It’s an interesting project, and a thought provoking quiz. Obviously, people need to do a little self-assessment about foreign policy. The old divisions just aren’t applicable anymore and it’s part of the reason why the Democrats have had a hard time fashioning a cogent policy in the face of Bush’s bizarre embrace of aggressive neoconservatism.
Announcement:
Lauching Nov. 1: e-thePeople’s American Choices
American Choices is an interactive self-assessment that helps users
understand today’s foreign policy debates. By taking a 12-question
survey,users get a sophisticated but accessible analysis of their stand on
foreign policy issues, and how it compares with that of others.
We believe that American Choices can help people cut through the highly charged foreign policy debate, and contribute to making our collective discussion less polarized and more informed. Our goal is to get 100,000 people to consider our foreign policy options through American Choices by the end of November. With your help we can do this through online media alone.
…
American Choices was developed in conjunction with the MacNeil/Lehrer
Newshour and By The People. It is available free of charge thanks to
a grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.
I don’t write a whole lot about economics because there are so many smart people in Blogovia who know a lot more about it than I do. But, I do wonder about these numbers they are touting every week and every quarter.
Perhaps I’m being paranoid in thinking that if the entire Wall Street establishment could be hoodwinked by a Texas snake oil hustler into believing that Enron was creating a completely new market that was too complicated for their their pretty little heads to understand, then maybe somebody could be cooking the books a teensy, weensy bit with these economic numbers. Or at least selling them dishonestly. (Nah. They couldn’t get away with that.)
The Angry Bear, one of those smart guys, shows how “the BLS has magically discovered a way for jobless claims to drop week after week, without the number of jobless claims ever actually falling.”
Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Alternatively, they could just hang a sign saying “Mission Accomplished.” That’s a good one, too.
It makes me wonder about these rather, shall we say, grandiose productivity and GDP stats. I mean, c’mon. Are people really working that much harder and more efficiently, all of a sudden? Everybody I know spends every spare minute on line, talking on the phone or bitching about how they haven’t had a raise in 2 years. hmmmmm.
Atrios says it’s no secret that the red-faced, spitting motormouth that Chris Matthews plays on TV is different from the real guy. It may be that a small percentage of insiders know that, but I doubt most of his viewers do.
Speaking at Brown University this week, the “Hardball” player told students that the White House’s rationale for invading Iraq was “totally dishonest” and that the Veep “is behind it all. The whole neo-conservative power vortex, it all goes through his office. He has become the chief executive …It’s scary.”
Cheney and the neo-cons saw in George W. Bush “a man who never read any books, who didn’t think too deeply, and they gave him something to think about for the first time in his life,” Matthews said, according to Rhode Island’s Woonsocket Call.
Now why do you suppose that Matthews has conveniently neglected to share this particular view on his show?
This is why they are called mediawhores. It is not just an fun epithet, thrown around to insult them. It is an accurate metaphor for what they do. They sell themselves for access and ratings.
Chris had better buy himself a new teddy, though, because it’s going to take some special attention to smooth over
this unfortunate little revelation that he does what he does for money, not love. His pimp had to bring him back into line.
A White House spokesman tells us Matthews’ analysis is “disrespectful, totally false and irresponsible. Mr. Matthews has lost touch with reality. The President made the decision to go to war using the same facts as the previous administration and the United Nations, which judged Saddam Hussein as a threat to the region.”
But, Bush loves you Chris, he really does. Now, get back out there and sell your ass.
Companies awarded $8 billion in contracts to rebuild Iraq and Afghanistan have been major campaign donors to President Bush, and their executives have had important political and military connections, according to a study released Thursday.
The study of more than 70 U.S. companies and individual contractors turned up more than $500,000 in donations to the president’s 2000 campaign, more than they gave collectively to any other politician over the past dozen years.
…
Major contracts for Iraq and Afghanistan were awarded by the Bush administration without competitive bids, because agencies said competition would have taken too much time to meet urgent needs in both countries.
Except, in the case of Iraq, there was no urgent need to start the war in the first place and everybody knows it. If getting rid of the evil Saddam was the predominant reason for the war, as the current spin would have it, then the Iraqi people surely could have held out for a couple of months so that we could follow the law in awarding billions of dollars in contracts. There really was no rush, now was there?
There are a good many reasons why Bush and his think tank intellectual dreamers got us into this thing, from visions of Empire to revenge to breaking OPEC to kicking ass. But, this one really helps explain the ridiculous hurry. The corporations didn’t get their tax cuts in the first term, and if Karl wanted to raise the obscene amount of money it’s going to take to brainwash the public into believing that Lil Cap’n T-Ball isn’t as incompetent as he looks, he had to give these guys a taste.
There was no threat, imminent or otherwise, but we rushed into war destroying every international relationship that stood in our way and coincidentally, had to hand out 8 billion dollars worth of no bid contracts to George W. Bush’s top political contributors — because there was no time to fill out the paperwork.
Avedon Carol writes about liberal internationalists’ unwillingness to recognize that continuing to support Bush’s Iraq policy is actually harming the cause of Iraqi freedom. Even if you believe that they support the same goals, it is clear that they are untrustworthy and incompetent. Knee jerk anti-Saddam rhetoric aside, it’s becoming possible that the average Iraqi is beginning to wonder if he hasn’t been thrown out of the frying pan into the fire.
I don’t get it. It reminds me of those stories about the guy who uncorks the jinni and you know whatever the guy wishes for is going to be delivered in such a way that it’s the last thing he wants, but he wishes for it anyway. Like Godfrey Cambridge saying, “I wanna make ’em laugh,” and instead of turning into a great comedian it’s just that people laugh no matter what he says or does. So then he wants to be a serious actor and says, “I wanna make ’em cry,” and he dies in a traffic accident and they all cry. What you want is for Iraq to be a free democracy, and you say, “I wanna invade Iraq and get rid of Saddam.” And you don’t get the democracy or the freedom or any of that, you just get the invasion and Saddam out of power because that’s all you wished for. So now you wish for – what? For the Democrats to all fall in line and give George Bush whatever money he wants that he claims will go to the restoration of Iraq? Come on, you know you can’t just write this guy blank checks. If you’re not prepared to nail down those wishes in unmistakable terms so that what you want to happen will actually happen, maybe you just better stop making wishes.
I think that the Democrats have an excellent campaign argument to make here. When some FauxNews whore like Carl Cameron asks the “what would you do about Iraq,” the answer is really quite simple.
They should say that the central Iraq policy problem is George W. Bush. He can’t get essential international support because after the way he handled the run up to the war, with the insults and the lies, the rest of the world doesn’t trust him. He can’t run the occupation because he refused to listen to those, even in his own administration, who have experience in post war occupation and planned accordingly. He followed bad advice.
To solve the emerging problems in Iraq immediately, George W. Bush needs to fire his foreign policy advisors, every one of them, and go on a world tour designed to reestablish trust in America’s motives and intentions. He needs to repudiate the Bush Doctrine, which has fueled the notion that the US believes it has the sole power to launch preventive wars and resolves to do so whenever it chooses, based upon modern intelligence techniques that we have just proven are completely unreliable.
If he refuses to do those two things, the only answer is to replace George W. Bush. That one act alone will completely change the international dynamic and immediately increase the liklihood of a renewed international effort in Iraq with both financial and military support. The world doesn’t mistrust the United States, it mistrusts George W. Bush.
We have problem in Iraq because George W. Bush arrogantly and short-sightedly alienated the rest of the world. Unless George W. Bush personally rectifies that situation immediately, the only solution is to replace George W. Bush.
He thinks the world revolves around him and he’s right.
Update: Sometimes I think I’m channelling others and don’t even know it. Tristero discusses this same thing and links to Liberal Oasis who writes about it today as well. The consensus is that the answer to the question of what to do about Iraq is get rid of GWB so that America is trusted again by other countries and they will be willing to help us out of this mess that Bush and his cronies created.
“I think it is outrageous. He blamed the sailors for that and it is something — an event — that his advance team staged. I guess that next thing we are going to hear is that the sailors told him to wear the flight suit and prance around on the aircraft carrier.”
Wes, it’s shimmy into a skintight jumpsuit and prance around an aircraft carrier like a Chippendales dancer.”
Ok. I guess you have to be a little bit more dignified. Still, great minds do think alike, eh?
So, self-described stalker Donald Luskin has his lawyer threaten to sue Atrios (and not incidentally out him) because Atrios also used the word “stalker” in his blog post about Luskin’s article “Face To Face With Evil” — in which Luskin describes his stalking of Paul Krugman.
Irony may be dead, but Luskin et al are energetically committing necrophilia on the corpse. Oy.
Apparently, Donald Luskin (who in my opinion, is showing some signs of serious mental illness) believes that it is acceptable for him to call Paul Krugman “evil” but it is not acceptable for Atrios to call Luskin a “stalker,”a phrase Luskin used to describe himself. Oh, and let’s not forget that Don was very offended, hurt and upset by the anonymous creepy people who said mean things about him in Atrios’ comments section. It’s just too much!
When, exactly, did the right wing become such a bunch of lame-assed pussies, anyway? These are the big, bad motherfuckers who are going to run the world? If this is any indication of how they take a punch, Jenna Bush had better get used to wearing a burka, because Osama bin Laden is going to be sitting in the White House within the next decade.
The whining, the crying, the wringing of the hands about “political hate speech,” the law suits over hurt feelings, running away from interviews with a 5’2″ woman because she was “aggressive,” snivelling about “leftist homophobia” for making fun of the simpering drooling over Bush’s “masculinity” — it’s all so pathetic.
We’ve got nothing to worry about folks. Limbaugh’s in rehab because he couldn’t take the pain and had to hide his illegal “little blue babies” under the bed so his meanie of a wife wouldn’t get all mad at him, Bennett spent years furtively cowering behind the “Beverly Hillbillies” video poker machine at the Mirage so that nobody would recognize him, Coulter’s having little temper tantrums on national TV because she’s not being “treated fairly,” and Junior travels with his own special pillow and can’t even give up his favowit, widdle butterscotch candies for longer than an hour and a half.
I will defend my record at the appropriate time, and look forward to it. I’ll say that the world is more peaceful and more free under my leadership, and America is more secure. And that will be the — that will be how I’ll begin describing our foreign policy.
shhhh. Don’t tell the Democrats.
And by the way, everything in the whole wide world is about me, me, me, nothing but me.
You know, I was struck by the fact when I was in Japan recently that my relations with Prime Minister Koizumi are very close and personal. And I was thinking about what would happen if, in a post-World War II era, we hadn’t won the peace, as well as the war. I mean, would I have had the same relationship with Mr. Koizumi? Would I be able to work closely on crucial relations? I doubt it. I doubt it.
That wudda been so sad cuz whenever he went tah Japan on a president trip he woodn’t o’ had his friend, cuz ther woodn’t o’ been the peace. Tank gunness we wun it or he wudda missed his special friend, ‘n then he wudda been all alone in Japan.
Here’s some more of that good ole 60’s deja vu vu. Remember that golden oldie, “Destroy The Village In Order To Save It?”
Here’s the Hip Hop update by Grand Master Chickenhawk:
“Honestly, it’s a little tougher than I thought it was going to be,” Lott said. In a sign of frustration, he offered an unorthodox military solution: “If we have to, we just mow the whole place down, see what happens. You’re dealing with insane suicide bombers who are killing our people, and we need to be very aggressive in taking them out.”
What happened to “give peace a chance,” my brotha?
Four years ago, NATO’s military commander, Gen. Wesley Clark, faced a similar barrage of pessimism from the press and from members of Congress hostile to President Clinton’s war in Kosovo. The skeptics argued that our adversary, Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic, had proven to be too mentally strong for us and that we should back off. Clark turned that argument on its head: By refusing to let Milosevic break our will, we would break his. Milosevic “may have thought that some countries would be afraid of his bluster and intimidation,” said Clark. “He was wrong. … He thought that taking prisoners and mistreating them and humiliating them publicly would weaken our resolve. Wrong again. … We’re winning, Milosevic is losing, and he knows it.”
I never believed Bush’s claim that overthrowing Saddam Hussein was essential to the war on terror. I’m angry that Bush continues to invoke that bogus rationale for the invasion. But the assassinations and indiscriminate bombings we’re witnessing in post-Saddam Iraq really are part of the war on terror. We can’t crumple under this pressure any more than we could have crumpled four years ago in the showdown with Milosevic. Bush is right, just as Clark was right: War is a contest of wills.
That’s why it’s so troubling today to see Clark join in the same self-fulfilling wave of determined pessimism and obstruction he battled four years ago. “This president didn’t know how he wanted [the Iraq war] to end. He doesn’t know what he’s doing today,” Clark charged in Sunday’s Democratic presidential debate. “I would not have voted [for the] $87 billion. … The best form of welfare for the troops is a winning strategy. And I think we ought to call on our commander in chief to produce it. And I think he ought to produce it before he gets one additional penny for that war.”
I don’t know whether we’ll win the postwar if Congress approves the money Bush asked for. But I know we’ll lose it if Congress doesn’t. That’s what happens when a nation at war starts to think like the Wes Clark of 2003. Just ask the Wes Clark of 1999.
The analogy might be applicable if:
a) cruel dictator Saddam (like Milosevic) was still in power at the time the comments were made or
b) we were actually “winning the postwar” whatever that means or
c) the bombings and assassinations were proven to be part of the WOT.
The fact is that we already removed the terrible dictator and are now engaged in a guerilla war against Gawd knows who and we don’t have any idea if it has fuck-all to do with the so-called war on terrorism or not. It’s entirely possible that the people who are blowing up Americans in Iraq are Iraqis who (not completely unreasonably) see us as an enemy — not because of Holy Jihad, but because we invaded their country, killed a bunch of people and look like we’re going to be staying around and running things for some time to come. Just because Arabs are doing the killing doesn’t automatically mean that it’s Islamic terrorism. And, even if it is, since there wasn’t any Islamic terrorism in Iraq until we invaded you’d have to conclude that we brought terrorism to the Iraqis.
But sadly I think that Sir Evenhand might be making the braindead point that any assassinations and bombings are part of the War On Terror, in which case we have always been at War With Oceania … er, Terror. Bombings and assassinations were not invented Osama bin Laden. Why, now that I think about it, even the good ole US of A is a terrorist nation by that definition.
Any comparison between what Wes Clark said during major combat operations in Kosovo as the commanding general and what he’s saying now after 6 months of complete chaos in post war Iraq is absurd. You might as well say that if you ever defended any war then you must defend all wars because other than the fact that a bunch of guys in uniform were conducting some kind of military operations in a foreign land, the two situations are completely different.
Furthermore, Clark, unlike patriots Tom DeLay and Trent Lott during Kosovo, isn’t saying that America should just up and leave in the middle of combat. He’s criticizing the president for not having a plan, which is true, not having a firm attainable goal, also true, and for not producing a winning strategy, which is indisputable. He contends that the only way to get these things is to hold up the money — the only power the congress has when it comes to foreign policy. If Clark had fucked up the Kosovo campaign as badly as this, you can believe that the Republican congress would have flayed both him and Clinton like a couple of dead fish.
Oh wait. They did. Only they did it in the midst of combat operations that proved to be tremendously successful within mere weeks, producing not one American combat death, and the lessons from which were thrown into the shredder when the big swinging Dick Cheneys came into office.
Saleton dutifully reported this at the time and now we see that he is doing his usual church lady superior dance by trying to stretch the Republicans’ laughably inept and silly criticisms of the Kosovo military campaign as equivalent to the ongoing worldwide condemnation of the Bush administration’s inept handling of the occupation of Iraq and the lies that brought us there.
He’s saying that Clark’s stating he wouldn’t authorize 87 billion dollars more for an occupation that was billed as cost free and which the president seems to be running by the seat of his pants, without any clear strategy is the same thing as these comments made by leading Republicans during combat operations in Kosovo. (Interestingly, what they wrongly said about Kosovo has actually come to pass in Iraq:)
“Once the bombing commenced, I think then [Slobodan] Milosevic unleashed his forces, and then that’s when the slaughtering and the massive ethnic cleansing really started,” Nickles said at a news conference after appearing on Meet the Press. “The administration’s campaign has been a disaster. … [It] escalated a guerrilla warfare into a real war, and the real losers are the Kosovars and innocent civilians.”
Nickles questioned the propriety of “NATO’s objectives,” calling its goal of “access to all of Serbia … ludicrous.” DeLay, meanwhile, voted not only against last week’s House resolution authorizing Clinton to conduct the air war–which failed on a tie vote–but also in favor of legislation “directing the president … to remove U.S. Armed Forces from their positions in connection with the present operations against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.”
“I don’t know that Milosevic will ever raise a white flag,” warned Nickles. DeLay agreed: “He’s stronger in Kosovo now than he was before the bombing. … The Serbian people are rallying around him like never before. He’s much stronger with his allies, Russians and others.” Clinton “has no plan for the end” and “recognizes that Milosevic will still be in power,” added DeLay.
Unless Clinton finds “a way to get the bombing stopped” and to “get Milosevic to pull back his troops” voluntarily, NATO faces “a quagmire … a long, protracted, bloody war,” warned Lott. Clinton “only has two choices,” said DeLay–to “occupy Yugoslavia and take Milosevic out” or “to negotiate some sort of diplomatic end, diplomatic agreement in order to end this failed policy.
Cohen said it was “highly unlikely” that Clinton would meet with Milosevic in response to Yugoslavia’s release of the three captured American soldiers over the weekend, since the Serbs were continuing their atrocities and weren’t offering to meet NATO’s conditions. DeLay called this refusal “really disappointing” and a failure of “leadership. … The president ought to open up negotiations and come to some sort of diplomatic end.” Lott implored Clinton to “give peace a chance” and, comparing the war with the recent Colorado high-school shootings, urged him to resolve the Kosovo conflict with “words, not weapons.”
And here’s my favorite:
And DeLay suggested that the United States should pull out unilaterally: “When Ronald Reagan saw that he had made a mistake putting our soldiers in Lebanon … he admitted the mistake, and he withdrew from Lebanon.”
Saleton says, “Bush is right, just as Clark was right: War is a contest of wills.”
Tell it to the 50,000 plus Americans who died in Vietnam and then ask them if that “contest of wills” made any damned difference. Not all wars are the same and this so-called “War On Terror” isn’t a war in any conventional sense, isn’t going to be won by conventional means and can’t be compared with conventional battles that were conventionally won.
Anybody who cannot see the difference between the success of the war in Kosovo (and the disingenuousness of the Republican “peaceniks” who opposed it) and this quagmire we’ve gotten ourselves into in Iraq, much less the ephemeral War On Terror is, as I wrote, either stupid or drunk.