Digby was talking about Afghanistan earlier, in the context of Obama seeking to see “the big picture” in allocating resources. I hope events like this fit into the edge of the frame.
Nine Afghan soldiers were killed and four others injured by a U.S. airstrike on an Afghan army checkpoint Wednesday in an apparent friendly-fire incident in eastern Afghanistan, according to Afghan and U.S. military officials.
The pre-dawn airstrike occurred after a convoy of coalition troops came under fire as they returned to their base in Khost province, according to a statement released by the U.S. military. Coalition soldiers called for air support after exchanging fire with Afghan troops near an Afghan army checkpoint in the Sayed Kheil area in what military officials said could be “a case of mistaken identity on both sides.” […]
Arsallah Jamal, governor of Khost province, said coalition and Afghan troops had been engaged in operations in the area for about 10 days before the strike occurred. Jamal said the army checkpoint was relatively new but was well-known and on a main road. “They knew it was there. They made a mistake,” Jamal said.
There was another airstrike in the region today that hit a Pakistani school and killed at least eight. And you can just read these stories with a sense of deja vu throughout the past seven years. We’ve been bombing Afghanistan for so long, as a band-aid to make up for the lack of troops, that I’m not sure if you asked an Afghan civilian that they would tell you that the Taliban is the real enemy and not the guys in the airplanes in the sky. Right now popular support for a foreign presence is almost even with opposition, and declining.
Russ Feingold spoke up today with one of those statements that isn’t allowed in the polite company of the foreign policy establishment in Washington – maybe we shouldn’t just transfer our military strength from one country to the next.
But few people seem willing to ask whether the main solution that’s being talked about– sending more troops to Afghanistan – will actually work.
If the devastating policies of the current administration have proved anything, it’s that we need to ask tough questions before deploying our brave service members – and that we need to be suspicious of Washington “group think.” Otherwise, we are setting ourselves up for failure.
For far too long, we have been fighting in Afghanistan with too few troops. It has been an “economy of force” campaign, as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff put it. But we can’t just assume that additional troops will undo the damage caused by years of neglect.
Sending more US troops made sense in, say, 2006, and it may still make sense today. The situation in Afghanistan has deteriorated badly over the past year, however, despite a larger US and coalition military presence.
We need to ask: After seven years of war, will more troops help us achieve our strategic goals in Afghanistan? How many troops would be needed and for how long? Is there a danger that a heavier military footprint will further alienate the population, and, if so, what are the alternatives? And – with the lessons of Iraq in mind – will this approach advance our top national security priority, namely defeating Al Qaeda?
How dare he try to ask questions, using such trifles as reason and logic. How dare he consider that massive military might can be anything but glorious. How dare he suggest that an international problem has something other than a military solution.
Joe Klein has published a very informative interview with Obama on foreign policy on Swampland and it’s worth reading from beginning to end. Even where I disagree with him, I can’t help but feel relieved and overjoyed at Obama’s impressive intelligence (which makes it more laughable than ever that Sarah Palin has the nerve to diss his readiness in foreign policy.)
Anyway, there’s a lot to digest in the interview, but the long passage about General Petraeus stuck out at me because of an article I’d read just prior to reading Klein’s piece. Here’s Obama in the Klein interview:
[Q] I have been collecting accounts of your meeting with David Petraeus in Baghdad. And you had [inaudible] after he had made a really strong pitch [inaudible] for maximum flexibility. A lot of politicians at that moment would have said [inaudible] but from what I hear, you pushed back.
[BO] I did. I remember the conversation, pretty precisely. He made the case for maximum flexibility and I said you know what if I were in your shoes I would be making the exact same argument because your job right now is to succeed in Iraq on as favorable terms as we can get. My job as a potential commander in chief is to view your counsel and your interests through the prism of our overall national security which includes what is happening in Afghanistan, which includes the costs to our image in the middle east, to the continued occupation, which includes the financial costs of our occupation, which includes what it is doing to our military. So I said look, I described in my mind at list an analogous situation where I am sure he has to deal with situations where the commanding officer in [inaudible] says I need more troops here now because I really think I can make progress doing x y and z. That commanding officer is doing his job in Ramadi, but Petraeus’s job is to step back and see how does it impact Iraq as a whole. My argument was I have got to do the same thing here. And based on my strong assessment particularly having just come from Afghanistan were going to have to make a different decision. But the point is that hopefully I communicated to the press my complete respect and gratitude to him and Proder who was in the meeting for their outstanding work. Our differences don’t necessarily derive from differences in sort of, or my differences with him don’t derive from tactical objections to his approach. But rather from a strategic framework that is trying to take into account the challenges to our national security and the fact that we’ve got finite resources.
[Q] But you didn’t have to make that point.
[BO] No well I think that I did, I felt it necessary to make that point even though I tried not to talk about it publicly, not knowing sort of what the terms of our discussion were. Precisely because I respect the Petraeus and [inaudible], precisely because they’ve done a good job and because my job as a candidate is preparing myself to be commander in chief. And I want to make sure that I’m taking their arguments seriously, they understand I’m taking their argument seriously. I want our military brass and our mid level officers to all feel that I am going to be listening to them. This notion that I’m not paying attention to them is nonsense. I’m listening to them very carefully and I take their advice with great seriousness. I just want them to know that I’ve got a, I potentially will have a broader task at hand.
[Q] Right.
[BO] And I want to make sure that we establish a relationship of respect early on. Again not just with the joint chiefs but also with folks who align responsibly on the ground.
[Q] Now I’ve heard that conversation characterized as everything from angry to spirited to agreeable. And I kind of took it as
[BO] I would say it was between spirited and agreeable. That’s how I would characterize it.
[Q] And after you made that point, [Petraeus] said I understand now.
[BO]He did.
Obviously I wasn’t there and have no way of interpreting that exchange, but I wouldn’t be so sure it means what it appears to mean. I certainly respect Obama for making it clear that he will be Commander in Chief and that his view is, by definition, more global, in every sense of the word. But I have a sneaking suspicion that The Man Called Petraeus may not be as sanguine about that interaction as Obama might wish.
The article I had just read was also about Petraeus and Andrew Bacevich quotes him saying that he no longer votes because he “thought senior leaders should be apolitical.” Bacevich points out that this used to be common among the higher reaches of the officer corps, but changed in recent decades when the military became much more overtly Republican. He questions Petraeus’ meaning, however:
… if Petraeus’s statement that “senior leaders should be apolitical” reflects the beginnings of a retreat from the partisanship that has infected the officer corps, that will be all to the good. Indeed, General Petraeus will perform a signal service to the military profession and to the nation if he genuinely honors that commitment.
Still, one wonders. Since he burst upon the scene during the invasion of Iraq back in 2003, Petraeus has displayed a political sophistication and savvy not seen in any senior officer since Colin Powell himself left active duty. Among other things, the general possesses and does not hesitate to deploy (as did Powell) a remarkable aptitude for courting politicians and members of the press. Rather than seeing war and politics as distinctive spheres, with soldiers confined to the former and civilian leaders dominating the latter, Petraeus understands (correctly) that the two spheres are inextricably linked. To restrict soldiers to a specific arena of activity — to limit their role to issues directly related to war fighting — makes little sense and would be self-defeating. This is especially true in an era when the United States remains committed to waging an open-ended global war against the forces of violent Islamic radicalism.
The so-called “Long War” is a political war par excellence, with “politics” here having a domestic as well as an international aspect — a reality apparent in the way that the Bush administration suppressed doubts about the “surge” in Iraq by employing Petraeus as its de facto spokesman. To criticize the policy became tantamount to criticizing the general, which few members of Congress or the media were willing to do.
Was Petraeus the administration’s willing dupe? Or was he shrewdly pursuing his own game that just happened to coincide with the administration’s? Who exactly was playing whom?
The question still to be determined is this: what role does Petraeus foresee himself playing as this deeply politicized war extends beyond the Bush presidency? Will he confine himself to rendering disinterested professional advice? Should Barack Obama win the election, will the apolitical soldier bow to the wishes of his new civilian master — despite Obama’s opposition to the war in which Petraeus built his reputation? We should hope so.
Yet by claiming to be apolitical — someone who stands “above” mere politics — Petraeus might also be positioning himself to assert a role not only in implementing policy but in shaping policy to suit his own agenda, in Iraq and elsewhere. In that event, General Marshall just might end up turning over in his grave.
I think there is nearly zero chance that Petraeus is apolitical and I would bet good money that he is positioning himself for a role in shaping policy. His willingness to be used by the Bush administration proves it in my mind. in fac, his recent protestations of being above politics are actually very cunning — if the country devolves back into angry partisanship, which it will (it always does), TMCP will be positioned to be the apolitical outsider with the leadership experience to lead us out of the darkness. There is no doubt in my mind that when he looks in the mirror he sees President Petraeus.
Obama had better watch his back. As Bacevich mentions in the article (and Lucian Truscott IV wrote in my comment section last night) there is a pretty recent example of another ambitious General who stabbed his president in the back. This is the one area where Obama should cultivate Powell’s advice. He’s an expert.
Apparently, it never occurred to the great guru that wealthy people would be greedy enough to destroy the system. It didn’t show up in his “models.”
Greenspan, who called the current financial crisis a “once-in-a-century credit tsunami,” said that he remained “in a state of shocked disbelief” that banks and investment firms did not do a better job of analyzing the risks involved with investing in home mortgages extended to less creditworthy borrowers. Under questioning from Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), the committee chairman, Greenspan acknowledged that the failure of that expected self-regulation represented “a flaw in the model” he used to analyze economics. “I was going for 40 years or more on the perception that it was working well.”
This is the fundamental problem with Randian thinking. They really do believe that capitalism is a moral system in which the people become wealthy because they are morally and intellectually superior to those who don’t. Why, it would be wrong for them to not self-regulate and endanger the whole economy, right? It wouldn’t make any sense.
“Let’s hope we are all wealthy and retired by the time this house of cards falters,” wrote [an analyst] in an email obtained by Waxman’s committee.
Being able to pass on all your risk to someone else while personally coming out on top is a pretty glaring and obvious flaw in the system unless you think that wealthy people are too wise and moral to ever do such a thing. The only people who believe that are Randians and Joe the Plumber. Everybody on Wall Street certainly seemed to know the score and acted accordingly.
The moral justification of capitalism does not lie in the altruist claim that it represents the best way to achieve “the common good.” It is true that capitalism does—if that catch-phrase has any meaning—but this is merely a secondary consequence. The moral justification of capitalism lies in the fact that it is the only system consonant with man’s rational nature, that it protects man’s survival qua man, and that its ruling principle is: justice.
Update: like Rand, Greenspan probably operated from the premise that “businessmen” were all moral agents. This is from an essay called An Answer for Businessmen, written by Rand in 1962.
The world crisis of today is a moral crisis—and nothing less than a moral revolution can resolve it: a moral revolution to sanction and complete the political achievement of the American revolution. We must fight for capitalism, not as a practical issue, not as an economic issue, but, with the most righteous pride, as a moral issue. That is what capitalism deserves, and nothing less will save it. I should like to suggest that you begin by applying to the realm of ideas the same objective, logical, rational criteria of judgment that you apply to the realm of business. You do not judge business issues by emotional standards—do not do it in regard to ideological issues. You do not build factories by the guidance of your feelings—do not let your feelings guide your political convictions. You do not count on men’s stupidity in business, you do not put out an inferior product “because people are too dumb to appreciate the best” do not do it in political philosophy; do not endorse or propagate ideas which you know to be false, in the hope of appealing to people’s fears, prejudices or ignorance. You do not cheat people in business—do not try to do it in philosophy: the so-called common man is uncommonly perceptive.
See, capitalists are all as honest as the day is long. The only problem with our capitalistic system is that these superior beings are overtaxed and over regulated, and restricted by the parasites from exercising their superiority. They are entirely rational and moral and should be trusted to do the right thing because it is who they are.
Uncle Alan is in his 80s and he’s just learned that his heroes aren’t what he thought they were after all. No wonder he’s in a state of “shocked disbelief.” It’s a wonder he didn’t keel over.
The successor of the Austrian far-right leader Jörg Haider was dismissed yesterday after he revealed a “special” relationship “far beyond” friendship with his former mentor. In emotional interviews with the national broadcaster and a tabloid newspaper Stefan Petzner spoke openly about his affair with Haider, who died at the age of 58 in a high-speed car crash after heavy drinking session at a gay club this month. Haider’s party, the Alliance for the Future of Austria, captured 11 per cent of the vote in national elections last month . Mr Petzner’s appointment as party leader was widely seen as a fulfilment of Haider’s last wish, as he had frequently said in public that he would like his young protégé to take his place one day. Mr Petzner dropped out of university when he met Haider at a party. At that time he was working as a journalist, writing about cosmetic treatments. Outraged by the interviews, the party felt compelled yesterday to dismiss its leader amid reports of his alleged role in Haider’s tragic death. Local papers said that, on the night of his accident, Haider and Mr Petzner had a row at a magazine launch party. Haider left in a hurry and drove to a gay club in Klagenfurt, his home town, where he drank vodka with male escorts. The reports said that he was hardly able to walk to his car.
He was such a lovely fellow:
Haider, in leading a revival of the Austrian Far Right, set out to say what is rightly unsayable in modern Europe. He praised the employment practices of the Nazi era, said that the SS should be honoured and called concentration camps “punishment camps”. He distanced himself from those remarks later, sort of, but many doubted a real change of heart. The war years appeared to arouse his passion more than anything in current policy, but he also launched an assault on immigration. He took his critics’ loathing as proof of his courage, as he did the diplomatic sanctions slapped on Austria in 2000 by the European Union in protest at his party’s role in government.
Nobody says that every gay person has a sweet and gentle heart. But in a world with less hostility toward gay people there would probably be fewer of these psychologically damaged closet cases seeking to prove their macho bonafides to the world by being Nazis.
Josh Marshall found this gem from a news item about the early voting sites in the heavily African-American Lake County in Indiana:
CROWN POINT, Ind. (AP) — A judge weighing whether to close down early voting sites in Lake County’s Democratic strongholds questioned local officials about the absentee voting process during visits to the disputed sites.
Lake County Superior Court Judge Diane Kavadias-Schneider toured the Gary, Hammond and East Chicago satellite voting sites Monday and heard hours of testimony and arguments on whether they are legal and fair.
Republicans want to shut down the centers in the largely Democratic county on the grounds that they will increase the likelihood of vote fraud in the Nov. 4 election.
Kavadias-Schneider, who was appointed a special judge in the case by the Indiana Supreme Court, questioned county elections board director Sally LaSota on Monday about the process of early voting and safeguards against vote fraud.
LaSota assured the judge that the elections board staff ensures voters are registered and don’t vote more than once. When Kavadias-Schneider asked, “What of those who have already voted?” R. Lawrence Steele, a GOP lawyer, replied, “Maybe those votes should be discarded.”
So this is, ultimately, why the right is making ACORN famous, calling for defunding and investigations and the like. It’s to cover their real agenda of trying to disenfranchise voters. It’s been the GOP ground game for a long time. And every time you think you’ve got it tamped down, it rises up somewhere else. Particularly slippery this year has been the “lose your house, lose your vote” effort to use foreclosure lists to challenge voters. Even after it was revealed and part of a lawsuit in Michigan, where the GOP was forced to surrender its effort, it has popped back up around the country. This is in Volusia County, Florida:
Thanks to a new law passed by the Florida Legislature, she explained, groups interested in challenging voters now may do so up to 30 days before an election.
Once a voter’s right to cast a ballot is challenged, McFall’s office must attempt to notify the voter, and must flag the voter’s name in the statewide database.
If the problem can’t be straightened out at the supervisor’s office before Election Day, the challenged voter will be required to vote a provisional ballot, then visit the Elections Office within 48 hours after the election to disprove the allegations of the challenge.
“One party, that we know of, is going to challenge every voter that’s being foreclosed on,” McFall said.
Foreclosure-related caging is just the tip of the iceberg. Ultimately, they don’t want you to vote.
I saw this story this morning and the footage was all over the TV. In all the reporting, everyone talked about how the mortgage convention featured a lot of protesters and that one of them tried to “arrest” Karl Rove on the stage. But nobody explained why in the hell Karl Rove was speaking to a convention of mortgage bankers in the first place. Doesn’t that seem like an extremely bad choice considering the current situation?
Apparently, these people still think he’s got something relevant to say to them. And that’s actually pretty scary.
I mentioned the other day that I had to cast a provisional ballot in 2006 and I got a number of emails from readers telling me about their problems with voter registration and voting. It pays to check it out ahead of time and make sure you haven’t been caged or purged.
Here’s an excerpt from a helpful post from Steve Rosenfeld at Firedoglake’s Oxdown Gazette:
What Should Voters Do? Voters need to be sure they are properly registered. They can do this by calling their county election office and verifying their voter registration information is in their county database and is current. Anyone who registered with the help of a voter drive this year should check to see that their form has been processed, as those applications have to be entered by local officials. If there are data-entry errors, many states still allow voters to fix those, so their right to vote is not jeopardized. In some locales, officials are still processing voter registration applications turned in weeks ago. While on the phone, voters should ask where their polling place is located and what form of ID is required. First-time voters must show more specific forms ID when checking in to vote. Voters can also ask about early voting options. There generally are two choices, although every state has its own laws. The first is called in-person early voting, where a voter will go to a county office or designated site and fill out a ballot. If there are any questions or mistakes made when voting, election officials can correct those. The second option is to get an absentee ballot, which is taken home and mailed. The downside of voting absentee is any mistakes in filling it out the ballot cannot always be corrected. In every election, a number of absentee ballots are disqualified for errors that could otherwise be fixed. Here are charts that describe each state’s early voting options and absentee ballot options. (This is voting by mail with an absentee ballot, which is not the same as in-person absentee voting, where voters fill-out and submit an absentee ballot at a county office before Election Day. Voter Challenges One of the big unanswered questions about the 2008 election is will the GOP try to contest the credentials of new voters as they show up at polling places. Voter challenges are a deliberate tactic to discourage voting. In most cases, these involve a party representative challenging an individual’s registration as that voter checks in at their polling place. A typical partisan challenger would claim that voter lives at a different address than what is in their voter registration record. The challenged voter then must produce an ID or a utility bill proving otherwise to vote. This tactic could not only delay that person from voting, but would also slow down others in line. The goal of voter challenges is both to victimize new voters and to prompt others to leave without voting. The solution to voter challenges is to call your local election office now to ensure that your registration is current. If your information is correct, you cannot be successfully challenged and you will vote. If a problem arises while voting, the challenged voter should call the nation’s largest election protection hotline, 1-866-OUR-VOTE, where they will reach an election lawyer or law specialist to help them solve the problem. That hotline is now being staffed during East Coast business hours. The prospect of partisan challenges in 2008 has been enhanced by a bureaucratic snafu that is not the fault of most voters. Government databases that are now being used for the first time in some states to verify voter registrations have had numerous “no matches” due to data-entry problems. The GOP is using this problem to suggest that Democrats are illegally padding voter rolls with fabricated voter registrations. Republicans have said, in lawsuits and public statements, that the only response to these mismatches is to recertify all new voters — which they know is not going to happen before Election Day. Secondarily, the GOP has argued that these voters should get a provisional ballot, which must be verified after Election Day before it is counted. Virtually all of the Republican-filed litigation — notably in Ohio, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania — has sought to invalidate voter registrations where a ‘no match’ has occurred. So far, the GOP has lost every case in court on this issue, including one at the U.S. Supreme Court. The Ohio Supreme Court dismissed a similar suit late on Tuesday. The Democratic National Committee, which is coordinating election protection efforts for the Obama campaign, also said that voters should not be intimidated by GOP voter suppression efforts.
I would imagine that most people who read blogs think they are up on all of this. But yours truly had to vote provisionally last time out — and I have voted in every election at the same precinct for over a decade. If you haven’t voted recently or have moved or have changed your name or just aren’t sure, check anyway. It can’t hurt.
And if you have relatives who might find this information helpful, send it to them too. It’s quite a shock to discover that you aren’t registered. I can’t even imagine what it would be like to be challenged. (They wouldn’t dare here in the People’s Republic of Santa Monica.) It’s best to make sure everything’s in order ahead of time.
The NY Times magazine has a fascinating feature about the McCain campaign in this week-end’s edition. The inside look at the Palin choice is really interesting. Republicans have become so enraptured by their hype about “marketing” and “branding” that they’ve forgotten that you need to have something in the package you’re selling besides air:
On Sunday, Aug. 24, Schmidt and a few other senior advisers again convened for a general strategy meeting at the Phoenix Ritz-Carlton. McInturff, the pollster, brought somewhat-reassuring new numbers. The Celebrity motif had taken its toll on Obama. It was no longer third and nine, the pollster said — meaning, among other things, that McCain might well be advised to go with a safe pick as his running mate.
Then for a half-hour or so, the group reviewed names that had been bandied about in the past: Gov. Tim Pawlenty (of Minnesota) and Gov. Charlie Christ (of Florida); the former governors Tom Ridge (Pennsylvania) and Mitt Romney (Massachusetts); Senator Joe Lieberman (Connecticut); and Mayor Michael Bloomberg (New York). From a branding standpoint, they wondered, what message would each of these candidates send about John McCain? McInturff’s polling data suggested that none of these candidates brought significantly more to the ticket than any other.
“What about Sarah Palin?” Schmidt asked.
[…]
After that first brief meeting, Davis remained in discreet but frequent contact with Palin and her staff — gathering tapes of speeches and interviews, as he was doing with all potential vice-presidential candidates. One tape in particular struck Davis as arresting: an interview with Palin and Gov. Janet Napolitano, the Arizona Democrat, on “The Charlie Rose Show” that was shown in October 2007. Reviewing the tape, it didn’t concern Davis that Palin seemed out of her depth on health-care issues or that, when asked to name her favorite candidate among the Republican field, she said, “I’m undecided.” What he liked was how she stuck to her pet issues — energy independence and ethics reform — and thereby refused to let Rose manage the interview. This was the case throughout all of the Palin footage. Consistency. Confidence. And . . . well, look at her. A friend had said to Davis: “The way you pick a vice president is, you get a frame of Time magazine, and you put the pictures of the people in that frame. You look at who fits that frame best — that’s your V. P.”
[…]
After McCain’s speech brought the convention to a close, one of the campaign’s senior advisers stayed up late at the Hilton bar savoring the triumphant narrative arc. I asked him a rather basic question: “Leaving aside her actual experience, do you know how informed Governor Palin is about the issues of the day?”
The senior adviser thought for a moment. Then he looked up from his beer. “No,” he said quietly. “I don’t know.”
This is where Karl Rove’s politics hit the wall. Indeed, it’s where the conservative movement hits the wall. They run their campaigns like car commercials and they govern with concepts like this:
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.”
It works for a while. They put on a good show. Then reality bites. Hard.
Have you noticed they keep reaching farther and farther back for terms of derision? First terrorist, then communist and socialist. Today, “running dogs”.
By Friday Obama will be an anarchist, by this time next week a Royalist and by election day a Pharisee.
Saying early voting cost too much money with rules that weren’t uniform, Republican legislators led a charge three years ago to set new statewide standards limiting the number of polling sites and their hours of operation.
Those revamped rules trimmed early voting from 12 hours per workday to eight.
During the first presidential election since Gov. Jeb Bush signed the bill in 2005, the new law’s impact can be seen throughout South Florida: exhausting lines at polling sites in Miami-Dade and Broward that led voters to miss work, senior citizens to beg for chairs and voting advocates to question whether some are being disenfranchised.
From Miami City Hall to the Southwest Regional Library in Pembroke Pines, voters on Monday and Tuesday — the first two days of early voting — sweated out waits of two to five hours. Broward reported record turnout for early voting, which ends Nov. 2.
Now, the debate over those achingly long lines has turned political. Some Democratic leaders contend the bill intentionally slowed down a process that has historically benefited the party.
There are two ways to look at this:
1. The Republicans were sincere about saving money by trying to make voting rules more uniform. By failing to take into account how this would mess up the people’s right to vote, they have proven they are – once again – totally incompetent at everything they touch.
2. The Republicans truly wanted to suppress Democratic votes by making the process of voting so onerous many people, especially Dems, would give up.
Personally, I see no reason why both can’t be true. They’re being both incompetent and malicious.
