Last week Bush careened from restrained but persistent evangelism before a convention of religious broadcasters to casual trash-talking with sailors in Jacksonville, Fla. “The terrorists brought this war to us — and now we’re takin’ it back to them,” he told the troops, leaning an elbow on the lectern, squinting crosswise at the camera, tossing a breathy Clint Eastwood chuckle. “We’re on their trail, we’re smokin’ them out, we’ve got ’em on the run.” One imagined the French Foreign Minister watching this lunch-hour martial spectacle and choking on his baguette.
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The American tradition of wartime leadership seems more subdued. The most memorable images are gaunt and painful: the haunted Lincoln; the dark circles under Franklin Roosevelt’s eyes; Kennedy standing alone, in shadows, during the Cuban missile crisis. This is a moment far more ambiguous than any of those; intellectual anguish is permissible. War may be the correct choice, but it can’t be an easy one. The world might have more confidence in the judgment of this President if he weren’t always bathed in the blinding glare of his own certainty.
Every single elected Democrat should be hammering on the sheer incompetence of the George W. Bush administration. Even if it’s really Clinton’s fault, even if it’s a complicated issue, even if the rest of the world is a bunch of nincompoops who just can’t be trusted, the job of President is to HANDLE IT AND GET THE JOB DONE.
Check out the cool movie tribute to the week-end demonstrations over on blah3.
And, I’ve been meaning to link for a couple of days to this great piece by Zizka on the value of hysteria.
Already we liberals have had to get used to the accusations of treason. Once the war starts, these will get worse. The Bush administration has already made comparable accusations against unccoperative Congressmen. We can expect that to get worse too, and the Democrats seem incapable of resisting effectively. If the war goes badly, God forbid, things will get worse yet; and when the economy stalls on top of everything else, as it seems very likely that it will, we can expect a further escalation of unofficial and official attacks on us.
So yeah, I’m paranoid and hysterical. If you have a problem with that, bite me. In certain periods of history it’s been the paranoids who survived. Are we living in one of these periods?
Krauthamer just said that Carol Mosely-Braun, a former US Senator from Illinois, former Ambassador to New Zealand and veteran of 10 years in the state legislature has the thinnest qualifications in Presidential political history.
I can think of at least one other person who ran for the office with even thinner qualifications, can’t you?
Soto over at Daily Kos does some more damage to Tom Friedman and also references this important article by Nicholas Lemann in the New Yorker on the Mid-east grand plan.
But as you read the Lemann article and evaluate the arguments by Feith, Cambone, and Wurmser in support of this grand plan, two things may strike you. First, the whole scenario above assumes that Al Qaeda does nothing during this domino-toppling in the Middle East, that all of these quasi-regime changes would take place over months and years against a backdrop devoid of Al Qaeda. Secondly, what is absent in these hoped-for developments are any Israeli actions towards progress with the Palestinians, as if the current situation can be frozen for several years while our grand plan evolves.
In other words, this Administration’s world view is based on the premise that only a military solution can deal with 9/11 and the Middle East, resulting in years of occupation, war, nationbuilding, domestic terrorist attacks, deficit spending, and “Pentagon or nothing” budgeting.
I think it’s actually worse than that. These guys never believed, and even after 9/11 still don’t believe, that terrorism is a serious problem. They are focused on their geopolitical gameboard and thus are unwilling and unable to analyse the changing situation in the mid-east (or anywhere else for that matter.) They’ve got a list and they’re checkin’ it twice. Don’t confuse them with inconvenient details.
Jason Vest wrote the following in TAP in June of last year:
Why wasn’t the threat posed by al-Qaeda — the only entity in recent years to attack U.S. government installations — foremost in the administration’s mind?
There are a lot of potential replies to that question, but the short answer — and the most convincing one — is that the Bush administration was still fighting the Cold War. Hence its unhealthy obsession with that weapons relic known as the Star Wars program, and with re-creating a bipolar world in which China would take over enemy duty for the Soviet Union, while Cuba remained a vital threat. Going up against a new evil empire and its satellites, or a regional hegemon, is familiar stuff; asymmetric war against a decentralized enemy with a complex geo-theological worldview isn’t.
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There’s no need to take this critic’s word for it; just visit the Center for Security Policy’s Web site. Judging from the dozens of “reports” the center has issued since the August 1998 embassy bombings, the most urgent threats to American national security are, in no particular order: China, ballistic missiles, Cuba, Iraq, and threats posed to Israel by Syria and Yasir Arafat. Osama bin Laden’s terrorist network doesn’t make the cut. Indeed, only two of the center’s “reports” since 1998 have dealt with al-Qaeda, and even those have done so only indirectly. According to the center, the most important lesson learned from the 1998 attacks was one illustrated by the U.S. retaliation against the al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant: that there’s no way “chemical weapons can be effectively and verifiably banned,” which proves that it’s necessary to kill any form of chemical weapons control.
It would be tempting to laugh this off if Gaffney’s group weren’t so influential. As one page on the Center for Security Studies Web site proudly notes, no fewer than 22 of the center’s advisory council members now occupy key national security positions in the Bush administration.
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With Iraq spawning terrorist legions, China girding for World War III, North Korea looking to launch a missile at Alaska, and Fidel Castro plotting to destroy the Colossus of the North, there simply wasn’t any room for bin Laden in the pantheon of threats that govern the Bush security orthodoxy.
There still isn’t , even now, and that is the problem.
If Doug Feith and John Bolton say they are going to “do” Iran and Syria next, I’d believe them. Osama bin Laden, economic meltdown, worldwide opprobrium, and a breakdown of international order aren’t anticipated in the plan and are therefore to be ignored as much as possible. (North Korea didn’t cower and run as they were supposed to when faced with our manly threats, and they are confused about that but undeterred.) All of these things are distractions from the plan.
Tell The Truth? You Might As Well Ask Them To Levitate.
Thomas Friedman, it’s too fucking late. And you are one to talk. You are the guy who said:
No, the axis-of-evil idea isn’t thought through – but that’s what I like about it. It says to these countries and their terrorist pals: “We know what you’re cooking in your bathtubs. We don’t know exactly what we’re going to do about it, but if you think we are going to just sit back and take another dose from you, you’re wrong. Meet Don Rumsfeld – he’s even crazier than you are.”
There is a lot about the Bush team’s foreign policy I don’t like, but their willingness to restore our deterrence, and to be as crazy as some of our enemies, is one thing they have right. It is the only way we’re going to get our turkey back.
And you have the cojones to accuse the Bush administration of “gratuitous bullying.” Unbelievable. You’re complaining that “The Bush folks are big on attitude, weak on strategy and terrible at diplomacy.” No shit Sherlock. Perhaps you should decline the next time a Bushie offers you a Viagra and Jim Beam cocktail before you write such simpleminded and immature drivel. You and your half-witted friends have enabled this group of Neanderthals since 9/11 with silly screeds like that above. I hope it made you feel all manly and powerful at the time because it sure is causing a lot of trouble now.
It’s too late to be asking the questions that should have been asked by our chickenshit Senators, our lazyass presscorp, good hearted liberals who want to free the Iraqi people from tyranny and realistic centrists who believe that WMD in the hands of belligerent smalltime dictators is a big enough risk that the US should abrogate international law and adopt a very risky doctrine of preventive war. It’s too late to look beneath the emotion and the superficial logic of stopping Saddam and try to find out what these people are really trying to do. We’re going in and whatever we might have done to plan or delay or mitigate the neocon fecklessness of the operation is irrelevant now.
It’s too late to be asking whether the plan to invade Iraq, which has been on the drawing board since 1992, is the right plan at the right time and for the reasons stated.
It is too late to wonder whether this group of highly ideological and inflexible individuals are able to properly evaluate the threat posed by Saddam Hussein in light of the real threat of terrorism on American shores and elsewhere.
It’s too late to be wondering whether this amateur hour of a foreign policy team is capable of handling so many crises’ at the same time, seeing as they “don’t even like to travel.” And the fact that they “spend so much time infighting over policy” is a direct result of not having a real President who guides policy, but one who is guided by whomever is in favor or has his ear at a given time.
It is too late to be wondering whether a party that would spend 100 million dollars to install a callow, empty suit like George W. Bush as President of the United States purely because he had “brand name recognition” is serious enough and smart enough to be leading this country into war. It certainly appears that the rest of the world is very, very nervous about the caliber of our leadership.
It’s too late to be asking the Bush team to “shape up, start dialing down the attitude, start selling this war on the truth, give us a budget that prepares the nation for war abroad not a party at home, and start doing everything possible to create a global context where we can confront Saddam without the world applauding him.”
You might as well be asking them to stop hating Bill Clinton. This is who they are. If you had bothered to read the pre-2000 writings of this foreign policy team or had torn your eyes from the comic book hagiography that grew up around Junior after 9/1, you would have realized that it was a big mistake to support this administration in anything but a laser-like focus on terrorism and the economy. Such things as huge changes in international law (like adoption of a doctrine of preventive war) should have been tabled until an administration with a competent leader and a democratic mandate from the people assumed power.
It’s a little too little, a little too late now, Tom, to be noticing that this administration doesn’t know what the hell it’s doing. It’s been obvious from January 21st, 2001. You were just having too much fun playing cowboys and indians with Wyatt Earp and his boys to look any deeper than the sophomoric rhetoric they spewed for the cameras. Now that reality has struck you don’t want to play anymore. Too late. You’re one of his posse.
Thomas Spencer takes the GOP to task for it’s little problem with accepting responsibility.
Have you ever noticed, ironically, that the folks who spend so much time talking about “responsibility” are usually the first to try to pass the buck?
Of course, if your entire worldview is based around the demonizing of liberals and claiming that they’re behind everything that’s wrong, that makes the shirking of responsibility a pretty easy thing to do. Nothing is your fault. It’s all the fault of liberals even if you control all three branches of government.
Yes, I have been enjoying watching Tucker Carlson blame Jimmy Carter for creating terrorism and Lyndon Johnson for causing teen pregnancy while acting shocked and dismayed that anyone would dream of pointing out that St. Ronald of Reagan gave Saddam anthrax, George Sr. told the Iraqis to go fuck themselves after the war or that Junior has singlehandedly and in record time turned the economy into a fair imitation of an oversized Argentina.
Of course, Clinton’s magnificent member is the fundamental reason for every problem remaining and no one debates that. But, still…