturday challenged lawmakers skeptical of his new Iraq plan to propose their own strategy for stopping the violence in Baghdad.

“To oppose everything while proposing nothing is irresponsible,” Bush said.

Oh George, shove it. Really.

There’s the Murtha plan, the Biden plan, the Baker-Hamilton plan, the Levin-Reed plan — and that’s just off the top of my head.

There are plenty of plans, all of which Bush thinks are “flaming turds” because they don’t allow him to pretend he is Winston Churchill now that he’s completely screwed everything up — as he always does.

Bush is only listening to Dick Cheney, nutball radio talk show hosts and neocon fantasists at this point because they continue to tell him that he is a glorious leader who is saving the world from the evil ones. He thinks he’s Truman, which is really funny since Truman is known for his saying “the buck stops here” and Junior Codpiece has never taken responsibility for anything in his life.

There are plenty of plans, any of which are better than this completely absurd escalation that nobody in America or Iraq (except John McCain and the Last Honest Man) wants.

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Mistakenly Aggressive

by digby

In fact, administration officials (anonymous due to diplomatic sensitivities) concede that Bush’s Iran language may have been overly aggressive, raising unwarranted fears about military strikes on Tehran. Instead, they say, Bush was trying to warn Iran to keep its operatives out of Iraq, and to reassure Gulf allies—including Saudi Arabia—that the United States would protect them against Iranian aggression. A senior administration official, not authorized to speak on the record, says the policy is part of the new Iraq offensive.

Please. I know these people are dumb, but even they aren’t this dumb.

It is obvious that they are trying to provoke Iran into some kind of Gulf of Tonkin incident. After all, Bush is known to think along these lines. You’ll recall that after the invasion the memo outlining the details of the January 31, 2003 meeting between Bush and Blair was leaked:

The memo also shows that the president and the prime minister acknowledged that no unconventional weapons had been found inside Iraq. Faced with the possibility of not finding any before the planned invasion, Mr. Bush talked about several ways to provoke a confrontation, including a proposal to paint a United States surveillance plane in the colors of the United Nations in hopes of drawing fire, or assassinating Mr. Hussein.

And yet everyone is supposed to believe that they didn’t mean to “raise unwarranted fears” about this new war, even with their inexplicable mention of patriot missiles and the fact that carrier groups are on their way to the region. Uh huh.

Normally, I would say that I hope the Iranians don’t take the bait. But that’s foolish. If they don’t take the bait, the administration will just make something up and say “you can believe your president or you can believe your eyes.” That’s what they do.

Update: Commenter Noen points to this article by Robert Parry at Consortium News who reminds us that Bush seemed to freak out Brian Williams and Tim Russert in his pre-speech briefing at the white house:

Commenting about the briefing on MSNBC after Bush’s nationwide address, NBC’s Washington bureau chief Tim Russert said “there’s a strong sense in the upper echelons of the White House that Iran is going to surface relatively quickly as a major issue – in the country and the world – in a very acute way.”

Russert and NBC anchor Brian Williams depicted this White House emphasis on Iran as the biggest surprise from the briefing as Bush stepped into the meeting to speak passionately about why he is determined to prevail in the Middle East.

“The President’s inference was this: that an entire region would blow up from the inside, the core being Iraq, from the inside out,” Williams said, paraphrasing Bush.

Despite the already high cost of the Iraq War, Bush also defended his decision to invade Iraq and to eliminate Saddam Hussein by arguing that otherwise “he and Iran would be in a race to acquire a nuclear bomb and if we didn’t stop him, Iran would be going to Pakistan or to China and things would be much worse,” Russert said.

If Russert’s account is correct, there could be questions raised about whether Bush has lost touch with reality and may be slipping back into the false pre-invasion intelligence claims about Hussein threatening the United States with “a mushroom cloud.”

[…]

While avoiding any overt criticism of Bush’s comments about an imaginary Iraqi-Iranian arms race, Russert suggested that the news executives found the remarks perplexing.

“That’s the way he sees the world,” Russert explained. “His rationale, he believes, for going into Iraq still was one that was sound.”

MSNBC’s Chris Matthews then interjected, “And it could be the rationale for going into Iran at some point.”

Russert paused for a few seconds before responding, “It’s going to be very interesting to watch that issue and we have to cover it very, very carefully and very exhaustively.”

Well, that would be a first.

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Banana Republic

by digby

What’s with all the military spying inside the US? Maybe the Pentagon ought to spend more time gathering intelligence in Iraq and Afghanistan and leave the spying on US citizens to the FBI, DHS, INS, DEA, ATF and state and local police agencies. I think they can handle the illegal wiretapping, mailreading and bank account tracking all by themselves.

Here’s another troubling sign:

Deep into an updated Army manual, the deletion of 10 words has left some national security experts wondering whether government lawyers are again asserting the executive branch’s right to wiretap Americans without a court warrant.

The manual, described by the Army as a “major revision” to intelligence-gathering guidelines, addresses policies and procedures for wiretapping Americans, among other issues.

The original guidelines, from 1984, said the Army could seek to wiretap people inside the United States on an emergency basis by going to the secret court set up by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, known as FISA, or by obtaining certification from the attorney general “issued under the authority of section 102(a) of the Act.”

That last phrase is missing from the latest manual, which says simply that the Army can seek emergency wiretapping authority pursuant to an order issued by the FISA court “or upon attorney general authorization.” It makes no mention of the attorney general doing so under FISA.

Bush administration officials said that the wording change was insignificant, adding that the Army would follow FISA requirements if it sought to wiretap an American.

But the manual’s language worries some national security experts. “The administration does not get to make up its own rules,” said Steven Aftergood, who runs a project on government secrecy for the Federation of American Scientists.

[…]

Like several other national security experts, Mr. Aftergood said the revised guidelines could suggest that Army lawyers had adopted the legal claim that the executive branch had authority outside the courts to conduct wiretaps.

But Thomas A. Gandy, a senior Army counterintelligence official who helped develop the guidelines, said the new wording did not suggest a policy change. The guidelines were intended to give Army intelligence personnel more explicit and, in some cases, more restrictive guidance than the 1984 regulations, partly to help them respond to new threats like computer hackers.

“This is all about doing right and following the rules and protecting the civil liberties of folks,” Mr. Gandy said. “It seeks to keep people out of trouble.”

And up is down and black is white.

This is bureaucratic buck passing that keeps the military perpetrators out of trouble by leaving the full responsibility with the Attorney General who they consider to be the unitary law enforcement officer of the unitary executive who claims unlimited power to wiretap without any kind of oversight. That would be how “doing right” is defined in our brave new world.

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No Soul

by poputonian

President Bush has an urge
To go on a psychotic-fed splurge
Like back in his school-boy class
When he exploded a poor frog’s ass
He’ll fix this urge with a surge

He’s the presidential rampager
He’ll use the troops as a wager
To bet that he’s right
That it’s worth it to fight
To save his ass from the Haguer

But the president has dug up a hole
That will end the Bush family role
As the walls cave in
Where words can’t spin
To bury the man with no soul

So we’re tired of hearin’ him preach
About freedom and liberty’s reach
To the far distant land
Of oil and sand
Instead, it’s time to impeach

From The Department Of Hey! Y’Never Know!

by tristero

From The New Republic:

No one is in a position to say for sure whether or not the new focus on counter-insurgency and its implementation in Bagdad and Anbar province is going to work.

Wrong. I’m in a position to say that it wont work.

How do I know? For an American escalation to have even the slightest chance of a positive outcome in Iraq, everything that history, psychology, and personal experience teaches us about human behavior would have to be wrong. Since that is not the case, the escalation will succeed only in increasing the misery of American and Iraqi mothers while exacerbating an intensifying civil war.

But if there is the slightest glimmer of hope in these grim times, it lies in part in the learning that has been going on in the army.

And the army, from single troops to generals, has learned – although truth be told, they knew this before the invasion – that an escalation will only make things worse.

It may be that the accumulated weight of past mistakes is too great to overcome. But perhaps not.

And it may be that I will lose the $50,000,000 state lottery. But perhaps not. Better buy $20,000 worth of tickets. Hey, y’never know!

Oh, and Jeff? Since you’re willing to entertain the notion an escalation is a good idea, why don’t you encourage your students at U Maryland to join the growing movement among privileged youth to enlist? They could come back from Iraq in one piece.

But perhaps not.

Saturday Night At The Movies

Life During Wartime: A Fantasy Getaway

By Dennis Hartley

In 2001, Mexican writer-director Guillermo del Toro used the Spanish Civil War as a backdrop for his ghost story “The Devil’s Backbone”. Six years later, del Toro has returned to the tumultuous Franco era, this time with a twist of dark fantasy in his new Spanish-language film, “Pan’s Labyrinth“.

12-year old newcomer Ivana Bacquero delivers an impressive, nuanced performance as the film’s central character Ofelia, an intelligent, introverted girl on the verge of puberty who still clings to her childhood fascination with fairy tales. She and her very pregnant mother have just set up quarters with her new stepfather Captain Vidal (the always brilliant Sergi Lopez), a brutal, sadistic Fascist officer charged with mopping up stubborn rebel forces entrenched in the Spanish countryside.

With nothing resembling love or affection forthcoming from the black-hearted Vidal, and with her mother becoming increasingly bedridden due to a difficult pregnancy, Ofelia finds an escape valve by retreating ever deeper into a personal fantasy world, which she enters through an imaginary gate in a nearby garden. This is not necessarily Alice through the looking glass, as you might think; this is a much darker world of personified demons and monsters borne from Ofelia’s subconscious take on the real-life horrors being perpetrated by her truly monstrous stepfather and his Fascist henchmen.

In certain respects, the film reminded me of 1973’s (much more subtle) “Spirit of the Beehive“, also set in Franco’s Spain, and likewise depicting a lonely young girl retreating into a private fantasy world in response to feelings of estrangement from her family.

While there are also some parallels here to the likes of “Alice In Wonderland”, “Spirited Away”, and “The Secret Garden”, be advised that this is not your garden variety feel-good fairy tale with a warm and fuzzy ending that you want to watch with the kids. The fantasy sequences are closer in tone to Grimm morbidity than to Tolkien whimsy; and del Toro pulls no punches depicting the real horror and suffering that takes place during wartime.

In the visual department, the director once again displays an admirable talent for seamlessly blending wildly imaginative production design and prosthetics to create a vivid fantasy world (del Toro’s resume includes Mimic, Blade II and Hellboy.)

I have a caveat: if you find depictions of soldiers being tortured and malevolent violence directed against women and children upsetting, proceed with caution. (I am aware that no decent human being in their right mind finds that kind of thing much fun to watch in the first place, but I see the potential for more sensitive viewers to become quite distressed).

War is unhealthy for children: The Chronicles of Narnia , The Tin Drum, Forbidden Games,Grave of the Fireflies , Hope and Glory, Au Revoir Les Enfants, Empire of the Sun, Two Women, Sophie’s Choice, The Diary of Anne Frank.

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Sharkskin Suits

by digby

While the government is digging around in your bank accounts for god knows what reasons, they have also decided that it’s better to let corporations off easy when it’s determined that they owe taxes.

The country is going broke and they are doing this:

Top officials at the Internal Revenue Service are pushing agents to prematurely close audits of big companies with agreements to have them pay only a fraction of the additional taxes that could be collected, according to dozens of I.R.S. employees who say that the policy is costing the government billions of dollars a year.

“It’s catch and release,” said Douglas R. Johnson, an I.R.S. auditor in Colorado for three decades who said he grew so frustrated at how large corporations were allowed to pay far less than what he thought they owed that he transferred to the agency’s small-business division.

This is free market theology in action: corporations should not have to pay taxes because it’s “taxing the money twice.” For some reason they think there is a law of nature that says you can’t do that when, in fact, it happens all the time all over the place and it’s factored into the economy quite efficiently. But free market fundamentalists are just like the biblical literalists. It doesn’t have to make sense. It’s all faith based.

What this shows though is yet another agency that’s been infiltrated by wingnut sharks who just mindlessly circle, biting off pieces of their agenda, programmed to just keep killing and eating no matter what. The government may be deeply in debt, the war may be sucking up hundreds of billions, six years of corruption and pork has sucked every bit of fat from the treasury, but by god they will not question whether it might be wise to boost revenues. The agenda says that taxes should not be levied on rich people and corporations and if they are they must not be collected. Keep circling and eating, circling and eating.

Via Norwegianity

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