Articulating The Popular Rage-The Mad Prophecies of Paddy C.
By Dennis Hartley
I couldn’t take it anymore…after viewing the first few episodes of NBC’s “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip”, I got up off my couch, switched off the DVR, went to my DVD shelf and made my annual pilgrimage back to The Source-Sidney Lumet’s Network . Back in 1976, this “satire” made us chuckle with its incredulous conceit-the story of a “fictional” TV network who hits the ratings g-spot with a nightly newscast turned variety hour, anchored by a self-proclaimed “angry prophet denouncing the hypocrisy of our time”. Now, 30 years later, it plays like a documentary (denouncing the hypocrisy of our time). The oft-noted prescience of the infinitely quotable Paddy Chayefsky screenplay goes much deeper than merely prophesizing the onslaught of news-as-entertainment (and its evil spawn, “reality” television)-it’s a blueprint for our age. In the opening scene, drunken buddies Peter Finch (as Howard Beale, respected news anchor soon to suffer a complete mental breakdown and morph into “the mad prophet of the airwaves”) and William Holden (as Max Shumacher, head of news division for the fictional “UBS” network) riff cynically on an imaginary pitch for a surefire news rating booster-“Real live suicides, murders, executions-we’ll call it The Death Hour.” Funny punch line back in 1976. Sadly, in 2006, we call it “The Nancy Grace Show”.
Later in the film, when the corporate “hatchet man” for “CCA” the network’s parent company (brilliantly played by Robert Duvall) barks “We’re not a respectable network, we’re a whorehouse”, one can not help but flash on the Fox network. Faye Dunaway steals all of her scenes as Diana Christenson, the completely soulless, ratings obsessed head of development who comes up with the idea to turn Beale’s mental illness into revenue. The most famous scene, of course is Beale’s cheerleading “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore” tirade, a call to arms (borne from a “cleansing moment of clarity”) for viewers to turn off the tube, break the spell of their collective stupor, (literally) stick their heads out the window and make their voices heard. Uh, the “Blogosphere”, anyone? (It’s very astute of Digby to choose Beale’s image and an excerpt from that monologue for the “Hullabaloo” masthead). For me, the most defining scene in the film is between Howard Beale and Arthur Jensen (CEO of “CCA”-wonderfully played by Ned Beatty). Jensen is calling Beale on the carpet for publicly exposing a potential buyout of CCA by shadowy Arab investors. Cognizant that Beale is crazy as a loon, yet still a cash cow for the network, Jensen uses reverse psychology and hands him a new set of stone tablets from which to preach-the “corporate cosmology of Arthur Jensen”. The ensuing monologue is surely screenwriter Chayefsky’s finest moment, savagely funny and frighteningly true (accurately presaging the whole WTO/New World Order scenario). Required viewing!
Got Chayefsky? A few more I recommend: The Americanization of Emily, The Hospital and Altered States (although he had his name taken off in protest to director Ken Russell’s brutal script revisions, a few unmistakable “Paddy meltdowns” remain intact).
I sincerely hope that the Democrats in the House and Senate, no matter how much pressure they get to do otherwise from the “centrist” Mandarins and callow Kewl Kidz, go hard after the Bush administration on war profiteering, cronyism, corruption and waste. This is a rare opportunity for the Democrats to properly expose the Republicans for the crooks they are — and dispell the myth once and for all that they are the wise stewards of the taxpayers money.
With Rumsfeld’s ignominious and overdue downfall, and the new willingness, however tepid, among the press to look at the malfeasance in the pentagon, this may be the best opportunity they will have in decades to show just what a mistake it is to write blank chacks for military spending.
Jason Vest spells it out in this interesting new article about what Robert Gates is really facing at the Pentagon — and what he’s likely to do about it:
“Rumsfeld will have two legacies. One is the war—it’ll go down in history as much as Rumsfeld’s war as Bush’s war,” says Winslow Wheeler, a veteran former Senate staffer and investigator who now runs the Straus Military Reform Project at the Washington, D.C.-based think tank, the Center for Defense Information. “But initially, people will probably miss the other legacy, which is the total mismanagement of the Pentagon. He inherited gigantic problems—ones that had nothing to do with Iraq—and made them worse. Iraq is only one part of Gates’ job. He’s going to have to undo a disastrous legacy on budget, program, and management issues.”
Despite all the at-odds-with-reality praise once lavished on Rumsfeld for his supposedly brilliant management style (2002’s The Rumsfeld Way: The Leadership Wisdom of a Battle-Hardened Maverick probably won’t be meeting the test of time), nonpartisan studies and government audits have long shown Rumsfeld to be a less-than-able Pentagon steward. In 2002, for example, Bush’s own White House Office of Management and Budget initiated the President’s Management Scorecard, a sort of quarterly report card assessing the top management of 25 major federal agencies and departments.
It uses a “Stoplight Scoring System,” with green for success, yellow for mixed results, and red for unsatisfactory. Wheeler notes that the DOD’s columns are more often defined by red and yellow than green. “The last time I checked, DOD ranked 24 out of 25—hardly a ringing endorsement,” Wheeler says.
Another solid indicator of the true nature of Rumsfeld’s legacy can be found in the files of the Government Accountability Office, the congressional investigative arm. Of the hundreds of GAO investigative reports devoted to the Defense Department on Rumsfeld’s watch, 25 deal in some way with Iraq. The other 861 have titles that, in many cases, indicate that Iraq wasn’t the only crisis crying out for Rumsfeld’s attention. Some pull no punches (“DOD Wastes Billions of Dollars through Poorly Structured Incentives”); others are, intentionally or not, drolly understated (“Hurricane Katrina: Better Plans and Exercises Need to Guide the Military’s Response to Catastrophic Natural Disasters”). It’s also hard not to be struck by the frequency with which subtle-yet-pointed phrases like “actions needed,” “issues require attention,” and “room for improvement” appear. (“Oversight,” for example, often appears in contexts that indicate a marked lack of the practice.)
Though the GAO organizes its reports by subject matter and agency, it also pinpoints “High Risk” areas, which it defines as activities with “greater vulnerabilities to fraud, waste, abuse, and mismanagement.” In this area, Wheeler notes, “Rumsfeld’s DOD has earned itself more GAO High Risk reports on failed management than any other federal agency.”
Read the whole thing. The level of corruption and mismanagement is so overwhelming that it’s almost impossible to believe that Republicans who built their careers screaming “tax and spend liberals!” have the nerve to even slink around the beltway like the lying weasels they are. Chutzpah doesn’t even begin to cover it.
Being as he is a Bush crony himself, Gates has more than a few skeletons in his closet with their hands out, so I wouldn’t hold out any hope that he’s going to be a crusading good government reformer. Not to mention the fact that his history shows that he is more than willing to, shall we say, shade the truth. But he’s only in for two years anyway, so his only job will be to hold things together until Junior can be safely spirited back to Crawford and they can begin to re-write history without him around to muck it up. Nothing serious will get done until there is a new administration.
But these two years can serve a very important political purpose for the Democrats if they play their cards right. They have a once in a generation opportunity to shine the light on the Republican revolving door with the pentagon and defense contractors that makes the process so corrupt they don’t even bother to put the numbers in the budget anymore. The way to do this is to contrast this bloated cronyism with the lack of body armor for the troops, the treatment and benefits they receive when they get back, the unwillingness to properly spend money on homeland security and all the rest. Now is the moment to show that these people have been getting rich off the backs of Americans overseas and taxpayers at home.
This issue touches every aspect of the Republican cock-up of the last six years from the insistence on tax cuts for the rich in the face of wartime spending, to corruption, malfeasance and failure. It will illustrate better than any other issue the fact that Republicans in both the congress and the White House are incapable of seriously dealing with the threats we actually face and are willing to steal the treasury blind whenever they get their hands on the check book no matter what the circumstances. The polls showed that corruption was a salient issue for voters this time but they are only aware of the tip of the iceberg. Now is the time to tattoo this image on the foreheads of every Republican office holder in the country.
If they can use “acid, amnesty and abortion” against the Democrats for thirty years, the Democrats can use “corruption, cronyism and incompetence” against them. Every time they talk about Democrats “taxing and spending” the Democrats should counter with “taxing and stealing.” These people have shown over and over again that they will rob the citizens of this country blind and then blame it on black people or single mothers or the working man who didn’t happen to be born rich. The Dems have a chance to turn that back on them for a generation if they do this right.
There are huge problems awaiting the next president. Unbelievably huge problems. If this country elects another Republican he will be just as beholden to the same interests that spent five years getting filthy rich off the backs of dead people in Iraq and Afghanistan — and New Orleans. If over the next two years the Democrats can peel back the curtain on the deals that were made, the American people might just recognize that we cannot afford to allow any more of these con-artists and screw-ups to run the country.
America’s growing contingent of post-60’s doves and the hope of military transformation are two sides of the same coin. The post-Vietnam rise of reflexive opposition to American military involvement has given birth to the dream of military transformation: war conducted by technology, with a “light footprint” from soldiers. So I “blame” both the administration’s over-hopefulness, and the very real domestic political constraints that make almost any American military venture difficult to undertake.
Check out that second sentence in the above excerpt, folks. Read it again and marvel. Kurtz is saying that the Rumsfeld doctrine – “a war conducted by technology, with a ‘light footprint’ from soldiers” – is, in fact, a response to liberals who made the American public, for the past 30 years in the wake of Vietnam, risk adverse. Put another way, using the rhetoric Kurtz’s pals applied to brand people like me “objectively pro-Saddam,” Rumsfeld and Bush are merely political compromisers who made the mistake of taking the “anti-war left” too seriously in making their plans for war.
I’m sure Kurtz thinks this is a thoughtful, nuanced, and balanced argument. After all, he’s assigning blame equally to an overly optimistic administration and an overly cautious public. And indeed, Kurtz thinks Josh Marshall’s criticism of his drivel is – such a thoughtful word! – “simplistic.” So let’s provide another example of Kurtz’s fair-minded, sophisticated “analysis:”
In fact, a huge chunk of the Democratic Party was against the Iraq war from the start, and would have opposed it even if–no, especially if–they thought that war could be won.
You read that right. Kurtz said many Democrats would have opposed the war because they thought the US would win it.
But maybe you think I am lifting Kurtz’s crap out of context, creating bullshit from pure gold. Ok. Here are the following sentences:
The doves hugely exaggerated even minor problems, such as those we faced in the first week or two of the shooting war. And as I noted in “Troop Dearth,” the polarization of debate during even the early and more successful phases of the war made it tough for the administration to admit errors on troop strength and correct course. But that doesn’t mean I hold the administration blameless. Far from it.
Yup, that’s what Kurtz wrote. He actually blames Bush’s penchant for suppressing bad news and his failure to admit mistakes on none other than we liberals who are way too quick to criticize him.
Now there are many ways to respond to this kind of garbage. One way is to do what Josh Marshall does, correctly note that Kurtz’s argument is beyond absurd, but argue with it anyway, patiently reminding everyone that Republicans completely controlled the government for nearly all of the past six years. To take his argument as serious enough to deserve refutation (and Josh does refute it with passion), however, provides Kurtz with gravitas he doesn’t deserve. It’s as if Neil de Grasse Tyson took time out to refute convincingly a clown who thinks the moon is made of green cheese – a significant portion of the DC punditocracy will start to smell something funny during a full moon. Hey, y’never know!
Another response is to ignore Kurtz, which unfortunately has the effect of letting this stuff fester and grow, as the history of rightwing nuttiness in America proves it will.
A third response is to note that this life is far too short, and the situation in Iraq is far too dire, to take seriously a man who blames the tragedies perpetrated by the Bush administration on the profound influence Michael Moore – via proxy – had on Donald Rumsfeld’s military strategizing in 2001.
A fourth alternative: Offer Stanley Kurtz an internship on the writing team for The Colbert Report. But there’s a slight problem: Kurtz isn’t the slightest bit funny in the “funny ha-ha” meaning of the word.
Former president Jimmy Carter’s new book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid has, according to Democracy Now, been completely ignored by the print media:
… the nation’s newspapers have largely ignored Jimmy Carter’s book since its publication two weeks ago. The book hasn’t even been mentioned in the news pages of the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Boston Globe or Los Angeles Times.
But, interestingly, the points raised in his book about the apartheid in Palestine are debated elsewhere, even in Israel. Carter points out on Hardball:
… the people in this country, in America, never know about this [apartheid], they never discuss this, there‘s no debate about it, there‘s no criticism of Israel in this country. And in Israel, there is an intense debate about the issues in this book. In this country, no.
He reiterates this point in the Democracy Now Q & A:
So the book is deliberately — I wouldn’t say controversial, but it’s deliberately designed to be provocative, because, as I said earlier, in Israel and in Europe, these kind of issues are debated every day, in a most vehement way, particularly in Israel. Pros and cons, arguing back and forth, in the news media, television, radio, the major newspapers. Never, in this country, do you hear any of these issues proposed publicly by an elected member of the House or the Senate or in the White House or NBC or ABC or CBS, New York Times, Washington Post, LA Times. Never. And I think it’s time for Americans to start looking at the facts about the Mid-East situation. And only then, and based on the knowledge of the facts, will we ever have a chance to move forward and consummate a peace agreement that would give Israel what they need and what they deserve — permanent peace, recognized by their neighbors and all Arab countries and the rest of the world — and the Palestinians to have their human rights, their land and a chance to have their own state, side by side, living in peace with their Israeli neighbors.
On the Hardball segment last Tuesday, Carter deconstructed the book’s title along with its purpose, which in part is to stimulate the debate:
Let‘s look at the entire title, if you don‘t mind. The first word is Palestine, which involves the land that belongs to the Palestinians, not the Israelis. I didn‘t refer to Israel, because there‘s no semblance of anything relating to apartheid within the nation of Israel.
And I also emphasized the word ‘not‘ — that is, peace, and not apartheid. That is what I hope to accomplish with this book, is sort of move to that goal. But there‘s no doubt that within the Occupied Territories—Palestinian land—that there is a horrendous example of apartheid. The occupation of Palestinian land, the confiscation of that land that doesn‘t belong to Israel, the building of settlements on it, the colonization of that land, and then the connection of those isolated but multiple settlements—more than 200 of them—with each other by highways, on which Palestinians can‘t travel and quite often where Palestinians cannot even cross.
So the persecution of the Palestinians now, under the occupying territories—under the occupation forces—is one of the worst examples of human rights deprivation that I know. … What is being done to the Palestinians now is horrendous in their own territory, by the occupying powers, which is Israel.
They‘re taken away all the basic human rights of the Palestinians, as was done in South Africa against the blacks. And I make it very plain in this book that the apartheid is not based on racism, as it was in South Africa. But it‘s based on the desire, of a minority of Israelis to acquire land that belongs to the Palestinians and to retain that land, and then to exclude the Palestinians from their own property and subjugate them, so that they can‘t arise and demonstrate their disapproval of being robbed of their own property. That‘s what‘s happening in the West Bank.
The transcript at Democracy Now covers most of what you get from the one at Hardball, but also goes beyond it with more information and assertions, and mentions three possible options for Israel. I would recommend that it be read first before delving into a debate here. Also, it’s worth reiterating that Carter is not ascribing racist underpinnings to this case of apartheid, and its use is only in reference to what is happening inside Palestine, not within Israel. In Israel, he acknowledges that Palestinians have full voting rights and are not separated out (by the State) from other Israeli citizens.
Greenwald skewers Friedman, easy pickings as those of us who have been appalled by his writings for years know. But Greenwald truly advances the dubious discipline of Tom Friedman Studies: The poor guy went back and reviewed Friedman’s pre-war columns and noticed among the scrambled metaphors, stupid aphorisms, basic grammatical mistakes, and bad analogies an incredibly dishonest pattern. I’ll leave it to you to go to Glenn’s site and read that part; it is well worth your while. What especially interested me was later on in the post, as it is apropos of our own discussions here:
It is not merely the case that having been pro-war doesn’t count as a strike against anyone. That is accurate. But far worse, the opposite is also true. It is still the case in Establishment Washington that having been pro-war in the first place is a pre-requisite to being considered a ‘responsible, serious’ foreign policy analyst. And having been anti-war from the start is the hallmark of someone unserious. The pro-war Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden are serious national security Democrats but Russ Feingold, Nancy Pelosi and Jack Murtha are the kind of laughable losers whom Democrats need to repudiate.Establishment Washington really is not interested in how to end this horrendous and despicable debacle we unleashed in Iraq. They are not interested in how to maximize U.S. interests. They are only interested in how to find a way to bring this disaster to some sort of slow resolution that looks as though it is a respectable and decent outcome — anything that makes it seem like it wasn’t a horrendous mistake in the first place.
That is exactly right. And it is outrageous. Why? Because it means that Bush/Iraq will be repeated real soon now somewhere else, by people who think the only problem was that Bush didn’t know how to do war right.
It seems that the Bush family has a habit of getting bent out of shape when new Senators don’t properly kiss their asses:
At his first White House reception with Bush Sr., Wellstone wasted no time in buttonholing the president about his progressive priorities. When Wellstone finally let him be, President Bush was heard asking an advisor, “Who is this chicken shit?”
I suppose before one becomes a Senator one might think that one has the right to speak seriously to the president about important issues when one is in his presence. Equal branch of government and all that rot. Apparently, that’s simply not done. At least it’s not done if the President is named Bush.
Perhaps the key to solving this particular problem is to not have any more presidents named Bush. Ever.
Since Hullabaloo seems to be obsessed with Josh Marshall’s posts of yesterday, I will continue with this observation from one of our readers on the subject of Stanley Kurtz’s offensive proposition that poor little Bushie was unduly constrained by the cowardly American public from doingwhatneededtobedone:
The other side of this stupidity is that Bush is under no real constraint to care what the American on the street thinks of his war, and in fact has not really given any indication of doing so.
PRESIDENT BUSH: …Look, people didn’t agree with my decision on Iraq, and I understand that. For Europe, September the 11th was a moment; for us, it was a change of thinking. I vowed to the American people I would do everything to defend our people, and will. I fully understood that the longer we got away from September the 11th, more people would forget the lessons of September the 11th. But I’m not going to forget them. And, therefore, I will be steadfast and diligent and strong in defending our country.
I don’t govern by polls, you know. I just do what I think is right. And I understand some of the decisions I made are controversial. But I made them in the best interest of our country, and I think in the best interest of the world. I believe when you look back at this moment, people will say, it was right to encourage democracy in the Middle East. I understand some people think that it can’t work. I believe in the universality of freedom; some don’t. I’m going to act on my beliefs so long as I’m the President of the United States. Some people say, it’s okay to condemn people for — to tyranny. I don’t believe it’s okay to condemn people to tyranny, particularly those of us who live in the free societies.
Bush really believes he’s some sort of Jesus-like figure and he’s made his disasterous decisions without any regard to the desires of the public.He has made a fetish of it. He believes he is morally superior to the hoi polloi. To now say that he has been restrained by the people is ridiculous. When he got into office with a dubious one vote majority on the Supreme Court he governed as if he had a mandate. He never cared what the congress thought — just ran roughshod over them. The man has always done exactly what he wanted to do.
The only public support he has ever cultivated (at Rove’s careful direction) was the 35% or so of his red-meat base or the business interests that paid for his presidency. On foreign policy he operates from his “gut” which means that he picks and chooses, without analysis or informed knowledge, from a variety of advisors with no thought to coherence or how such decisions might be implemented. Even Cheney cannot adequately control him. It could just as easily be decisionmaking by Ouija board. The problem is not that the public failed to approve of Bush’s harebrained schemes. The problem is Bush’s scemes themselves.
The Iraq invasion was the result of an absurd amalgam of greed, rage, naivete and hubris that was Shakespearean in its complexity. But for the president and many of his followers it was quite simple:
In State of Denial, Woodward recounts how Michael Gerson, at the time Bush’s chief speechwriter, asked Henry Kissinger why he had supported the Iraq war:
“Because Afghanistan wasn’t enough,” Kissinger answered. In the conflict with radical Islam, he said, they want to humiliate us. “And we need to humiliate them.” The American response to 9/11 had essentially to be more than proportionate—on a larger scale than simply invading Afghanistan and overthrowing the Taliban. Something else was essential. The Iraq war was essential to send a larger message, “in order to make a point that we’re not going to live in this world that they want for us.”
He is, of course, being disingenuous. (It’s Kissinger, after all.) Iraq was a secular government, for all its ills. Invading it had nothing to do with radical Islam. Kissinger may be a nobel prize winning Harvard professor but his remarks are entirely based on lizard brain primitivism. And it’s that primitivism that informed George W. Bush’s vaunted “gut” and led the most powerful nation on earth into Iraq for no good reason.
It’s similar to what happens when a wild animal like a bear comes down out of the hills and mauls someone. Back in the day they used to round up a posse (now they call in the professionals) grab their guns and go out to kill the bear. It doesn’t really matter which bear just that the defenders of civilization can bring home a bear carcass and show everyone that if a bear kills one of them they are going to get revenge — preferably by killing one that was even bigger than the one that did the killing. They always say that it was because the bear was dangerous and it had developed a taste for human blood or something like that. (The people don’t ever really know if the dead bear is the one, do they?) The purpose isn’t really to kill the bear that did the deed. And it isn’t as Kissinger says, to show the other bears that they will be killed if they do this again. It’s to quell their own fear by proving to themselves that they are not helpless.
George W. Bush was very, very frightened after 9/11 and for a variety of motivations his administration persuaded him that killing the Iraq bear would make him feel better. The public’s support or lack of support was irrelevant.
Update: For a perfect example of post 9/11 pants-wetting masquerading as Kissingerian message-sending, here’s Tom Friedman:
No, the axis-of-evil idea isn’t thought through – but that’s what I like about it. It says to these countries and their terrorist pals: “We know what you’re cooking in your bathtubs. We don’t know exactly what we’re going to do about it, but if you think we are going to just sit back and take another dose from you, you’re wrong. Meet Don Rumsfeld – he’s even crazier than you are.”
There is a lot about the Bush team’s foreign policy I don’t like, but their willingness to restore our deterrence, and to be as crazy as some of our enemies, is one thing they have right. It is the only way we’re going to get our turkey back.
You can smell the fear all over those words, can’t you?
Update II: Just so there is no mistake. I am not insulting hunters or any other professional who deals with wildlife. This is a (lame) parable not a comment on the culture of gun owners. Nor is it meant to imply that people who work for animal control do not care about the animals or do not try to insure that the animals they kill are indeed dangerous animals. My point was that it didn’t matter if the animal that they killed was the “guilty” party in order that the fear in the community (or among some hunters who are more like George Bush)is quelled.
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.
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.
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.
