Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

BlunderBush

The LA Times has lately been running some highly critical news analysis of the Bush administration. In fact, the Times is out front on a lot of issues pertaining to the mid-east, largely because of its fine expert Robin Wright, who is one of the most insightful analysts of the politics of the region around.

Today, the LA Times has two interesting reviews of the Bush administration’s “diplomacy”, the first being a global analysis of how their blunderbuss technique is perceived both overseas and domestically, and the second is a scathing indictment of Paul Wolfowitz’s obviously inept diplomacy in Turkey:

The World Casts a Critical Eye on Bush’s Style of Diplomacy

By Doyle McManus

“If we’re an arrogant nation, they’ll view us that way,” George W. Bush said during his 2000 presidential campaign. “But if we’re a humble nation, they’ll respect us.”

Little more than two years later, the world’s verdict on President Bush’s diplomacy is split — between critics who see it as arrogant and allies who support its goals but sometimes wonder where the “humble” went.

The leaders of France, Germany, Russia and China, all nations Bush hoped to count as allies in the confrontation with Iraq, have joined to resist the president’s drive toward war, with complaints over what they see as American highhandedness.

Even staunch allies such as Prime ministers Tony Blair of Britain and Jose Maria Aznar of Spain have sent word to Bush that some U.S. bravado — like Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld’s dismissal of “Old Europe” — has done more harm than good.

Bush and his aides, not surprisingly, push back.

“What you have here is a president who is willing to point out what’s right and wrong, maybe sometimes undiplomatically,” said a senior administration official who spoke on condition of anonymity.

[…]

Can you believe this? I’m going to have to begin to give more credence to the idea that President Gantry actually believes that he has been chosen by God to lead this Crusade. He alone is endowed with the wisdom to proclaim what is right and what is wrong.

This is precisely the kind of provocative fundamentalist sloganeering that plays into bin Laden’s hands while offending the more modern rationalists who make up the moderate muslim factions in the mid-east, not to mention our allies and cultural compatriots in the rest of the world.

They really are two of a kind.

Turkish Vote Is Study in Miscalculation

By Richard Boudreaux

Early last month, Vice President Dick Cheney telephoned Turkey’s prime minister with an urgent message: The Bush administration wanted the country’s parliament to vote within days– just before the Muslim holiday of Bayram– on a request to base U.S. troops in Turkey for an assault on Iraq.

The timing of the pressure struck a raw nerve here, one that was still aching when Turkish lawmakers finally took up the request Saturday and dealt it a surprise defeat. As Turks offered explanations Sunday for this stinging defiance of their strongest ally, tales of American insensitivity were high on the list.

[…]

“The Americans kept giving ultimatums and deadlines, asking Turkey to jump into a barrel of fire,” he said. “They seemed to think we could be bought off, but we had real security concerns about what Iraq would look like after Saddam. They never addressed those concerns.”

[…]

For their part, U.S. officials believed the Turks could not afford to turn them down. On the assumption that Turkish leaders understood this, officials led by Paul D. Wolfowitz, the deputy Defense secretary, kept pressing hard for a decision. When Turkey balked, U.S. officials, in private comments to reporters, often questioned the country’s value as an ally.

“The disinformation campaign against Turkey played a big role in upsetting national feelings,” Erdogan told reporters Sunday.

In the end, Washington tried to bargain for Turkey’s loyalty with the promise of an aid package that would include $6 billion in grants. The deal nearly fell apart last week when Turkey balked at one of the conditions– that it agree to strict International Monetary Fund guidelines for reform of its economy.

By week’s end, the government had accepted the condition, but it had no time to explain and sell the accord to lawmakers, many of whom felt that Turkey had been shortchanged.

“The time pressure put on Turkey did not help the Americans’ case,” a senior Turkish diplomat said, because it forced the government to call a vote prematurely.

It is not surprising, when you think about it, that the Bush administration has little patience for the needs of a democratic country to heed the will of its people. There is a strong undemocratic streak running through the modern Republican party that has been becoming more and more obvious over the last 10 years. They are simply not very attuned to the needs of politicians who feel that they must adhere to the wishes of their constituents. This is just as obvious in the way they are treating elected American representatives as in their treatment of overseas allies.

It’s also another reason why we should not place too much store in their professions of desire for democracy throughout the mid-east. This is one concept where practicing what you preach is truly a prerequisite for requiring it of others.

PSYCHOMACHIA

Today, in his ongoing quest to find some way to reconcile his sophomoric cheerleading for the past year with the fact that the team he’s cheering is simultaneously more cynical and more incompetent than his idealistic, childish view of them ever dreamed, Tom Friedman is reduced to sports metaphors. But, he is clearly having a problem letting go of the fantasy that his team aren’t Knights of the roundtable, they are reckless buffoons.

He frames the coming war as a “drama” to which he’d love to pull up a chair and pop up a big bowl of popcorn and just enjoy for the sheer pleasure of watching George W. Bush (professional cheerleader) throw the long bomb. (Has there ever been a less appropriate metaphor? It’s enough to make the stomach churn — even more so if you have a loved one in the military or you happen to be an unfortunate Iraqi likely to be on the receiving end of Bush’s throwing arm. What was he thinking?)

But the truth is that Friedman doesn’t really see this as a dramatic sporting event. He’s no jock, and it shows. He sees it as some sort of medieval morality play in which George W. Bush is Strength, Saddam and bin Laden are Satan and Evil and the Middle East is a democratic Paradise waiting to be born. Strength and Force (with a little help from the comical Crazy) will lead a Crusade to teach the twins, Ignorance and Poverty, that Democracy is their Savior.

But, the long litany of mistakes and miscalculations that Friedman subsequently narrates — what he calls his “dilemma” — is so unintentionally hilarious that it is obvious that what we are seeing is actually a Mack Sennet Keystone Kops farce. Friedman says he thinks the “plan” to spread wholesome democratic capitalistic all-American goodness would have been better served if the Bush administration hadn’t angered all of Europe by trashing the Kyoto treaty, hadn’t alienated the Russian national security elite by trashing the ABM treaty, or hadn’t proposed one radical tax cut on top of another one on the “eve of a huge, costly nation building marathon abroad.”

And Tom thinks Bush made a mistake in not rallying the country for energy conservation, and should have initiated a Manhattan Project for alternative energy. He should have also been deeply involved in resolving the Israeli Palestinian conflict even to the extent that we would threaten to withdraw funds from Israel if they did not cease building settlements. And needless to say it would have been better if the administration had put the Arab countries (like Saudi Arabia, perhaps?) on notice that we would not sit idly by while they tolerated extremists.

It’s actually difficult to watch someone flail so helplessly against that undertow of realism that flows though his column today. He frets that because of all these errors in judgment that “Bush has told us the right thing to do, but he won’t “be able” to do it right.” It apparently doesn’t occur to him that people this inept are highly unlikely to complete a hail mary pass. In fact, President Quarterback hasn’t connected even once in the entire game.

This wishful thinking is running amuck among people who are even less dazzled by the President’s manufactured machismo than Tom Friedman. They cling to the idea that even though this administration has fouled up every single foreign policy initiative, that they wasted all of the U.S. moral authority emanating from 9/11, that they have been proven over and over again to be the boldest and most shameless liars to ever occupy the White House, that somehow they “Just Have To” do this one right. The long bomb “Just Has To” connect.

I think it’s time for everybody to start considering just what we are going to do in the event this thing, like every single other thing this administration has done, goes wrong? What are we going to do when the “It Just Has To Work” theory of geopolitics fails?

Update:

David E.gives Gridiron Tom a damned good fisking.

Courtesy Brief Intelligence via The Agoniste both of which I have sadly neglected to add to the blogroll until today.

I have also added the fine blogs:

Dratfink

ArchPundit

Wampum Blog

Stoutdem

Tom Moody

Reveries Of The Solitary Blogger

everything is wrong

Nobody Knows Anything

Byzantium’s Shores

Something’s Got To Break

The Sack Of Iraq*

I imagine that a lot of us have picked up our copies of “The Guns of August” in recent weeks. There is a sense of things hurtling out of control, nothing going quite the way anyone conceived it. Hubris and belligerant confidence seem to overrule rational analysis in much the same way that the great powers miscalculated and overreached in the early days of WWI.

Vaara points out in a very interesting essay that this is not surprising — that our feelings of deja vu are because the coming invasion, rather than being a “Project For A New American Century,” is really the final chapter of the last one.

It’s a very provocative and interesting piece.

* Phrase also coined by Vaara, but I plan to use it liberally.

My Poor Eyes

I received an e-mail this morning from blogger Centerpoint who kindly pointed me to his site where I could learn how to make my print more readable. Being HTML impaired, I appreciate all the help I can get.

I learned that blogger does not require me to set the font size, which means that everyone can adjust the font on their browsers to the size most comfortable for them. On the larger and largest font sizes on Explorer, the print is quite large and in bold. I hope this helps.

I also changed the font to Ariel, which is the font that I have always preferred for letters. I hope this helps, too.

We Don’t Need Your Stinking War

Monkey Media Report has a very interesting post up about the alternative to war:

Not sure why I haven’t seen more discussion of this one in the blog world: With Weapons of the Will: How to Topple Hussein Nonviolently by Peter Ackerman and Jack DuVall. It’s a ‘must-refute’ for those in favor of a costly U.S. invasion/occupation. Originally published in Sojourners magazine last September (and linked approvingly in a fascinating 3-part analysis at One Hand Clapping), the article points out that civilian populations have risen up a number of times to overthrow dictators who were at least as willing to engage in mass murder as Saddam:

“It’s essential to understand that unless a regime wants to murder the entire population, its ability repressively to compel a population’s compliance is not infinitely elastic.”

According to the authors, the key to sparking the kind of resistance that overthrew Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu in Romania and Augusto Pinochet in Chile is breaking the stranglehold of fear that keeps the people in check. Once that happens – look out, dictator:

“No one doubted the willingness of Pinochet’s regime, in the 1970s and early 1980s, to use terror as an instrument of repression in order to assure the regime’s control: Disappearances, brutal killings of dissidents, and arbitrary arrests had silenced most dissenters. But once that silence was broken in 1983 in a way that the regime could not immediately suppress — through a one-day nationwide slow-down, followed by a nighttime city-wide banging of pots and pans in Santiago — the regime was no longer able to re-establish the same degree of fear in the population, and mammoth monthly protests were soon under way.”

In the case of Romania in 1989, it was the population of Timisoara that lit the bonfire:

“[Shoot to kill orders] arrive in Timisoara that afternoon. At 17:00 water cannons and tear gas are used against the people, tanks and APD’s enter the streets and the shooting begins at about 18:00. They fire indiscriminately into the crowd. This was the watershed of the Revolution – differentiating it from previous demonstrations such as strikes in the Jiu valley and the 1987 riots in Brasov. News spreads quickly, especially by foreign TV and radio transmissions from neighbouring countries. The scale of the massacre becomes more and more exaggerated with reports of up to 60,000 dead in Timisoara…That same night there are sporadic anti-Ceausescu riots in other towns…”

Yep, that’s how successful popular revolt usually works. It’s interesting that when President Bush went to Romania last November, he called upon the memory of Ceausescu to drum up support for invading Iraq. “From that balcony, the dictator heard your voices and faltered,” Bush said, while failing to mention that no foreign army had been necessary. (It should be added that Soviet hands were probably pulling strings behind the scenes in 1989, just as U.S. hands would pull them in Iraq today).

Ackerman and DuVall also note a key point about Saddam’s rule that may make it easier to bring down than the regime of someone like Pinochet:

[“Saddam’s] hold on power is even more reliant on personal loyalties and their reinforcement by material rewards and mortal penalties. As such, the frequent reports of his repression should be seen not only as a sign of his brutality, but as evidence of the disaffection that his capricious, personal style continues to breed: He would not have to crack down if there were no one who might be disloyal.”

In other words, if Hussein started ordering mass executions of crowds in broad daylight – a likely move – a military mutiny like the ones that took place in Romania and Chile would be an even more likely countermove. And it turns out there’s also a strategic advantage from the perspective of a hawk like Rumsfeld:

“[If a campaign began with] civilian-based incidents of disruption that were dispersed around the country and that did not offer convenient targets to shoot at, any attempt to crack down would have to depend on the outermost, least reliable members of Saddam’s repressive apparatus”.

Why is this not the plan on the table in the White House? Why are we spending billions of dollars and endangering the lives of, for instance, my roommate’s brother-in-law? The authors’ final paragraph says it all:

“Regimes have been overthrown that had no compunction about brutalizing their opponents and denying them the right to speak their minds. How? By first demonstrating that opposition is possible, peeling away the regime’s residual public and outside support, quashing its legitimacy, driving up the costs of maintaining control, and overextending its repressive apparatus. Strategic nonviolent action is not about being nice to your oppressor, much less having to rely on his niceness. It’s about dissolving the foundations of his power and forcing him out. It is possible in Iraq.”

Sound like pie in the sky?

Tell it to Nikolae and Elena

This would have worked. With modern media and a concerted effort in other countries in the region, it would have worked. But, it would not effectively establish our reputation as the meanest muthafuggahs on the planet and that, after all, is what this is all about.

“You Will be democratic, and I mean now” is an interesting, if completely incoherant, concept.

Read the entire post. He has many great links to the subject. This, it seems to me, was the real alternative to war.

Cakewalk

Matthew Yglesias has an interesting post up about the propaganda efforts headed up by Westwood One in the mid-east. He says:

You want to convince people that the United States is not determined to destroy their traditional values, and that democratic procedures and basic human rights are compatible with a variety of cultural forms, and this program sounds like it’s doing the exact reverse.

The problem, of course, is that the only values the United States has been very interested in promoting are the values of capitalism. And those values, while fine as far as they go, without an equal emphasis on democracy, freedom and opportunity have helped to sow the resentment and hatred we are now seeing. Everytime we broadcast about our opulent way of life to a bunch of poor people with little hope living under a tyrannical despot, we are asking for their rage to be turned toward us.

The Westwood One executive is quoted as saying:

When we play a song by Jennifer Lopez, we talk about all the difficulties she has overcome,” he says. “Those are great stories about the kind of things that can happen to you when you live in a democracy.” As long as ratings are Pattiz’s first and last concern (“don’t lead with what makes us unpopular,” he lectures me), METN will do little more than pander to the lowest common denominator in his trademark, Pepsi-Generation style.

Sad to say that because of their circumstances and experiences in life, the average youth in the mid-east is a much more serious person than that. And we should be much more serious about giving them something more than consumerism because they don’t have the money or the inclination to buy if that’s all we’re selling.

Which brings me to this most disturbing article from today’s LA Times. If this is any indication, Richard Perle is gonna have some splainin’ to do when we are greeted with terrible hostility rather than a road to Baghdad strewn with rose petals.

[…]

Here, in the middle of the desert, closer to the Saudi Arabian border than to Amman, Jordan’s relatively cosmopolitan capital, it is easier to hear the unvarnished sentiments and frustrations of this Arab country.

“Maan is a case study for Jordan. It reflects how we think in this country,” said Taher Masri, an urbane former prime minister who remains close to the government. The confrontational statements, he says, are part of a complex philosophy common in this part of the world.

“Saddam is not liked for himself. He is liked, if he is liked, because he stands up to America and Israel — and it has developed that the source of power for Israel is America and this is, of course, what” Al Qaeda’s Osama bin Laden has been saying.

“And what you will see in the streets is not support of Saddam, it’s anti-American, anti-Israeli feeling,” Masri said.

The confrontation in Maan also suggests how far even moderate Arab governments might go in responding to further unrest that could be ignited by a war in Iraq. It demonstrates that when moderate Arab countries repress the most vociferous Islamist voices, they run the risk of inflaming anti-American sentiments because the repression appears to be in the service of U.S. interests.

[…]

They love us. They really love us.

What a terrible, terrible mess.

3/4 – I apologize for the misspelling of Yglesias’s name again. I know someone with the “I” spelling and it seems to be a block. But, I’m sure that a guy who occasionally makes a typo or two, as Mr. Yglesias does, won’t hold it against me.

Closets

Atrios links to this article by Michelangelo Signorile on the Koufax matter and his comments section has a very lively debate going on the subject.

I think that Signorile and some of the commentors are dancing around another issue, but I’ll get to that.

First, I don’t agree with whole “public figure” aspect of this argument at all. If somebody makes an issue of their sex lives, then it becomes an open topic. Similarly, if you make public pronouncements about other people’s sex lives then you have opened up your own for scrutiny. But, if you are just living your life, (as a long retired athlete, for instance) you have a right to have keep your sex life private, period. The issue with the media is sexual privacy no matter what the gossip item refers to, whether it has to do with being gay or having blow jobs in the oval office.

Tabloids are exploitive, lying, piece of shit rags that feed the base nature of everybody who reads them and as much as I believe in free speech I can’t say that I wouldn’t feel gleeful at the sight of a pile of New York Posts going up in flames. They are a destructive force in our culture and if you don’t believe me then just turn on

television news for 10 minutes and you’ll understand what I’m talking about. It is no coincidence that Bill “Enemy of the State” O’Reilly came from that bastion of respectable journalism, “Inside Edition.” It is a pervasive influence in our politics and has been instrumental in the dumbing down of our national media and the trivializing of our political system to such a degree that an ignorant sock-puppet could be elected President because the news media were obsessed with the superficialities of the candidates to the exclusion of everything substantive.

The argument should not be about whether there exists a double standard, but why there aren’t more standards to begin with.

But, with the case at hand, there is more to it than that, isn’t there? From what I can tell, people are dismayed that the issue was blown up because of the nature of the “charge” — that is that he was accused of being gay and it was treated as if he had been a “child molester.” This is true. But, there’s a little Claude Raines action going on here, too. It is wholly unsurprising that in the macho world of sports that an item like this would gain attention and approbation. But, it’s not fair to say that the sportwriters across the board find it “contemptible” that someone would be accused of being gay. After all, they didn’t react to the original blind item at the time and the reaction to the Mike Piazza rumor was far less energetic.

Part of what they are reacting to (and I don’t doubt that there is quite a bit of homophobia involved as well) is that this is Sandy Koufax, a legend and notoriously private man, who has been falsely accused of making a deal with an author contingent upon her not revealing that he is gay. It’s not just the gay thing, it’s also the idea that he was portrayed as an underhanded liar. A lot of people admire Sandy Koufax, for more reasons than his pitching arm, and that hurt. But, to be fair, they also reacted strongly when Koufax quit the organization and a lot of them said that it was “wrong” for him to be accused of being gay by using rather obtuse language.

Which brings us to the heart of the matter. In some of the commentors’s arguments the idea is bubbling that because there is nothing wrong with being gay, that a public figure of integrity should not object to being called gay, whether he is or not. One could correct the record for accuracy’s sake, but it really shouldn’t be much of a concern because, after all, there’s nothing wrong with being gay so what’s wrong with people thinking you are?

This is a fatal error, I think, because it supposes that people, gay or straight, should not mind if others misrepresent their sexual orientation. If it is not ok to force gay people to publicly live as if they are straight, is it really much different to ask straight people to behave as if it doesn’t matter if they are perceived as being gay?

I realize that there are many people who have an ambiguous sexual orientation and that is a perfectly natural state for them. But, for many others, sexual orientation is an intrinsic part of who they are and it is fundamental to their identity. To assume that it should not matter to people how they are perceived in that way is asking to change something very basic in human nature. This seems to me to be the very essence of the gay rights movement. It’s not just about being who you are — after all, you have no choice in the matter — it’s about being seen and accepted for who you are.

Sandy Koufax, rightly or wrongly, will now be the Hall of Fame pitcher who will be known for his blazing fastball and also the guy about whom it will be said “he was gay.” The truth or untruth of that is certainly not relevant to his standing as a legendary athlete. But, to him, as a person it might matter a great deal if it is not true, not because he finds being gay “contemptible” but because it is a fundamental misrepresentation of who he really is.

One should not have to be willing to have the world believe one is gay, in order to be completely open and accepting of homosexuality. I don’t think we can ask people to live a lie, or to acquiesce to lies told about them, no matter what cause it purports to serve. Nothing good can come of it.

(For the record, I’ve been called gay by wing-nuts in comments sections and in e-mail many, many times. When idiots call someone “gay” on the internet, it is so stupid that one can only laugh in return. I don’t consider morons hurling “gay” as an epithet the same as normal people misperceiving someone as being gay when they are not. A fine distinction, but a distinction nonetheless.)

Update:

In retrospect, I think I was unfair in categorizing Signorle as one who thinks people should accept a designation of gay to further the cause. He clearly states in his article an admiration of the way Mike Piazza handled the situation, which was to deny that he was gay and shrug it off while offering support to gay players. And, he further stated clearly that he thought one of the issues that needed tending was the sensitivity of athletes. To that I can only agree, but one couldn’t confine it to the gay issue. Jocks are about the most insensitive humans on earth. It’s a big job.

41

Seth Michaels was at the George the First speech at Tufts and gives us a rundown. It’s very interesting that Senior is in a bit of a defensive posture as he tries to explain why he didn’t “finish the job” as the neocon imperialists accuse him of 20 times a day all over the media. He had some very good reasons, one of which was that they would never have been able to fulfill Madrid if they had exceeded the UN mandate.

And, Madrid and the peace process managed to ratchet down the violence in Israel for almost 10 years and was very well worth trying. It’s one of the main keys to future peace in the region and at least Poppy had the brains to see that.

I’m not a big fan of the guy in general, but I have to admit that the press treated him unfairly today by only highlighting his rude joke:

“We’ve now found another real good reason to use duct tape”

It’s a typical Bush smartass remark, but according to Seth he’d also said this:

“I understand where they’re coming from, and I hope they’ll listen and understand where I’m coming from…I hope those demonstrators, who are speaking from their hearts, understand this…what we seek is not hegemony, but compliance with a wide variety of UN resolutions. I think there is such a concept as a just war…the 43rd president shares the innately human desire to avoid conflict that might kill innocent people.”

Seth says: Pretty classy for a 78-year-old guy who just got the finger from a 20-year-old. Also worth noting is that he did not, as his son and his son’s administration have done, try to link Iraq directly to Al-Qaeda:

“Today we have another ingredient we didn’t have in 1991 – Sept. 11. I’m not saying that there’s a conspiracy between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, but the U.S. must protect its citizens and friends.”

It’s always been my contention that the bitchy, Dowdian KewlKidz style of political reporting started with Bush and that supermarket scanner. It was misrepresented at the time and then used against him as if what they’d said was true. Needless to say, Clinton and Gore suffered from the same treatment.

I naturally assumed that any president would be subjected to this treatment going forward, but I was wrong. President FratBoy was exempted from any serious scrutiny from day 1. I can only assume that the Republicans became so good at manufacturing these scandals and embarrassments that the press forgot how to do it for themselves. Today, they were reminded by seeing ole’ 41 and they fell back into step. I can’t think of how else to explain it.

Walk Toward The Light, Jim.

How come nobody’s noticed that James Pinkerton has crossed over from the dark side?

Check out these columns from the past few weeks.

This guy used to be a dyed in the wool reactionary but I’ve noticed that lately he’s been well…pretty sensible and rational. I hate to make too big of a thing about it because he’ll probably lose his children’s slots at Sidwell Friends or get drummed out of the segregated country club, but it’s so rare these days that a pundit escapes from the underworld and lives to tell about it. (And you can’t really blame them since the brilliant 12 year old marketers are convinced that anyone who is “anti-war, anti-Bush and skeptical of the administration’s motives” is, like, such a total loser.)

Anyway, I’d like to propose a toast to Jim Pinkerton, former Republican lackey. To Courage and Integrity!