John Amato has the video of Joe and Valerie Wilson’s press conference this morning. It’s quite moving seeing Valerie Wilson speak. She is a very impressive person. You can’t help but be struck by what a travesty it is that the administration was willing to destroy her career and weaken our national security for political purposes.
I think of the NSA spying program and all the other programs that the president and his henchmen insist aren’t being used againt political opponents and I have to laugh. In light of what they were willing to do to a covert CIA agent, why would anyone think they wouldn’t be willing to use their power to spy on their political opponents. It’s pretty clear they have no limits.
Scooter Libby has been collecting millions for his defense fund from all manner of rich Republicans. Mary Matalin has even held a big fundraiser at the Carville home. If anyone would care to help out the Wilsons, who aren’t millionaires and don’t have the entire Washington establishment backing them, here’s a web-site where you can contribute to their legal support trust.
I wonder what would be happening in Mississippi right now if Trent Lott were more popular among Democrats than Republicans? Do you think the Mississippi Republicans would be happy?
This handy chart comes from Political Arithmetic, who writes:
It is incredibly rare to see a Senator more popular among opposition partisans than within his own party. Yet that is increasingly the case for Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman. Since late in 2005, Lieberman’s approval rating among Democrats has dropped from around 70%, to the mid-50s. In two early June polls, Lieberman fell again, to under 50% approval among Democrats. This was after Democratic primary challenger Ned Lamont’s strong showing at the CT Democratic Convention, but before Lieberman made public his plans to run as an independent should he lose the primary. (The data in the graph are taken from Quinnipiac University polls and from SurveyUSA’s 50 state tracking poll in Connecticut. The two polling houses track each other reasonably well in CT, so I’ve pooled the data and won’t focus on differences between the two polling organizations here.)
While slowly trending down recently, Lieberman’s job approval among Republicans remains in the upper 60s, while job approval among independents has fallen to the mid-to-upper 50s, as has overall approval.
Now here’s the question. What happened in late 2005 that made Lieberman tank among Democrats? It certainly wasn’t blogofascist attention at that point.
I’m guessing it was this, which was picked up by all the local papers in Connecticut.
If Trent Lott told his Republican constitutents they were betraying the country by speaking out against a Democratic president, I suspect he’d find himself in the same straits as Joe Lieberman does today.
That commie outfit, the non-partisan Congressional Government Accountability Office, has analyzed the Bush administration plan in Iraq. Naturally, being terrorist lovers, they found that the plan was a complete failure.
The report is worth reading, but it’s written in bureaucratese which makes it something of a challenge to those of us whose first language is English. Luckily, Tim Dunlop at the Road To Surfdom has translated it for you:
I’ve called in Surfdom’s team of crack linguists again to do a bit of translation (which is bolded):
The November 2005 National Strategy for Victory in Iraq and supporting documents incorporate the same desired end-state for U.S. stabilization and reconstruction operations that were first established by the coalition in 2003: a peaceful, united, stable, and secure Iraq, well integrated into the international community, and a full partner in the global war on terrorism.
They’d really like it if everything worked out perfectly.
However, it is unclear how the United States will achieve its desired end-state in Iraq given the significant changes in the assumptions underlying the U.S. strategy.
It’s really hard for things to work out perfectly when you have no idea what you are doing.
The original plan assumed a permissive security environment.
They figured the biggest problem would be hookers and post-coital cigarette smoking.
I haven’t had the guts to listen to FoxNews this morning, but I’ve been tuned in to CNN. According to their latest chyron, “the middle east is hurtling out of control.” There are breathless teasers: “Were the missiles made in Iran???!!!” They have sent in Anderson Cooper (and he looks just fabulous in his desert gear.) New logos are being designed as we speak. Eric Boehlert notes this oddity in CNN coverage.
Is it groundhog day?
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.
They are incoherent. Even while they publicly pretend to be seeking a peaceful solution, they’re publicly fanning the flames:
John R. Bolton, the American representative, denounced Hezbollah for a “deliberate and premeditated provocation” meant to destabilize the region. Mr. Bolton also said that Syria and Iran, which he called the main sponsors of Hezbollah, must be “held to account” for the kidnapping of the Israeli soldiers.
“No reckoning with Hezbollah will be adequate without a reckoning” with those two countries, Mr. Bolton said.
I can’t help but think back to the summer of 2002, before the last midterm, when the Iraq war suddenly seemed inevitable. From that moment it didn’t matter what anyone said — and deep inside we all knew it. The only question at that point was whether you’d jump on the bandwagon.
I have a sinking feeling that we are in the same position again today. Perhaps this time it will peter out. Let’s hope so. But even if it does, after the smoke has cleared (if it clears) we will have a middle east that is more unstable than it was a week ago. And despite the fact that the Bush administration has been instrumental in destabilizing it over these past few years the smart bet is that by a very tiny majority, the American people will once again look to the “strong” leadership of the GOP to handle the situation.
I’m beginning to believe that if there is a God, he is definitely a Republican. He seems to always provide for Karl at just the right moment. (Either that or Karl is a genius at turning lemons into lemonade.) I don’t know if he’s succeed this time. But look for the GOP rhetoric to start shifting to reflect the notion that the world needs the big tough Republicans to manage this dangerous situation. They will count on Americans reflexively accepting that premise as they have for the last thirty years. The question is whether the events of the last six might have made them wonder if that makes sense anymore.
Update:Billmon darkly analyzes the situation through the prism of oil politics — as only he can. Jesus Christ, what a mess.
Here’s one of those cases where moral authority really comes in handy:
President Bush told Lebanon’s leader on Friday that he would urge Israel to limit civilian casualties as it steps up attacks on its neighbor, a promise that fell short of Beirut’s calls for a cease-fire.
“President Bush affirmed his readiness to put pressure on Israel to limit the damage to Lebanon as a result of the current military action, and to spare civilians and innocent people from harm,” said a statement from Lebanese Prime Minister Fuad Saniora’s office
Conservative Progression-Progression: What Causes What?
by poputonian
David Brooks’ starry-eyed wet dream (see Conservative Progression post below) reminds me more of the nexus between the French and Indian War, in which England kicked France out of North America, thus ostensibly gaining control of the North American booty, and its connection to the ensuing financial debacle, which led eventually to America’s founding. The consequences were at best contingencies as they played out, but the connections in retrospect are inextricable: the war led to the the ensuing financial disaster, which led to Britain’s coercion of the American colonies in an attempt to refill her treasury, which triggered America’s resistance, which led to the violence, which resulted in the founding of American Democracy.
So who picked up all the marbles? In Brooks’ analogy England would have, since they started the chain of causation. But in reality the result of the war led in part to England’s eventual decline. So who or what is it that will rise out of the Conservative Progression-Progression? After they’ve destroyed America, it sure as hell won’t be lasting power for conservatives.
For a succinct look at America’s financial status, see this apt post by Mimikatz at The Next Hurrah.
But with economics as with everything else, Bush knows what he knows, and facts (especially the fact that the cumulative debtwill almost certainly double on his watch) are only for sissies.
I imagine Digby will have something to say about this later, but for now I would suggest reading this amazing guest post by BigTentDemocrat at TalkLeft.
Those clever boys over at TNR are at it again today:
With all due respect, I think Mike missed the key passage in the Obama interview he linked to earlier. This one clearly takes the cake:
Q: You probably saw what Atrios said: let’s not talk about process, let’s actually exercise some leadership. How would you-
A: I, I, I, I don’t think I understand the criticism. I mean, I didn’t read the article.
Whaaa???!!! You don’t read Atrios, Senator Obama? I mean, as a U.S. Senator, isn’t it kind of your obligation to keep up with who’s a “whiny ass titty baby” and who’s just a “wanker”? Unbelievable.
I think this is a great insight, however, from one of TNR’s commenters:
In looking at Scheiber’s post again, I now realize what it reminds me of … Steve Allen’s infamous reading of the lyrics to “Be-Bop-A-Lula” on his TV show in the 1950s.
Like Scheiber, Allen probably thought he was putting that whole uncouth new genre in its place.
There is an element of “that’s not music, it’s just noise!” to this little dustup.
(Whatever you do, don’t tell these guys about hip-hop. They’ll have an aneurysm.)
One of my favorite hawkish pundit rationalizations of the last year or so, since it has become evident even to them that Iraq is a cock-up of epic proportions, is that even if it looks bad right now, it could improve in the next 30 years or so in which case everything will turn out all right in the end and everybody will be happy. Indeed, if you look at it in the long sweep of history, even if Iraq devolves into outright civil war, the US did the right thing by “laying the foundations for peace.” (David Ignatius rather famously set that forth in this op-ed.)
However, I’ve never seen this so interestingly explained as is has been today by David Brooks:
In 1848 a democratic revolution swept across Europe, and then promptly collapsed. Thousands of protesters were killed in the streets. Authoritarian regimes were re-established. Some called 1848 “the turning point when Europe failed to turn.”
And yet that wasn’t true. Anti-democratic regimes did regain power, but within decades they had enacted most of the reforms the revolutionaries of 1848 had asked for. Constitutions were written. Suffrage was expanded. Welfare systems were created.
Conservative authoritarians enacted these reforms reluctantly, and with cynical motivations. But they knew they had to keep up with the times to retain their grip on power and to forestall more radical change. Democracy didn’t move forward in a burst of glory, but in a long slog of gradual concessions made by reluctant conservative reformers.
I wonder if, when we look back at the world of today from some future vantage point, we will see an echo of that pattern.
(Interesting that he calls the the reluctant acquiesers conservative authoritarians. Without irony, too.) But his point is that progress always happens so just because conservative authoritarians stand in its way doesn’t mean anyone should get their panties in a bunch. They’ll get it together eventually.
Brooks takes his look into the future:
We’ll see a burst of democratic change that swept the world between 1980 and 2005. Authoritarian regimes collapsed, sometimes under their own weight (the Soviet Union), sometimes amid outside pressure (the Philippines) and sometimes by force (Iraq). In places where the fabric of society was thick, nations maintained their equilibrium and democratic dreams were realized. But in nations where totalitarianism had been strongest, and civil society most brutally pulverized, liberation begat chaos.
In these places, the old political order was the only source of social authority, and once that was removed everything was permissible. The worst people in the nation were given free rein to prey upon the best. In Iraq, that meant brutal violence, rampant crime and a sectarian power struggle that produced unimaginable horror.
In Russia, the chaos produced a culture of plunder and gangsterism that rewarded the dishonest. A large share of the population was set free to drink themselves to death, with the average lifespan of the Russian man declining by seven years.
Moreover, the Western liberators were complicit in and discredited by the chaos. In Russia, the West sent in economists and technocrats. Coming from places that had always been stable, they took for granted the moral foundations that undergird stability. They didn’t see that Russia lacked these foundations, and that any institutions they built on top would simply be perverted.
In Iraq, the American liberators didn’t understand what would happen if brutalized Iraqis were left in a state of nature, and didn’t or couldn’t impose a humane order.
Yes those brutalized regimes just couldn’t get it together and nobody could really help them. It was sad. But fear not. Everything turns out ok in the end with the help of some good old fashioned conservative authoritarianism:
So if the first stage of the democratic era in these places was liberation and the second stage was chaos, the third stage was conservative restoration. Unlike the Western democrats, the conservatives — Putin in Russia, the theocrats and strongmen who came to dominate Iraq [can you believe it? — d] — did understand the desire for order. They understood the people’s desire to live in an environment in which it was possible to lead a dignified life. They shared the feeling of national shame that had come amid the chaos and the longing to restore national prestige. In short, they had a deeper understanding of human nature than the technocrats who came to modernize them.
These conservatives did have their shortcomings:
The autocrats created nations that were not totalitarian but not free. On the one hand they sought to stifle liberty in order to secure their grip on power. Democracy activists were arrested and TV stations suborned. On the other hand, as in 1848, the democratic forces did not go away. The people, especially the growing middle classes, longed for freedom. New technologies threatened centralized power.
You see, if everybody just has a little patience, waits a few decades maybe, a century in some cases, it will all turn out just fine. The key is that progress just “happens” sort of inevitably (certainly without the hard work of those icky “progressives” who keep plugging away for decades for equality and freedom.)The conservative authoritarians will eventually give way because otherwise they have to govern with terror which is “unstable.” (Thank goodness for small favors.)
(One wonders about his little fantasy about democracy activists arrested and TV stations being suborned. Seeing as he writes for the NY Times, you’d think he’d see a little foreshadowing in his own backyard, but I don’t think he does…)
If this pattern is true, and future historians do look back on our period this way, then a crucial task for U.S. foreign policy in the years ahead will be to cajole semi-autocratic regimes — in places ranging from Russia to the Middle East and even China — into making gradual democratic reforms. At the moment we do this badly, alternating between bold speeches that call for revolution and craven diplomatic gestures that suggest capitulation.
Why not here? This is the most powerful question in the world today: Why not here? People in Eastern Europe looked at people in Western Europe and asked, Why not here? People in Ukraine looked at people in Georgia and asked, Why not here? People around the Arab world look at voters in Iraq and ask, Why not here?
Thomas Kuhn famously argued that science advances not gradually but in jolts, through a series of raw and jagged paradigm shifts. Somebody sees a problem differently, and suddenly everybody’s vantage point changes.
”Why not here?” is a Kuhnian question, and as you open the newspaper these days, you see it flitting around the world like a thought contagion. Wherever it is asked, people seem to feel that the rules have changed. New possibilities have opened up.
The question is being asked now in Lebanon. Walid Jumblatt made his much circulated observation to David Ignatius of The Washington Post: ”It’s strange for me to say it, but this process of change has started because of the American invasion of Iraq. I was cynical about Iraq. But when I saw the Iraqi people voting three weeks ago, eight million of them, it was the start of a new Arab world.”
So now we have mass demonstrations on the streets of Beirut. A tent city is rising up near the crater where Rafik Hariri was killed, and the inhabitants are refusing to leave until Syria withdraws. The crowds grow in the evenings; bathroom facilities are provided by a nearby Dunkin’ Donuts and a Virgin Megastore.
The head of the Syrian Press Syndicate told The Times on Thursday: ”There’s a new world out there and a new reality. You can no longer have business as usual.”
[…]
Why not here?…this is clearly the question the United States is destined to provoke. For the final thing that we’ve learned from the papers this week is how thoroughly the Bush agenda is dominating the globe. When Bush meets with Putin, democratization is the center of discussion. When politicians gather in Ramallah, democratization is a central theme. When there’s an atrocity in Beirut, the possibility of freedom leaps to people’s minds.
Not all weeks will be as happy as this one. Despite the suicide bombings in Israel and Iraq, the thought contagion is spreading. Why not here?
That was none other than David Brooks in February of 2005.
Can someone remind me again why i am supposed to take these people seriously? This is some kind of bi-polar reality in which they “believe” certain things one day and then as soon as they are no longer able to hold the facts at bay, simply shift to a completely different stance without so much as a backward glance at their own mistaken judgment. (Josh Marshall documented a similar shape shift from Robert Kaplan earlier this week.) I guess being a hawkish pundit means never having to say you’re sorry.
Liberals have plenty of internal disagreements. The punditocrisy can talk of little else. But at least these internal disagreements don’t usually happen inside each individual liberal’s head.
How a country like the US can support freedom and democracy, and what tools should be used, is a valid question. There has always been the problem of a mighty superpower seeming to throw its weight around having the effect of creating a certain human resistence to its influence. Nobody has an easy answer to that question, but most liberals believe that the best, if not perfect, hope lies in international law and institutions.
But, honestly, anybody who thought that it was a good idea to illegally (and virtually unilaterally) invade and occupy a middle eastern nation that had not attacked anyone, in the name of freedom and democracy was nuts. (To compound the error by thinking that you could use torture and humiliation in the process and still somehow be seen as a valiant liberator is simply mind-boggling.) If there is ever a case in human events in which you cannot adopt an “ends justify the means” philosophy it’s in the realm of spreading liberal values. The minute you do it, you have defeated yourself.
This was not a difficult thing to understand for those who actually believe in liberal values. It seems, however, to still elude those who for the last decade, at least, have been swinging wildly from one position to the other without even pausing for breath. David Brooks has managed to go from starry-eyed neocon optimist to dreary, cold hearted realist in less than 18 months. I shudder to think where he and his friends might land by 2008.
Arthur Silber has been bellowing about Iran for some time now, convinced (as is Seymour Hersh) that the administration is really quite serious about attacking. (Whether or not forces within the administration or the military gather to prevent this is an open question.) Today, Arthur homes in on the question of this latest somewhat inexplicable actions by Israel and how it may relate to this plan.
He quotes Drudge’s latest screaming headline:
Israel has information that Lebanese guerrillas who captured two Israeli soldiers are trying to transfer them to Iran, the Foreign Ministry spokesman said. Spokesman Mark Regev did not disclose the source of his information.
I do not have adequate tin foil today to comprehend the full spectrum of issues. But let me just say that I would not find it suprising for the Bush administration hard liners to work in concert with the Israeli hard-liners to gin up a crisis that ends up “requiring” action against Iran. It is to the political advantage of both groups to do so. I certainly don’t know that this has happened but from watching this administration operate for the past six years I do know that it could happen. And that’s scary enough.
Certainly, it’s quite odd that the US seems to be simply sitting on the sidelines diplomatically and throwing ill-advised potshots from the sidelines. Arthur quotes this passage from an article by Jim Lobe:
“The combination of our own diplomatic disengagement, our blaming Syria and Iran, and our giving the Israelis a green light [for their military campaign] has inflamed the entire region,” according to Clay Swisher, a former State Department Middle East expert and author of the Truth About Camp David, who just returned from Lebanon last week.
It’s always likely that this sort of thing is just typical Bushian incompetence. But I would never discount the idea that there is a wrongheaded Cheneyesque plot behind it as well. There often is.
Matt Yglesias also discusses this a bit yesterday in a TAPPED post, quoting from a Yossi Klein Halevi essay that claims this is all part of a plan for Israel to finally destroy Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran. Matt wryly observes:
Let me just go on the record as saying that as bad an idea as bombing Iran may be, doing so as part of a wildly impractical scheme for Israel to launch a general Middle Eastern war is significantly less appealing.
Meanwhile, I totally understand why establishment liberal foreign policy types don’t like to talk about Israel, but things are getting to the point where I don’t think total silence in the face of dramatic goings-on is very viable.
