My piece from earlier about why liberal hawks shouldn’t have supported the invasion of Iraq on the merits, unfortunately comes to mind as I read Sam Gardiner’s paper (pdf) at the Century Foundation that everyone’s talking about. He’s been convinced that the US has been preparing the ground in Iran for military action since last spring.
He writes this:
The real U.S. policy objective is not merely to eliminate the nuclear program, but to overthrow the regime. It is hard to believe, after the misguided talk prior to Iraq of how American troops would be greeted with flowers and welcomed as liberators, but those inside and close to the administration who are arguing for an air strike against Iran actually sound as if they believe the regime in Tehran can be eliminated by air attacks….[But] no serious expert on Iran believes the argument about enabling a regime change. On the contrary, whereas the presumed goal is to weaken or disable the leadership and then replace it with others who would improve relations between Iran and the United States, it is far more likely that such strikes would strengthen the clerical leadership and turn the United States into Iran’s permanent enemy.
….At the end of the path that the administration seems to have chosen, will the issues with Iran be resolved? No….Will the United States force a regime change in Iran? In all probability it will not….Will the United States have weakened its position in the Middle East? Yes….After all the effort, I am left with two simple sentences for policymakers. “You have no military solution for the issues of Iran. You have to make diplomacy work.”
That sounds, once again, as if the administration is rushing headlong into something that is a very bad idea. But then, it’s not surprising, is it?
Here we are, a few weeks before another important election in which the Republican hold on power is threatened and suddenly the shit is coming down. The terrorists are all going to be running in the streets if we don’t hurry, hurry, hurry and pass the president’s torture bill. Iran is on the verge of getting nukes and sending them to kill you in your beds any day now. The world is a horrible, frightening place and if you don’t know it you are a fool. All that’s standing between us and chaos is a man and his codpiece.
Richard Holbrook was on Blitzer today and was terribly confused by all this. It made me laugh:
Holbrook: And today’s events — and Jack Cafferty really got it right — President Bush’s speech was pretty good as speeches go, but the theater here is remarkable. A hunk president, the world’s leading anti-Semite, has been elevated to a mano a mano on the world stage today by circumstances which I don’t understand. I don’t understand why President Bush would have allowed himself to be scheduled on the same day as Ahmadinejad.
BLITZER: Could he change that, or is that something that is up to the United Nations?
HOLBROOKE: That’s a technological issue. I’d leave it to the current ambassador, but let me just put it this way: Had I been in that job, I would have done everything I could to prevent them talking on the same day so that — to prevent the kind of conversations you and Jack Cafferty correctly were just having.
This is just theater today, but a tiny pipsqueak leader and an anti-Semite of the worst order, the worst since Hitler in some ways, is being given this co-equal status. That’s what we’re talking about.
Really, Dick. You aren’t that stupid are you? They desperately need to make that pip-squeek leader equal to Bush so that Bush can be seen “standing up to him” and smiting him. The theater at the UN today was boffo and it was the whole point. There’s an election to win.
And meanwhile, playing on screen #2, we had the macho, resolute president demanding that the congress approve his “tough” interrogation techniques while the Senators proved that Republicans are independent mavericks who follow their own equally resolute moral code. God bless the Republican Party, it has it all. Only they can save us from the Islamofascists and keep America clean and pure and good at the same time. Vote GOP or die.
I don’t know if it will work again. This trillion dollar franchise is getting a little bit stale. But damn, the production values are awesome. They not only know how to put lipstick on this pig, they give it botox and liposuction.
Update: I don’t mean to suggest that this is only about electoral politics. That dictates the timing but it doesn’t mean they aren’t serious about confronting Iran or legalizing torture. It’s all part of the same game. I think they’ve proven they like exercizing power in all the ways that that implies.
BLITZER: … the International Atomic Energy Agency stops short of flatly saying they are building a bomb.
BOLTON: They have stopped short, but they’ve also refused to say that Iran’s program is purely peaceful. It may just take one piece of information that the IAEA published. Iran has documents from AQCON[A.Q Kahn], the great nuclear proliferator from Pakistan about how to fabricate uranium metal into hemispheres. There’s only one use of uranium metal formed in the hemisphere, and that’s to form a nuclear weapon. But nothing to do with peaceful uses of nuclear power.
BLITZER: But you understand why some people are skeptical of the Bush administration’s stance given the failures on the weapons of mass destruction intelligence leading up to the Iraq war?
BOLTON: Quite honestly, I think it’s few and far between, people who are skeptical of what direction Iran is taking. Where there have been disagreements with our European friends and even with Russia and China have been over how to handle it. But I will say, it’s not — this is not a dispute over intelligence. Obviously, intelligence can be wrong in several different directions. This is fundamentally a dispute I think within the security council about when to impose sanctions.
BLITZER: Because I raise the question because going into the war with Iraq, all of the intelligence communities in Europe and the Middle East and United States, they seem to be convinced that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. We now know he did not, so maybe all of the intelligence communities as far as Iran are wrong right now for whatever reason.
And I say that only because the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Richard Lugar, the ranking Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, a member of the intelligence committee, Carl Levin of Michigan, they told me recently that U.S. intelligence on Iran — they don’t believe is very good.
BOLTON: Well I think our intelligence could get much better, let’s put it that way. But don’t forget, intelligence was wrong about Saddam Hussein in 1990, ’91 too when they didn’t think they were close to developing a nuclear weapon, where the IAEA had no proof, but where after that war, we learned a lot about what Saddam Hussein was up to.
So as they say, intelligence can be wrong in a lot of directions. There is no doubt that the strategic decision that Iran has been following for close to 20 years has been to get not only a nuclear weapons capability, but to enhance the range and accuracy of their ballistic missile forces as well and that combination is extraordinarily dangerous.
BLITZER: How close, based on the information you have, is Iran to building a nuclear bomb?
BOLTON: Well, this is where the intelligence estimates vary and they vary all over the lot. I think precisely because of our uncertainty about the exact state of Iran’s nuclear program, we have to treat their clear effort to get a nuclear weapon capability as very serious and not to assume that the intelligence estimates that put it off for many years are necessarily going to be right.
When you see a regime seeking the capability and you see a president like Ahmadinejad denying the existence of the Holocaust, calling for Israel to be wiped off the map, sponsoring conferences with names like the World Without the United States, this is something that it’s not only capabilities, it’s intentions that you have to take seriously.
BLITZER: So you think it’s realistic to assume if they had a bomb, they would actually use it?
BOLTON: I think it’s realistic in a regime that is the central banker of international terrorism that is seeking a ballistic missile capability far beyond any legitimate defensive needs they might have, but which also puts arms and weapons in the hands of terrorists today. We’ve got a threat if they had the weapon, they could not make it with a ballistic missile, they could give it to a terrorist group like Hamas or Hezbollah as well.
BLITZER: Well that sounds very ominous, even much more dangerous than what the United States feared going into the war with Iraq. I assume the military option is being dusted off if it’s not more advanced?
BOLTON: Well I think we’ve said repeatedly we never take the military option off the table, but President Bush has been emphatic for several years now our preferred way of dealing with the Iranian program is through peaceful and diplomatic means and he emphasized that again this morning at the U.N.
BLITZER: If those peaceful diplomatic means don’t work, sanctions don’t get off the ground, if there’s no change in the Iranian position, what happens then?
BOLTON: Well that’s why we say we don’t take any option off the table about, but our effort at the moment, our concentration, our focus is on getting it resolved through diplomatic means. Through sanctions, if need be.
BLITZER: Is it credible to think that the U.S. could destroy Iran’s nuclear weapons program, assuming they have one?
BOLTON: I think they should believe that.
BLITZER: Do you think the U.S. could that with air strikes, with cruise missiles, with — presumably they spread out their facilities around the country and they’re deep underground. They learned the lessons of the Iraqis back in 1981 when the Israelis destroyed their reactor.
BOLTON: Well I’m not sure what the Iranians have really learned and I don’t want to get into a hypothetical how it might happen. But I do think that the president has been very clear over a number of months that it’s unacceptable for Iran to have nuclear weapons. I think when he says it’s unacceptable, I think what he means by that, it’s not acceptable.
BLITZER: Is Senator Voinovich of Ohio right when he compares Ahmadinejad to Hitler?
BOLTON: I think any man who denies the existence of the Holocaust and calls for Israel to be wiped off the map hasn’t learned the lessons of history and I don’t know what kind of comparison you can draw other than that.
BLITZER: Would you make a similar comparison?
BOLTON: That’s not my function. I mean, what I do is follow the policies set by the president and the secretary. We all have our personal opinions. I think it’s unacceptable for the head of a member government of the United Nations that says — the charter of which says we are to resolve our differences by peaceful means to have somebody like that calling for another U.N. member state to be wiped off the map.
BLITZER: Is that why you don’t think the president or other top officials should be meeting with Iranian leaders right now?
BOLTON: Well, we have made an incredibly generous offer to Iran on the nuclear question, even though they are a principal state sponsor of terrorism. We’ve even been willing to put that aside to say we would be prepared with the Europeans and the Russians and the Chinese to sit down with Iran if they do one thing, they suspend their uranium enrichment activity. And that’s not the U.S.’ condition, that’s the European’s condition, it’s the Security Council’s condition, it’s the IAEA’s condition.
I don’t know why all that sounds so familiar, but it does. I feel like I was sitting right here at my desk some time in the not too distant past, reading speeches about an evil man who wanted to kill Americans and gassing people like in the holocaust and centrifuges and aluminum tubes and security council resolutions and mushroom clouds…
It was fall, too … just after labor day. Must be deja vu.
They couldn’t possibly try this again before another mid-term election, could they?
And the country isn’t going to fall for it again, are they?
The ongoing back and forth about why liberal hawks shouldn’t have supported the invasion of Iraq because they should have known that the Bush administration was incompetent or known it was impossible to succeed continues. And all those things are correct. But I never hear anyone discuss why invading Iraq was a bad decision on the merits.
For reasons I’ve never been able to fathom, a whole bunch of liberal hawks accepted the premise of the Bush Doctrine without considering the ramifications of such a doctrine and whether it was wise to adopt it. Right after 9/11 the Doctrine was a simple formulation that if a government harbored terrorist enemies of the United States, they too were considered an enemy of the United States. That made some sense, particularly as it was applied to Afghanistan. After all, the Taliban didn’t just have terrorists in its midst, it was actively working with them and supporting them. Deposing them was an obvious reaction to the terrorist attacks and very few but the purely pacifist (a thoroughly respectable but extremely rare principle in our culture) objected to it. Indeed, most Americans, hawk and dove alike, agreed after 9/11 that any government that would actively help such criminals as bin Laden had to be stopped.
But soon the Bush Doctrine took on a new character altogether which came almost verbatim from an infamous Defense Department document written by Paul Wolfowitz in 1992 (and rejected by Bush’s father.) I won’t go into the details of that (if you’re unfamiliar with that you can read up on it here) except to point out that the concept of preventive war was folded into the Bush Doctrine and accepted as if it had always been there and that the nation had embraced it just as they’d embraced the much simpler, earlier doctrine. They had also very cleverly hijacked the term “pre-emptive” (which had long been an accepted form of self-defense) to mean the more sinister and illegal term “preventive” which had been rejected by all civilized nations for decades. And lo and behold, Iraq was immediately seen as the first nation in need of such “pre-emption.”
We all knew that certain members of the Bush administration had been obsessed with Iraq for a decade for reasons that had nothing to do with terrorism. And while their obsession did not automatically delegitimize their argument to go into Iraq after 9/11, it certainly should have given liberal hawks some pause. Here was, after all, a group of people who robotically insisted “9/11 changed everything” and yet it had not, evidently, changed their view on Iraq at all, nor had they even taken a moment to reassess. You could smell the opportunism in the air and that should have made smart people skeptical. Nobody knew for sure what the state of Iraq’s WMD arsenal or programs were, of course (although the shaky nature of the “evidence” certainly made my tin-foil hat chirp and squawk like crazy.) But we did know that he had successfully been contained for twelve years and after 9/11 there were good reasons not to rush into anything without a full reassessment of everything. And my God, were they ever rushing into it.
Virtually none of the foreign policy establishment were concerned that invading Iraq was a bad strategy in light of the threat of terrorism. It was obvious that we would inflame the Islamic radicals and create more of them — an American occupying army in the mideast at a time of rising extremism and anti-American fervor was about as provocative an act as could have been imagined. This argument was glossed over as some sort of appeasement when, in fact, it was extremely salient. Why on earth would you go out of your way to aid the recruitment of your enemy unless it was absolutely necessary? The administration may need to play to its base with useless strongman preening but there was no excuse for liberal hawks not to care about this argument.
But the greatest strategic error was dismissing the possibility that by occupying Iraq it would empower Iran in the process. This was indoubtedly seen as pessimism or immoral realpolitik by the neocons and liberal hawks, but it was a very serious consideration that we are now seeing played out before our very eyes. It’s quite clear that the most successful beneficiary of our Iraq policy has been Iraq’s longtime rival, Iran. Had Iraq really presented the existential threat the administration claimed, it might have made sense. But nobody but the most deluded of neocons believed that Saddam was planning to launch drone planes filled with nukes and chemical weapons at the US. There should have been more attention paid to the ramifications of empowering Iran before we invaded Iraq by people who should know better. (The great irony is that the administration is now recycling the same fearmongering to use against Iran — instead of “gassed his own people” it’s “denies the holocaust.” SOS)
So, in the months before we went into Iraq the situation was this:
The Bush Doctrine was morphing before our eyes into a permission slip for unilateral aggression based on nothing more than guesswork about a possible future threat, degrading our moral authority before the war even started.
Many of our allies were balking which meant that we would potentially lose valuable cooperation on terrorism and would have a much harder time coalition building in the future.
Saddam had been successfully contained for more than a decade and could have stayed contained for some time, even if the hyped up threat assessment had turned out to be correct.
The evidence for terrorist ties between Iraq and al Qaeda was virtually non-existent and there was no reason to believe that they would ever have the same goals. Conversely, invading iraq was likely to empower islamic extremism in Iraq and elsewhere.
We rushed into it as if it were an emergency when Saddam had done nothing for years. This meant that planning (which never happened anyway) would have had to be done on a crisis basis, increasing the chance of mistakes and missteps.
We were commmitting our military to a non-urgent long term operation at a time when we needed them to be flexible for the emerging threats of the new era of Islamic extremism.
We knew that upending the structure of the middle east before we had a chance to fully assess the situation could result in empowering the actors we wanted to marginalize, both state and non-state.
For all those reasons one could see not just that it was an impossible task or that the Bush administration would mess it up but that it was simply a bad idea when the circumstances after 9/11 dictated that we be smart about national security. 9/11 didn’t change everything but you’d think the threat of terrorism and assymetrical warfare would have changed the neocon and liberal hawk’s longtime assumptions about the efficacy of traditional military power. If there was ever a time for realism — in the pure sense of the word — it was then. Instead, we had the right lashing out incoherently at their ancient demons and the liberal hawks naively believing that it was a good idea to express our goodness and greatness through a military action that was quite obviously unnecessary at that moment and for which the risk far outweighed the benfit.
We all know that the result was even worse that we feared. We couldn’t know they did no planning at all for the occupation. It didn’t occur to us that they would literally bring in 20 something college Republicans to run the reconstruction. I couldn’t imagine they would botch it so thoroughly on every level that we have now exposed ourselves as something of a paper tiger when it comes to such unilateral actions. It’s weakened us considerably. (And it’s also brought us to a very frightening point…) The abandonment of moral authority with aggressive war and torture, the lost opportunities in Afghanistan, the empowering of Iran are all fall-out from this terrible decision and while we couldn’t necessarily know exactly what would happen, there was NO DOUBT that the outcome was unpredictable. Great powers can’t afford to run dangerous military experiments with unpredictable results unless it’s absolutely necessary. Blowback tends to be rather extreme.
The administration dazzled the nation with a big show and the media was chomping at the bit to have a “real” war that they could cover. But when you stripped away all the hysterical rhetoric it was clear then that even if the Bush administration had been capable of preventing Iraq from descending into chaos and achieving all its goals, liberal hawks should have known that rushing into war in the spring of 2003 was a bad idea anyway.
In the midterm election on November 7, Bush predicted Democrats won’t win either the House or the Senate. “I believe these elections will come down to two things: one, firm belief that in order to win the war on terror there must be a comprehensive strategy that recognizes this war is being fought on more than one front, and, two, the economy.” Bush said the price of gasoline, which has been falling rapidly, is one of the “interesting indicators” that the press should watch carefully. “Just giving you a heads up,” he added.
Now, Digby observed that Bush must have told Them – the Oil “Them” – to open the spigot. And indeed, gas prices have fallen. But in truth, it’s a leap of faith to suggest that the lower oil prices this election seas…sorry, I meant, this fall, had anything to do with the fact that there are 2 oilmen running the United States and their political ass is on the line. I wouldn’t presume to suggest, say, that Bush, Cheney, and Rice begged the cartels and companies to temporarily ease off on the pricegoug… sorry, the utterly fair profit margin they’re taking.
No, what interests me is Bush’s confidence that the election is in the bag. And him giving his rightwing press pals a “heads up.” A heads up. For what? The world anxiously awaits. And I’m not kidding.
I remind you: Bush don’t bluff. Bush do whatever the hell he wants to do. If I were Betting Bill Bennett, I’d lay even odds that the Mayberry Machiavelllis got a little treat in store for the rest of us this fall. And no, I’m bettin’ it ain’t jes’ gamey voting machines, which goes without saying.
As it happens, I’ve kept a short list of October surprises I’ve been working on and I was gonna wait until, you guessed it, October, but given that the “heads up” comment seems to have slipped under the radar a little, I thought I’d release it now to draw a little attention to the very probable threat behind Bush’s remark.
Potential October Surprises
1. Osama bin Laden is captured or killed. That would explain why Osama’s name’s been cropping up in Bush’s speech after so long an absence. Somewhat possible.
2. Another attack on the continental US. This seems unlikely to me, not only because Bush/Rove would never plan such a thing -they didn’t in the past and they won’t in the future, people. Nor will they let bin Laden or any of the zillion of new enemies Bush and Cheney have created do 9/11 part deux from their neglect. Why? The country simply won’t unite behind Bush if he neglects to protect us a third (or fourth) time during his regime. He got a free pass on September 11, ditto for anthrax. But after Katrina, a spectacular attack on the “homeland” ain’t gonna play too well.
3. A nuclear strike, either on Iran or somewhere else like NoKo, unilateral, pre-emptive, and announced as a fait accompli. Bush has, after all, started military ops against Iran, according to Sam Gardiner. Not that likely, but I was getting jumpy one night, and the paranoia overruled my desire to sleep.
4. The exquisitely-timed revelation of a major financial or sexual scandal involving major Democrats. I think this is very likely.
5. Rumsfeld will resign for “health reasons.” Very likely, imo. Everyone loathes him. His replacement? Well, the kind of mentality that would replace a bozo like Ashcroft with a worse bozo like Gonzales…who’s to say? Jerry Boykin? Nah, not even Bush is that stu…as I was saying…who knows who will replace Rumsfeld? But I think Rumsfeld is about to pursue a career for which he has genuine talent: Comic poetry.
6. Bush got bupkus and the “heads up” really is a bluff, which means he psyched us out and so we waste tons of time and bucks trying to figure out what’s he holding and come up empty. I think that’s highly unlikely. He’s a liar but he’s no bluffer, if you can get your heads around that. (And if you do, you can ‘splain it to me sometime ’cause I can’t.)
7. Gas prices will fall. Oh, right, that happened already, but it’s not enough to tip the election his way.
Feel free to imagine other surprises Bush may be concocting. Maybe his ever creative lawyers have found a legal means to strip Massachusetts, New York, and Vermont, and so on of their statehood and annex them as single counties in New Alabama, New Mississippi, or New Texas. The ultimate gerrymander. Maybe, lawyers are standing by ready to contest each and every Democratic victory that slips past Diebold.
Go for it, boys and girls. Emulate Karl Rove. Let your imagination, eh… rove free. What’s Bush planning?
I just saw John Fund on Hardball saying over and over again that the president and John McCain would find a reasonable compromise on the torture issue that will satisfy everyone. I find that amusing. It was as if government was working as it should with the president debating the opposing party and coming to a nice bipartisan outcome.
The only problem, of course, is that is isn’t really “bipartisan” at all, is it? It’s a stragely public debate between a nutball Republican president and a nutball Republican senator. Can there be any question that “bipartisanship” and “compromise” between these two, six weeks before an election, would not result in John Fund being satisfied? I thought not.
I hear Joe Lieberman is running on his bipartisan credentials these days too and it’s not surprising either. His definition of bipartisanship is also to take sides with John McCain in a Rovian kabuki with George Bush, follow the script, get rolled and then call it a compromise.
George W. Bush doesn’t actually compromise with Democrats and Republicans in congress have consciously governed without Democratic input for six years. There has not been any birpartisanship as it is commonly understood since Bill Clinton was president. (And when Bill Clinton was president, Lieberman sided with the same Republicans he sides with today and called that bipartisanship too.)
This new definition of bipartisanship means Republicans like Joe Lieberman, John McCain and Lindsay Graham are considered the loyal opposition to a Republican president.
I don’t think that’s very good for America, do you?
Update: Click through to the link above to see some actions you might take to get the man who says he should be re-elected because he can work with Republicans to get things done, to answer the burning question: Whatjah Get Joe?
If facts mattered, and they haven’t for a very long time, this would be among the very stupidest things printed in a major newspaper in the last five years. And that is saying a lot, believe you me.
A reinvigorated presidency enrages President Bush’s critics, who seem to believe that the Constitution created a system of judicial or congressional supremacy. Perhaps this is to be expected of the generation of legislators that views the presidency through the lens of Vietnam and Watergate. But the founders intended that wrongheaded or obsolete legislation and judicial decisions would be checked by presidential action, just as executive overreaching is to be checked by the courts and Congress.
The changes of the 1970’s occurred largely because we had no serious national security threats to United States soil, but plenty of paranoia in the wake of Richard Nixon’s use of national security agencies to spy on political opponents.
Both Eschaton and Josh have weighed in on the unspeakable historical illiteracy of this remark. I would like to add a few things to what they said.
I remember the ’70’s very well thank you very much, and while the USSR was a threat, and so was the Middle East – I well remember the gas lines – the most serious threat of all to the security of the United States was the imperial presidency of Richard M. Nixon. Many of us who do recall how dangerous he was, including Krugman himself, now agree that Nixon was a piker compared to Bush.
But there’s something more important here than proving Yoo wrong, which any highschool kid with access to a stack of history books, or the Internets could do in five minutes.
Yoo knows he’s lying here and he doesn’t give a damn what you or I think. Why? Because he knows the New York Times has anointed him worthy of space on their editorial page and all that matters is that they print what he writes. It’s the same con as “Intelligent Design” creationism: you gain mainstream cred merely by being included in the debate. And Yoo’s little stunt is all of a piece with the far-right contempt for normal American citizens, not to mention reality. The kind of mentality that would assert there were no serious national security threats during the ’70’s is the same mentality that plants a male hooker among the Whiite House press corps to fluff the press secretary (and at least once, Bush) when the questions get too tough.
The extent of sheer contempt for the people of America these people show never fails to take my breath away. They truly hate Americans, and American values. And these monarchy-loving assholes, these total losers who are literally smirking at the presumed ignorance of the people they dare to lead, these are populists?
So why is the Bush administration so determined to torture people?
To show that it can.
The central drive of the Bush administration — more fundamental than any particular policy — has been the effort to eliminate all limits on the president’s power. Torture, I believe, appeals to the president and the vice president precisely because it’s a violation of both law and tradition. By making an illegal and immoral practice a key element of U.S. policy, they’re asserting their right to do whatever they claim is necessary.
[snip]
Only now, five years after 9/11, has Mr. Bush finally found some things he wants us to sacrifice. And those things turn out to be our principles and our self-respect.
Bush was not bluffing, he was actually going to invade a country that had nothing to do with 9/11 because…well, because he could. It is still the only reason that makes sense. Because he could.
BTW, the first time I wrote that that was the reason Bush was invading Iraq was back on February 28, 2003.
Note: I’m not suggesting Krugman steals from bloggers like yours truly – he’s a brilliant man and this isn’t the hardest conclusion to come to, after all. No, I’m simply boasting shamelessly that I said it first. Boasting shamelessly about priority – and proving it with a link – is one of the great pleasures of blogging, made even more so because said priority is, as it is in this case, utterly trivial and meaningless.]
I had read excerpts of Fred Barnes’ column describing his meeting with the president and fellow conservative sycpophants, but I didn’t get a chance to read the whole thing until today. The codpiece is full to bursting even as the mind is shrinking.
Inside the Oval Office President Bush gives journalists a “heads up” about the mid-term elections, among other things. [That’s the real headline, I swear — d]
WE NOW KNOW WHY the Bush administration hasn’t made the capture of Osama bin Laden a paramount goal of the war on terror. Emphasis on bin Laden doesn’t fit with the administration’s strategy for combating terrorism. Here’s how President Bush explained this Tuesday: “This thing about . . . let’s put 100,000 of our special forces stomping through Pakistan in order to find bin Laden is just simply not the strategy that will work.”
Rather, Bush says there’s a better way to stay on offense against terrorists. “The way you win the war on terror,” Bush said, “is to find people [who are terrorists] and get them to give you information about what their buddies are fixing to do.” In a speech last week, the president explained how this had worked–starting with the arrest and interrogation of 9/11 planner Khalid Sheik Muhammad–to break up a terrorist operation that was planning post-9/11 attacks on America.
“It’s really important at this stage . . . to be thinking about how to institutionalize courses of action that will enable future presidents to gain the information necessary to prevent attack,” he said. This, presumably, would include the use of secret prisons, tough but legal interrogation techniques, a ban on lawsuits against interrogators, electronic eavesdropping, and monitoring of bank transfers, among other measures.
Bush talked about his strategy in the fight against Islamic jihadists in a 95-minute session in the Oval Office with seven journalists. At the outset of the interview, which occurred the morning after his speech to the nation on the fifth anniversary of 9/11, Bush declared: “I’ve never been more convinced that the decisions I made are the right decisions.”
Barnes is so in the tank for Bush that he’s grown gills, so I wouldn’t expect even the tiniest bit of skepticism from him. But I assume he’s accurately reporting what the president said. And he’s reporting that Bush’s plan to combat terrorism is to institutionalize torture, warrentless spying on his own citizens, indefinite detention, secret prisons, warrantless monitoring of bank transfers and legal immunity for those who carry out those tasks.
What do you suppose such “institutions” usually characterize?
He’s also consciously conflating “rogue states” and terrorists, and failing to draw the proper distinctions at the same time, just as he’s done from the beginning. He does not think, for instance, that it’s important to “decapitate” the head of al Qaeda, yet “decapitating” Saddam Hussein made the world safer.
I’m sure I don’t need to point out how wrong both of those suppositions are. Bin Laden continuing to elude the vast power of the US only makes him stronger — and deposing Saddam uselessly destabilized the world in ways that we haven’t even been able to fully discern yet. (What we know now is that we have precipitated a civil war in Iraq and empowered Iran — not bad for government work.)
This also brings up something I found somewhat hilarious in his press conference the other day:
Q Thank you, Mr. President. Earlier this week, you told a group of journalists that you thought the idea of sending special forces to Pakistan to hunt down bin Laden was a strategy that would not work.
THE PRESIDENT: Yes.
Q Now, recently you’ve also —
THE PRESIDENT: Because, first of all, Pakistan is a sovereign nation.
Q Well, recently you’ve also described bin Laden as a sort of modern day Hitler or Mussolini. And I’m wondering why, if you can explain why you think it’s a bad idea to send more resources to hunt down bin Laden, wherever he is?
THE PRESIDENT: We are, Richard. Thank you. Thanks for asking the question. They were asking me about somebody’s report, well, special forces here — Pakistan — if he is in Pakistan, as this person thought he might be, who is asking the question — Pakistan is a sovereign nation. In order for us to send thousands of troops into a sovereign nation, we’ve got to be invited by the government of Pakistan.
I know. I know…
Barnes continues:
Bush said it’s difficult for many people to understand how serious the terrorist threat is. “It’s impossible for someone to have grown up in the 50s and 60s to envision a conflict with people that just kill mercilessly, using techniques that are kind of foreign to modern warfare. But it’s real. I’m telling you, it’s real.”
I grew up in the 1960’s doing nuclear war drills in school. My next door neighbors in Wichita, Kansas had a bomb shelter in their back yard. On October 22, 1962 the president of United States went on television and told the American people that we were on the brink of nuclear war — and we were. If he thinks that is somehow less frightening than bunch of suicde bombers and nutballs with box cutters, he truly is stupid.
This was what a president sounds like when he is dealing with a real and imminent existential threat:
I call upon Chairman Khrushchev to halt and eliminate this clandestine, reckless, and provocative threat to world peace and to stable relations between our two nations. I call upon him further to abandon this course of world domination, and to join in an historic effort to end the perilous arms race and to transform the history of man. He has an opportunity now to move the world back from the abyss of destruction by returning to his government’s own words that it had no need to station missiles outside its own territory, and withdrawing these weapons from Cuba by refraining from any action which will widen or deepen the present crisis, and then by participating in a search for peaceful and permanent solutions.
I pity these poor idiots who are so desperate for meaning in their lives that they are trying to turn Islamic extremism into a threat on that scale. Apparently, since it isn’t they are just going to try to make it so.
The aburdity of his statement that people who grew up in the 50’s and 60’s can’t understand this kind of threat should send chills down people’s spines, however. This is the president of the United States not some moist, bobby soxer who’s desperate to be that nurse kissing the handsome sailor in the famous VE Day picture. We need leaders who are clear eyed about threats to our country and fashion appropriate responses.
Barnes continues:
Bush dismissed as cynical the charge that he hasn’t asked the American people to accept sacrifices as American soldiers fight against terrorists in Iraq and elsewhere. “You know what the definition of sacrifice is for a lot of people” who question him about the lack of sacrifice? “How come you didn’t raise taxes? That’s what that means as far as I’m concerned . . . If we had raised taxes to create a sense of sacrifice, it would have caused even greater sacrifice because I believe raising taxes in a recession would cause the economy to get even worse.”
I don’t know what he thinks he’s saying here, but he’s said it more than once. Evidently he’s persuaded himself that by cutting taxes, he’s asked the American people to sacrifice. Or something. It’s completely incoherent.
The truth is that he hasn’t asked anyone for a sacrifice (except the poor soldiers) because he’s waiting to get out of office so somebody else can give the country the bad news and be blamed for it. That’s how Republicans govern. And until Democrats learn to hang this stuff around their necks they will continue to get away with it.
The president said he is not isolated in the White House. “I know exactly what’s in the news,” he said. “I listen to a lot of people. I’ve got smart people around me. And they can march right in here–this Oval Office can be slightly intimidating, but I’ve got people here who can fight through the aura and say, ‘I think you’re wrong. I think you’re right.'”
It’s a standing joke among the president’s top aides: who gets to deliver the bad news? Warm and hearty in public, Bush can be cold and snappish in private, and aides sometimes cringe before the displeasure of the president of the United States, or, as he is known in West Wing jargon, POTUS…it is not clear what President Bush does read or watch, aside from the occasional biography and an hour or two of ESPN here and there. Bush can be petulant about dissent; he equates disagreement with disloyalty. After five years in office, he is surrounded largely by people who agree with him. Bush can ask tough questions, but it’s mostly a one-way street. Most presidents keep a devil’s advocate around. Lyndon Johnson had George Ball on Vietnam; President Ronald Reagan and Bush’s father, George H.W. Bush, grudgingly listened to the arguments of Budget Director Richard Darman, who told them what they didn’t wish to hear: that they would have to raise taxes. When Hurricane Katrina struck, it appears there was no one to tell President Bush the plain truth.
He won’t stand for dissent, it’s quite obvious. Instead, grey eminences like Dick Cheney play all kinds of mind games to get him to do something he doesn’t understand. He is a spoiled, stupid stubborn little brat — a dauphin terror who does not lead but rather succumbs to whichever appeal to his vanity sounds good. He is a disaster.
In the midterm election on November 7, Bush predicted Democrats won’t win either the House or the Senate. “I believe these elections will come down to two things: one, firm belief that in order to win the war on terror there must be a comprehensive strategy that recognizes this war is being fought on more than one front, and, two, the economy.” Bush said the price of gasoline, which has been falling rapidly, is one of the “interesting indicators” that the press should watch carefully. “Just giving you a heads up,” he added.
I guess he told them to “turn on the spigot.”
This guy doesn’t just sound thick and slow any more. He increasingly sounds completely nuts.
The outlines of the torture debate kabuki emerged this morning with the interviews with John McCain and Stephen Hadley on This Week. It is actually quite straightforward. McCain was very optimistic they could reach a compromise and Hadley said that the three conditions for compromise are this:
1. they must be able to keep the program (which is, of course, entirely up to Junior who stomped his little feet until he turned blue at his press conference, threatening to allow terrorists to kill us all in our beds if he doesn’t get his way.) It’s entirely within his power to “keep the program.”
2. they must give their intelligence professionals “clear guidelines” with congressional support. In other words they need some sort of bill that says the congress supports the president’s CIA interrogation program. (Perhaps Bush can lead a little cheer.)”Clear guidelines” means nothing. What they are seeking is exactly opposite of “clear guidelines. So, basically, they simply have to assert that they’ve got them and they’ve got them. Check.
3. they must find a way to do this by accomodating McCain’s desire that they not “amend” Article III. McCain has already set forth how they will do this:
McCain and the other GOP senators have indicated they would be willing to amend domestic U.S. law, especially the War Crimes Act, to permit at least some “enhanced” CIA techniques. They are also willing to pass legislation that would deny many rights to detainees at Guantánamo Bay and allow them to be held indefinitely.
Bush has always said that he wanted to “clarify” Article III and I predict that they will soon have a breakthrough that says they have found a way to do just that — by amending the War Crimes Act.
And all over the country the word will go forth that the Republicans in the US Senate stood up to the unpopular George W. Bush — Sing Hallalujah! They are tough on terrorists and moral to boot! We can all vote Republican again with a clear conscience — accountability and oversight have arrived thanks to St. John McCain the Anointed One.
Aside from the obvious electoral benefits of this kabuki dance, I also suspect the administration’s substantive goal all along was to stage a public fight on torture in order to get the congress to compromise on all the military tribunal issues. They got their cornpone tool Huckelberry Graham to eliminate judicial review and habeas corpus, and all they need now is to force the kewl mavericks to give up their requirement that terrorists be allowed access to the evidence against them and they will have codified their Gitmo gulag. Excellent work.
Update: The main reason I know this is kabuki is more than just instinct. It’s because crap like this gives away the game:
Another irony lies in the fact that the congressional rules for interrogations that the Bush administration now seeks to embrace in the new legislation — the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 — were vigorously opposed by the White House before their adoption by Congress. Bush disliked them so much that when he signed the law Dec. 30, he appended a statement objecting to some of its provisions and explicitly reserved his right to interpret them “in a manner consistent” with his constitutional authorities as president and commander in chief.
In another twist, the principal Republican lawmakers responsible for the Detainee Treatment Act — Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) — said last year that they meant the law to set a minimum, humane standard of treatment for detainees held by both the Defense Department and the CIA. But they now are telling colleagues it would be a bad law for the CIA to follow in the future because its language would slight international treaty obligations.
A retired intelligence professional who said he has discussed the matter at length with colleagues said the predominant view at the agency is that McCain — who made clear in congressional debate last year that he disapproved of what the CIA was doing — was surprised to learn later that the Detainee Treatment Act did not put a stop to it.
All those “twists” and “ironies” and the picture of a naive, hoodwinked St John the Anointed just don’t pass the smell test.
I have no doubt that McCain and Bush will stand together, all smiles, at a bill signing ceremony some time in the not too distant future. And then the president will issue a signing statement designed to cover his ass and everyone elses ass and John McCain will run for president as the man who saved America’s soul.
Two points to add to Digby’s post on the sheer stupidity, Republcian cronyism and cynicism that operated within the CPA:
1. This story is not news. I recall hearing within months of the invasion that the main qualification for service in CPA was obeisance to the Sun King of Crawford. What is news is the prominence that an influential member of the media is providing for this story. In an election season no less. But the fact that this wasn’t discussed when it was happening should remind us all of how completely the media was co-opted when it mattered the most, when robust reporting could have made a difference.
Not that by the time of the CPA much difference could be possible. The moment the invasion started, a blunder of historical proportions was set in motion. The rest is weary detail and a Euphrates of blood.
As glad as I am that these stories are finally getting wide, prominent coverage, I would be a lot happier if the press would report aggressively and, most importantly, report in a prominent way in real time on the current pack of lies about Iran and the Bush administration’s plans for war. While readers of this blog are informed enough to know that war with Iran is a very real possibility unless there is a significant shift of power in Congress this fall, it seems to be falling under the radar of most Americans.
Time to beat the drums, loudly.
2. Perhaps the most difficult thing for normals like you and I to understand is the myth that “The Good Person can do no wrong” to which rightwing nuts, especially the religious, are so prone. But it is quite real. When Bush nominated Harriet Miers for the Supreme Court, a woman with absolutely no legitimate qualifications for such an intellectually demanding job, he defended her by insisting on her Goodness. And had she been found to be truly Good by the extreme right, she would be sitting on the court right now, in way, way, way over her head. But it wasn’t her lack of qualifications that doomed Miers. It was that, to the right, she wasn’t Good – she was a feminist who probably had objections to poor women using coathangers and lye for abortion.
To the right, if you are Good, then you simply cannot, by definition, do wrong. So, when you’re looking to fill a position of authority, you don’t look for the most qualified in terms of experience. You look for the person who is the most Good. Since being a “Christian” means you’re Good, since being a Republican loyal to Bush means you’re Good, that is far more important than Arab language skills. Because what does it matter if you can speak the language if you’re not Good? By definition your decisions are Bad!
Therefore, from the Bush administration’s standpoint, they truly believed they were hiring the best people possible to bring Iraq rapidly to its feet. Yes, of course, it was cynical politicking. But it was also, at the same time and without contradiction, utterly sincere.
And therefore, not only must Republicans be routed from Congress this fall, but Americans must fight a constant battle to ensure that in the future, these lunatics lose even more influence over the American government and never regain the presidency.
[Update: Atrios makes the important point that it’s not just the notion of The Good that drives the rightwing, or cynicism but also a full disconnect with reality and genuine sociopathy. Agreed.]