Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Blinkered Agenda

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.

[…]

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.

[…]

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.

Must…follow….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.

Turgid Prose

I think Peggy Noonan may have found her dream man — a true blue, god fearing’ macho Republican named General J. C. Christian

And he’s a sensitive poet, too

War

War is a manly game

it’s played for fun

it’s played for fame

once Saddam is on the run

we’ll bomb the Syrians

and take there guns

and if Korea begins to play

we’ll nuke Iran

and then we’ll pray

We’ll thank the lord

for our good fortune

as we eat the hearts

of some poor persian

Thanks to Atrios for the link.

Moi?

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…

A TBOGG Moment

…the “take that hill, hoo-yah” hyperbole that comes so naturally from those who will be watching the war front-row-center on Fox news, with a Zima in one hand and a box of Screaming Yellow Zonkers in the other

You know who you are. Jane. Rod. Stevie. George.

Can You Say Intellectually Inconsistent?

Avedon Carol Says:

[…]

And given the Bush Family Empire’s performance in America, just how seriously can we take their occasional flights of fancy about creating democracy in Iraq? They are speaking openly of shifting the burdens of taxation almost entirely onto those who must get up every day and work for a living, and even those who cannot make a living, and relieving the rich of any such obligations to society. They speak openly of removing whatever protections America’s working people have against unsafe conditions, fraud, and broken contracts so that the wealthiest and most powerful can treat us virtually as slaves – only without the obligation to feed and house us. The administration itself is comporting itself as if it has a divine right of monarchy, and the changes it is effecting in our laws and official culture really do parallel those of the early Third Reich. If these people are so happy to accept – promote, in fact – such measures in the United States, what makes you think they have any real resistance to the idea of tyrannical leadership in Iraq? Certainly their past (and, for that matter, continuing) history in the area doesn’t lend credence to their fidelity to the values of liberty for the people, in Iraq or anywhere else.

[…]

Bravo.

Aside from wondering why keeping Saddam in a box, even with sanctions, isn’t better than dropping a payload equal to the firebombing of Tokyo on a civilian population, aside from knowing an explosion of terrorism is likely to result from the sight of a massive US army on the ground in the mid-east at this most dangerous moment, aside from being fully aware that the planning for this invasion has been underway for more than a decade undergirded by the same arguments of imminent danger that have not come to fruition, and aside from the fact that the administration has openly and shamelessly cast itself as Ariel Sharon’s kindred spirit at a time when such a declaration of solidarity is recklessly stupid…

Aside from all that, the main reason that I cannot support any kind of quasi-unilateral pre-emptive or preventive war is that I am 100% certain that the people who are agitating the strongest for it are hypocritical, incompetent, myopic, twistedly idealistic, mendacious and psychologically crippled.

I think it can wait for another 2 years until smarter, saner people can be put in charge of running the world. I’ll support freeing the Iraqi people from tyranny if somebody else is doing the freeing. These guys are far more likely to throw them out of the frying pan directly into the fire. For the sake of the Iraqi people and the people of the world, these people must not be allowed to play with matches.

War Planners Speak of the Risks

NY Times

WASHINGTON, Feb. 17 — Senior Bush administration officials are for the first time openly discussing a subject they have sidestepped during the buildup of forces around Iraq: what could go wrong, and not only during an attack but also in the aftermath of an invasion.

Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld has a four- to five-page, typewritten catalog of risks that senior aides say he keeps in his desk drawer. He refers to it constantly, updating it with his own ideas and suggestions from senior military commanders, and discussing it with President Bush.

A top advisor to the Secretary of Defense told the NY Times that Mr Rumsfeld’s discussions with the President have been frank but mostly positive. The Secretary is quoted as saying, “Mr. President, we are rapidly approaching a moment of truth both for ourselves as human beings and for the life of our nation. Now, truth is not always a pleasant thing. But it is necessary now to make a choice, to choose between two admittedly regrettable, but nevertheless *distinguishable*, postwar environments: one where you got twenty million people killed, and the other where you got a hundred and fifty million people killed.”

The advisor stressed that despite the hard choices facing the president that Mr Rumsfeld nonetheless was optimistic that US forces could pacify the Iraqi troops and people in a short time, while “keeping a lid” on terrorist recruitment and possible reprisals at home. Still, he was honest in his assessment that the American people would have to accept some vulnerability to terrorist attacks in the coming days. He reportedly told the President, “I’m not saying we wouldn’t get our hair mussed, but I do say no more than ten to twenty million killed, tops, uh, depending on the breaks.”

Vice-president Dick Cheney, who has taken the lead in preparations for possible biological or chemical attacks in here United States was reported to have insisted upon the smallpox vaccination program for all “first line” emergency workers. According to administration sources, however, his concerns are incresingly focused on possible contamination of the water supply.

At a meeting of The National Academy of Creationist Scientists and Christian Astrologers in January, Cheney was quoted as saying, “It’s incredibly obvious, isn’t it? A foreign substance is introduced into our precious bodily fluids without the knowledge of the individual, and certainly without any choice. That’s the way your hard-core Terrorist works.” The orange alert of last week was said by sources in the Office of Homeland Security to have been put in place by Cheney himself when he lost control of his precious bodily fluids during Shania Twain’s half time appearance at the Super Bowl.

More

Whoopsie Daisy

Connie Chung just mouthed the words “Oh Shit” after mangling the word glucose. Heh.

Speaking of bad language …. My favorite protest signs were:

Stop Mad Cowboy Disease

and

Dick + Bush = We’re Fucked

New Kidz

Welcome to a very good writer, Glen England at A Brooklyn Bridge.

And

Political Parrhesia a political blog with an interesting point of view.

Thanks to The Lefty Directory for including me.

Is It Time For Godwin’s Law To Be Repealed?

The Baltimore Sun reports on Ashcroft and his cadre of Federalist ideologues. As with the foreign policy team, the Justice Department is riddled with a bunch of right wing radicals who would be more at home in Pinochet’s Chile that the world’s oldest democracy.

[…]

“In the Justice Department, one of the great tensions is always between the political appointees at the top and the career lawyers in the middle,” said Mark Graber, a political scientist at the University of Maryland, College Park. “This seems to be an administration where the political appointees are far more determined to set policies on more matters than usual.”

Michael Greenberger, a professor at the University of Maryland law school, agrees: “From what I can gather, there is a tight circle around the attorney general. There is not a lot of vetting of ideas beyond that. A lot of career attorneys who have served the attorney general through a lot of different administrations have been shunted aside.”

[…]

I think what you have within the Justice Department is a small group of very bright, federalist society lawyers who are talking to each other and coming up with ideas that have a superficial attraction — military tribunals, detaining enemy combatants — while anybody practiced in the area will tell you this stuff accomplishes absolutely nothing,” Greenberg said. “It’s sort of like counterterrorism by headline rather than counterterrorism by a scientific analysis of what law enforcement is all about.”

Others are concerned about the damage that Ashcroft-sponsored measures, passed under the guise of fighting terrorism, could do to civil liberties. The first Patriot Act, which saw little opposition in the weeks after Sept. 11, lessened restrictions on wiretaps and allowed long-term detention of material witnesses without charges. The draft of the second measure goes further in these areas.

[…]

According to the ACLU’s Nojeim, the act “would encourage police spying on political and religious activities, allow the government to wiretap without first going to court and allow it to more readily strip Americans of their citizenship, rendering them stateless in their own country.”

Said Warnken: “If you take this to its ultimate conclusion — and I am only being slightly flippant here — as long as we are under threat of terrorism you can literally say that the Bill of Rights is de facto repealed until we catch the last terrorist. And that won’t be until your great-grandchildren grow old.”

You know it’s quite difficult to contain the impulse to break Godwin’s Law when I read things like this. There is an aggressive and radical global ambition, a total assumption of power in the hands of the executive, an overhaul of the legal system that blatently abrogates fundamental principles and an unprecedented cronyism between big business and government. All that is left is the internal “threat” who must be eradicated.

Oh wait. There is one.

“There are spooky parallels between the way Hussein and American liberals campaign and try to get support. Saddam Hussein is obviously a student of American liberal Democrat politics and Stalin at the same time.”