Huh?
by digby
Italy will host an international conference next week to discuss the possibility of a ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah guerrillas in Lebanon, the Italian government said on Friday.
[…]
An Italian foreign ministry spokesman said neither Syria nor Iran – accused by Israel of sponsoring Hezbollah – had been invited, and no one from Israel was expected to attend for the time being.
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ReElect The Fighters
by digby
Last week I wrote regarding the mid-east crisis:
Karl Rove must be very happy this morning. He is convinced that “war” (it doesn’t matter who or why) always accrues to the Republican party’s benefit. And the media agree that when things heat up, they really want the guys with the big swinging members in charge. (For some reason, they are under the misapprehension that the group of chickenhawks running the US government have such endowments.)
I realize that it is somewhat distasteful to discuss this issue with domestic politics in mind. But I can guarantee that the white house is. They view everything through the lens of domestic politics.
There was some disagreement among readers who thought that it is ridiculous to think a widening war could benefit the failed Republicans. I certainly hope that’s true.
But in case anyone thinks they aren’t going to run on their reputation for manly manliness anyway, think again:
Vice President Dick Cheney on Friday pointed to the fighting between Israel and Hezbollah as fresh evidence of the ongoing battle against terrorism that underscores the need to keep President Bush’s Republican allies in control of Congress.
“This conflict is a long way from over,” Cheney said at a fundraising appearance for a GOP congressional candidate. “It’s going to be a battle that will last for a very long time. It is absolutely essential that we stay the course.”
Cheney’s visit to Tampa helped raise about $200,000 for the campaign of Gus Bilirakis, a state legislator who is running for the Tampa Bay area congressional seat his father is vacating.
“Gus is going to remember that the first order of business is to protect the American people and to support the men and women who defend us in time of war,” Cheney told the audience at a $500-a-ticket fundraising reception. “There’s still hard work ahead in the war on terror.”
Cheney said that as Republicans make their case to voters in the midterm elections, “it’s vital that we keep issues of national security at the top of the agenda.” He faulted Democrats in Congress who have pushed for a timetable for withdrawing Americans from Iraq, saying that would send the wrong message to terrorists.
“If anyone thinks the conflict is over or soon to be over, all they have to do is look at what’s happening in the Middle East today,” he said.
I know it seems ridiculous in light of what we are seing in Iraq that they would think of running on their superior competence in dealing with the middle east. But remember, the Republicans are counting on thirty years of rightwing propaganda to get them over the line again. They expect that many voters will simply fall back into their comfortable understanding of the two parties: the Republicans are tough men who can handle national security and the Democrats are sensitive women who will help you when you need help (if you’re a pathetic loser who actually needs help that is.) The Fighters and the Lovers. This is the paradigm under which we’ve lived for many years and people find it very disconcerting to be asked to relinquish such reflexive internalized beliefs — no matter what they see before them.
I do not know that they can pull it off one more time. We may have finally reached a tipping point. But I’m not counting any chickens.
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Political Capital
by digby
Ezra wonders why war president Bush killed off compassionate conservative president Bush.
I’ve never been entirely convinced by the explanations for why that happened. Bush’s record in Texas and his rhetoric on the campaign trail never suggested the sort of leader that would emerge. September 11 changed him, but it’s not precisely clear why it enabled such an abandonment of the domestic realm. I will, in the interest of debate, offer this thesis, which I find interesting if not convincing. I’ve adapted it from something Grover Norquist said at the Prospect breakfast: He argued that the high poll numbers of 9-11 straitjacketed the administration, leaving them terrified of downward drift. So in their efforts to retain 80 percent approval ratings, they refused to engage in the sort of divisive, unpopular fights needed to actualize their agenda. They just went with the interest groups as the path of least resistance. And by the time they were ready for domestic policies again, they couldn’t afford to split the coalition. Compassionate conservatism died because Bush became popular and wasn’t willing to sacrifice that support for issues beneath War and Peace.
I would argue that there never was a “compassionate conservative” Bush, but a political slogan that was adopted when the face of the party was the slavering beasts of the Gingrich years who shut down the government and impeached a popular president against the will of the people. The game plan was to run Bush as a Republican Clinton without the woody.
And to the extent that they actually believed any of their campaign blather about “soft bigotry of low expectations” and prescription drug coverage, it was only to massage certain constituencies they needed to cobble together a majority — which they didn’t actually manage to do in 2000. Karl was just buying votes like any smart pol does.
Bush, however, always wanted to be a “war president” and knew exactly what he wanted to do with all that political capital:
“He was thinking about invading Iraq in 1999,” said author and journalist Mickey Herskowitz. “It was on his mind. He said to me: ‘One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief.’ And he said, ‘My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait and he wasted it.’ He said, ‘If I have a chance to invade … if I had that much capital, I’m not going to waste it. I’m going to get everything passed that I want to get passed and I’m going to have a successful presidency.”
What we didn’t realize is that so much of his agenda had to do with expanding executive power and invading Iraq. Indeed, he probably didn’t realize it either, but he’s the type of personality who undoubtedly found those two agenda items very enticing.
They failed on social security, the big ticket domestic item of the second term, but the reason was that they always overestimated the amount of political capital a “war president” who only won a second term by 51% of the vote actually has. He had plenty of juice after 9/11 but he used it all up on Iraq — and when the WMD didn’t show, most of that evaporated over time.
But the tax cuts, the indiscriminate deregulation, the expansion of executive power (not only through the programs like the illegal wiretapping but through the passage of the Patriot Act as well) can only be considered great successes by the standard he set forth. The reason his “compassionate conservative” agenda wasn’t part of that package is because it was just an campaign ploy to begin with. After 9/11 they made the calculation that he could win by running solely on national security with a smattering of homo-hating. And he did.
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Another Moment of Clarity
by digby
The conflict in the mideast has always had a certain kabuki element. In the past when these situations would flare up, Israel would take an agrressive action to demonstrate that it wasn’t a pushover and the US would step in like a Dutch uncle and reluctantly pull the pissed off Israelis back. In a dangerous part of the world, these face-saving kabukis can prevent things from hurtling out of control while allowing each side to stage a little bloodletting. It’s an ugly, ugly business, but ultimately it has managed to help keep this volatile region from hurtling out of control. The “honest broker” thing may have always been phony, but sometimes a phony “honest broker” is all you need.
This time, the US has abandoned that role and they are letting Israel off the leash to do some real damage before they “step in.” Via Atrios I see that Bush thinks he’s smarter than everyone else on this:
When hostilities have broken out in the past, the usual U.S. response has been an immediate and public bout of diplomacy aimed at a cease-fire, in the hopes of ensuring that the crisis would not escalate. This week, however, even in the face of growing international demands, the White House has studiously avoided any hint of impatience with Israel. While making it plain it wants civilian casualties limited, the administration is also content to see the Israelis inflict the maximum damage possible on Hezbollah.
As the president’s position is described by White House officials, Bush associates and outside Middle East experts, Bush believes that the status quo — the presence in a sovereign country of a militant group with missiles capable of hitting a U.S. ally — is unacceptable.
The U.S. position also reflects Bush’s deepening belief that Israel is central to the broader campaign against terrorists and represents a shift away from a more traditional view that the United States plays an “honest broker’s” role in the Middle East.
In the administration’s view, the new conflict is not just a crisis to be managed. It is also an opportunity to seriously degrade a big threat in the region, just as Bush believes he is doing in Iraq. Israel’s crippling of Hezbollah, officials also hope, would complete the work of building a functioning democracy in Lebanon and send a strong message to the Syrian and Iranian backers of Hezbollah.
“The president believes that unless you address the root causes of the violence that has afflicted the Middle East, you cannot forge a lasting peace,” said White House counselor Dan Bartlett. “He mourns the loss of every life. Yet out of this tragic development, he believes a moment of clarity has arrived.”
One former senior administration official said Bush is only emboldened by the pressure from U.N. officials and European leaders to lead a call for a cease-fire. U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan demanded yesterday that the fighting in Lebanon stop.
“He thinks he is playing in a longer-term game than the tacticians,” said the former official, who spoke anonymously so he could discuss his views candidly. “The tacticians would say: ‘Get an immediate cease-fire. Deal first with the humanitarian factors.’ The president would say: ‘You have an opportunity to really grind down Hezbollah. Let’s take it, even if there are other serious consequences that will have to be managed.’ “
They are now officially crazy.
I haven’t bought into all the 1914 stuff that’s been going around, but I’m heading that way. It will be sheer luck if we avoid serious consequences from letting these dimwit megalomaniacs loose on the world.
It seems like a good time to remind people of our vaunted leader’s history. I’m speaking, of course, of Dick Cheney. (I won’t bother with Junior– he’s a foreign policy ventriloquist dummy.)
From Frances Fitzgerald in the NY Review of Books:
In “A World Transformed,” the memoir that he and Bush senior published in 1998, [Brent] Scowcroft makes it clear that while all Bush senior’s top advisers had different perspectives, the fundamental division lay between Defense Secretary Richard Cheney and everyone else. By his account, and by those of others in the administration, Cheney never trusted Gorbachev. In 1989 Cheney maintained that Gorbachev’s reforms were largely cosmetic and that, rather than engage with the Soviet leader, the US should stand firm and keep up cold war pressures.
In September 1991 Cheney argued that the administration should take measures to speed the breakup of the Soviet Union—even at the risk of encouraging violence and incurring long-term Russian hostility. He opposed the idea, which originated with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Colin Powell, that the US should withdraw its tactical nuclear weapons from Europe and South Korea. As a part of the preparations for the Gulf War he asked Powell for a study on how small nuclear weapons might be used against Iraqi troops in the desert.
This is the person who is playing a longer game than the tacticians, not Little Bushie. And he is playing a long game. His sharklike, relentless, predatory concentration on achieving long held goals no matter what the current circumstances is quite awesome to behold. The problem is that he’s nuts.
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Heckuva Job Neggie
by digby
So apparently John “Death Squad” Negroponte has decided that rather than take the risk of information being leaked, the CIA just won’t compile National Intelligence Estimates anymore. Ken Silverstein at Harper’s blog reports that ever since the last NIE on Iraq was rejected by the Bush administration back in 2004 (for being “too negative”) they haven’t bothered to write another one.
Apparently, they want to keep the president from having to deal with bad news:
“What do you call the situation in Iraq right now?” asked one person familiar with the situation. “The analysts know that it’s a civil war, but there’s a feeling at the top that [using that term] will complicate matters.” Negroponte, said another source regarding the potential impact of a pessimistic assessment, “doesn’t want the president to have to deal with that.”
Especially going into an election.
And heaven forbid that the president of the United States be aware that his lovely little war is turning into a living nightmare:
Iraqi leaders have all but given up on holding the country together and, just two months after forming a national unity government, talk in private of “black days” of civil war ahead.
Signalling a dramatic abandonment of the U.S.-backed project for Iraq, there is even talk among them of pre-empting the worst bloodshed by agreeing to an east-west division of Baghdad into Shi’ite and Sunni Muslim zones, senior officials told Reuters.
Tens of thousands have already fled homes on either side.
“Iraq as a political project is finished,” one senior government official said — anonymously because the coalition under Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki remains committed in public to the U.S.-sponsored constitution that preserves Iraq’s unity.
One highly placed source even spoke of busying himself on government projects, despite a sense of their futility, only as a way to fight his growing depression over his nation’s future.
“The parties have moved to Plan B,” the senior official said, saying Sunni, ethnic Kurdish and majority Shi’ite blocs were looking at ways to divide power and resources and to solve the conundrum of Baghdad’s mixed population of seven million.
“There is serious talk of Baghdad being divided into east and west,” he said. “We are extremely worried.”
On the eve of the first meeting of a National Reconciliation Commission and before Maliki meets President George W. Bush in Washington next week, other senior politicians also said they were close to giving up on hopes of preserving the 80-year-old, multi-ethnic, religiously mixed state in its present form.
“The situation is terrifying and black,” said Rida Jawad al -Takki, a senior member of parliament from Maliki’s dominant Shi’ite Alliance bloc, and one of the few officials from all the main factions willing to speak publicly on the issue.
“We have received information of a plan to divide Baghdad. The government is incapable of solving the situation,” he said.
As sectarian violence has mounted to claim perhaps 100 lives a day and tens of thousands flee their homes, a senior official from the once dominant Sunni minority concurred: “Everyone knows the situation is very bad,” he said. “I’m not optimistic.”
The spectacle in Lebanon has taken over the popular imagination and the attention of the media. But it really should be noted that while the death and destruction is significant — and a widening war is a frightening consequence of what’s happening there — 100 people a day are now being killed in Iraq. Many more are being wounded. There are now tens of thousands of refugees. It’s turning into a bloodbath.
I know it would be wrong to worry the president’s beautiful mind with such ugliness, but perhaps the congress ought to get off its ass and demand a comprehensive analysis of the situation from the US Intelligence community anyway. Just for the heck of it.
And by the way, are any of the national reporters covering the Lieberman-Lamont race asking old Joe whether he still thinks there is a lot of “progress” being made there? I know that the bad language we bloggers use is a much more important issue, but this does seem like a logical question that someone might think is worth asking.
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The Logic of Rebellion
by poputonian
Fear of an ecclesiastical conspiracy against American liberties, latent among nonconformists through all of colonial history, thus erupted into public controversy at the very same time that the first impact of new British policy in civil affairs was being felt. And though it was, in an obvious sense, a limited fear (for large parts of the population identified themselves with the Anglican Church and were not easily convinced that liberty was being threatened by a plot of the Churchmen) it nevertheless had a profound indirect effect everywhere, for it drew into public discussion — evoked in specific form — the general conviction of eighteenth-century Englishmen that the conjoining of “temporal and spiritual tyranny” was, in John Adams’ words, an event totally “calamitous to human liberty” yet an event that in the mere nature of things perpetually threatened. For, as David Hume had explained, “in all ages of the world priests have been enemies to liberty … Liberty of thinking and of expressing our thoughts is always fatal to priestly power … and by an infallible connection which prevails among all kinds of liberty, this privilege can never be enjoyed … but in free government. Hence … all princes that have aimed at despotic power [Bush, Rove] have known of what importance it was to gain the established clergy, as the clergy, on their part, have show a great facility in entering into the views of such princes.”
Excerpted from The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967) by Bernard Bailyn; winner of the Bancroft Prize in American History and a Pulitzer in History; p. 97, chapter titled The Logic of Rebellion.
“new … policy in civil affairs’ … “gain the established clergy” … “despots”
Moral Boundaries
by digby
“This bill would support the taking of innocent human life in the hope of finding medical benefits for others. It crosses a moral boundary that our decent society needs to respect, so I vetoed it.”
Jesus H. Christ.
BAGHDAD, 20 July (IRIN) – The Iraqi government says it is worried about increasing sectarian violence in the country, following statistics released by the UN Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI) stating that nearly 6,000 civilians were killed in May and June alone.
“Sectarian violence in Iraq is increasing and day after day more bodies are being found countrywide after suffering serious torture,” says Lt. Col. Abdel-Kareem Hassan, a senior official in the Ministry of Interior. “The numbers presented by UNAMI has just confirmed this is reality and also increases fear among the local population.
“We [the government] have to act fast in holding talks with insurgents and the reconciliation plan should be put in practice to prevent more innocent civilians from dying due to the lack of security.”
According to the UNAMI report, insurgent, militia and terrorist attacks continued unabated in many parts of Iraq, especially in Baghdad and in the central and western regions.
“A total of 5,818 civilians were reportedly killed and at least 5,762 wounded during May and June 2006,” the report stated. “Killings, kidnappings and torture remain widespread. Fear resulting from these and other crimes continued to increase internal displacement and outflows of Iraqis to neighbouring countries.”
In the first six months of the year, 14,338 people were killed, the report added. The statistics were compiled with help from the Ministry of Health.
The Ministry of Health says that more than 50,000 people have been killed “in a brutal way” since April 2003. “All these bodies were unrecognisable and suffered serious torture,” says Safa’a Yehia, senior official in the Ministry of Heath. “What is more shocking is that this included women and children. We have reached a serious deterioration in conditions and instead of an improvement of this sectarian violence, the death toll is rising without control.”
I guess it’s a good thing the Bridegroom is coming shortly so that we can finally sort out where all these moral boundaries really are. I need some divine guidance because I’m terribly confused.
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What Government Minders Don’t Understand
In response to the Empire post below, the Government Minder assigned to Hullabaloo made this comment regarding Arab reaction to the Israel/Hezbollah conflict :
“The assertion that Americans are turning isolationist, as evidenced by this poll on the Israel/Lebanon conflict, is an overly broad interpretation. Look at the recent emergency meeting of the Arab League; half its member nations were critical of Hezzbollah instead of a uniform condemnation of Israel. That split is historic and unprecedented.”
Is it?
Here are some additional scraps from that Chicago Trib op-ed piece written in 2005 by E.W. Chamberlain III, a retired Army colonel. It provides some elucidation on the topic. The title of the op-ed was Prediction.
The toll of the war in both lives and treasure are going well beyond what we were promised. The elections in Iraq already are proving themselves to have been merely a vote of the majority for the majority with no room for any meaningful minority voice in the emerging government. Our goal of bringing democracy to Iraq, while worthy, is unattainable. The Shiite clerics won’t stand for it. The clerics, who have taken on the same titles as those used by the Iranian Shiite clerics when they toppled the Shah, have won the elections. The grand titles being used in Iraq right after the elections, “Ayatollah of the Revolutionary Islamic Council,” for example, should have some people in Washington sitting up and taking notice. The Iranians already have visited the newly elected clerics, and it will be but a short time before some agreements between the two countries are formalized. Washington persists in seeing Iraq as, well, full of just Iraqis. Washington doesn’t differentiate between the religious sects in Iraq, nor does it understand that the concept of a state called “Iraq” was arbitrarily devised by the British and the French in the Balfour Declaration at the end of World War I as those two victors divided the spoils of war. People in Iraq and Iran are Shiite first, and Iraqis and Iranians second.
…
The first predictable event was that the Shiites would score an overwhelming victory at the polls in January. This was a no-brainer, because they were the only ones participating. The Sunni political parties had seen the handwriting on the wall and had withdrawn from a contest they could not even hope to win. The Kurds participated in the elections and are participating in the development of the constitution, but this will continue only as long as U.S. forces remain on the ground. Once they are gone, the best the Kurds can hope for is an independent state recognized and supported by the United States in a sea of enemies. The worst they can expect is to be dominated and oppressed by the government in Baghdad, switching one secular dictator for a non-secular one. So much for democracy in Iraq. The insurgency in Iraq is Sunni, which many in Washington have yet to figure out. They are fighting us because we provide a focal point for rallying the Sunni people inside and outside of Iraq. As soon as we leave, the full force of the insurgency will fall upon the Shiite government of Iraq. It already has started. The suicide car bombings that have killed so many Iraqi civilians are mistakenly tagged as terrorist attacks, when in reality they are attacks against Shiites by the Sunni insurgency. If a couple of Americans also get killed, so much the better in their view, but the real target is the Shiite population and the Shiite-dominated government. Probably even before the U.S. withdraws, the “democratically elected” Shiite government in Iraq will be aligned rapidly with Iran and will receive open and massive support. The Saudi Arabian government will continue to support the Sunni insurgency, as it does today, but the support will become open. The Sunni insurgency eventually will lose as the full weight of a Shiite Iraq and a Shiite Iran overwhelms it. Numbers alone, coupled with a real war of attrition that does not discriminate between combatants and noncombatants or follow any rules of engagement, will result in horrific casualties and defeat. This will not be the kinder, gentler, American way of war. This will be an Old Testament conflict with no quarter given.
The remnants of the Sunni insurgency will flee to Saudi Arabia. There they will foment discord because the Saudi royal family did not do enough and allowed the Sunnis to be defeated in Iraq. The royal family will be overthrown in a violent revolution in Saudi Arabia led by Sunni clerics who long have chafed under the pro-Western rule of the House of Saud. The Sunni clerics will emerge as the dominant power in Saudi Arabia. Americans and all other Westerners will be killed or, at best, ejected from Saudi Arabia, which has enough native petrochemical engineers and knowledgeable oil field workers, and can find other non-Westerners to run the oil fields. No Westerner need apply. Of course, we need not fear another attack here at home from Osama bin Laden as all this occurs, because he will have fulfilled his fatwa. The only thing bin Laden ever said he was after was to remove the Westerners from Saudi Arabia, the Land of the Holy Places. This will be done when the clerics assume control of Saudi Arabia. Bin Laden will win the war on terrorism by achieving his goals with our unwitting help.
Anxiety for the established Sunni order? An emerging Shia dominance? Trouble in oil land?
Not only is it understandable, apparently it was predictable.
If only.
So Much For The Indispensible Nation
by digby
Nearly two-thirds of Americans believe the United States should stay out of the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah militants in Lebanon, according to a CNN poll conducted and released Wednesday by Opinion Research Corp.
Sixty-five percent of 633 American adults responding to the telephone poll said the United States should not play an active role in attempting to solve the issue.
Yet respondents were much more closely divided on whether they would favor the presence of U.S. ground troops as part of an international peacekeeping force on the border between Israel and Lebanon.
Forty-five percent said they would favor such a measure, and 42 percent said they would oppose it. Thirteen percent had no opinion.
One might assume on first glance that this is incoherent. How can 65% believe that the US should stay out of it while 45% favor sending in peacekeepers? But if you think about it, it likely reflects a natural and healthy reluctance to give the Bush administration permission to pursue some mad plan to fight WWIII, which is what they are hearing from the wingnuts on TV.
The neocons have achieved the opposite of what they set out to achieve. Instead of an empire their failed experiment is turning the American public isolationist. There was a time not so long ago when it would have been assumed that the US would play an active role in solving any serious foreign policy crisis. After the cock-ups of the last few years, people are no longer so sanguine that we will actually help the situation rather than make it worse.
As we survey the situation tonight, it seems as if the Bush administration is living in an alternate universe. In a week, after Israel has “defanged” Hezbollah, Condi is slated to fly in and sing kumbaaya. Either that or we are going to officially begin WWIII. Or Armageddon is imminent — oh happy day, the Bridegroom is on his way. These are what the big thinkers on the right are offering us right now. Of those choices the Bush administration has, so far, opted for the first scenario. They are going to wait until the Israelis shoot all the bad guys and then they’ll ride in and hold a town meeting.
David Ignatius wrote today:
There is an attitude among policymakers in the United States and Israel that I would call “Prospero’s temptation,” after the wizard of Shakespeare’s “The Tempest.” Prospero thinks that with his magic powers he can do anything — subdue the wild Caliban and the other denizens of his haunted island and bend them to his purposes. This temptation was evident in Ariel Sharon’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982; it was clear in America’s 2003 invasion of Iraq. In each case, Israel and America were encouraged by their Arab allies to think that they could alter the fundamentals in a way that the Arabs themselves could not. You can hear echoes of that same thinking today, as Israeli analysts talk of how the Sunni nations — Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan — are privately thanking them for breaking Shiite power.
I’m not sure why anyone is surprised by this:
”We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
That is what’s known as magical thinking and it is the hallmark of this administration. Again, maybe the public really has the right of this. We’ve seen ample evidence over the last six years that these are not the people you want in charge during a crisis.
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