Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

“We Don’t Do Body Counts”

by digby

When I read things like this today in the Washington Post by Andrew J. Bacevich, I’m struck by the fact that people like me, and many, many others were talking about this stuff years ago and predicting the problems that would ensue. Now, the neocon experiment, full of inconsistencies and downright silly assumptions, has played out before our very eyes and its failure is there for all to see.

The article above is about one of those little discussed issues in the mainstream media, Iraqi civilian deaths, and how that has affected the ostensible mission in Iraq. Now why this subject hasn’t been an obvious topic in the press or among pundits and thinkers until now, I do not know, but it seems like a pretty obvious problem to me:

The killing at the Samarra checkpoint was not an atrocity; most likely it was an accident, a mistake. Yet plenty of evidence suggests that in Iraq such mistakes have occurred routinely, with moral and political consequences that have been too long ignored. Indeed, conscious motivation is beside the point: Any action resulting in Iraqi civilian deaths, however inadvertent, undermines the Bush administration’s narrative of liberation, and swells the ranks of those resisting the U.S. presence.

Gen. Tommy Franks, who commanded U.S. forces when they entered Iraq more than three years ago, famously declared: “We don’t do body counts.” Franks was speaking in code. What he meant was this: The U.S. military has learned the lessons of Vietnam — where body counts became a principal, and much derided, public measure of success — and it has no intention of repeating that experience. Franks was not going to be one of those generals re-fighting the last war.

Unfortunately, Franks and other senior commanders had not so much learned from Vietnam as forgotten it. This disdain for counting bodies, especially those of Iraqi civilians killed in the course of U.S. operations, is among the reasons why U.S. forces find themselves in another quagmire. It’s not that the United States has an aversion to all body counts. We tally every U.S. service member who falls in Iraq, and rightly so. But only in recent months have military leaders finally begun to count — for internal use only — some of the very large number of Iraqi noncombatants whom American bullets and bombs have killed.

Through the war’s first three years, any Iraqi venturing too close to an American convoy or checkpoint was likely to come under fire. Thousands of these “escalation of force” episodes occurred. Now, Lt. Gen. Peter Chiarelli, the commander of U.S. ground forces in Iraq, has begun to recognize the hidden cost of such an approach. “People who were on the fence or supported us” in the past “have in fact decided to strike out against us,” he recently acknowledged.

An occupying army has been shooting civilians indiscriminately (or at least it seems that way) engendering resentment among the population and they are just now recognizing that this might not have been the best idea in the world? Jesus.

This was a conscious decision on the part of military planners, by the way:

In the early days of the insurgency, some U.S. commanders appeared oblivious to the possibility that excessive force might produce a backlash. They counted on the iron fist to create an atmosphere conducive to good behavior. The idea was not to distinguish between “good” and “bad” Iraqis, but to induce compliance through intimidation.

That certainly sounds like the American mindset post 9/11, doesn’t it? (And it sounds like the Republican mindset post WWII) So there’s no big surprise.

But there was something else going on among the ivory tower think tank neocons who were strutting around the world like little Napoleons during this period. They were hyping delusionary conspiracy theories like their pal the nutball Laurie Myelroie’s fantasy BS about Saddam and the first world trade center bombing and calling all the top military brass in to watch “The Battle of Algiers” to take the wrong lessons from it. And, most importantly, they were passing out an ignorant book called “The Arab Mind” throughout the military, which was apparently taken quite seriously by a fair number of officers:

“You have to understand the Arab mind,” one company commander told the New York Times, displaying all the self-assurance of Douglas MacArthur discoursing on Orientals in 1945. “The only thing they understand is force — force, pride and saving face.” Far from representing the views of a few underlings, such notions penetrated into the upper echelons of the American command. In their book “Cobra II,” Michael R. Gordon and Gen. Bernard E. Trainor offer this ugly comment from a senior officer: “The only thing these sand ni**ers understand is force and I’m about to introduce them to it.”

Such crass language, redolent with racist, ethnocentric connotations, speaks volumes. These characterizations, like the use of “gooks” during the Vietnam War, dehumanize the Iraqis and in doing so tacitly permit the otherwise impermissible. Thus, Abu Ghraib and Haditha — and too many regretted deaths, such as that of Nahiba Husayif Jassim.

He doesn’t mention that the word they use now instead of gook is “Hadji” or “Ali Baba.” Same shit, different war. Maybe all wars. But this one is unique in the post war world. We did this one almost alone, based on lies and some hidden agenda which nobody has yet fully explained. Indeed, the consensus seems to be that these starry eyed neocon checkenhawk warriors each had their own reasons for wanting to invade, none of which were legal, moral or politically sellable.

These bully tactics came directly from the likes of Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz and other simpleminded conservatives in the leadup to the war. Here’s Sy Hersh writing about Abu Ghraib back in 2004:

The notion that Arabs are particularly vulnerable to sexual humiliation became a talking point among pro-war Washington conservatives in the months before the March, 2003, invasion of Iraq. One book that was frequently cited was “The Arab Mind,” a study of Arab culture and psychology, first published in 1973, by Raphael Patai, a cultural anthropologist who taught at, among other universities, Columbia and Princeton, and who died in 1996. The book includes a twenty-five-page chapter on Arabs and sex, depicting sex as a taboo vested with shame and repression. “The segregation of the sexes, the veiling of the women . . . and all the other minute rules that govern and restrict contact between men and women, have the effect of making sex a prime mental preoccupation in the Arab world,” Patai wrote. Homosexual activity, “or any indication of homosexual leanings, as with all other expressions of sexuality, is never given any publicity. These are private affairs and remain in private.”

The Patai book, an academic told me, was “the bible of the neocons on Arab behavior.” In their discussions, he said, two themes emerged—“one, that Arabs only understand force and, two, that the biggest weakness of Arabs is shame and humiliation.”

Here’s an interesting discussion of the book’s bizarre sexual fixation. The fact that so many rightwingers devoured it and believed it says everything you need to know to know about their provincialism and their personal psychological issues:

But the larger point is that no one seems to have cared much about accuracy, neither Patai nor his neocon readers. Patai says more or less what we’ve long wanted to believe, and that was enough. And the objectifying, dehumanizing and contemptuous tone of Patai’s discussion of a people he claims to like is inseparable from his arguments. It is a great tragedy if it influenced American conduct in Iraq.

Well it did. And the tragedy is there for all to see. This strain of self-serving, unsophisticated thinking permeated the ranks of the conservative intelligensia that is running this nation (making it obvious that the reason these people had been mostly denied a place in academia was not because of their politics, but because of their shallow intellects.) As it turns out, George W. Bush’s small mind was emblematic of conservatism at the turn of the century.

Bacevich in the WaPo piece continues:

Moral questions aside, the toll of Iraqi noncombatant casualties has widespread political implications. Misdirected violence alienates those we are claiming to protect. It plays into the hands of the insurgents, advancing their cause and undercutting our own. It fatally undermines the campaign to win hearts and minds, suggesting to Iraqis and Americans alike that Iraqi civilians — and perhaps Arabs and Muslims more generally — are expendable. Certainly, Nahiba Husayif Jassim’s death helped clarify her brother’s perspective on the war. “God take revenge on the Americans and those who brought them here,” he declared after the incident. “They have no regard for our lives.”

Yes, it has had widespread political implications, political implications predicted by many, many of us who could see that sending a bunch of Americans into the heart of the middle east with no knowledge of the culture, a lie for a mission, an officer corps convinced that Arabs were primitive creatures who had to be subdued by brute force and sexual humiliation and a political leadership that lived on starry-eyed dreams of American omnipotence and high-tech fairy dust — was a colossal mistake of epic proportions.

It was all there for people to see. Seymour Hersh saw it and he was called a terrorist by Richard Perle. That was par for the course.

Bacevich concludes:

For all the talk of Iraq being a sovereign nation, foreign occupiers are the ones deciding what an Iraqi life is worth. And although President Bush has remarked in a different context that “every human life is a precious gift of matchless value,” our actions in Iraq continue to convey the impression that civilian lives aren’t worth all that much.

That impression urgently needs to change. To start, the Pentagon must get over its aversion to counting all bodies. It needs to measure in painstaking detail — and publicly — the mayhem we are causing as a byproduct of what we call liberation. To do otherwise, to shrug off the death of Nahiba Husayif Jassim as just one of those things that happens in war, only reinforces the impression that Americans view Iraqis as less than fully human. Unless we demonstrate by our actions that we value their lives as much as the lives of our own troops, our failure is certain.

This was a very good article until this point. Our failure is already certain no matter what we do. The fundamental flaw in this entire enterprise is not how we did it, although the massive failures outlined in this article are so obvious that it’s imperative to discuss them on their own terms. In fact, I worry that what this failure of execution reveals is a military leadership so lacking in intellectual ability and so wracked with primitive racism that this country cannot count on it to actually defend us in case of a real war. The officer corps are supposed to be smart guys, not a bunch of idiots who would read some piece of trash like “The Arab Mind” and actually believe it — much less use it as the basis for tactics on the ground. This is a dangerous situation for America.

However, the fundamental flaw remains the invasion itself, a bad decision from which everything else flows. The lesson is that an illegal, dishonest war of choice is doomed on its own terms. In the modern world outright conquest is impossible and anything else cannot be finessed with spin and wishful thinking.

That we compounded that error with a comic book understanding of the people we were “liberating” and a lack of postwar planning that was criminal in its negligence is just more evidence of the perfidy of this administration and its congressional enablers. But the central problem remains that it is not how we waged the war, it’s that we waged it at all.

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Primary Qualification

by digby

Julia defends Dr. Condoleeza Rice from the nasty rumors that are swirling around her again.

I think it’s ludicrous to suggest that she’s gotten where she is today by any means other than a rare talent for convincing men who aren’t as smart as she is that she respects them for their minds.

Which is precisely how everyone who works for this administration, up to and including Karl Rove, got their job.

I hadn’t thought about it before, but it’s true that the entire Bush administration is made up of people with the mindset of a certain class of educated women of the 1950’s. They’re all office wives to one degree or another.

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Throwing Out The Bums

by digby

Moderate Republicans say a planned summer push by the House leadership on conservative causes like gun rights and new abortion restrictions threatens the re-election prospects of embattled centrists, who are key to the party’s drive to hold Congress.

Frustrated and angry, they say the leadership’s new American Values Agenda, a list of initiatives heavy on ideological themes, seems short-sighted and ill-timed considering that few conservatives are at serious risk in November.

“It was stupid and gross,” said Representative Christopher Shays, Republican of Connecticut. “They have this obsession to satisfy conservative Republicans who will probably be re-elected no matter what happens. They get job satisfaction, but they are making it more difficult for me to win my race.”

Mr. Shays and others said the announcement of the agenda took them by surprise, particularly after House Republicans seemed to be back on track after a few strong weeks of emphasizing new fiscal controls and a push on national security issues. House moderates have also been supportive of the leadership’s hard line against the idea of potential citizenship for illegal immigrants, saying that reflects public sentiment.

I’ll be looking for the Sunday shows to feature lots of handwringing about the divided Democrats, particularly the crazed, angry purists of the left who are trying to drag the party away from the center of American politics. That is the operative narrative.

I’m sure they will not mention this from Chris Bowers:

Five weeks ago, I complained that the media and political establishment were unfairly focused upon the Connecticut Senate primary. While conservative Democrat Ed Case poses a serious threat to incumbent Senator Daniel Akaka in Hawaii, and while far-right Stephan Laffey poses a serious threat to Lincoln Chafee in Rhode Island, the media and political establishment has paid relatively little attention to those primaries. How much less? Look at these numbers from Google News:

* Lieberman Lamont: 1,590 matches in the last month
* Chafee Laffey: 97 matches in the last month
* Akaka Case: 79 hits in the last month.

Interesting, no? Chris continues with this observation:

…whenever I see the LA Times or any other rag editorialize on the Connecticut Senate primary, I just think back to these Google News numbers. If they, or any other organ of the political and media establishment think that primary challenges against incumbent Senators are wrong, then why aren’t they editorializing about Hawaii and Rhode Island? All of the complaints that have been leveled against progressives for trying to unseat Lieberman can easily be turned against the DLC for trying to unseat Akaka, or against the conservative movement for trying unseat Chafee. However, such complaints are not coming. Until they are, and until the news media starts giving those two races anywhere near the same level of attention they lavish upon Connecticut, anyone who complains about what we are doing in Connecticut is a hypocrite. As long as conservatives and the DLC are not criticized for using the primary system to enact change, progressives should not be criticized for using the primary system to enact change.

And while they’re at it, maybe they could also recognize that the national Republican party seems intent upon making it harder for moderates to win while the national Democratic party is working overtime to protect them. If “moderation” and “centrism” are what the media see as the gold standard, it certainly would seem that the Big Tent Republican establishment hasn’t gotten the memo.

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Codpiece Fatigue

by digby

Do you remember the term “Clinton fatigue?” You know, back when everybody was really, really tired of peace and prosperity and talking about oral sex? (You can understand why everyone wanted our long national nightmare to be over…)

It occurs to me that some conservatives, at least the educated ones, must be feeling some serious “Bush fatigue” about now. When they hear ignorant, puerile drivel like this come out of his mouth, some of them (a couple of them?) must look at the calendar and count the days until their personal nightmare is over:

“It didn’t say we couldn’t have done — couldn’t have made that decision, see?” Mr. Bush said at a news conference in Chicago. “They were silent on whether or not Guantánamo — whether or not we should have used Guantánamo. In other words, they accepted the use of Guantánamo, the decision I made.”

I’m the decider, see. They accepted my decision, see.

Whenever he sounds this moronic I’m reminded that it’s probably how it was explained to him. That “see” is the tip-off. He can’t actually understand the decision and then go out and expect that people won’t think he’s a complete idiot for saying what he just said. He doesn’t get it. Nobody can spin that badly, not even him.

As TBOGG put it, this is Bush’s version of: “That chick at the bar? She’s totally digging on me.”

Update: Jeff Jacoby apparently thinks that because Bush says he takes the Supreme Court decsions “seriously” it means he isn’t seizing dictatorial powers. After repeating Andrew Jackson’s famous saying “John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it” Jacoby writes:

President Bush learns the court’s ruling in Hamdan has gone against him. A five-justice majority held the military commissions created by the administration to try the Guantanamo detainees are invalid, since they were never authorized by congressional statute. The justices seem to have repudiated Bush’s claim that the Constitution invests the president with sweeping unilateral authority in wartime. “The court’s conclusion ultimately rests upon a single ground,” Justice Stephen Breyer pointedly notes in a concurrence. “Congress has not issued the Executive a ‘blank check.’ “

Whereupon Bush says — what? “The justices have made their decision; now let them enforce it”? Something even more acid? Perhaps he repeats a statement he has made previously — “I’m the decider, and I decide what is best”?

Not quite. He says he takes the court’s decision “seriously.” A few moments later he says it again. And then comes this: “We’ve got people looking at it right now to determine how we can work with Congress, if that’s available, to solve the problem.” There is no disdain. No bravado. No criticism. Just an acknowledg ment that the Supreme Court has spoken and the executive branch will comply.

Some dictator.

It isn’t 1832 anymore. Even presidents who are aggressive in their claims of authority don’t flout Supreme Court decisions. Harry Truman relinquished the steel mills, Richard Nixon turned over the Watergate tapes, Bill Clinton submitted to Paula Jones’s deposition. Al Gore conceded the 2000 election. Now Bush will acquiesce as well.

For better or worse, our legal system as it has evolved makes the judiciary, not the president, “the decider.” Bush presses his claims forcefully, as he is entitled to do — but only to a point. We remain a nation of laws, not of men. For all the promiscuous talk about dictatorship, was that ever really in doubt?

Perhaps Jacoby doesn’t know that congress tried to strip the court of jurisdiction in any cases such as this — even going so far as to insert a bogus debate into the record so that the court would be misled as to the intent of the congress when that failed.

There is no guarantee that the Eunuch Caucus would not happily hand over all its constitutional powers to Bush — and strip the court of all of it powers while they’re at it. The only thing keeping them from it is the fact that they haven’t figured out how to finesse stealing an election where the polls have the GOP down by more than a few points before election day. But they’re working on it.

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Mr Excitememt

by digby

Atrios says that Evan Bayh is out campaigning for president and people are comparing him to Harry Truman. Might I suggest that we actually nominate Harry Truman instead? I knows he’s been dead for decades, but I feel confident that his mouldering corpse has more charisma than Evan Bayh.

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The One Percent Doctrine By Ron Suskind

by tristero

Buy it. Read it. It is absolutely wonderful and indispensable if you want a glimmer of insight into what’s going on. We’ll tawk more when I get back from a brief holiday.

Because He Deserved It

Yesterday, the Aspen Daily News published Ken Lay’s obituary. It details out his exemplary deeds, his meager upbringing, his dedication to the Lord, and his love of family. The obit is filled with quotes from the Scriptures and a laundry list of useful charities. It includes such minutia as the claim that he once helped “a former Enron employee pay their mortgage.” The obituary contains roughly two thousand words, all of them in testimony to Lay’s superiority as seen through the eyes of those who knew him, and apparently through the eyes of God. Upon reading it, it becomes evidently clear why the man plundered the Earth’s resources for his own personal gain, and why he stole billions from others. It was because he deserved it. If there was a Scripture for it, it would probably go like this: “Take what you can, but share some of the booty with others. Be charitable, sometimes, and the Lord will have your back.”

Dr. Kenneth Lee Lay

Tribal Crush

by digby

Most of us bloggers have said this in one way or another over the past few weeks. But I think Ezra gets to the nub better than any of us have:

Because it’s not about the war. Or moderation. Or ideology at all. It’s about partisanship. The lines are brightly drawn, but in unexpected places. You can support the President’s war, but you can’t protect him from criticism. You can vote with Republicans, but you can’t undermine Democrats. You can be a hawk, but you can’t deride doves. The politics here are tribal, and Lieberman’s developed too severe a crush on the neighboring chieftain to participate. I’ve tried to explain why that may be — he gropes towards praise and recognition, and receives both more readily from the right — but pop psychology isn’t quite the point. And nor is ideology. Or the war. For all the mockery Bush received, his assertion that “you’re either with us or against us” was more widely applicable than he realized. Lieberman’s actions convinced liberals that he didn’t merely disagree with them, or fear the political ramifications of their positions, but that he was actively against them. And while they can withstand an impressive amount of disagreement, they won’t stand for dislike.

Well, yeah. Why should we? We get enough disdain from the Republicans — who last I looked controlled all three branches of government. Last night Lieberman did it again, chastizing Lamont and his supporters for ruining the Democratic party. When’s the last time you heard a Republican candidate attack his own voters?

This has been going on for decades, actually. It’s part of the old third-way, sistah-soljah, triangulatin’ that we saw coming out of the 80’s presidential wilderness. Liberal bashing was a bipartisan sport for a long time and resulted in successfully making the word into an epithet. But although some were slower on the uptake than others, most Democrats began to wise up during the 90’s when they realized that the Republican Party had morphed into a rabid band of partisan dogs who literally had no limits. The last few years have persuaded even the most conservative red state Dems that it is a mistake to trust the Republican majority and the Bush administration. As Grover famously said, they consider bipartisanship to be date rape. And it’s the Republicans who are slipping the roofies in the drinks, not us.

As proof of the fact that the rank and file aren’t ideological purists, I would offer the support for James Webb, a man easily as conservative as Lieberman, but who is as repulsed by Republican rule as the most liberal ex-Nader voter. I have been very hard on Mudcat Saunders on this blog and there is much in his book “Foxes In The Henhouse” co-written with Steve Jarding with which I disagree. But a good part of the book is a primer on how to call out Republicans and I think it’s worth paying attention to.

Here’s an example of it in action:

Republican Sen. George Allen attacked his Democratic challenger’s opposition to a flag-burning amendment, and James Webb retaliated by calling Allen a coward who sat out the Vietnam War “playing cowboy at a dude ranch in Nevada.”

The statement by a senior adviser to Webb, a decorated veteran and former secretary of the Navy, went to extraordinary lengths to question Allen’s fortitude, even repeatedly using the middle name the senator detests and never uses, Felix.

“While Jim Webb and others of George Felix Allen Jr.’s generation were fighting for our freedoms and for our symbols of freedom in Vietnam, George Felix Allen Jr. was playing cowboy at a dude ranch in Nevada,” said Webb strategist Steve Jarding in the statement Tuesday.

Haha.

I’m not sold on Saunders and Jarding’s national strategic vision, but I can’t help but think the Democrats would be well served to adopt their attitude. Democrats, moderate and liberal alike, are tired of being pushed around by these assholes. Joe Lieberman apparently didn’t get the memo. Let’s hope he gets it on August 8th.

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Bring ‘Em On, Korean-Style

by tristero

Total bullshit:

President Bush… said he was fairly confident the United States could have intercepted a North Korean rocket if it had been headed for America.

“I think we had a reasonable chance of shooting it down,” Mr. Bush said at a televised news conference in Chicago, where he was asked about North Korea’s test-firing of seven missiles, including one long-range Taepodong 2.

Total bullshit. Why? From the same article:

The United States has small batteries of missiles in Alaska and California ready to be used as interceptors, although they have not yet been tested…

[Bush] did say that he had not talked to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld about whether American interceptor missiles could have brought down the North Korean rocket.

But, hey, y’never know! Maybe if we all close our eyes and pray to baby Jesus and promise to be good little girls and boys forever, those there missiles could just work perfectly without being tested. Y’know, like when you bang on the hood of your car and the engine just all-of-sudden starts?

Uh huh. Now, here’s two questions for you:

1. What would have been the consequences if a missile interception by the US had succeeded?

2. And the consequences if it hadn’t?

My answers:

1. A totally unnecessary and very expensive war with NoKo with the upshot being a Korea and environs just about as stable and predictable as Iraq. With one difference: Next door is China who, of course, would simply sit around and do nothing.

2. Liberals would be blamed for the failure because, being Godless, we didn’t pray with enough sincerity.

Why Do They Hate Us So Much?

by digby

The United States of Kafka strikes again. Here’s yet another story of unspeakable horrors at the hands of Americans against some Algerian nobody who was the victim of a bad translation.

After being held for a week in a prison in the mountains of Malawi, Mr. Saidi said, a group of people arrived in a sport utility vehicle: a gray-haired Caucasian woman and five men dressed in black wearing black masks revealing only their eyes.

The Malawians blindfolded him, and his clothes were cut away, he said. He heard someone taking photographs. Then, he said, the blindfold was removed and the agents covered his eyes with cotton and tape, inserted a plug in his anus and put a disposable diaper on him before dressing him. He said they covered his ears, shackled his hands and feet and drove him to an airplane where they put him on the floor.

“It was a long trip, from Saturday night to Sunday morning, ” Mr. Saidi recalled. When the plane landed, he said, he was taken to what he described as a “dark prison” filled with deafening Western music. The lights were rarely turned on.

Men in black arrived, he said, and he remembers one shouting at him through an interpreter: “You are in a place that is out of the world. No one knows where you are, no one is going to defend you.”

He was chained by one hand to the wall in a windowless cell and left with a bucket and a bottle in lieu of a latrine. He remained there for nearly a week, he said, and then was blindfolded and bound again and taken to another prison. “There, they put me in a room, suspended me by my arms and attached my feet to the floor,” he recalled. “They cut off my clothes very fast and took off my blindfold.” An older man, graying at the temples, entered the room with a young woman with shoulder-length blond hair, he said. They spoke English, which Mr. Saidi understands a little, and they interrogated him for two hours through a Moroccan translator. At last, he said, he thought he would learn why he was there, but the questioning only confounded him.

He said the interrogators focused on a telephone conversation they said he had had with his wife’s family in Kenya about airplanes. But Mr. Saidi said he told them that he could not recall talking to anyone about planes.

He said the interrogators left him chained for five days without clothes or food. “They beat me and threw cold water on me, spat at me and sometimes gave me dirty water to drink,” he said. “The American man told me I would die there.”

[…]

In prison, Mr. Saidi said, he was interrogated daily, sometimes twice a day, for weeks. Eventually, he said, his interrogators produced an audiotape of the conversation in which he had allegedly talked about planes.

But Mr. Saidi said he was talking about tires, not planes, that his brother-in-law planned to sell from Kenya to Tanzania. He said he was mixing English and Arabic and used the word “tirat,” making “tire” plural by adding an Arabic “at” sound. Whoever was monitoring the conversation apparently understood the word as “tayarat,” Arabic for planes, Mr. Saidi said.

“When I heard it, I asked the Moroccan translator if he understood what we were saying in the recording,” Mr. Saidi said. After the Moroccan explained it to the interrogators, Mr. Saidi said, he was never asked about it again.

“Why did they bring me to Afghanistan to ask such questions?” he said in the interview. “Why didn’t they ask me in Tanzania? Why did they have to take me away from my family? Torture me?”

That’s an excellent question.

We are now a pariah nation and this is a primary reason why. I just finished the book “American Against the World” by Andrew Kohut and Bruce Stokes. More than 70% of the world now regards us dangerous. Almost as many would like to see another power emerge to check ours. We are disliked and mistrusted and becoming more disliked and mistrusted every day. It’s not getting better. It is incomprehensible that anyone can believe that this has not made our country less safe.

Kevin Drum quotes James Fallows describing a talk with Robert Dearlove today:

And — the point he stressed time and again, even in a bonus comment after the official program session had ended — the Western world, notably the United States, was doomed unless it reclaimed “the moral high ground.” By the end of the Cold War, he said, there was no dispute world wide about which side held the moral high ground. As a professional spy master, he said that reality made it so much easier for him to recruit operatives — they would volunteer to come to him, because they believed in the cause. Therefore, as a matter of pure strategic necessity, the United States needed to behave according to its best traditions, not the exigencies of an open-ended wartime emergency. (I’m paraphrasing a little, but not taking too many liberties.)

When American Democrats say things like this — as some of them occasionally screw up the courage to do — they are dismissed as pathetic one-worlders. The words are somehow more plausible coming from a man who would have been James Bond’s boss.

The words are plausible because they are plausible. It shouldn’t matter from whose mouth they emanate. Indeed, they have emanated from many, many mouths over the last few years, including mine. Aside from protesting the sheer irrationality of the invasion of Iraq and the extreme measures undertaken under the presidents wartime powers, one of the main liberal arguments has been this practical observation that crude thuggish behavior was counterproductive — that our strength lay in our technological mystique, our open society that would not succumb to threats and our ability to get allies to support us and work with us globally to shut down these terrorist operations. That argument has been given hardly a moment of consideration — helped mightily by the news media in the early days who were determined to play well-coiffed soldiers in the reality TV show called the GWOT.

The right has managed to dominate with an internally inconsistent argument that says in order to preserve our civilized values we must do unspeakable, uncivilized things, even to innocent people. (The constitution isn’t a suicide pact!) And the great thing about it is that if we were to suffer another terrorist attack, it wouldn’t disprove this thesis, it would make the case for redoubling it. (tristero takes this on, here, in case you missed it.)

The facts are that our actions have made more enemies, have made our allies mistrust us and have opened the door to the idea that because we are behaving like an unpredictable rogue superpower, the world needs other military powers to challenge us. The more this happens, the more the rightwing nuts insist that we should be tougher and stronger and meaner so that we can put these naysayers in their place. This taken to its logical ends is catastrophe for America.

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