In casting himself as the reluctant but critical-for-these-times candidate, the former history professor is looking back to 1860, and the wildfire support for Lincoln’s candidacy touched off by a series of speeches…. “I was fascinated by Holzer’s portrait of Lincoln spending three months at the Springfield state library, putting together the definitive argument about the Constitution, the Founding Fathers and slavery,” Gingrich says.
“He turns it into a 7,300-word speech – gives it once in New York, once in Rhode Island, once in Massachusetts, once in New Hampshire. Then he goes home. I was struck by the sheer courage of the self-definitional moment that said, ‘We are in real trouble, we need real leadership, and if that’s who you think we need, here’s my speech’,” Gingrich says, suggesting he intends to do the same thing.
So can we look forward to the 21st version of such immortal phrases as “the mystic chords of memory,” or “a house divided cannot stand,” or “the last best hope on earth?”
Well, Newt gives us a preview. When asked if he is running for president, Gingrich replied:
‘I’m going to tell you something, and whether or not it’s plausible given the world you come out of is your problem’ …. ‘I am not ‘running’ for president. I am seeking to create a movement to win the future by offering a series of solutions so compelling that if the American people say I have to be president, it will happen.’
What command of the language! What magnanimity of spirit! What perspective on his own ambitions!
Now if he’d only grow a beard, lose 250 pounds, buy those shoes with humongous soles teenage girls wear to make him 6’5″ – what else would he need? A brain and a heart, you say? Oh, don’t be snarky.
Sigh. It truly is amazing the slime that has access to the mainstream discourse these days.
(Btw, simply because Gingrich totally mangled Lincoln at Cooper Union, don’t prejudge the book. I read it when it came out and as I recall, it’s actually very good. )
Watching all these neocon rats racing to fling themselves off the sinking Republican ship is an amazing sight to see. On Blitzer’s show yesterday they were all over the place, blaming everyone but themselves for the disaster in Iraq.
Ken Adelman is heartbroken to find that the administration is dysfunctional and incompetent. David Frum just wishes the president had followed through on the words David Frum had put in his mouth. Michael Rubin throws Condi under the bus and then backs up over her:
ADELMAN: Well, I think, when you look at the record, Wolf, it’s a record that has a lot of mistakes. You can’t read a book without, you know, realizing that.
George Packer’s book, “The Assassin’s Gate,” Michael Gordon and Bernie Trainor’s book on “Cobra II,” Bob Woodward’s book on “State of Denial,” Tom Ricks’s book, “Fiasco” — they all have different episodes but the same sad, story.
And you have to ask yourself, how did this happen? And all them attempt, and all of them are serious works and all of them full of facts and figures and episodes. And to tell you the truth, it just breaks your heart.
BLITZER: Does it break your heart, David Frum, to see how this situation unfolded?
Because in the Vanity Fair quotes that were released — the whole article has not yet been published, but in the quotes — I’ll read one of them from you, and you’ll tell me if this is accurate: “I always believed, as a speechwriter that if you could persuade the president to commit himself to certain words, he would feel himself committed to the idea that underlay those words.”
And the big shock to me has been that, although the president said the words, he just did not absorb the ideas. And that is the root of, maybe, everything.
FRUM: Yes, that is an accurate quote.
BLITZER: It is accurate?
FRUM: Yes. And it reflects a lot of what I’ve been saying for the past year and a half.
When the president gives these speeches, every speech is the result of a battle for the president’s heart and mind, as has famously been said about the speech-making process.
So different people try to persuade the president to say different kinds of things. And he considers and deliberates. And George Bush committed himself to a series of propositions.
One, he was going to stop Iran and North Korea from acquiring these terrible weapons. And two, that in Iraq, he was going to put his trust in the future of Iraq in a democratic process.
Instead, what happened in Iraq, for example, was the United States became an occupying power almost immediately.
That even before the invasion of Iraq, the decision was made not to have any kind of an Iraqi face on the future government, on the next government of Iraq, because…
BLITZER: Was that Paul Bremer who made that decision, who was the provisional authority representative, the proconsul, as some people say he was? Or was that a decision made by Rumsfeld or Cheney?
FRUM: Paul Bremer was the result of it. But the reason there was a proconsul was because a decision was made not to have an Iraqi provisional government. And that came about because the administration fought itself to a standstill. I mean, there were people who — there were a number of Iraqis, each of whom had patrons in the administration.
BLITZER: A lot of people would say, that was, Michael Rubin, a huge blunder. You were there. You worked for Paul Bremer. Who came up with that idea of a U.S. military occupation as opposed to trying to let the Iraqis take charge?
RUBIN: Well, I’d second what David said, that that decision, Paul Bremer was the result of that decision. What there was was a debate within the administration about, you have the Iraqi opposition. You had, I believe it was seven key figures. And the question was whether to allow them to become a provisional government. They had already been self-selected through a number of conferences. Or whether there would be some sort of American presence first.
The real debate in Washington was whether we would have more influence before liberation or after liberation. And ultimately, it was the National Security Council, the national security adviser which made the decision to go with an American occupation presence.
BLITZER: That was Condoleezza Rice?
RUBIN: That was Condoleezza Rice and Stephen Hadley.
BLITZER: The deputy national security adviser…
RUBIN: At the time, yes.
BLITZER: … who’s now the national security adviser. And Condoleezza Rice, of course, is the secretary of state now.
RUBIN: That was the compromise that came out of interagency debate, when again, as David said, the State Department, the Pentagon and the others fought themselves to a standstill.
BLITZER: And you think that was a blunder?
RUBIN: I do believe it is one the greatest blunders we have made. The Coalition Provisional Authority and Paul Bremer did a lot of good, but nothing they accomplished which was good couldn’t have been accomplished without an immediate transfer of sovereignty. And the fact that we labelled ourselves an occupying power, unlike in Bosnia, unlike in Kosovo and elsewhere, really put — it justified all the insurgent rhetoric against us. And it turned our allies from those creating a democracy into collaborators.
Frum and Rubin are both saying that they never backed an occupation but rather instead wanted to put “an iraqi” in charge of the country from the get. Apparently temporary viceroy Bremer was the compromise. Tim at Balloon Juice, seeing Richard Perle’s similar explanation in yesterdays WaPo, and concludes:
Arguing about Iraq often gets stuck on what exactly our original exit strategy was supposed to be. Rumsfeld clearly planned to get in and out rapidly, which can only mean that we intended to knock over the top tier of leadership and hand over the country to somebody. Who, exactly, is often the sticking point.
The top candidate was always Ahmad Chalabi. A serial fabricator, forger, convicted embezzler and the charismatic leader of a ragtag group of Iraqi exiles Chalabi clearly owned the hearts and minds of neoconservatives. Now that we know the rest of his story (no support inside Iraq, a likely double agent for Iran) the appeal to incredulity fallacy seems so tempting that even I want to write it off on the grounds of a basic faith in humanity. Nobody can be that dumb, etc. Sadly one cannot deny that the Chalabi handover makes more sense than any other explanation for the Pentagon’s prewar behavior. Handing Iraq over to one of Saddam’s liutenants seems improbable in light of the dewy-eyed humanitarianism displayed by early war supporters. Saddam had killed off homegrown opposition leaders and Ali al-Sistani wasn’t offered the job (too close to Iran). It would be Chalabi, or…who?
I have no problem saying they would have been that dumb. The neocons for all their brilliance have serious and fatal blindspots and one of them is a terrible, immature romanticicm. I can’t say whether the pentagon really went in with a light force because they were planning to do a quick handover to Chalabi (although it makes as much sense as anything else — and they did pay him more than $30 million.) I do know, however, that the starry eyed neocons believed that Chalabi was going to be the George Washington of Iraq. (It’s hard to believe now that they could be this absurdly naive, but they were.)
Chalabi was hailed in some circles, especially among the neocons at AEI, as the “George Washington of Iraq…” After the Republicans regained the White House in 2001, many of the neocons took top national-security jobs. Perle, the man closest to Chalabi, chose to stay on the outside (where he kept a lucrative lobbying practice). But Wolfowitz and Feith became, respectively, the No. 2 and No. 3 man at the Defense Department, and a former Wolfowitz aide, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, became the vice president’s chief of staff. Once the newcomers took over, the word went out that any disparaging observations about Chalabi or the INC were no longer appreciated. “The view was, ‘If you weren’t a total INC guy, then you’re on the wrong side’,” said a Pentagon official. “It was, ‘We’re not going to trash the INC anymore and Ahmad Chalabi is an Iraqi patriot who risked his life for his country’. ”
So maybe Rummy and Dick truly agreed with Perle and company that they could roll into Iraq, topple Saddam and quickly turn it over to their pal Ahmad and then build some nice, permanent air-conditioned bases in the middle of the desert. Within a year or so it would be just like Germany, only hotter and without the good beer.
From what Rubin says, Condi and Hadley were whispering in Junior’s other ear telling him that Chalabi was a bad choice. And Junior, being the braintrust he is, decided to split the difference and go in with Rummy and Dick’s light force but do Condi’s occupation — without any planning, of course, just the knowledge that his “gut” told him it was the right thing to do. (Oy — why didn’t they just consult Nancy Reagan’s astrologer?)
It’s possible. Sometimes it keeps me awake nights wondering what it would have been like to have a real president when all this came down — you know, one who had enough brains to sift all this advice in a coherent fashion and who had the experience and maturity to actually lead instead of flip a coin or read the pattern in the bottom of his morning frosted flakes for signs of what to do. If this doesn’t prove that it really does matter who’s in charge, I don’t know what will. This conservative committee of “grown-ups” fucked things up royally.
Meanwhile, just becaue the neocons are running for the exits doesn’t mean they don’t continue to be wrong about everything. It is their most distinguishing characteristic. Right now, however, their brand is very damaged so they are beginning to distance themselves from their “movement” in a most clumsy and amusing fashion:
BLITZER: Ken, I’ll start with you. The Iraq Study Group…I see ten very influential, prominent guys, but I don’t see one conservative, neoconservative, Ken Adelman. What do you make of that?
ADELMAN: Nothing, to tell you the truth. I’m not a neoconservative. I was always a conservative. While the neoconservatives, I guess, were Trotskyites in campaigning in some nefarious manner in 1964, I was campaigning for Barry Goldwater. So I think it doesn’t matter all that much. It’s an academic exercise. Because I am conservative and all that. But I think it’s a very good group, and I’m interested in what they have to say.
BLITZER: Are you concerned, though, about the membership of this Iraq study group, David Frum, given their histories, the so-called realist as opposed to the neoconservative, the idealist school of thought?
FRUM: I think it is — I’m with Ken. I’m not sure how helpful any of those terms are.
It’s certainly not helpful to David Frum and the rest of the neocons, is it?
But they aren’t going anywhere, not really. They are always wrong but they always find ways to rationalize their dizzy incompetence. And they truly do represent the intellectual wing of the conservative movement, such as it is. Without them, the Republican party would no longer have a foreign policy. Poppy and Jim Baker aren’t going to last much longer and Pat Buchanan is going to be tied up down at the border taking potshots at “Jose” for the forseeable future.
So, this is what we are going to be dealing with in right wing foreign policy from now on. Here’s Rubin again, spelling it all out:
BLITZER: To bring in the regional powers, including Iran and Syria and to start a dialogue. The Iraq study group of James Baker and Lee Hamilton, they’re already doing what Bush administration refuses to do. They’ve been meeting with high-ranking Iranian and Syrian officials.
RUBIN: Actually, the Bush administration doesn’t refuse to do it. On May 31st, Condoleezza Rice offered to have direct talks with Iran in the context…
BLITZER: But they laid out certain conditions?
RUBIN: The only condition was that Iran suspend uranium enrichment during the duration of the talks.
BLITZER: But Baker-Hamilton didn’t ask for that suspension.
RUBIN: But you know what? Four days later, Ayatollah Khamenei, the supreme leader of Iran, got up in response to Condoleezza Rice’s offer and said, why don’t you just admit that you’ve lost? Why don’t you just admit that you are weak and your razor is blunt?
That was Iran’s response.
Yes. It was quite the zinger, wasn’t it? Let’s nuke ’em back into the stone age.
Rubin and friends think that insults and bluster are real and that great nations should react in anger when some bombastic fool says something stupid. (But then, they always thought we should invade the Soviet Union because they were rude to the US too. Somebody forgot to tell them about the sticks and stones thing when they were kids.)
In this sense they’ve got an awful lot in common with al Qaeda — they both have an outsized sense of “pride” which is really insecurity. It’s not a good idea for the world’s most powerful nation to react to a street corner diss. We should set the agenda, not some blowhard who is trying to impress his followers.
It is a cosmic joke that we had a terrible combination of vain, hubristic neocons and a brand name in an empty flightsuit in charge when militant Islamic fundamentalism made its big play. These guys always lose their heads when somebody taunts them and they overreact. There’s a lesson in that somewhere.
A year from now, we could end up in the middle of a full-blown civil war costing a thousand American lives a month. We could end up taking sides in a shooting war against Turkey, a NATO ally. We could end up fighting off an armed invasion from Iran. We could end up on the receiving of an oil embargo led by Saudi Arabia. Who knows?
Possibly.
Or suddenly tomorrow, the scales could fall from al-Sadr’s eyes, and from Maliki’s, and from everyone else’s, and they would realize that after the horror of the Saddam years, it is simply crazy to fight amongst themselves for control of such a potentially wealthy country like Iraq when there are plenty of petro-dollars (or petro-euros) for everyone.
Or maybe tomorrow Osama bin Laden will get on tv and say, “Mein Gott, what a schmuck I’ve been. After deep study of Torah, and after discovering the joys of matzo ball soup, I’ve decided to convert and become a Lubavitcher. As for my ex-friend Ayman al-Zawahiri, the heretic! He’s renounced all religious belief and become Richard Dawkins personal physician and valet.”
Hey! Y’never know.
Let me put this another way, to make the point clear. I’ll ask, and answer, a rhetorical quesion or two.
Are any of Kevin’s scenarios even remotely plausible?
Yes, mathematically, they are. They could conceivably happen.
Are the scenarios I proposed even remotely plausible?
Yes, mathematically, they are. They could conceivably happen.
Are they of equal plausibility?
No, of course not. Kevin’s scenarios are far more likely than mine.
What is the approximate probability of one of Kevin’s scenarios happening? Of mine?
Roughly 10% to 65% for Kevin. As for mine, roughly .000000000000000001% to .00000000000001%.
Using everyday language, how would you best summarize these probabilities?
It”s somewhat possible, to likely, that one of Kevin’s scenarios may actually turn out to be an accurate prediction. As for you, tristero, it’s never ever gonna happen. Give it up.
How come so many people, including Kevin Drum but more importantly, far more influential people than he, literally thought something close to the exact opposite in 2002/03? How come people believed for even one second that positive outcomes to Bush/Iraq that could never possibly happen (do I really have to add “colloquially speaking” to qualify that assertion?) might happen? Or that a good outcome, however defined, had – at the very least – equal probability to all the tragic scenarios that were somewhat possible to likely?
Beats me. I will be spending the rest of my life trying to answer that question. Maybe someday I’ll learn the answer.
Old CW: First woman Speaker will be Rayburn redux. New CW: Botox bumbler blows first play.
This particular Mean Girlz theme didn’t spring from nowhere. It’s coming directly from Frank Luntz:
LUNTZ: I always use the line for Nancy Pelosi, “You get one shot at a facelift. If it doesn’t work the first time, let it go.”
This must have focused grouped well among their target wingnut pigs because, as I previously noted, Queenbee Dowd generously shared this one with the whole world today (before she went off on a sexist rant of her own):
Ted Olson, the former solicitor general and eloquent Republican lawyer who argued the Bush v. Gore case before the Supreme Court, was warming up the rabidly conservative Federalist Society crowd for John McCain with a few sexist cracks about Botox.
The new Congress could amuse itself, he said, by “searching for any sign of movement in Speaker Pelosi’s forehead.” The Senate, he added, would be entertained by “the expressionless, Pelosi-like forehead of Senator Clinton.”
I just have one question for these fine fellows who think this is appropriate: do they really want to start getting into discussions of looks? Because I don’t know who told them they looked like George Clooney and Brad Pitt but whoever it was was either drunk or blind.
This is very dangerous ground for these extremely plain looking middle aged men to be walking on. Dennis Miller ruined a comedy career doing conservative “humor” like this. (And perhaps Liddy Dole and Kay Bailey Hutchinson and Arnold Schwarzenegger should have a discrete talk with them before this gets out of hand and starts to blow back in some unfortunate directions.)
Luntz gave the game away. This kind of derisive babble is not simply a bunch of overgrown frat boys ‘n sorority girls disrespectfully talking about these women’s looks. It’s designed very specifically to trivialize them. It’s right out of the Spring 2000 Earth Tones catalogue.
And the Kewl Kidz, anxious as ever to prove their sophomoric Spite Girl bona-fides, are more than happy to “pass it on” as that snotty little CWitem proves.
Newsweek cleverly puts this disclaimer at the bottom:
The CW is not NEWSWEEK’s opinion, but an informal distillation of the ever-changing thinking of Beltway pundits and the chattering classes.
I don’t doubt it for a minute. And the fact that the RNC’s most famous focus grouper openly admits that he’s pushing the line is purely coincidence.
Letters@newsweek.com Mailing Address: Newsweek 251 W. 57th St. New York, NY 10019
If the Democrats won on November 7th, the Vice-President said, that victory would not stop the Administration from pursuing a military option with Iran.
Anyone who thinks the next two years are gonna be a cakewalk will be forced to listen 10 times in a row to the score to “The Full Monty: The Musical.”
If you think Republicans took the day off in 2000, 20002, and 2004, think again. Get up off your asses. Here we go.
As if to underscore my point,* we have seen in the past week or so a veritable Katrina of trash from the right and the administration. There’s the return of the judicial nominees from hell. There’s Bolton’s nomination. And Cheney assuring the Federalist Society goons that GOP losses won’t keep Bush from nominating right wing lunatics to the bench. And, of course, there is Eric Keroack, a loser so weird even a weird loser like John Podhoretz can’t entirely agree with him.
And now, courtesy Bob Cesca comes Pat Robertson’s latest outrage:
A viewer wrote in to ask Pat Robertson a question
Why [do] evangelical Christians tell non-Christians that Jesus (God) is the only way to Heaven? Those who are Hindu, Buddhist, Islamic, etc. already know and have a relationship with God. Why is this? It seems disrespectful.
Robertson replied that it is not all disrespectful because all other religions really just worship “demonic powers.”
No. They don’t have a relationship. There is the god of the Bible, who is Jehovah. When you see L-O-R-D in caps, that is the name. It’s not Allah, it’s not Brahma, it’s not Shiva, it’s not Vishnu, it’s not Buddha. It is Jehovah God. They don’t have a relationship with him. He is the God of all Gods.** These others are mostly demonic powers. Sure they’re demons. There are many demons in the world.
Yes, it’s true that there are many demons in the world. And yes, obviously, Pat Robertson is one of them. Me, I prefer Maxwell’s Demon and always have.
Anyway, any questions as to why the Democrats have to move and move fast?
*Alas, the rest of that post was not so clear. Apologies.
** Dig the blasphemy. Robertson’s saying that Jehovah is one God, the top God, among many. Who knew he was a polytheist?
Collective Guilt And Punishment: Worse Than Racism
by poputonian
Let’s try this one more time. Sharkbabe said:
Sadly the mass of Americans are no more moved by Iraqi deaths than they were by Vietnamese deaths. … How hard is it to imagine your own neighborhood in ruins, your husband and children dead, your job gone, basics of life gone (clean water, electricity), future gone – why does nobody seem to grasp this or care? I still don’t get it. It’s more than racism, it’s something worse.
When I first read that, I tried to find a previous comment made by the brilliant aimai, but couldn’t locate it. Now I have. Aimai was correcting me for calling Jose Chung a racist. Jose had rationalized the Haditha massacre in part because Iraqis were so barbaric as to distribute DVDs of themselves killing American soldiers. In his mind, otherwise innocent Iraqis therefore deserved to be massacred. He even stated that Iraqi children preferred the DVDs to cartoons. Jose said he couldn’t see any logic in me calling him a racist. As aimai pointed out, he was right:
aimai: Got to side with the josebot on this one, poputonian–his haditha anecdote makes him a soulless, would be mass murderer … but it doesnt *necessarily* make him a racist. In fact, I’d bet all lombard street to a china orange that jose would happilly see lots of people killed in revenge for lots of perceived and imaginary infractions on jose’s world. And I’m sure that some would include members of jose’s own ethnic group,whatever that is, and possibly even members of his own family. Jose’s postings clearly point to both a massive and a fragile ego, a boundless and childish sense of rage, and an unlimited and utterly improbable sense of inflated self worth. But he’s not necessarily a racist. As if that could possibly make it any worse, or any better.
Me: Maybe so, aimai. What I took from his comment was that he sees a group of barbaric people, and from it then concludes that other people who look and dress like them must be sublimated into a culture he knows and understands. In other words, to his small and feeble mind, all Iraqi people must be tamed. Isn’t that racism?
aimai: poputonian, you know, no one despises the josebot and what it spits out more than I do, but it doesn’t make it racist. Jose is concluding–or trying to argue in a pathetic fashion–that all iraqis should be subject to some kind of strict group punishment in which even small children and non-combatants must pay for the sins of their countrymen. But I think jose probably thinks that about a lot of groups if he thinks they are “not on his side.” I don’t doubt that in practice jose finds that, oddly, lots of non-white people are “really evil” and need punishing but he will always think it’s because of something they ‘really did’ and not because he is over-categorizing due to a racist impulse which confuses individual with group. But I also think jose would cheerfully see lots of people of his own race killed, if it didn’t cost him anything and he determined they were “on the wrong side.” The idea of collective guilt and collective punishment is very old, and very retrograde. Its been abandoned by every civilized society. But jose still advocates for it, pathetically and by implication, with a sidewise wink and a kind of “omlettes must be made” attititude.
Here’s the thing, pop, Jose … lacks intelligence, and he certainly lacks empathy. All he has is a persistence of bad faith and a deep and abiding cowardice. It’s not even worth trying to discern his motives–frankly, even a true racist whose every impulse came from race hatred could be a more admirable figure than Jose. Such a person could be loving (to some) noble (to some), courageous in conflict, honest and upright in argument (to some). They could even be peaceful, generous, and empathetic in all things except their chosen fixation (race). Jose can never be any of those things.
Here’s Digby’s original Haditha war crime post (from May), and the corresponding comment thread from which the above comments are extracted.
Ken Adelman’s flack has been getting him a lot of publicity lately, the latest being the lead-off “Had I known then what I know now” guy in this Washington Post article about rats deserting the sinking ship of George Bush’s state. And he seems genuinely horrified over what he contributed to, if still somewhat deluded on the subject of it being a good idea.
Now, being generous people, let’s take Adelman at his word and welcome him back to reality. And I’m not being sarcastic or snarky. I’m genuinely glad that Adelman has wised up, even if it’s late in the game. However, the fact that Adelman now understands the consequences of what he so foolishly advocated doesn’t change those facts, or his responsibility.
First of all, Ken Adelman has the blood of tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of innocents on his hands. Assuming the best, that he is at some level a moral person, he will have to live with the horror of that fact for the rest of his life, that he directly contributed to the slaughter and carnage. But that is not all.
If there are (as there should be but probably won’t be) trials for the perpetrators of this illegal war, Adelman may escape indictment on a technicality but he is morally obligated to testify truthfully about all he knew and saw within the Bush administration regarding the planning and execution of the Bush/Iraq war.
Assuming the likeliest, that there are no trials, Adelman needs to write a book describing in detail what his thinking was that led to the infamous “cakewalk” comment (and weasling out of it by saying it merely referred to taking Baghdad won’t do) and what he knows about the Bush administration.
Secondly, and in my opinion far more important than punishing Adelman (I know many of you disagree, and you’re probably right, but it’s just not my personality to focus on punishing people for their crimes), after writing that book he should immediately retire from having any kind of role in the theorizing or implementation of foreign affairs. Time for a career change, Ken, and I don’t mean teaching foreign affairs somewhere. I mean it’s time to reactivate those adolescent dreams of becoming a death metal superstar, or opening up the motorcycle chop shop you and your wife always fantasized about.
In short, it’s time for Ken Adelman to go away. He didn’t merely make a mistake. He made hundreds of spectacularly awful mistakes. He was wrong about Rumsfeld’s competence, wrong about the very idea of invading Iraq, wrong about the cakewalk, and wrong to keep his mouth shut for so long. Kudos for speaking out (sort-of) before the November election, but that is not enough to recommend Adelman for a continued career in international affairs.
The corollary, of course, is that people who were right about Bush/Iraq from the get-go should consider a career in foreign relations and they should achieve serious influence. Step one: Elect a Democratic president. Step two: don’t count on the mere election of a Democrat to the presidency to guarantee good advisers: work hard to make sure s/he appoints them.
The article is also useful as it gives more insight into the delusional aspect of Richard Perle’s thinking, and by extension the mindset of neoconservatism and the Republican far-right:
Perle said the administration’s big mistake was occupying the country rather than creating an interim Iraqi government led by a coalition of exile groups to take over after Hussein was toppled. “If I had known that the U.S. was going to essentially establish an occupation, then I’d say, ‘Let’s not do it,’ ” and instead find another way to target Hussein, Perle said. “It was a foolish thing to do.”
Perle, head of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board at the time of the 2003 invasion, said he still believes the invasion was justified. But he resents being called “the architect of the Iraq war,” because “my view was different from the administration’s view from the very beginning” about how to conduct it. “I am not critical now of anything about which I was not critical before,” he said. “I’ve said it more publicly.”
In other words, Perle had a plan, a Grand Vision of exactly how to topple Saddam, install Chalabi, and transform Iraq into a land of milk and honey. Then, through some magical osmosis known only to neoconservatives, the rest of the Arab Middle East would follow. Oh, and by the way, while Israel would finally be safe unto eternity, they should hold onto those nukes they don’t have (wink, wink) just in case.
God save us from all future visionaries with clear plans to transform the world.
What Perle is saying is that he laid out the exact steps to follow and if things changed, hey, don’t blame him, they didn’t follow his carefully reasoned plan, which had to be followed to the letter if it was to work.
As if anything as complicated as the invasion and conquest of any country, let alone one the size and complexity of Iraq, can be done according to a linear plan with no deviations. Of all the insane assumptions behind the reasoning for the Bush/Iraq war, this was always one of the most idiotic, that you could write a straightforward narrative of what you wanted to happen and follow it. And it is truly incredible how many people fell for it. But they did.
The world simply doesn’t work the way Perle wants it to. As Anatol Lieven said, to title a book “An End to Evil” as Perle and Frum did, is insane. One cannot have serious discussions of American foreign policy with such people; it is simply incredible that they ever had, and worse, still have, influence in the foreign policy of the most powerful country in the world.
The article ends with words by Kenneth Adelman that are worth repeating:
The whole philosophy of using American strength for good in the world, for a foreign policy that is really value-based instead of balanced-power-based, I don’t think is disproven by Iraq. But it’s certainly discredited.
Good.
And going forward, let’s operate under the assumption that a “value-based” foreign policy has, in fact, been disproven by Iraq.
To those of you who may not be familiar with my earlier posts on the subject, I am not in any sense advocating “realism” nor an abandonment of ethical principles in foreign policy; nor, for that matter, do I believe that it is impossible for countries to identify “the good” and act to further it.
I simply believe that foreign policy must be guided, above all, by what Raymond Aron called “prudence.” I think what he means, at least in part – and I”m sure you’ll correct me – is that a country must act cautiously, carefully, and very knowledgeably in international relations, steering an unclear and inevitably compromised course between the Scylla of realism and the Charybdis of idealism. It is as foolish to behave like Henry Kissinger as it is like Elliott Ness (“Okay gentleman, let’s do some good!””).
I would emphasize caution and knowledge. Crazy people start unnecessary wars. The history of the last six years demonstrates quite well that the world would have enough problems to deal with had there never been a Bush/Iraq war.
Stupid people deal with other countries from a position of near-total ignorance. And again, the last six years proves that the so-called “black box” paradigm of realism – and its corollary, that all countries and peoples roughly aspire to Americanism with a local accent – is preposterous.
A policy of prudence will neither prevent war in all cases, nor preclude fighting a just war. It is not appeasement nor war-mongering. but simple common-sense. And it helps countries avoid wars. Even when you’re dealing with a crazed worsethanhitler lunatic like Saddam Hussein? Yes. Especially then.
In the particular case of Iraq in 2002, a prudent course would have been to drop the sanctions and/or try to refocus them so that they hurt Saddam’s administration rather than the people in the country. In addtion, it was necessary to reinstate the inspection regime, backed up with highly targeted force if necessary to compel inspections (the so-called coerced inspection idea).
What would be the prudent course in Iraq right now? There isn’t one. There isn’t any good course in Iraq. It is a monumental catastrophe. one our grandchildren will be living with. The best I can come up with is get the troops out as quickly as possible and then wait for Bush to leave office in January, 2009 and assess the situation then. Nothing good can or will happen as long as Bush is in office.
That sounds grim and defeatist, I know. But having lived with Bushism now for 6 years, I also know that it is a realistic attitude. The Hamilton-Baker Commission will achieve nothing except create more American deaths (both of Americans and by Americans) while delaying the inevitable withdrawal a few extra months.
And this tragedy – one of the worst debacles in American history, and that is saying a lot – is the legacy of men and women like Kenneth Adelman. And that is why I say, glad you woke up, Ken. Now, go away.
[UPDATE: Peter Daou, quoting Lambert, has a nice takedown of the very idea behind the article, that the most “powerful” criticism has come from his erstwhile supporters. They are, of course, absolutely right.]
In a comment thread below, Sharkbabe noted the American apathy toward death and destruction in Iraq, and asked the key question why:
Sadly the mass of Americans are no more moved by Iraqi deaths than they were by Vietnamese deaths. … How hard is it to imagine your own neighborhood in ruins, your husband and children dead, your job gone, basics of life gone (clean water, electricity), future gone – why does nobody seem to grasp this or care? I still don’t get it. It’s more than racism, it’s something worse.
Her comment reminded me somewhat of a letter Benjamin Franklin wrote to his friend Anthony Todd, the postmaster in England. Granted, the American Revolution was a war between Anglo-cousins, so it obviously wasn’t a race war. But I think it illustrates how people with power do things without thinking about the consequences, just because they can. Here’s what Franklin wrote:
How long will the insanity on your side the water continue? Every day’s plundering of our property and burning our habitations, serves but to exasperate and unite us the more. The breach between you and us grows daily wider and more difficult to heal. Britain without us can grow no stronger. Without her we shall become a tenfold greater and mightier people. Do you choose to have so increasing a nation of enemies? Do you think it prudent by your barbarities to fix us in a rooted hatred of your nation, and make all our innumerable posterity detest you? Yet this is the way in which you are now proceeding. Our primers begin to be printed with cuts of the burnings of Charlestown, of Falmouth, of James Town, of Norfolk with the flight of women and children from those defenseless places, some falling by shot in their flight.
Allen and his people, with Lovell, an amiable character and a man of letters, all in chains on board your ships. Is anybody among you weak enough to imagine that these mischiefs are neither to be paid for nor be revenged, while we treat your people that are our prisoners with the utmost kindness and humanity? Your ministers may imagine that we shall soon be tired of this, and submit. But they are mistaken, as you may recollect they have been hitherto in every instance in which I told you at the time that they were mistaken. And I now venture to tell you, that though this war may be a long one (and I think it will probably last beyond my time) we shall with God’s help finally get the better of you; the consequences I leave to your imagination.
This is what happens when people who are incapable of empathy find their way into the world’s top power cell. They start wars because they can; because to them it feels good. It’s country versus country first, a competition to force others to submit to your will, even if you have to torture them, or kill them. Apparently, these war-makers do not understand that when you attempt to conquer a culture, that culture’s “innumerable posterity” will “detest you.” They might even merge into a new and different adversary, in the case of the Middle East, perhaps a more powerful Shia crescent.
Sharkbabe closed with this:
If Pelosi had an empathetic populace to work with, this atrocity would never have happened in the first place. As it is, I think she’s being very astute in her rhetoric (and I hope tactics) toward achieving the goal at hand – to stop this soul-sickening holocaust as soon as possible.
