I’m hearing Rep. John Culberson (R-Nutcase) on MSNBC saying that we know that terrorists are coming over the Mexican border, hiding among friendly illegal immigrants, and that we should trust American volunteers (with no history of mental illness — which leaves out his constituents) to patrol the border. Just the other day I heard Governor Bill Richardson on Fox going on and on about how illegal immigrants are mutilating animals but we should beef up the border patrol to deal with it.
This kind of talk, in my experience, always means that the economy is in deep shit. I don’t care what the numbers say and I don’t care how happy everyone is supposed to be in this wonderful growing economy — it obviously sucks. Illegal immigrant bashing never happens when the party’s in full swing.
I can see that we are going to spend a lot of time on this convenient scapegoating the next few years and judging from Richardson’s approach, the populist Democratic position is going to be that we need to bash Mexicans with professional border patrol agents as opposed to picking them off with vigilante posses. I guess we are taking the kinder gentler approach?
Economic populism does have an unfortunate history of teaming up with nativism and it looks like the Republicans and the Democrats are going to be racing to see who can get there first. Business always willingly puts up with a short term phony interruption in their cheap labor supply in order to feed the rubes, so no worries of a GOP crack-up on this one. The bigger question is whether the hispanic population is going to put up with the inevitable race baiting that underlies these periodic bash-fests. Whoever threads that needle the best is probably going to be the winner in the western swing states.
One problem with getting older is that you begin to see these pernicious patterns play out repeatedly within your own lifetime and it is profoundly depressing.
I try not to make sweeping claims about things for which I cannot possibly know the answer, but like most people I often have some sort of feeling about what the answer will be nonetheless. This is because when you examine certain odd claims your intuition and deductive powers kick in even when you don’t have all the evidence. I have that feeling about the Able Danger story, which is why I haven’t written about it.
First of all, anything that Curt Weldon is involved with is automatically suspect. It just is. He’s a nutball who shouldn’t be let anywhere near a position of real authority. That doesn’t mean he’s automatically wrong, of course, but when you combine it with the fact that his evidence is based upon memory, documents have disappeared and the guy backing up the claim has subtly changed his story — let’s just say my skeptical antenna are way, way up. Something is wrong with this picture. Particularly this part:
As to the timing of why this is all coming out only now, Shaffer revealed in his appearance on NPR’s Talk of the Nation Wednesday that it was Weldon’s idea to make a fuss over Able Danger being shut down, only after Shaffer and Phillpott recently approached him to get support for funding their new data mining proposal.
C’mon.
And if JPod and his ilk get covered in ignominy over it, so much the better. They want so much for it to be true, particularly the part about the 9/11 commission blowing these allegations off. They also want to blame it on Jamie Gorelick, which makes no sense whatsoever but it will mean they can exonerate the poor little Pentagon which just didn’t know what to do. (And did you know that Jamie Gorelick once worked at the Pentagon too, a long time ago? Coincidence? I think not…)
The whole thing sounds incredibly dicey to me. I’m not saying it’s impossible. I’m open to seeing some real evidence — I’d be happy to see Rummy’s Pentagon nailed for a cover-up. But I have a feeling that this is a Burkett special.
A former top aide to Colin Powell says his involvement in the former secretary of state’s presentation to the United Nations on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction was “the lowest point” in his life.
“I wish I had not been involved in it,” says Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, a longtime Powell adviser who served as his chief of staff from 2002 through 2005. “I look back on it, and I still say it was the lowest point in my life.”
[…]
Powell’s speech, delivered on February 14, 2003, made the case for the war by presenting U.S. intelligence that purported to prove that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Wilkerson says the information in Powell’s presentation initially came from a document he described as “sort of a Chinese menu” that was provided by the White House.
“(Powell) came through the door … and he had in his hands a sheaf of papers, and he said, ‘This is what I’ve got to present at the United Nations according to the White House, and you need to look at it,'” Wilkerson says in the program. “It was anything but an intelligence document. It was, as some people characterized it later, sort of a Chinese menu from which you could pick and choose.”
Wilkerson and Powell spent four days and nights in a CIA conference room with then-Director George Tenet and other top officials trying to ensure the accuracy of the presentation, Wilkerson says.
“There was no way the Secretary of State was going to read off a script about serious matters of intelligence that could lead to war when the script was basically un-sourced,” Wilkerson says.
In one dramatic accusation in his speech, Powell showed slides alleging that Saddam had bioweapons labs mounted on trucks that would be almost impossible to find.
“In fact, Secretary Powell was not told that one of the sources he was given as a source of this information had indeed been flagged by the Defense Intelligence Agency as a liar, a fabricator,” says David Kay, who served as the CIA’s chief weapons inspector in Iraq after the fall of Saddam. That source, an Iraqi defector had never been debriefed by the CIA, was known within the intelligence community as “Curveball.”
After searching Iraq for several months across the summer of 2003, Kay began e-mailing Tenet to tell him the WMD evidence was falling apart. At one point, Wilkerson says, Tenet called Powell to tell him the claims about mobile bioweapons labs were apparently not true.
“George actually did call the Secretary, and said, ‘I’m really sorry to have to tell you. We don’t believe there were any mobile labs for making biological weapons,'” Wilkerson says in the documentary. “This was the third or fourth telephone call. And I think it’s fair to say the Secretary and Mr. Tenet, at that point, ceased being close. I mean, you can be sincere and you can be honest and you can believe what you’re telling the Secretary. But three or four times on substantive issues like that? It’s difficult to maintain any warm feelings.”
The president had no problems in that regard, did he? He still has warm feelings galore.
I’m glad to see that some members of the administration are coming forward to say they have regrets. It’s important for the historical record. But don’t expect the mainstream press to care about it. This is all old news, you know.
I do think it’s an important insight into the psychology of people who are involved with these things. There were a few who spoke out and a few who resigned in protest but not many. It’s important that we examine that phenomenon and try to figure out how this happens. It’s not unprecedented, of course. There have been many examples and some amazing analysis done on the subject. But here we have it in real time, someone who knew the government was taking the country to war for inscrutable reasons and yet he went along. He is not without a conscience. And conditions were such that he would have lost his career, but he wouldn’t have lost his freedom or his life if he had quit. But he didn’t. Neither did Powell, who could have changed the course of history had he resigned. Why didn’t they?
In an otherwise quite reasonable defense of Cindy Sheehan, Garance Franke-Ruta makes this statement:
Sheehan hails from a part of the country where, when she went looking for answers, the easiest ones to find are the ones that she found. There is no grassroots, accessible organizing by Democratic foreign policy centrists, for example, so when people outside D.C. start looking for answers, all they find is one part of the left spectrum of opinion.
I find it very unusual that someone who blogs would say such a thing. I very much doubt that Sheehan drove to a Berkeley Code Pink potluck for answers to her questions about Iraq. I know she lives in a regional backwater where the folks are all unsophisticated rubes who don’t know nothin’ bout foreign policy like all the smart people in Washington DC do, but I suspect they do have the internet and television. She may have even read a blog called TAPPED.
It’s patronizing to assume that her views are the result of being unable to access the sophisticated thinking in washington DC. I suspect she chose the people who are supporting her today as much as they chose her. After all, two years ago when her son was killed it was pretty hard to find any “sophisticated” liberals in Washington DC who gave a flying fuck. They were still waving flags and talking about kicking ass. It was only the “default leftist” hayseeds out in nowheresville who would give this woman the time of day.
I agree with Franke-Ruta that her power derives from her moral authority as a mother whose child was killed. What else would it be? She’s not a professional politician, analyst or activist. Her political views are secondary. But she isn’t a child, either. Her political views are no more spurious than any other American’s and I would give her more credit than to assume that they stem from an inability to obtain other opinions. If she wanted to read transcripts of Brookings symposiums about Iraq, she certainly could. And she may have for all we know.
Furthermore, as eRobin pointed out on the American Street yesterday, her peacenik beliefs probably stem more from her committed catholicism than anything else. There is a strain of serious lefty catholic politics in this country from long before the Berrigan brothers. Out here in the California boondocks, catholics tend to be very leftwing indeed.
Kevin Drum challenges “failure is not an option” Democrats to put up or shut up:
…if you do believe we can win in Iraq, let’s hear what you mean by “win” and how you think we can do it, and let’s hear it in clear and compelling declarative sentences. “Stay the course” isn’t enough. What Bush is doing now obviously isn’t working, so what would you do that’s significantly different?
Conversely, if you don’t believe we can win in Iraq, and you’re only suggesting we stay there because you can’t stand the thought of “looking weak,” then your moral compass needs some serious adjustment.”
I can’t imagine any realistic “winning” scenario at this point in which Americans are involved. Indeed, it was lost from the the minute we defied the world and decided to go it alone. It’s the “american-ness” of the occupation that is its most immediate problem. So we should go, if only to relieve that pressure.
There is a very slight chance that if we leave the Iraqis themselves will create a stable, democratic system but I’m extremely pessimistic. The country was an artificial construct to be begin with and the fact that the majority were repressed by the minority for decades, and that vast amounts of money is at stake in certain areas and there is a rise of extreme religious fundamentalism in the region means that this is almost certainly destined for disaster. It was foreseen by many that we could actually make things worse for the Iraqi people and we have.
The next question is whether it will ignite the rest of the region in some way or whether it will be confined to Iraq only. It is becoming a training ground for terrorist tactics already and we seem unable to do anything about it. As Kevin points out, this too was inevitable:
The insurgency is not going to give up, the Army doesn’t seem to have any kind of consistent commitment to using counterinsurgency techniques against it, we don’t know for sure that they’d work anyway, and let’s face it: the track record of major powers beating large-scale overseas insurgencies is close to zero in the past half century.
But Kevin’s question about “looking weak” is more than an academic one to both the neocons and Osama bin Laden. The neocons are convinced that everything from the rise of terrorism to male pattern baldness is the result of looking weak. They have been very explicit in their view that American presidents Reagan and Clinton both made terrible mistakes by withdrawing from Lebanon and Somalia. It is a fundamental part of their threat analysis.
Likewise, Bin Laden credits the mujahadeen running the Russians out of Afghanistan as precipitating the destruction of the Soviet super power. There are undoubtedly many of his followers who think that the insurgency running the US out of Iraq would accomplish the same thing, which is, of course, ridiculous. But providing bin Laden with the opportunity to declare “victory” is enough to give the neocons apoplexy.
I don’t happen to think we should make decisions based upon what bin Laden thinks about anything. We have provided him with plenty of recruiting material by invading Iraq — there is little margin in worrying about whether withdrawal will result in bin Laden taking a victory lap.(How ironic it would be, too, considering that it was Bush who created a fictitious connection between al Qaeda and Iraq in the first place.) The neocons worry incessantly about this. It’s almost as if they share the Japanese obsession with “face” and they will do almost anything to save it. They will fight withdrawal with every breath in their bodies.
And that brings me back to Kevin’s post. He says:
Either you believe that there’s a way we can win in Iraq — a real way that involves the leadership of George Bush and his staff, not some fantasy scenario in which he suddenly turns into the reincarnation of FDR — or you don’t. And the only reason to stay in Iraq is if you think we can win.
There is no real way to win in Iraq with or without George Bush and his staff. But there are different ways of losing. He is not going to stand for a complete withdrawal, timed or otherwise. They aren’t leaving. The military is forcing them to draw down, and they probably will for practical and domestic political reasons. But they will not just pick up and leave which means that the perception of American occupation — and certainly the perception of American involvement in the government — will continue. And, of course, the civil war that is developing will also continue. I cannot realistically see another scenario developing.
That’s the real world we are living in until 2008. The Bush administration will watch Iraq turn into the ninth circle of hell before they will completely withdraw. So, Kevin’s challenge to Democrats to come up with a better plan is actually a political challenge. They can try to put pressure on the government, but they will not make any headway on policy. Not with this group.
Everything is about positioning for the next two elections. And that I see in two phases. Now is the time to lay blame where blame should be laid and ensure that Bush’s splendid little war is seen as his debacle and no one elses. Calls for withdrawal by the dove camp are perfectly appropriate. It’s vastly important that Republicans be held responsible for this failure. That is not an emotional response — it is, I believe, an essential process before we can change the foreign policy dynamic that has plagued us ever since the 50’s. The wimp-baiting from the right has gotten us into the two worst foreign policy debacles of the last half century and we have to put a stop to it.
Remember, unless something catastrophic happens, the US will not leave Iraq until 2008. But we will have to leave as soon as he is out of office. Right now, the Democratic foreign policy hawks are calling for more troops — an impossibility. But that demand, made in 2005, may allow them to argue that when the going got tough they were calling for more troops and Bush wouldn’t listen. By 2007 this will be a moot point, but it may be smart to articulate it now. Under tremendous pressure at that point from the doves in the party, the candidates will all sorrowfully conclude that despite their best efforts in 2004, 2005, 2006 and 2007 to get Bush to win the this war decisively, he failed, and now we have no choice but to withdraw completely and actively court international involvement — which they, unlike Bush, might actually be able to accomplish.
I think that we are seeing a Democratic pincer movement that is going to fatally squeeze the Republican policy. On the one side we have the growing Cindy Sheehan withdrawal movement, very emotional very compelling. It’s the right argument, but its main purpose is to weaken Bush — there is no chance in hell that it will force a complete troop withdrawal. On the other side he has the Democratic establishment calling for more troops and a greater effort to gain international support. Bush cannot do that either. He is trapped. All he can say is “stay the course” which is not adequate to win and ensures that we lose slowly and painfully.
I’m sorry to have to reduce this to politics. It is an absolutely horrible situation that should have been prevented and wasn’t. That was our failure. But it has happened and it is what it is. The only thing we can do is ensure that Republicans are held accountable for this failure and prepare the ground for the future. If I thought we could convince the GOP to do anything different, I would put politics aside and say that we should all work together. But that is clearly impossible. They will not listen. They will not admit that they’ve made any mistakes. And worst of all, they will not do the one thing that might make a difference — take the US off the playing field in Iraq. They believe that doing that in past situations from Vietnam to Somalia is the reason terrorism is a threat today. More importantly, they would lose face and that they will not do.
All we are left with is politics. And we should not be afraid to be strategic. I’m not sure it’s a bad idea for the ’08 presidential hopeful club to be hawkish right now, for the reason I outlined above. And I also think it’s a good time for the dove faction to exert itself. Pressure coming from both the left and right on Bush is a good idea. I think it stands us in good stead for when we actually have the power to do the thing that needs to be done — withdraw.
And we simply have to change this right-left foreign policy dynamic that is really a vestige of the old cold war mentality and has no place in this new century. This is a complicated world and we cannot continue to allow hawks to wage non-essential wars they cannot win in order to define liberals as wimps and show the world how omnipotent we are. Especially since each time they do it we end up in an unwinnable quagmire with horrible loss of blood and treasure. It’s got to stop here.
George W. Bush’s streak of good luck continues — at the expense of others as usual.
Cindy Sheehan had to leave Crawford to take care of her ailing mother. Without her, the protest becomes something different, less compelling and less meaningful. What a shame.
But it was very worthwhile. The questions about Iraq have crystalized for a lot of people who up until now just felt vaguely uncomfortable. The press have been forced to see the anti-war sentiment that has clearly been showing up in the polls in human terms. And Democrats and others have been able to connect with one another in a personal and meaningful way for the first time in a long time. That is not something that we should ever underrate. People need to feel part of things; they need to be allowed to be human. Cindy Sheehan and her protest gave a vast, frustrated and near hopeless number of Americans something to believe in. Let’s hope it changed the zeitgeist for good.
The prosecutor in the BTK case just said that the prisoner should be put into the general prison population to “hack it out with the other guys.”
She is undoubtedly a law and order Republican.
This is not to say that I don’t understand the feelings of the families of the victims. This guy is a psychopathic monster. If one of them said something like that I think it would be understandable. It’s human. But, there was once a time when the representatives of the justice system were expected to hold to higher standards of reason and reverence for the law in these situations — which doesn’t include publicly hoping that a prisoner be killed by other prisoners in jail.
Of course this prosecutor made an utter fool of herself for more than five minutes with her bizarre giggly affect so maybe she’s on drugs or something. Even Blitzer and Greenfield were appalled by her antics.
Update: I stand corrected. Apparently she is a law ‘n order Democrat.
Sam Rosenfeld asks a very good question. Why aren’t the elected Dems using the Roberts nomination to make our case for the future? There is no margin anymore in giving the Red State Dems “free” votes on anything because the Republicans have shown time and again that there is no reward for “good” Democratic behavior. I would hope that Reid is whipping the caucus to give Roberts as small a margin as possible. But, there’s more to it than that. There is opportunity in losing by making a well defined case against the politics, philosophy and policy that Roberts so clearly represents. I’ve seen no signs as yet that the Senate Democrats are going to exert even the smallest amount of political intensity to that job.
Acknowledging that Roberts nomination is almost sure to be confirmed, Rosenfeld says:
What remains continuously puzzling is the binary logic Democrats insist on applying to situations like this, wherein either a full substantive victory or the complete evaporation of political energy seem to count as the only possible alternatives. On this issue as with many others, there remains a weird disinclination to focus party efforts on using substantive defeats over actual policy outcomes (which are largely foreordained anyway for the minority party) to highlight contrasts with the GOP and forge a message for future electoral battles.
On the one hand, Roberts’ confirmation is essentially a lock, barring unforeseen developments during the hearings. Outside advocacy groups have their own interests to attend to and their own reasons for demanding opposition to the nominee, but for Senate Democrats, an active push to block Roberts doesn’t really make sense. On the other hand, there truly is little substantive justification for Democrats to actually endorse this nomination. So why do it?
As Matt wrote last month, “being in the minority comes with a few advantages — first and foremost among them a release from the obligation to think realistically.” It shouldn’t be impossible, with creativity and coordination, to make the principled argument against Roberts part of the case for sending more Democrats to Washington. And it’s a bit distressing that throughout the coverage of base-party tensions over strategy on Roberts, this never seems to come up as an option worth considering.
This seems to me to be a Dem weakness across the board. If we can’t win, why bother? (A corollary to this is, “if it’s risky we shouldn’t do it.”) I suspect this is a matter of psychology — some of it a holdover from the 60’s, as we’ve discussed before — and some of it an unwillingness to admit that the political minority and we are playing a different game. Yglesias’ point is important. When you don’t have the responsibility of governance (and particularly when the majority goes out of its way to govern in a purely partisan way) you are much freer to operate from a totally political standpoint.
It seems that many Democrats find that cheap or disreputable. But what it is, is opposition politics. Because you have no real power to enact your agenda, the strategy should be to frame the opponents agenda in the most offensive way possible and present an alternative that could not be passed today in either governing coalition but for which you would like to build a consensus over time.
I think that the Roberts nomination should be opposed on the basis of his active hostility to a right to privacy. Others may differ — he’s absurdly business friendly and anti-environmental, so a case can be made against him on that. In fact, he’s pretty much everything loathesome I can imagine in a judge, (except that he is not anti-intellectual and he’s obviously well qualified for the job.) But we should find a philosophical issue or two that we believe really define the difference between the two parties and begin to inculcate that difference in the minds of the electorate.
It’s risky because we have no assurance that people will always agree with us. But that risk aversion is our biggest problem. We seem to think that we can be all things to all people and we just can’t. So, we need to stake out a claim and work to bring some people over to our side. That takes time and effort and a willigness to use every opportunity we have in front of the cameras or on the op-ed pages to make our argument to the American people.
PM Carpenter recently discussed Newt Gingrich’s recent call to arms in just these terms and clearly illustrates why the other side wins (barely) even though they are not really supported by the people on the issues themselves:
[Newt says] “Our core pattern should be ‘there is a BIG difference [between left and right] and it is a fact….’ We must then take such key facts to immediately illustrate a large vision; we cannot remain in arguments at the detail level.”
If you’re a conservative, odds are you won’t admit what Newt just admitted. If you’re a liberal, you’ll smile at what Newt just admitted, which is that conservatives cannot successfully debate liberals because the details that underlie most debates tend to support the liberal position, not the conservative. If the details supported Newt’s side, rest assured he would be touting the marvels of the fine point.
His outline of political action was also a resoundingly open call to demagogic arms. The “core pattern” he mentioned means, in translation, to repeat, repeat, repeat the “BIG” differences without ever substantiating the conservative arguments behind them. In fact, there should be no conservative arguments – just catchy slogans that appeal to those uninterested in inconvenient details. It’s not the “Big Difference” that Mr. Gingrich stresses as the advisable course of action. It’s the “Big Lie.”
That is the game they have been playing for 25 years and they are winning with it. And it’s more than just the fact that they can’t win the substantive argument. It’s also because they’ve learned how to define themselves in big, philosophical terms and they successfully used their public platforms throughout their years, in and out of power, to project that definition. They never miss an opportunity.
I don’t suggest that we adopt their dishonest demagoguery, but we do have to learn how to counter this effectively. Having wonky analytical arguments may be good for policy (and I hope we will always do this) but politically it’s disasterous. Clearly, the public doesn’t want to hear the details. If they did, they’d study the issues and vote for the party that most closely aligns with their interestsd — and the Democrats would have a majority. They want a vision.
We will probably not win on Roberts. The nuclear option is very unlikely to be triggered unless Bush nominates a total nutcase — and since the bar for that has been set lower than Janice Brown, I don’t think it’s possible. That’s the sad consequence of not winning the presidency or the Senate in the last election. But it doesn’t mean that we can’t use these occasions to build for the future and make our case. Just because we can’t win it today doesn’t mean that we don’t have a responsibility to lay the groundwork for winning tomorrow. Are these politicians so spoiled that they simply refuse to stage a tactical defeat, even for a higher purpose?
Washington Post reporter Jim VandeHei says Bush spokesman Scott McClellan “is seen as someone who might not tell you a lot, but is not going to tell you a lie. More broadly, we go to the [White House press] briefings if for no other reason to hear the White House spin on world events. They rarely figure into our daily reports because we will talk to Scott and others one on one and not in front of a crowd.”
Setting aside the ridiculous assumption that McClellan tells the truth, which is completely unbelievable unless he’s a braindead robot, can someone tell me why reporters should get their questions answered in private? The press briefings are purely PR exercises and the reporters should refuse to go instead of giving the white house a platform to spin bullshit as news. If the real news is gathered privately, then the press is simply playing a role in a public relations event.
The reader who pointed this out to me said something to the effect of, “it’s easy to see why JD Guckert felt so at home in those briefings.” No kidding.
Kos has posted a handy list of the fine support the Republicans gave their commander in chief when he took action to stop ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. I urge you all to read it and maybe even print it out to hand to your Republican friends when they get in your face about it being unamerican to not support the president in a time of war.
There is one quote missing from Kos’ list, however, and it’s one I must have heard a hundred times, from none other than our favorite maverick JJ McCain:
We didn’t have to get into Kosovo. Once we stumbled into it, we had to win it. This administration has conducted a feckless photo-op foreign policy for which we will pay a very heavy price in American blood and treasure.