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.
There have been a good number of excellent documentaries examining various aspects of the Sixties protest movement (“The War At Home”, “Berkeley In The Sixties” and the more recent “Weather Underground”), but none focusing specifically on the members of the armed forces who openly opposed the Vietnam war-until now. “Sir! No Sir!” is a fascinating look at the GI anti-war movement during the era. Director David Zeigler combines present-day interviews with archival footage to good effect in this well-paced documentary. Most people who have seen Oliver Stone’s “Born On The Fourth Of July” were likely left with the impression that paralyzed Vietnam vet and activist Ron Kovic was the main impetus and focus of the GI movement, but Kovic’s story was in fact only one of thousands (Kovic, interestingly, is never mentioned in Ziegler’s film). While the aforementioned Kovic received a certain amount of media attention at the time, the full extent and history of the involvement by military personnel has been suppressed from public knowledge for a number of years, and that is the focus of “Sir! No Sir”. In one very astutely chosen archival clip, a CBS news anchor somberly announces that there appears to be some problems with “troop morale” in Vietnam (while in the meantime, behind closed doors, the US military was apparently imprisoning dissenting GIs left and right under “incitement to mutiny” charges, sometimes just for being overheard expressing anti-war sentiments). All the present-day interviewees (Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine vets) have interesting (and at times emotionally wrenching) stories to share. Jane Fonda speaks candidly about her infamous “FTA” (“Fuck The Army”) shows that she organized for troops as an antidote to the somewhat creaky and more traditional Bob Hope USO tours. Well worth your time. The film would make an excellent double bill with the classic documentary “Hearts And Minds” (DVD available from Criterion).
Editors note: Dennis Hartley is a Seattle based comedian, radio personality, film buff and writer. He has agreed to review films for the discerning Hullabaloo reader on a semi-regular basis. We have joined the Ironweed Film Club (what the NY Times calls a “progressive film festival” on DVD) and will be featuring those films, as well as others that we think will be of interest to you liberal schmarties. Please welcome him to our motley crew.
In an unprecedented transparent attempt to severely limit the right to peaceful protest and freedom of speech of low-wage Houston janitors and their supporters, a Harris County District Attorney has set an extraordinarily high bond of $888,888 cash for each of the 44 peaceful protestors arrested last night. Houston janitors and their supporters, many of them janitors from other cities, were participating in an act of non-violent civil disobedience, protesting in the intersection of Travis at Capitol when they were arrested in downtown Houston Thursday night. They were challenging Houston’s real estate industry to settle the janitors’ strike and agree on a contract that provides the 5,300 janitors in Houston with higher wages and affordable health insurance.
The combined $39.1 million bond for the workers and their supporters is far and above the normal amount of bail set for people accused of even violent crimes in Harris County. While each of the non-violent protestors is being held on $888,888 bail …
[…]
Community activists and leaders expressed concern and dismay today at the police’s use of horses to intimidate and corral janitors participating in the non-violent civil disobedience Thursday night in downtown Houston. The police’s choice to use horses to stop the protest resulted in four people being injured, including an 83-year old female janitor from New York.
I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night, Alive as you and me. Says I “But Joe, you’re ten years dead” “I never died” said he, “I never died” said he.
“In Salt Lake, Joe,” says I to him, him standing by my bed, “They framed you on a murder charge,” Says Joe, “But I ain’t dead,” Says Joe, “But I ain’t dead.”
“The Copper Bosses killed you Joe, they shot you Joe” says I. “Takes more than guns to kill a man” Says Joe “I didn’t die” Says Joe “I didn’t die”
And standing there as big as life and smiling with his eyes. Says Joe “What they can never kill went on to organize, went on to organize”
From San Diego up to Maine, in every mine and mill, where working-men defend their rights, it’s there you find Joe Hill, it’s there you find Joe Hill!
I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night, alive as you and me. Says I “But Joe, you’re ten years dead” “I never died” said he, “I never died” said he.
