Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

The Best And The Brightest

by digby

Here is a fascinating look at one of our government’s most important foreign policy innovators. Considering her extremely important position and intimate influence on the president one can’t help but wonder how the administration’s mid-east policy came to be so simplistic and infused with magical thinking:

As part of her job, this Phi Beta Kappa, summa cum laude graduate in journalism and English from Southern Methodist University in Dallas, and former Texas television reporter, still writes news scripts — to the world.

In the past year, she has created the “rapid response unit” to monitor global media, produce a daily summary of driving news and put out the government’s cohesive response. Every cabinet secretary, ambassador, military commander gets these pages. “This was my effort to try, literally, to get the federal government on the same page.”

Her next major assignment is to lead an interagency process in writing a strategic communications plan — this time for the entire U.S. government.

“I will frequently say, ‘I’ve been doing so many meetings, I can’t get any work done.’ I have to have time to think and have time to write. I’m very verbal, I like to talk, I like people, but I’m also a writer.” What she goes home to write, these days, is this master plan.

[…]

Despite her resistance to meetings, her top management tip is for a manager to spend time with his/her own people — and not to pigeonhole them in their job descriptions. She likes a “very collaborative approach so we have very interesting staff meetings, lots of ideas and laughs.

“I’m an idea factory. My staff laughs at me. If I’ve had a really good exercise night, I’ll come in the next morning and have several ideas.“

[…]

She says that it is “vitally important for our children to foster better relationships between America and people of different countries and cultures. I mean children in Canada, children in the United States, my own son, children around the world.”

She has three job goals:

First: “Foster a sense of hope and opportunity. These are rooted in our values, beginning with our belief in the dignity of every person — in every person’s right to live in freedom, in equality, in a just society.”

Second: “Work to marginalize the violent extremists and to confront their ideology of tyranny and hate. I really believe that’s vitally important for our children to have a peaceful future.”

Third: “Foster a sense of common interests and values between Americans and Canadians and people across the world. We have to be able to communicate a common humanity. You can’t, I wouldn’t think, blow up a bomb next to someone you see is a human being who has a lot in common with you.”

[…]

What will history say about this president?

“I believe they’ll say that he championed freedom and democracy and changed a volatile and dangerous region into one that was more, much more, hopeful and optimistic.”

And, on the economic front, after the 2000 stock market bubble burst after 9/11, she says, “they’ll say that his tax cuts helped avoid significant economic disruption.”

As for herself, she continues to craft and deliver the Bush administration’s public message.

Her nighttime reading is telling. A re-reading of Bernard Lewis’ What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response. Alaa Al Aswany’s The Yacoubian Building, about a building in Cairo and all its inhabitants. And, at her bedside, evangelist Billy Graham’s new book, The Journey: How to Live by Faith in an Uncertain World.

It’s this kind of thing that explains how Dick Cheney came to be so powerful.

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How Do You Like Your Democratic Iraq Now, Mr Lieberman?

by digby

So I hear that the national political press corps is about to descend on Connecticut like a swarm of locusts to cover the Lieberman Lamont primary in its final week. They are going to be following Joe around in a bus apparently.

This is good news, actually. Maybe they can finally get him to answer a few questions about Iraq, which he has suddenly clammed up about. It seems like only yesterday that Joe was saying stuff like this every day:

“We have reached an important milestone and achieved a new momentum in reaching a goal all Americans should embrace – building a secure, peaceful, democratic Iraq that is no longer a threat to the United States or the international community,”

Now, not so much.

If I were a real journalist and I had a chance to chat with Joe, I’d ask him if he still thinks that’s true in light of his fellow Senators’ condemnation of Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki’s remarks about Israel. It seems nobody has yet been able to get him to explain this.

He did attend and applaud Maliki’s speech, but failed to appear afterwards when reporters were asking questions. He’s been so busy bragging about his earmarks and having his campaign place flyers in black neighborhoods accusing Lamont of being a racist (Lee Atwater would be proud) that perhaps he hasn’t had time to weigh in on the most pressing foreign policy issues of the day.

Still, Joe is a man of principle and mid-east policy is his signature issue, so I’m sure he’ll be more than happy to take questions. Joe has been like a proud papa about this new Iraqi government. I’m curious what he thinks of it now, aren’t you?

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Who’s Putting The Party First?

by digby

Jonathan Alter’s irrational fear of hippies leads him to write this:

…the Senate needs collegial moderates who work across party lines. It’s the only way to stop the really bad stuff. And the revival of the romance of the antiwar left is a potential disaster for the Democrats. That’s what gave the world Richard Nixon in 1968, when ideologically pure liberals who had backed Eugene McCarthy in the primaries refused to rally around Hubert Humphrey because Humphrey was “complicit” in the Vietnam War machine.

Apparently, challenging someone in Senate primary is comparable to people sitting out an election as a protest. I’m not sure why that is. If there is a move afoot to sit out the election, I haven’t seen any sign of it. But hey, it’s always 1968 in the DC establishment’s mind so let’s get groovy and smoke a doobie.

And I’d love to know what “really bad stuff” has been stopped by Joe Lieberman lately. The last I heard he was signing on to illegal domestic spying and indefinite prison sentences at Gitmo. He didn’t think Abu Ghraib was such a big deal and certainly didn’t lead the fight against torture. I haven’t heard a word from him about signing statements or what to do about the black hole money pit that is Iraq. If that’s the result of compromise, what in the hell were the Republicans originally trying to do — institute capital punishment for eating falafels?

Clinton managed to forge a pragmatic center for Democrats, which is why he didn’t hesitate to campaign last week for Lieberman. Clinton’s strong support may well pull the man who once called his behavior “disgraceful” over the finish line. It’s also a warm-up for selling his pro-war wife to skeptical liberals.

A lot of thanks Clinton got for his pragmatic centrism, too. He came within a hairsbreadth of being driven from office (with the help of his friend Joe)and when the Republicans took over they took the pragmatic surplus he created, handed it out to their rich friends and then proceeded to govern from as far right as they could possibly get with no thought to “collegial” moderation.

Grover Norquist said it and he meant it: they Republicans consider bi-partisanship date rape — and it ain’t the Democrats who are slipping the roofies in the kool-aid.

At some point in the last five years it should have occurred to Joe, who had no wingnut constituents to whom he needed to pander, that he was being used like a blow-up doll at a frat party.

The bloggers who have noisily intervened deny they’re interested in ideological purity. They point to their support in Senate races for pro-life candidates. But on Iraq, the liberal blogs brook no dissent.

The Iraq war is not a tiny little policy difference. It has endangered our economic health and our national security. It’s a matter of life and death. Is there anything these Washington insiders believe is worth fighting for? If “brooking no dissent” means that I think the Democratic party should stand with the large majority of Americans who want us out of Iraq, then I guess I’m guilty. On the war, there really should be NO controversy within the party, and there really isn’t except among DC insiders whose irrational fear of hippies has them paralyzed on the greatest issues of our time.

Not that it matters in Connecticut. If Lamont wins, only the laziest analysts can attribute it to the Netroots. Daily Kos is not exactly Topic A in the diners and union halls of the Nutmeg State.

But if the blogs aren’t a force on the ground, they are becoming a powerful factor in directing the passions (and pocketbooks) of far-flung Democratic activists. They’re helping fuel a collective version of what shrinks call “projection,” where the anger of Democrats at Bush is projected on a handy target, in this case Lieberman. But in doing so, they have neglected what FDR called “the putting of first things first.” Job one for Democrats is identifying which Republican House incumbents are vulnerable in their own states and directing all available energy against them. Savaging fellow Democrats (except those who cannot win) should come after taking control, not before.

Bloggers are doing just what Alter says they should be doing, championing candidates across the country, liberal centrist and conservative, to beat Republicans. Clearly, he isn’t following the netroots very closely. There is one primary going on in Connecticut featuring one Democratic incumbent whose challenger is being championed by bloggers. The intention was that this challenge would be over on August 8th at which point everyone would gather around the winner and on to victory in November.

Except there’s now a little wrinkle. Joe Lieberman is apparently determined to run as an independent and put the safe Democratic seat at risk. I don’t know why the bloggers or Lamont are being admonished for failing to put the party first, when all they did was stage a primary challenge, a very basic act of democracy.

Perhaps Alter should have a chat with Joe and his people about “putting first things first” eh?

The challenge facing voters this year is not to hold Democrats accountable for their heresies but Republicans accountable for where they have taken the country. They are the ones in power, not Joe Lieberman.

There’s only one Democrat being held accountable for his “heresies” and that’s Joe Lieberman. And that’s because this election is a referendum on George W. Bush and Republican rule. Unlike many Republican politicians, Lieberman refused to distance himself from Bush and the Republicans when presented with a challenger. And like other Republicans who refuse to admit the error of their ways, he stands to lose this election because of it. When a “throw the bums out” election comes along, it’s only smart to try not to be lumped in with them.

This isn’t about a 60’s style liberal “anti-war movement,” which was a massive youth movement built around the draft coupled with huge social and cultural upheaval. This is just people trying to elect representatives to national office who represent their views. Despite all this blather about “congenial bipartisanship” the Republican Party went so far right they went off the cliff — people are doing the predictable (and responsible) thing and pushing back. Many of them care passionately about their country and are frightened of the direction in which it’s going. They are trying to do something about it. Is that really so scary?

This is just plain old politics, nothing unusual about it except we organize and talk over the internets. America hasn’t heard much from liberals in a while but we’ve been out here the whole time — and our policies have remained popular in spite of all the vilification we’ve endured because of the pathological fear of hippies that permeates the Democratic establishment.

Roll up a fattie, put on some Buffallo Springield and kick back, boys. It really isn’t the end of the world if Democrats feel some passion about their politics. Human beings need some of that to be motivated. And so do political parties.

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The New York Times

July 30, 2006
Editorial
A Senate Race in Connecticut

Earlier this year, Senator Joseph Lieberman’s seat seemed so secure that — legend has it — some people at the Republican nominating convention in Connecticut started making bleating noises when the party picked a presumed sacrificial lamb to run against the three-term senator, who has been a fixture in Connecticut politics for more than 35 years.

But Mr. Lieberman is now in a tough Democratic primary against a little-known challenger, Ned Lamont. The race has taken on a national character. Mr. Lieberman’s friends see it as an attempt by hysterical antiwar bloggers to oust a giant of the Senate for the crime of bipartisanship. Lamont backers — most of whom seem more passionate about being Lieberman opponents — say that as one of the staunchest supporters of the Iraq war, Mr. Lieberman has betrayed his party by cozying up to President Bush.

This primary would never have happened absent Iraq. It’s true that Mr. Lieberman has fallen in love with his image as the nation’s moral compass. But if pomposity were a disqualification, the Senate would never be able to call a quorum. He has voted with his party in opposing the destructive Bush tax cuts, and despite some unappealing rhetoric in the Terri Schiavo case, he has strongly supported a woman’s right to choose. He has been one of the Senate’s most creative thinkers about the environment and energy conservation.

But this race is not about résumés. The United States is at a critical point in its history, and Mr. Lieberman has chosen a controversial role to play. The voters in Connecticut will have to judge whether it is the right one.

As Mr. Lieberman sees it, this is a fight for the soul of the Democratic Party — his moderate fair-mindedness against a partisan radicalism that alienates most Americans. “What kind of Democratic Party are we going to have?” he asked in an interview with New York magazine. “You’ve got to agree 100 percent, or you’re not a good Democrat?”

That’s far from the issue. Mr. Lieberman is not just a senator who works well with members of the other party. And there is a reason that while other Democrats supported the war, he has become the only target. In his effort to appear above the partisan fray, he has become one of the Bush administration’s most useful allies as the president tries to turn the war on terror into an excuse for radical changes in how this country operates.

Citing national security, Mr. Bush continually tries to undermine restraints on the executive branch: the system of checks and balances, international accords on the treatment of prisoners, the nation’s longtime principles of justice. His administration has depicted any questions or criticism of his policies as giving aid and comfort to the terrorists. And Mr. Lieberman has helped that effort. He once denounced Democrats who were “more focused on how President Bush took America into the war in Iraq” than on supporting the war’s progress.

At this moment, with a Republican president intent on drastically expanding his powers with the support of the Republican House and Senate, it is critical that the minority party serve as a responsible, but vigorous, watchdog. That does not require shrillness or absolutism. But this is no time for a man with Mr. Lieberman’s ability to command Republicans’ attention to become their enabler, and embrace a role as the president’s defender.

•

On the Armed Services Committee, Mr. Lieberman has left it to Republicans like Lindsey Graham of South Carolina to investigate the administration’s actions. In 2004, Mr. Lieberman praised Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld for expressing regret about Abu Ghraib, then added: “I cannot help but say, however, that those who were responsible for killing 3,000 Americans on September 11th, 2001, never apologized.” To suggest even rhetorically that the American military could be held to the same standard of behavior as terrorists is outrageous, and a good example of how avidly the senator has adopted the Bush spin and helped the administration avoid accounting for Abu Ghraib.

Mr. Lieberman prides himself on being a legal thinker and a champion of civil liberties. But he appointed himself defender of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and the administration’s policy of holding hundreds of foreign citizens in prison without any due process. He seconded Mr. Gonzales’s sneering reference to the “quaint” provisions of the Geneva Conventions. He has shown no interest in prodding his Republican friends into investigating how the administration misled the nation about Iraq’s weapons. There is no use having a senator famous for getting along with Republicans if he never challenges them on issues of profound importance.

If Mr. Lieberman had once stood up and taken the lead in saying that there were some places a president had no right to take his country even during a time of war, neither he nor this page would be where we are today. But by suggesting that there is no principled space for that kind of opposition, he has forfeited his role as a conscience of his party, and has forfeited our support.

Mr. Lamont, a wealthy businessman from Greenwich, seems smart and moderate, and he showed spine in challenging the senator while other Democrats groused privately. He does not have his opponent’s grasp of policy yet. But this primary is not about Mr. Lieberman’s legislative record. Instead it has become a referendum on his warped version of bipartisanship, in which the never-ending war on terror becomes an excuse for silence and inaction. We endorse Ned Lamont in the Democratic primary for Senate in Connecticut.

I couldn’t agree more.

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Pathological Fear Of Hippies

by digby

Do you ever notice those older ladies who still wear their hair in the style they first adopted when they were 22 years old? Or eyeglasses? For some reason they never noticed that 40 years have passed since they first wore that style and they’ve never thought to take a look in the mirror and assess whether it still suits them.

That’s what the Washington political establishment is like when it comes to the Democratic party. They are still wearing their 60’s era cat-eye bifocals and helmet-head beehives long after they ceased to be fashionable.

The people backing Lamont are nothing if not sincere. But their breed of Democrats — many of them wealthy, educated, extremely liberal — often pick candidates who are rejected by the broader public. Many of the older Lamont supporters went straight from Eugene McCarthy and George McGovern in the 1960s and ’70s to Howard Dean in 2004. They helped Joe Duffey challenge Sen. Tom Dodd in Connecticut for the 1970 Democratic nomination on the Vietnam War issue, only to lose to Republican Lowell Weicker in November. Lamont’s campaign manager, Tom Swan, is also director of Connecticut Citizen Action Group, a populist organization founded in the 1970s by Toby Moffett, a Ralph Nader protege and anti-Vietnam activist who was one of the “Watergate babies” elected to the House in 1974. Moffett’s political career also was ended by a loss to Weicker, who stayed in the Senate until Lieberman finally beat him in 1988.

Gosh, don’t tell anybody, but Joe Lieberman ran Bobby Kennedy’s Connecticut campaign in 1968. In fact, if you look at most professional Democratic politicians over the age of 50, you can probably find a connection to that unreconstructed hippy hero George McGovern within one degree of separation. I guess that explains everything.

I don’t know what the hell he’s talking about when he says that those who voted for McCarthy and McGovern went directly to Dean. If these “political activists” were old enough to vote in 1968 you can bet they also voted for Carter, Mondale, Dukakis, Clinton, Gore and Kerry. I voted for all those guys. It’s simpleminded bullshit to say that the biggest threat to the party is liberal elites. We’ve been voting for every preachy southern conservative and every bland technocratic centrist they’ve thrown at us since 1976. (It sure would have been really great if even one of them — except Carter, who barely pulled it off — could have won a fucking electoral majority! )

This is a deep and festering illness within political circles for which the only cure is to plug your ears and stop listening to the geezers. As far as David Broder and his ilk are concerned, nothing consequential has happened in the Democratic party in 38 years. That’s the whole ball of wax — “liberal insurgents,” “silent majority” “Anti-Vietnam activist” all of it. Their irrational fear of hippies has rendered them incompetent to understand current politics for what they really are. And it has handed the Republicans the most powerful weapon in ther arsenal.

The thing that scared the straights (like Broder, I’m sure, considering his panic over the Clintons) back in the day was massive numbers of young long haired males and liberated braless women and blacks with huge afros that theatened all their fundamental beliefs about how society was supposed to operate. This was a jarring social and cultural change from the super conformist 50’s and it freaked people out.

The political issues were just a small part of why people voted for Nixon both times and why the political establishment moved to the right (as the culture itself grew ever more liberal.) Broder and his pals’ facile rendering of that history has pretty much crippled liberalism for almost 40 years and it’s long past time that we ignored those who persist in perpetuating it.

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RMA 1.0

by digby

Billmon, in another of his excellent essays on the Israel Lebanon crisis (aptly entitled “the Debacle”) points out what I think may just be the most important fact to emerge about our Really Big Adventure in the mid-east these last few years:

It’s a dismal situation for the Israelis — worse, in many, many ways, that what I would have called the worst-case scenario before the war started. This is what happens when your state-of-the-art blitzkrieg machine is exposed as a relic of a past century.

In 1870, when the Emperor Louis Napoleon declared war on Prussia, he was confident his armies could beat those of Kaiser Wilhelm I just as throughly as his famous uncle had whipped the Prussians at the Battle of Jena in 1806. After all, everyone “knew” the French were the masters of modern military science. In Europe’s capitals the betting was on how long it would take the French to get to Berlin.

But the Prussians had undergone something of a revolution in military affairs since Jena. They’d reformed their Army, created the world’s first general staff and mastered the use of railways to mobilize reserves and move troops quickly to the front.

The result was Zola’s Debacle — an utter defeat for the French, in which their entire army, and their Emperor, were cut off, surrounded and captured at the battle of Sedan. The political and military balance of power in Europe was transformed forever.

[…]

What is clear is that the failure of Israel’s blitzkrieg (and at the moment, it looks like a catastrophic failure, at least politically) will have enormous repercussions in the Middle East, just as the downfall of Louis Napoleon had in late 19th century Europe. By betting the ranch on a quick, decisive victory, the Anglo-Israeli alliance has committed both a crime and a mistake. The architects may escape punishment for the former, but I think the latter is going to come back to haunt them, and probably very soon.

I think the same can be said for the Giant — America. The Iraq invasion, too, has exposed the great military superpower as being incapable of handling the next generation of warfare. Everyone had an inkling of this after Vietnam, but I suppose that many assumed the US had managed to regroup and learn from its mistakes. We Americans were certainly led to believe the military had done so — we’ve been bombarded with propaganda for years about how the new generation of officers had a completely different understanding of assymetrical warfare and the military’s relationship to the political institututions it served.

So much for that.

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Peas In A Pod

by digby

So we come to this: increasingly violent exhortations from the right to clap louder — leading inexorably from public musings about torture to actual torture and now, possibly, from public musings about genocide to … actual genocide? I certainly hope not, but I have no reason to be optimistic.

Greg Djerejian at Belgravia Dispatch writes:

J-Pod concludes his piece by asking: “(c)an it be that the moral greatness of our civilization – its astonishing focus on the value of the individual above all – is endangering the future of our civilization as well?”

Sounds so reasonable, doesn’t it, J-Pod’s closing, heart-felt query? But I fear it’s nothing more than hyperbole born of deep paranoia, one married to serious incompetence, given that the tactics J-Pod would have us consider would, not only lead us towards a savage race to the moral gutter, and thus immense catastrophe in terms of the decent society America has been able to, almost miraculously, preserve these past two odd centuries plus—but also not even achieve the intended result—as fighting an insurgency movement in such fashion, as any serious West Pointer would tell you, is absolutely, drop-dead, out of the gates, doomed to failure. Utter, total, mega-failure.

[…]

The cornerstone of our polity and civilization, that what distinguishes us from our fanatical, nihilistic foes, is our respect of law, including the laws of war enshrined in the post-WWII, post-Holocaust era. To throw these by the way-side, in favor of the law of the jungle, is to defeat ourselves. We will have done the bidding of the Osama bin Laden’s of our own volition, hoisted ourselves on our own petard, condemned ourselves to reversing the great human gains obtained via the Renaissance, Enlightenment, and modernity. This is too terrible to contemplate, and we cannot allow it to come to pass as a polity. I remain confident it won’t, though in my darker moments I wonder what awaits us if greater 9/11s visit our shores.

I’m going to make an obvservation that is inflammatory and politically incorrect so beware. I think it has to be said, though:

In many ways Osama bin Laden and and the J-Pod’s are not all that different. They both hold with a simplistic, hyper-masculine belief that life is determined entirely by perceptions of strength and dominance. They are, of course, not the first. (“The whole world of nature is a mighty struggle between strength and weakness — an eternal victory of the strong over the weak.”) Nor are they alone.

As you continue to read things like this and wonder what are the consequences of the US losing both its moral authority and its powerful mytique, think about this:

The Soviet defeat produced in bin Laden not just a feeling of pride and self-confidence, but megalomania. He speaks about his dream of creating a unified Islamic empire, encompassing 50 countries, stretching from North Africa and the Balkans, encompassing the whole Middle East (including Israel, naturally) and former Soviet Central Asia, all the way to Indonesia and the Philippines on the Pacific. It turned out that bin Laden regarded the Soviet Union not as the primary enemy, but merely as the weakest link in the chain. He turned his attention to waging war against his erstwhile ally, the United States.

Please tell me in what substantial way these goals (if not entirely the means) differed from the post cold war PNAC plan for American global hegemony?

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Glorious Wankers

by digby

This really pisses me off. Atrios’s wanker of the day, the ole perfesser, apparently finds it amusing to dishonestly claim that Josh Marshall once advocated killing many civilians in Iraq in order to pacify the country. This is nonsense, as Unfogged points out here.

Here’s the thing about Marshall’s argument, which a lot of us made in the run-up to the Iraq war: the glorious paladins of the 101st Keyboarders were dying to play Patton (in their minds, of course) and decided early on that the occupation of Iraq would be exactly as it had been in Germany and Japan after WWII. They were packing up nylons and Hershey bars for months in anticipation of our boys needing some blackmarket currency so Mr Roberts and Phil Silvers could keep the motor pool running — “Maresy-doats and dozy-doats” went to the tops of the wingnut geek charts and stayed there for two years.

People tried to point out that the occupation of Japan and Germany were relatively peaceful affairs because the nations were defeated enemies whose entire infrastructure and systems of government had been destroyed in bloody conflict. Those conditions tend to create a pacific people who willingly accept a new order so that they can resume normal life after many years of horrifying warfare. The terrific generosity of the west, particularly the US, after WWII was a unique historical moment in which the victors treated the vanquished with respect and committed to rebuilding those societies as soon as possible. It wasn’t, of course, because we were good and they were evil — it was because we had learned the lessons of WWI the hard way — and becuase we were building a bulwark against the Soviets.

Any historical parallels between our unprovoked, pre-emptive invasion and occupation of Iraq and post war occupations of Europe and japan existed only in the fevered wet dreams of the keyboard commandos and their neocon comic book heroes — like Condi Rice who characterized WWII as the US “liberating the Germans from Hitler.”

Marshall’s column was another of the many, many warnings that were given back in the beginning of the war that these cakewalk-in-the-sky notions of what is actually required to make a foreign occupation be as successful as the aftermath of WWII were ridiculous. Contrary to Reynolds’ profoundly dishonest characterization, Marshall wasn’t advocating massive violence against the Iraqis, he was saying that because we were rightly unwilling to unleash hell on a civilan population for anything less than existential reasons, the occupation would not work. And he was right, just like all of us who pointed out that this grotesque comparison between WWII and the illegal invasion of Iraq was not only immoral and counterproductive, but doomed to fail on its face because of the sophomoric delusions of those who were dreaming of glory and tribute from the safety of their Barcaloungers.

Meanwhile, these same great global strategists are now truly advocating ultraviolence in the mid-east and calling it “birth pangs.” I don’t think “wanker” is adequate to describe such people.

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Encroachment and the Force of Empire (and Oil)
by poputonian
The mix is a little different today.

Two hundred and fifty years ago, the essential stakes were the abundant natural resources of North America, and the ostensible possessors of it were the Native Americans. The encroachers were the New Americans and their system of competitive trade, which paid premiums to anyone in a dominant position. To become dominant in America required settlement and expansion; to accomplish expansion required land. In 1758, an Ohio Valley Indian said this to an English missionary (source):

“We have great reason to believe you intend to drive us away, and settle the country; or else, why do you come to fight in the land that God has given us?”
…
“Why don’t you and the French fight in the old country, and on the sea? Why do you come to fight on our land? This makes everybody believe you want to take the land from us by force, and settle it.”

It was true then, that gaining control of the land would require coercion, something best done systematically through the vehicle of trade and in the name of freedom. Writing in the mid-1990s, historian R. Douglas Hurt (source above) tells of the futility in making any resistance to the force of empire:

“White settlers and traders aggressively pushed into that region and prevented accommodation between the British and the Ohio Indians. These “Frontier People” sought not accommodation with the Ohio Indians but rather their removal. Compromise did not enter their thoughts, and magnanimity never governed their actions. Respecting personal freedom more than law and advocating their right to take unused land rather than to await negotiated settlements with trans-Appalachian Indians, these frontier people moved relentlessly into the Ohio Valley. By 1774, approximately fifty thousand whites lived on the trans-Appalachian frontier, and the British army could not control them. By that time, the British no longer remained the principal enemy of the Ohio Indians. Instead it was the relentless westward-moving Americans.

The paragraph below describes the manner in which the said force of empire deals with any attempt to resist it. This comes from another historian, also writing before 9/11, who tells how the British brain trust, along with the New Americans, discerned that they were opposed in North America by an organized conspiracy:

“How else, Amherst and his colleagues wondered, could so many diverse Indian groups have acted in concert against them? The British, trapped within their understanding of the Indians as childlike, violent creatures, could not explain what had happened to them in the west unless they could stipulate a French conspiracy behind it all. They never understood that the evidently synchronized attacks were loosely coordinated local revolts, all responding to the common stimuli of conquest, white encroachment, and Amherst’s Indian policies, all animated by a religious revival with pan-Indian overtones, and all motivated by the desire to restore to North America a sympathetic European power to act as a counterpoise to the British and their numerous, aggressive colonists.“

Hurt also noted that the Indian resistance ” … popularly known as the “conspiracy of Pontiac” … should be more appropriately known as a “Defensive War” or as a war for independence by western Indians.”
Everyone knows the rest of this particular story.

Today, the mix is different. It’s oil instead of land, and a different opposing culture instead of Indians. But the alchemy is identical. It’s the American system of unrestrained trade and a society dependent on a natural resource (oil) for its continued dominance; trade dominance, cultural dominance, material dominance, and religious dominance. Whatever brutal force is required to suppress anyone with an impulse to resist has become the de facto foreign policy. It’s a foreign policy that fosters encroachment and builds empire. It’s also a foreign policy that leverages the ambiguous qualities of liberty and freedom to ostensibly justify its violent suppression of any resistance. The President of the United States said so yesterday:

And so we have, we’ve taken a foreign policy that says: On the one hand, we will protect ourselves from further attack in the short run by being aggressive in chasing down the killers and bringing them to justice.

And make no mistake: They’re still out there, and they would like to harm our respective peoples because of what we stand for.

In the long term, to defeat this ideology – and they’re bound by an ideology – you defeat it with a more hopeful ideology called freedom.

And, look, I fully understand some people don’t believe it’s possible for freedom and democracy to overcome this ideology of hatred. I understand that. I just happen to believe it is possible.

And I believe it will happen.

And so what you’re seeing is, you know, a clash of governing styles.

For example, you know, the notion of democracy beginning to emerge scares the ideologues, the totalitarians, those who want to impose their vision. It just frightens them.

And so they respond. They’ve always been violent.

Here’s a rewrite of the bolded phrasing that historian Anderson used above:

The British Bush, trapped within their in his understanding of the Indians Arabs as childlike, violent creatures, could not explain what had happened to them in the west America on 9/11 unless they he could stipulate a French an ideological conspiracy behind it all.

Encroachment and empire? Not understood here at home. Oil. Huh? This is Bush’s foreign policy of submit or die. It’s happened before with great success.

Well, great success for those in the dominant position.

The Man Is Clear In His Mind, But His Soul Is Mad

by tristero

Apparently, when John Podhoretz read Heart of Darkness he came to the conclusion that Kurtz had the right attitude:

What if the tactical mistake we made in Iraq was that we didn’t kill enough Sunnis in the early going to intimidate them and make them so afraid of us they would go along with anything? Wasn’t the survival of Sunni men between the ages of 15 and 35 the reason there was an insurgency and the basic cause of the sectarian violence now?

In other words, as Kurtz memorably wrote, “Exterminate all the brutes.” And then Podhoretz asks:

If you can’t imagine George W. Bush issuing such an order, is there any American leader you could imagine doing so?

Why yes, John, I can. Commander Jeff Schoep, the leader of the National Socialist Movement would be more than happy to issue such an order. He writes:

It is of tantamount [sic] importance, that each and every one of us as White Patriots be of steel will and determination! I will refer to a quote by a great American NS martyr, Capt. Joseph Tommassi “We must prepare to seize the day”. Our Aryan peoples have triumphed throughout history!

A few examples: in Germany we had Adolf Hitler who fought Communism and Jewry (one and the same), in Romania the great Vlad Dracul (who drove the Turks out of his land), in Serbia the great Prince Lazar who repelled the mongrel invaders out of Kosovo, etc.

We are of the Race that drove Genghis Khan and the Huns from Europe, the Race that claimed America, and nearly rid it of the pestilence of the American Indians, the Race that drove the mongrel Mexicans out during the Mexican-American war, and many other glorious accomplishments throughout history!

We have a lot to live up to, as today’s White Racial Patriots! …

Thinking back to what I wrote about being timid, when duty calls. I am not trying to dwell on the issue, I just do not understand the rational [sic]. The will to protect and defend one’s own, should be a natural instinct! …

Whether Movement veteran, or fresh new enlistments, we all must put the collective Racial, and National whole, above self.

An assault on one of us, must be viewed as an assault on all, regardless of Rank, position, group affiliation, etc.

They also have some very groovy desktops John can download for his computer.

Of course, we’d have to persuade Commander Jeff to exterminate young Arabs. He is, after all, a proud anti-Semite but I think that once it’s explained to him that Arabs are also not Aryan – and, in fact, Semites – he’ll get with the program.

Hat tip to Anonymous in comments, who finds Podhoretz, I’m not kidding here, “insightful.”

[UPDATE: Seymour Paine in comments notes that “anti-Semite” was coined specifically to refer to Jews, not *all* folks who speak a Semitic language. He also says that Nazis and Arabs have, historically, been quite friendly. Irregardless and notwithstanding,* once we explain to Commander Jeff why he shouldn’t discriminate among kinds of Semites, John Podhoretz will have precisely the kind of American leader he so desperately craves.

*Yes, of course I know they’re not words.]