Thursday, May 27, 2004

Remarks by Al Gore at New York University

Gore Criticizes Bush on the Iraq War

Remarks by Al Gore
May 26, 2004
As Prepared

George W. Bush promised us a foreign policy with humility. Instead, he has brought us humiliation in the eyes of the world.

He promised to "restore honor and integrity to the White House." Instead, he has brought deep dishonor to our country and built a durable reputation as the most dishonest President since Richard Nixon.

Honor? He decided not to honor the Geneva Convention. Just as he would not honor the United Nations, international treaties, the opinions of our allies, the role of Congress and the courts, or what Jefferson described as "a decent respect for the opinion of mankind." He did not honor the advice, experience and judgment of our military leaders in designing his invasion of Iraq. And now he will not honor our fallen dead by attending any funerals or even by permitting photos of their flag-draped coffins.

How did we get from September 12th , 2001, when a leading French newspaper ran a giant headline with the words "We Are All Americans Now" and when we had the good will and empathy of all the world -- to the horror that we all felt in witnessing the pictures of torture in Abu Ghraib.

To begin with, from its earliest days in power, this administration sought to radically destroy the foreign policy consensus that had guided America since the end of World War II. The long successful strategy of containment was abandoned in favor of the new strategy of "preemption." And what they meant by preemption was not the inherent right of any nation to act preemptively against an imminent threat to its national security, but rather an exotic new approach that asserted a unique and unilateral U.S. right to ignore international law wherever it wished to do so and take military action against any nation, even in circumstances where there was no imminent threat. All that is required, in the view of Bush's team is the mere assertion of a possible, future threat - and the assertion need be made by only one person, the President.

More disturbing still was their frequent use of the word "dominance" to describe their strategic goal, because an American policy of dominance is as repugnant to the rest of the world as the ugly dominance of the helpless, naked Iraqi prisoners has been to the American people. Dominance is as dominance does.

Dominance is not really a strategic policy or political philosophy at all. It is a seductive illusion that tempts the powerful to satiate their hunger for more power still by striking a Faustian bargain. And as always happens - sooner or later - to those who shake hands with the devil, they find out too late that what they have given up in the bargain is their soul.

One of the clearest indications of the impending loss of intimacy with one's soul is the failure to recognize the existence of a soul in those over whom power is exercised, especially if the helpless come to be treated as animals, and degraded. We also know - and not just from De Sade and Freud - the psychological proximity between sexual depravity and other people's pain. It has been especially shocking and awful to see these paired evils perpetrated so crudely and cruelly in the name of America.

Those pictures of torture and sexual abuse came to us embedded in a wave of news about escalating casualties and growing chaos enveloping our entire policy in Iraq. But in order understand the failure of our overall policy, it is important to focus specifically on what happened in the Abu Ghraib prison, and ask whether or not those actions were representative of who we are as Americans? Obviously the quick answer is no, but unfortunately it's more complicated than that.

There is good and evil in every person. And what makes the United States special in the history of nations is our commitment to the rule of law and our carefully constructed system of checks and balances. Our natural distrust of concentrated power and our devotion to openness and democracy are what have lead us as a people to consistently choose good over evil in our collective aspirations more than the people any other nation.

Our founders were insightful students of human nature. They feared the abuse of power because they understood that every human being has not only "better angels" in his nature, but also an innate vulnerability to temptation - especially the temptation to abuse power over others.

Our founders understood full well that a system of checks and balances is needed in our constitution because every human being lives with an internal system of checks and balances that cannot be relied upon to produce virtue if they are allowed to attain an unhealthy degree of power over their fellow citizens.

Listen then to the balance of internal impulses described by specialist Charles Graner when confronted by one of his colleagues, Specialist Joseph M. Darby, who later became a courageous whistleblower. When Darby asked him to explain his actions documented in the photos, Graner replied: "The Christian in me says it's wrong, but the Corrections Officer says, 'I love to make a groan man piss on himself."

What happened at the prison, it is now clear, was not the result of random acts by "a few bad apples," it was the natural consequence of the Bush Administration policy that has dismantled those wise constraints and has made war on America's checks and balances.

The abuse of the prisoners at Abu Ghraib flowed directly from the abuse of the truth that characterized the Administration's march to war and the abuse of the trust that had been placed in President Bush by the American people in the aftermath of September 11th.

There was then, there is now and there would have been regardless of what Bush did, a threat of terrorism that we would have to deal with. But instead of making it better, he has made it infinitely worse. We are less safe because of his policies. He has created more anger and righteous indignation against us as Americans than any leader of our country in the 228 years of our existence as a nation -- because of his attitude of contempt for any person, institution or nation who disagrees with him.

He has exposed Americans abroad and Americans in every U.S. town and city to a greater danger of attack by terrorists because of his arrogance, willfulness, and bungling at stirring up hornet's nests that pose no threat whatsoever to us. And by then insulting the religion and culture and tradition of people in other countries. And by pursuing policies that have resulted in the deaths of thousands of innocent men, women and children, all of it done in our name.

President Bush said in his speech Monday night that the war in Iraq is "the central front in the war on terror." It's not the central front in the war on terror, but it has unfortunately become the central recruiting office for terrorists. [Dick Cheney said, "This war may last the rest of our lives.] The unpleasant truth is that President Bush's utter incompetence has made the world a far more dangerous place and dramatically increased the threat of terrorism against the United States. Just yesterday, the International Institute of Strategic Studies reported that the Iraq conflict " has arguable focused the energies and resources of Al Qaeda and its followers while diluting those of the global counterterrorism coalition." The ISS said that in the wake of the war in Iraq Al Qaeda now has more than 18,000 potential terrorists scattered around the world and the war in Iraq is swelling its ranks.

The war plan was incompetent in its rejection of the advice from military professionals and the analysis of the intelligence was incompetent in its conclusion that our soldiers would be welcomed with garlands of flowers and cheering crowds. Thus we would not need to respect the so-called Powell doctrine of overwhelming force.

There was also in Rumsfeld's planning a failure to provide security for nuclear materials, and to prevent widespread lawlessness and looting.

Luckily, there was a high level of competence on the part of our soldiers even though they were denied the tools and the numbers they needed for their mission. What a disgrace that their families have to hold bake sales to buy discarded Kevlar vests to stuff into the floorboards of the Humvees! Bake sales for body armor.

And the worst still lies ahead. General Joseph Hoar, the former head of the Marine Corps, said "I believe we are absolutely on the brink of failure. We are looking into the abyss."

When a senior, respected military leader like Joe Hoar uses the word "abyss", then the rest of us damn well better listen. Here is what he means: more American soldiers dying, Iraq slipping into worse chaos and violence, no end in sight, with our influence and moral authority seriously damaged.

Retired Marine Corps General Anthony Zinni, who headed Central Command before becoming President Bush's personal emissary to the Middle East, said recently that our nation's current course is "headed over Niagara Falls."

The Commander of the 82nd Airborne Division, Army Major General Charles H. Swannack, Jr., asked by the Washington Post whether he believes the United States is losing the war in Iraq, replied, "I think strategically, we are." Army Colonel Paul Hughes, who directed strategic planning for the US occupation authority in Baghdad, compared what he sees in Iraq to the Vietnam War, in which he lost his brother: "I promised myself when I came on active duty that I would do everything in my power to prevent that ... from happening again. " Noting that Vietnam featured a pattern of winning battles while losing the war, Hughes added "unless we ensure that we have coherence in our policy, we will lose strategically."

The White House spokesman, Dan Bartlett was asked on live television about these scathing condemnations by Generals involved in the highest levels of Pentagon planning and he replied, "Well they're retired, and we take our advice from active duty officers."

But amazingly, even active duty military officers are speaking out against President Bush. For example, the Washington Post quoted an unnamed senior General at the Pentagon as saying, " the current OSD (Office of the Secretary of Defense) refused to listen or adhere to military advice." Rarely if ever in American history have uniformed commanders felt compelled to challenge their commander in chief in public.

The Post also quoted an unnamed general as saying, "Like a lot of senior Army guys I'm quite angry" with Rumsfeld and the rest of the Bush Administration. He listed two reasons. "I think they are going to break the Army," he said, adding that what really incites him is "I don't think they care."

In his upcoming book, Zinni blames the current catastrophe on the Bush team's incompetence early on. "In the lead-up to the Iraq war, and its later conduct," he writes, "I saw at a minimum, true dereliction, negligence and irresponsibility, at worst, lying, incompetence and corruption."

Zinni's book will join a growing library of volumes by former advisors to Bush -- including his principal advisor on terrorism, Richard Clarke; his principal economic policy advisor, former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, former Ambassador Joe Wilson, who was honored by Bush's father for his service in Iraq, and his former Domestic Adviser on faith-based organizations, John Dilulio, who said, "There is no precedent in any modern White House for what is going on in this one: a complete lack of a policy apparatus. What you've got is everything, and I mean everything, run by the political arm. It's the reign of the Mayberry Machiavellis."

Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki told Congress in February that the occupation could require "several hundred thousand troops." But because Rumsfeld and Bush did not want to hear disagreement with their view that Iraq could be invaded at a much lower cost, Shinseki was hushed and then forced out.

And as a direct result of this incompetent plan and inadequate troop strength, young soldiers were put in an untenable position. For example, young reservists assigned to the Iraqi prisons were called up without training or adequate supervision, and were instructed by their superiors to "break down" prisoners in order to prepare them for interrogation.

To make matters worse, they were placed in a confusing situation where the chain of command was criss-crossed between intelligence gathering and prison administration, and further confused by an unprecedented mixing of military and civilian contractor authority.

The soldiers who are accused of committing these atrocities are, of course, responsible for their own actions and if found guilty, must be severely and appropriately punished. But they are not the ones primarily responsible for the disgrace that has been brought upon the United States of America.

Private Lynndie England did not make the decision that the United States would not observe the Geneva Convention. Specialist Charles Graner was not the one who approved a policy of establishing an American Gulag of dark rooms with naked prisoners to be "stressed" and even - we must use the word - tortured - to force them to say things that legal procedures might not induce them to say.

These policies were designed and insisted upon by the Bush White House. Indeed, the President's own legal counsel advised him specifically on the subject. His secretary of defense and his assistants pushed these cruel departures from historic American standards over the objections of the uniformed military, just as the Judge Advocates General within the Defense Department were so upset and opposed that they took the unprecedented step of seeking help from a private lawyer in this city who specializes in human rights and said to him, "There is a calculated effort to create an atmosphere of legal ambiguity" where the mistreatment of prisoners is concerned."

Indeed, the secrecy of the program indicates an understanding that the regular military culture and mores would not support these activities and neither would the American public or the world community. Another implicit acknowledgement of violations of accepted standards of behavior is the process of farming out prisoners to countries less averse to torture and giving assignments to private contractors

President Bush set the tone for our attitude for suspects in his State of the Union address. He noted that more than 3,000 "suspected terrorists" had been arrested in many countries and then he added, "and many others have met a different fate. Let's put it this way: they are no longer a problem to the United States and our allies."

George Bush promised to change the tone in Washington. And indeed he did. As many as 37 prisoners may have been murdered while in captivity, though the numbers are difficult to rely upon because in many cases involving violent death, there were no autopsies.

How dare they blame their misdeeds on enlisted personnel from a Reserve unit in upstate New York. President Bush owes more than one apology. On the list of those he let down are the young soldiers who are themselves apparently culpable, but who were clearly put into a moral cesspool. The perpetrators as well as the victims were both placed in their relationship to one another by the policies of George W. Bush.

How dare the incompetent and willful members of this Bush/Cheney Administration humiliate our nation and our people in the eyes of the world and in the conscience of our own people. How dare they subject us to such dishonor and disgrace. How dare they drag the good name of the United States of America through the mud of Saddam Hussein's torture prison.

David Kay concluded his search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq with the famous verdict: "we were all wrong." And for many Americans, Kay's statement seemed to symbolize the awful collision between Reality and all of the false and fading impressions President Bush had fostered in building support for his policy of going to war.

Now the White House has informed the American people that they were also "all wrong" about their decision to place their faith in Ahmed Chalabi, even though they have paid him 340,000 dollars per month. 33 million dollars (CHECK) and placed him adjacent to Laura Bush at the State of the Union address. Chalabi had been convicted of fraud and embezzling 70 million dollars in public funds from a Jordanian bank, and escaped prison by fleeing the country. But in spite of that record, he had become one of key advisors to the Bush Administration on planning and promoting the War against Iraq.

And they repeatedly cited him as an authority, perhaps even a future president of Iraq. Incredibly, they even ferried him and his private army into Baghdad in advance of anyone else, and allowed him to seize control over Saddam's secret papers.

Now they are telling the American people that he is a spy for Iran who has been duping the President of the United States for all these years.

One of the Generals in charge of this war policy went on a speaking tour in his spare time to declare before evangelical groups that the US is in a holy war as "Christian Nation battling Satan." This same General Boykin was the person who ordered the officer who was in charge of the detainees in Guantanamo Bay to extend his methods to Iraq detainees, prisoners. ... The testimony from the prisoners is that they were forced to curse their religion Bush used the word "crusade" early on in the war against Iraq, and then commentators pointed out that it was singularly inappropriate because of the history and sensitivity of the Muslim world and then a few weeks later he used it again.

"We are now being viewed as the modern Crusaders, as the modern colonial power in this part of the world," Zinni said.

What a terrible irony that our country, which was founded by refugees seeking religious freedom - coming to America to escape domineering leaders who tried to get them to renounce their religion - would now be responsible for this kind of abuse..

Ameen Saeed al-Sheikh told the Washington Post that he was tortured and ordered to denounce Islam and after his leg was broken one of his torturers started hitting it while ordering him to curse Islam and then, " they ordered me to thank Jesus that I'm alive." Others reported that they were forced to eat pork and drink alcohol.

In my religious tradition, I have been taught that "ye shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles? Even so, every good tree bringeth forth good fruit; but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit... Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them."

The President convinced a majority of the country that Saddam Hussein was responsible for attacking us on September 11th. But in truth he had nothing whatsoever to do with it. The President convinced the country with a mixture of forged documents and blatantly false assertions that Saddam was in league with Al Qaeda, and that he was "indistinguishable" from Osama bin Laden.

He asked the nation , in his State of the Union address, to "imagine" how terrified we should be that Saddam was about to give nuclear weapons to terrorists and stated repeatedly that Iraq posed a grave and gathering threat to our nation. He planted the seeds of war, and harvested a whirlwind. And now, the "corrupt tree" of a war waged on false premises has brought us the "evil fruit" of Americans torturing and humiliating prisoners.

In my opinion, John Kerry is dealing with this unfolding tragedy in an impressive and extremely responsible way. Our nation's best interest lies in having a new president who can turn a new page, sweep clean with a new broom, and take office on January 20th of next year with the ability to make a fresh assessment of exactly what our nation's strategic position is as of the time the reigns of power are finally wrested from the group of incompetents that created this catastrophe.

Kerry should not tie his own hands by offering overly specific, detailed proposals concerning a situation that is rapidly changing and unfortunately, rapidly deteriorating, but should rather preserve his, and our country's, options, to retrieve our national honor as soon as this long national nightmare is over.

Eisenhower did not propose a five-point plan for changing America's approach to the Korean War when he was running for president in 1952.

When a business enterprise finds itself in deep trouble that is linked to the failed policies of the current CEO the board of directors and stockholders usually say to the failed CEO, "Thank you very much, but we're going to replace you now with a new CEO -- one less vested in a stubborn insistence on staying the course, even if that course is, in the words of General Zinni, "Headed over Niagara Falls."

One of the strengths of democracy is the ability of the people to regularly demand changes in leadership and to fire a failing leader and hire a new one with the promise of hopeful change. That is the real solution to America's quagmire in Iraq. But, I am keenly aware that we have seven months and twenty five days remaining in this president's current term of office and that represents a time of dangerous vulnerability for our country because of the demonstrated incompetence and recklessness of the current administration.

It is therefore essential that even as we focus on the fateful choice, the voters must make this November that we simultaneously search for ways to sharply reduce the extraordinary danger that we face with the current leadership team in place. It is for that reason that I am calling today for Republicans as well as Democrats to join me in asking for the immediate resignations of those immediately below George Bush and Dick Cheney who are most responsible for creating the catastrophe that we are facing in Iraq.

We desperately need a national security team with at least minimal competence because the current team is making things worse with each passing day. They are endangering the lives of our soldiers, and sharply increasing the danger faced by American citizens everywhere in the world, including here at home. They are enraging hundreds of millions of people and embittering an entire generation of anti-Americans whose rage is already near the boiling point.

We simply cannot afford to further increase the risk to our country with more blunders by this team. Donald Rumsfeld, as the chief architect of the war plan, should resign today. His deputies Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith and his intelligence chief Stephen Cambone should also resign. The nation is especially at risk every single day that Rumsfeld remains as Secretary of Defense.

Condoleeza Rice, who has badly mishandled the coordination of national security policy, should also resign immediately.

George Tenet should also resign. I want to offer a special word about George Tenet, because he is a personal friend and I know him to be a good and decent man. It is especially painful to call for his resignation, but I have regretfully concluded that it is extremely important that our country have new leadership at the CIA immediately.

As a nation, our greatest export has always been hope: hope that through the rule of law people can be free to pursue their dreams, that democracy can supplant repression and that justice, not power, will be the guiding force in society. Our moral authority in the world derived from the hope anchored in the rule of law. With this blatant failure of the rule of law from the very agents of our government, we face a great challenge in restoring our moral authority in the world and demonstrating our commitment to bringing a better life to our global neighbors.

During Ronald Reagan's Presidency, Secretary of Labor Ray Donovan was accused of corruption, but eventually, after a lot of publicity, the indictment was thrown out by the Judge. Donovan asked the question, "Where do I go to get my reputation back?" President Bush has now placed the United States of America in the same situation. Where do we go to get our good name back?

The answer is, we go where we always go when a dramatic change is needed. We go to the ballot box, and we make it clear to the rest of the world that what's been happening in America for the last four years, and what America has been doing in Iraq for the last two years, really is not who we are. We, as a people, at least the overwhelming majority of us, do not endorse the decision to dishonor the Geneva Convention and the Bill of Rights....

Make no mistake, the damage done at Abu Ghraib is not only to America's reputation and America's strategic interests, but also to America's spirit. It is also crucial for our nation to recognize - and to recognize quickly - that the damage our nation has suffered in the world is far, far more serious than President Bush's belated and tepid response would lead people to believe. Remember how shocked each of us, individually, was when we first saw those hideous images. The natural tendency was to first recoil from the images, and then to assume that they represented a strange and rare aberration that resulted from a few twisted minds or, as the Pentagon assured us, "a few bad apples."

But as today's shocking news reaffirms yet again, this was not rare. It was not an aberration. Today's New York Times reports that an Army survey of prisoner deaths and mistreatment in Iraq and Afghanisatan "show a widespread pattern of abuse involving more military units than previously known.'

Nor did these abuses spring from a few twisted minds at the lowest ranks of our military enlisted personnel. No, it came from twisted values and atrocious policies at the highest levels of our government. This was done in our name, by our leaders.

These horrors were the predictable consequence of policy choices that flowed directly from this administration's contempt for the rule of law. And the dominance they have been seeking is truly not simply unworthy of America - it is also an illusory goal in its own right.

Our world is unconquerable because the human spirit is unconquerable, and any national strategy based on pursuing the goal of domination is doomed to fail because it generates its own opposition, and in the process, creates enemies for the would-be dominator.

A policy based on domination of the rest of the world not only creates enemies for the United States and creates recruits for Al Qaeda, it also undermines the international cooperation that is essential to defeating the efforts of terrorists who wish harm and intimidate Americans.

Unilateralism, as we have painfully seen in Iraq, is its own reward. Going it alone may satisfy a political instinct but it is dangerous to our military, even without their Commander in Chief taunting terrorists to "bring it on."

Our troops are stretched thin and exhausted not only because Secretary Rumsfeld contemptuously dismissed the advice of military leaders on the size of the needed force - but also because President Bush's contempt for traditional allies and international opinion left us without a real coalition to share the military and financial burden of the war and the occupation. Our future is dependent upon increasing cooperation and interdependence in a world tied ever more closely together by technologies of communications and travel. The emergence of a truly global civilization has been accompanied by the recognition of truly global challenges that require global responses that, as often as not, can only be led by the United States - and only if the United States restores and maintains its moral authority to lead.

Make no mistake, it is precisely our moral authority that is our greatest source of strength, and it is precisely our moral authority that has been recklessly put at risk by the cheap calculations and mean compromises of conscience wagered with history by this willful president.

Listen to the way Israel's highest court dealt with a similar question when, in 1999, it was asked to balance due process rights against dire threats to the security of its people:

"This is the destiny of democracy, as not all means are acceptable to it, and not all practices employed by its enemies are open before it. Although a democracy must often fight with one hand tied behind its back, it nonetheless has the upper hand. Preserving the Rule of Law and recognition of an individual's liberty constitutes an important component in its understanding of security. At the end of the day they (add to) its strength."

The last and best description of America's meaning in the world is still the definitive formulation of Lincoln's annual message to Congress on December 1, 1862:

"The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise - with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country. Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history...the fiery trial through which we pass will light us down in honor or dishonor to the latest generation...We shall nobly save, or meanly lose the last best hope of earth...The way is plain, peaceful, generous, just - a way which, if followed, the world will forever applaud, and God must forever bless."

It is now clear that their obscene abuses of the truth and their unforgivable abuse of the trust placed in them after 9/11 by the American people led directly to the abuses of the prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison and, we are now learning, in many other similar facilities constructed as part of Bush's Gulag, in which, according to the Red Cross, 70 to 90 percent of the victims are totally innocent of any wrongdoing.

The same dark spirit of domination has led them to - for the first time in American history - imprison American citizens with no charges, no right to see a lawyer, no right to notify their family, no right to know of what they are accused, and no right to gain access to any court to present an appeal of any sort. The Bush Admistration has even acquired the power to compel librarians to tell them what any American is reading, and to compel them to keep silent about the request - or else the librarians themselves can also be imprisoned.

They have launched an unprecedented assault on civil liberties, on the right of the courts to review their actions, on the right of the Congress to have information to how they are spending the public's money and the right of the news media to have information about the policies they are pursuing.

The same pattern characterizes virtually all of their policies. They resent any constraint as an insult to their will to dominate and exercise power. Their appetite for power is astonishing. It has led them to introduce a new level of viciousness in partisan politics. It is that viciousness that led them to attack as unpatriotic, Senator Max Cleland, who lost three limbs in combat during the Vietnam War.

The president episodically poses as a healer and "uniter". If he president really has any desire to play that role, then I call upon him to condemn Rush Limbaugh - perhaps his strongest political supporter - who said that the torture in Abu Ghraib was a "brilliant maneuver" and that the photos were "good old American pornography," and that the actions portrayed were simply those of "people having a good time and needing to blow off steam."

This new political viciousness by the President and his supporters is found not only on the campaign trail, but in the daily operations of our democracy. They have insisted that the leaders of their party in the Congress deny Democrats any meaningful role whatsoever in shaping legislation, debating the choices before us as a people, or even to attend the all-important conference committees that reconcile the differences between actions by the Senate and House of Representatives.

The same meanness of spirit shows up in domestic policies as well. Under the Patriot Act, Muslims, innocent of any crime, were picked up, often physically abused, and held incommunicado indefinitely. What happened in Abu Ghraib was difference not of kind, but of degree.

Differences of degree are important when the subject is torture. The apologists for what has happened do have points that should be heard and clearly understood. It is a fact that every culture and every politics sometimes expresses itself in cruelty. It is also undeniably true that other countries have and do torture more routinely, and far more brutally, than ours has. George Orwell once characterized life in Stalin's Russia as "a boot stamping on a human face forever." That was the ultimate culture of cruelty, so ingrained, so organic, so systematic that everyone in it lived in terror, even the terrorizers. And that was the nature and degree of state cruelty in Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

We all know these things, and we need not reassure ourselves and should not congratulate ourselves that our society is less cruel than some others, although it is worth noting that there are many that are less cruel than ours. And this searing revelation at Abu Ghraib should lead us to examine more thoroughly the routine horrors in our domestic prison system.

But what we do now, in reaction to Abu Ghraib will determine a great deal about who we are at the beginning of the 21st century. It is important to note that just as the abuses of the prisoners flowed directly from the policies of the Bush White House, those policies flowed not only from the instincts of the president and his advisors, but found support in shifting attitudes on the part of some in our country in response to the outrage and fear generated by the attack of September 11th.

The president exploited and fanned those fears, but some otherwise sensible and levelheaded Americans fed them as well. I remember reading genteel-sounding essays asking publicly whether or not the prohibitions against torture were any longer relevant or desirable. The same grotesque misunderstanding of what is really involved was responsible for the tone in the memo from the president's legal advisor, Alberto Gonzalez, who wrote on January 25, 2002, that 9/11 "renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions."

We have seen the pictures. We have learned the news. We cannot unlearn it; it is part of us. The important question now is, what will we do now about torture. Stop it? Yes, of course. But that means demanding all of the facts, not covering them up, as some now charge the administration is now doing. One of the whistleblowers at Abu Ghraib, Sergeant Samuel Provance, told ABC News a few days ago that he was being intimidated and punished for telling the truth. "There is definitely a coverup," Provance said. "I feel like I am being punished for being honest."

The abhorrent acts in the prison were a direct consequence of the culture of impunity encouraged, authorized and instituted by Bush and Rumsfeld in their statements that the Geneva Conventions did not apply. The apparent war crimes that took place were the logical, inevitable outcome of policies and statements from the administration.

To me, as glaring as the evidence of this in the pictures themselves was the revelation that it was established practice for prisoners to be moved around during ICRC visits so that they would not be available for visits. That, no one can claim, was the act of individuals. That was policy set from above with the direct intention to violate US values it was to be upholding. It was the kind of policy we see - and criticize in places like China and Cuba.

Moreover, the administration has also set up the men and women of our own armed forces for payback the next time they are held as prisoners. And for that, this administration should pay a very high price. One of the most tragic consequences of these official crimes is that it will be very hard for any of us as Americans - at least for a very long time - to effectively stand up for human rights elsewhere and criticize other governments, when our policies have resulted in our soldiers behaving so monstrously. This administration has shamed America and deeply damaged the cause of freedom and human rights everywhere, thus undermining the core message of America to the world.

President Bush offered a brief and half-hearted apology to the Arab world - but he should apologize to the American people for abandoning the Geneva Conventions. He also owes an apology to the U.S. Army for cavalierly sending them into harm's way while ignoring the best advice of their commanders. Perhaps most importantly of all, he should apologize to all those men and women throughout our world who have held the ideal of the United States of America as a shining goal, to inspire their hopeful efforts to bring about justice under a rule of law in their own lands. Of course, the problem with all these legitimate requests is that a sincere apology requires an admission of error, a willingness to accept responsibility and to hold people accountable. And President Bush is not only unwilling to acknowledge error. He has thus far been unwilling to hold anyone in his administration accountable for the worst strategic and military miscalculations and mistakes in the history of the United States of America.

He is willing only to apologize for the alleged erratic behavior of a few low-ranking enlisted people, who he is scapegoating for his policy fiasco.

In December of 2000, even though I strongly disagreed with the decision by the U.S. Supreme Court to order a halt to the counting of legally cast ballots, I saw it as my duty to reaffirm my own strong belief that we are a nation of laws and not only accept the decision, but do what I could to prevent efforts to delegitimize George Bush as he took the oath of office as president.

I did not at that moment imagine that Bush would, in the presidency that ensued, demonstrate utter contempt for the rule of law and work at every turn to frustrate accountability...

So today, I want to speak on behalf of those Americans who feel that President Bush has betrayed our nation's trust, those who are horrified at what has been done in our name, and all those who want the rest of the world to know that we Americans see the abuses that occurred in the prisons of Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantanamo and secret locations as yet undisclosed as completely out of keeping with the character and basic nature of the American people and at odds with the principles on which America stands.

I believe we have a duty to hold President Bush accountable - and I believe we will. As Lincoln said at our time of greatest trial, "We - even we here - hold the power, and bear the responsibility."

Oliver Willis: Like Kryptonite To Stupid

Oliver Willis: Like Kryptonite To Stupid

Tuesday, May 18, 2004

Paul Krugman: The Wastrel Son

The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Columnist: The Wastrel Son

He was a stock character in 19th-century fiction: the wastrel son who runs up gambling debts in the belief that his wealthy family, concerned for its prestige, will have no choice but to pay off his creditors. In the novels such characters always come to a bad end. Either they bring ruin to their families, or they eventually find themselves disowned.

George Bush reminds me of those characters — and not just because of his early career, in which friends of the family repeatedly bailed out his failing business ventures. Now that he sits in the White House, he's still counting on other people to settle his debts — not to protect the reputation of his family, but to protect the reputation of the country.

One by one, our erstwhile allies are disowning us; they don't want an unstable, anti-Western Iraq any more than we do, but they have concluded that President Bush is incorrigible. Spain has washed its hands of our problems, Italy is edging toward the door, and Britain will join the rush for the exit soon enough, with or without Tony Blair.

At home, however, Mr. Bush's protectors are not yet ready to make the break.

Last week Mr. Bush asked Congress for yet more money for the "Iraq Freedom Fund" — $25 billion for starters, although Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy defense secretary, says that the bill for the full fiscal year will probably exceed $50 billion, and independent experts think even that is an underestimate. And you know what? He'll get it.

Before the war, officials refused to discuss costs, except to insist that they would be minimal. It was only after the shooting started, and Congress was in no position to balk, that the administration demanded $75 billion for the Iraq Freedom Fund.

Then, after declaring "mission accomplished" and pushing through a big tax cut — and after several months when administration officials played down the need for more funds — Mr. Bush told Congress that he needed an additional $87 billion. Assured that the situation in Iraq was steadily improving, and warned that American soldiers would suffer if the money wasn't forthcoming, Congress gave Mr. Bush another blank check.

Now Mr. Bush is back for more. Given this history, one might have expected him to show some contrition — to promise to change his ways and to offer at least a pretense that Congress would henceforth have some say in how money was spent.

But the tone of the cover letter Mr. Bush sent with last week's budget request can best be described as contemptuous: it's up to Congress to "ensure that our men and women in uniform continue to have the resources they need when they need them." This from an administration that, by rejecting warnings from military professionals, ensured that our men and women in uniform didn't have remotely enough resources to do the job.

The budget request itself was almost a caricature of the administration's "just trust us" approach to governing.

It ran to less than a page, with no supporting information. Of the $25 billion, $5 billion is purely a slush fund, to be used at the secretary of defense's discretion. The rest is allocated to specific branches of the military, but with the proviso that the administration can reallocate the money at will as long as it notifies the appropriate committees.

Senators are balking for the moment, but everyone knows that they'll give in, after demanding, at most, cosmetic changes. Once again, Mr. Bush has put Congress in a bind: it was his decision to put American forces in harm's way, but if members of Congress fail to give him the money he demands, he'll blame them for letting down the troops.

As long as political figures aren't willing to disown Mr. Bush's debt — the impossible situation in which he has placed America's soldiers — there isn't much they can do.

So how will it all end? The cries of "stay the course" are getting fainter, while the calls for a quick exit are growing. In other words, it seems increasingly likely that the nation will end up disowning Mr. Bush and his debts.

That will mean settling for an outcome in Iraq that, however we spin it, will look a lot like defeat — and the nation's prestige will be damaged by that outcome. But lost prestige is better than ruin.

David Brooks: In Iraq, America's Shakeout Moment

The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Columnist: In Iraq, America's Shakeout Moment

Monday, May 17, 2004

Book Summary

Steven Greffenius has done what few academics would: written a book praising the virtues of Ronald Reagan as a statesman and politician. Through analysis of Reagan's speeches and policies, Greffenius portrays a political leader who integrated American traditions and ideals. The book reaches into Reagan's heart and mind, and emerges with a president who was thoughtful, prophetic, and liberal minded. People who respect democratic principles and the fundamentals of American life—and who sense the erosion of these—should read this book.

An examination copy is available as a complimentary e-book to anyone who would like to consider The Last Jeffersonian for classroom use. The book is easy to download, easy to navigate, and fully searchable. Your bookstore can order copies of The Last Jeffersonian at a discount directly from the publisher.

"The critics have been quick to dismiss Reagan as a master of myths, slogans, anecdotes, and theatrical gestures. The glory of the Greffenius defense is to display these as intrinsic to the content of Reagan's ideas. He shows how Reagan spoke and acted outside the political boxes of his times by thinking in terms of a latent tradition of Jeffersonian democracy that had survived into postwar America mainly as scattered stories and occasional catchwords. Reagan brought to these a distinctively republican feeling for heroism in the everyday lives of ordinary citizens. He added an extraordinary capacity of invention, attuning values and vistas from earlier times to the landscapes of politics late in the twentieth century. The Greffenius argument is that the resulting ideas, the political rhetoric of Ronald Reagan, deserve to be taken seriously by people who would understand and improve American politics. The case is convincing." From the Foreword by John S. Nelson.

The Last Jeffersonian considers President Reagan's political thought with care. The book's table of contents is listed below. Please click the title for Chapter 5 for a quick look at a sample chapter.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: The Last Jeffersonian

Chapter 2: The Actor and the Politician

Chapter 3: Jefferson's Legacy

Chapter 4: Visions of America

Chapter 5: Self-Improvement

Chapter 6: Dreams of Wealth

Chapter 6: The Idealist

Chapter 8: Self-Government

Chapter 9: Domestic Divisions

Chapter 10: Money and Taxes

Chapter 11: Good Guys and Bad Guys

Chapter 12: Democracy Is Not a Fragile Flower

Chapter 13: Heroes of the Story

Chapter 14: Conclusion

Comments from Jonathan Pack

I just wanted to point out a few things about the U.N.
Would we had known of the oil-for-food BILLIONS that have
been laundered if we had not gone into Iraq?  The program
that is headed by the Secretary General Annon.  And as far
as our allies against us in Iraq, if you were France or
Russia and you knew that "your" oil fields were going to be
taken from you and given back to Iraq, wouldn't you be
against the war?  France and Russia both had the rights to
the 3 largest oil fields in Iraq.  I'm pretty sure I know
why they were against, along with the BILLIONS that they
would eventually stop getting from the oil-for-food
program.  Now I am only 20 years old and most likely you
won't take me seriously, but these are just my
observations.  What would Reagan say to this?  Are you
writing your thoughts or the your ideas of what Reagan
would say?  I do believe Reagan was somewhat of a right vs.
wrong guy.  However, I have not had the years that you have
had to research and discover, but no matter what you say,
and no matter what evidence you put in front of me, I
believe the basic fact of this war is that we are helping a
country feel freedom.  Whether this was the idea of
President Bush's plot to go into Iraq, we may never know,
but the Iraqi people, in many areas, are doing things that
they couldn't even dream of under Saddam.  Yes, there are
still terror groups and certain Iraqi groups that are
causing many troubles, and our embarrassing those Iraqi
prisoners and our ourselves did not help, but I do believe
that Iraq will be much more stable in the near future.
Heck, look at when we started our democracy over 200 years
ago.  We had turmoil.  We had fights.  We had chaos.  It
may not have been to the extent of today, but we still had
a lot of trouble in our beginning.  These are just my
thoughts, and I hope you read and critique them if you may.
Thank you for reading.

Jonathan Pack

Ronald Reagan on Equality

"Andrew Sullivan nominates a fairly bland quote from Bush's excellent Lott denunciation for inclusion in Bartlett's. But isn't this the star sentence --

Every day our nation was segregated was a day that America was unfaithful to our founding ideals.

When it comes to recent Republican presidential egalitarianism, I still prefer Ronald Reagan's far more difficult appeal for social equality (as opposed to mere legal equality or equality of opportunity):

"Whether we come from poverty or wealth... we are all equal in the eyes of God. But as Americans that is not enough--we must be equal in the eyes of each other. "
Books & Culture's Book of the Week: "Trust but Verify" - Christianity Today Magazine
The New York Times > International > Middle East > Powell Says C.I.A. Was Misled About Weapons

Wednesday, May 05, 2004

Ugly War: Why America Should Leave Iraq


The latest news from Iraq shifts our attention from the fighting in Fallujah, Baghdad and Najaf to the treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. 60 Minutes did the right thing to distribute those pictures, and the public reaction has been indignation: "How can that be? Who would have thought? This is an outrage. What's going on here?" How else can you react in public? Who will take responsibility for something like that?

So how do people think we are treating Saddam right now? Do we think he has a TV set in his cell and a weight room next door? If we found out that he was kept naked in a damp cell with a bag over his head, would we be too disturbed? How about Osama? Suppose we caught him? That's an even clearer case, because he's an enemy who actually attacked us. How concerned would we be over proper treatment if we were interrogating him?

The Israelis have used interrogation methods like the ones we've seen in Iraq for a long time. In fact, we learned these methods from the Israelis. What's the best way to wear a prisoner down without actually torturing him? We've never issued a word of objection to the Israelis' methods. We've adopted the same stance as the Israelis: when it comes to stopping people who want to blow up little children in shopping centers, the ends justify the means.

How do you suppose we've been treating the prisoners we caught in Afghanistan? Do we have congressmen who want to know what's been going on in Guantanamo? If we thought that torture would help us find the people who planned 9/11, or that we could stop a future attack with interrogation methods that clearly violate international norms, would we stop at humiliation? Who doesn't think that we've already used those methods to gather information from the people we've captured in Afghanistan?

The reason we're reacting this way to abuse of Iraqi prisoners is that we have a bad war on our conscience. Iraqis are not our enemies. For the most part, they are honorable people. We know that if an army invaded our country and then occupied it, we would stand up to them, just as they have stood up to us. We know that those Iraqi prisoners threaten us because we're in their country when we shouldn't be. That's far different from the case of Al Qaeda and the Taliban, who brought their war to us.

So now those contractors and reservists are going to pay, probably with prison time, for their acts. Someone has to pay, and the perpetrators will be the ones. They took pictures of themselves and their victims, ugly snapshots to show how much fun they were having. It's not often you get to treat other people this way! Let's have a party! But some of those guards, even though they're guilty, will be scapegoats nevertheless. We'll be so indignant about the acts of the guilty few, that it'll be easy to forget that wars are inherently ugly, especially wars that were wrong from the beginning.

In fact, we've been distracting ourselves from this question of right and wrong from the start. I've heard these arguments so often: "If our leaders say it's the right thing to do, it must be the right thing to do." And: "We have to get the terrorists." Well, who are the terrorists? Anyone we don't like and anyone we're afraid of? Where is the cold, ruthless focus on the people who actually want to do us harm?

The last big distraction from our guilt was several months ago, when it became apparent at last that we weren't going to find dangerous weapons in Iraq. We were all discussing whether the intelligence agencies were to blame for feeding bad analysis to the president and his advisors. The premise of the whole controversy was that if we had found weapons, our invasion would have been justified. As it was, we made a big mistake that hurt our credibility, and we have to find out who is to blame. But this effort to blame the CIA for bad information misses two important points.

The first one is that this war wouldn't be justified even if Hussein did have the weapons Bush said he had. We had already conducted air operations over Iraq for a long time, and if we discovered weapons or materials we wanted to get rid of, we could have done so easily, just as the Israelis did when they bombed the Iraqi nuclear reactor a generation ago. We did not need to bomb Baghdad and send in 200,000 troops to get rid of dangerous weapons. We needed to do that to get rid of Hussein, and that was clearly our aim.

The other point we managed to miss during the intelligence controversy is that Bush clearly cooked up any argument he thought would succeed during the lead-up to war. He even said that Hussein helped to carry out the 9/11 attacks, and people believed him! When reporters challenged him to defend the war after we couldn't find any weapons, he said, "What's the difference?" For Bush, it didn't matter whether Hussein actually had any weapons. What mattered was that he wanted them, and in a post-9/11 environment, anyone who could be dangerous in the future has to be crushed.

It does remind me of an old saying that I read in grad school. George Kennan or someone of his temperament said that "Anyone is free to think the whole world is his enemy, and if he believes it long enough, it'll be true." Here again, though, Bush and his people have given themselves away. If they really believed in their own doctrine of preemption, they'd pull out of Iraq and go on to the next dangerous character on their axis of evil list. The list is pretty long, you know. In fact, they want to stick it out in Iraq, because their real motive was to get Hussein, and to make an example of Iraq to the rest of the world. See what we can do to a tyrant like that, and how we can reshape his country in our image? See what will happen to you if you mess with us?

Now a lot more people want to mess with us. And they will. They already have. We can't pull out of Iraq for fear that it'll become another Afghanistan, racked by civil war and home to radical Islamists who can train and plot and organize. We can't stay unless we truly want to become an occupying, not a liberating power. The measures we must use as an occupying power are a lot harsher than the measures used in Abu Ghraib prison. Ask the families in Fallujah who lost brothers and sisters, sons and daughters, mothers and fathers, what occupying powers have to do to "pacify" a defeated nation.

We have no business in Iraq, and we have already paid so much for our mistake. I don't mean dollars, either. Who can remember now the good will that flowed toward our shores in the weeks and months after 9/11? Tony Blair's was only the most eloquent voice: he spoke for the rest of our brothers and sisters all over the world, all those people who had themselves suffered the scourge of radical Islam and other vicious movements for decades. Now the United States, the most powerful member of the international community, could lead good and brave people everywhere in a cause that was right and necessary. Positive action had been too long in coming, but now the people who lay buried under the concrete of the World Trade Center required some response. Justice required punishment, prevention, and perseverance. We had the opportunity to fight a just war, and to do much good with the help of others.

It's almost a laughable understatement now to say that we squandered the good will that existed two and a half years ago. We wanted, needed, and had the support of good Muslims everywhere, people who recognized the totalitarian threat that Al Qaeda and its sympathizers posed to their own civilization. We had allies everywhere, people who would help us without our even asking for help. Among those who saw 9/11 not only as a tragedy but as an opportunity, moderate Muslims would see the possibilities for reconciliation and mutual assistance most clearly. Instead, we went nuts, to use a phrase that has come to mind altogether too often in the last year. We killed so many people who had nothing to do with the war we were involved in. So many people who wished us no harm, and nothing but good.

I need to make a few more points here. One has to do with the place criticism of this sort has in post-Vietnam America. The second, related to the first, has to do with the origins of my own judgments on this matter. The third has to do with what we should have done in 2002 instead of planning a war with Iraq, and what we can still do in our fight against Al Qaeda. And the fourth concerns what we have to do in Iraq right now, to keep a bad situation from reaching the so-called tipping point. For make no mistake, we could lose our special place in the world for good here. We could follow a course that will lead historians two centuries from now to say, "Here is where it started. Here was the beginning of the end for America's supreme position in the world."

Before I take up these points, though, let me recall another thought that has come to mind many times since 9/11. In the days after that shocking event, I said we need a Winston Churchill to lead us now. We need someone with his eloquence, his faith, his sense of aggressive perseverance, and his defiance. He was Europe's last great defender of democracy and freedom during a troubled time, and but for him, the Nazis might have established themselves across the continent for much more than four years. In late 2001, we needed someone like that, and I didn't see anyone able to take that role.

Then Bush gave his speech to the joint session of Congress, and one could feel a bit more hopeful about our leadership. The speech was well-written and well-delivered: Bush issued a resolute, decisive response to our enemies and a clear request for action to our friends. Then we went to war in Afghanistan, and for once we had allies who would actually fight. The northern alliance, as the soldiers fighting the Taliban were called, proved willing to fight hard, and the victory was theirs with our assistance from the air. Things looked better as we had the former rulers of that long-suffering country on the run.

After that war, we needed to plan what to do next. Who could have expected, during that time, that the administration had already set its military sights on Iraq, and had done so from the first days after 9/11? They even thought that Iraq could be a repeat of Afghanistan. Our agile force had succeeded so quickly in Afghanistan - we could do the same thing with our other enemy across the way, and finish off the work we had started during the Gulf War ten years ago. Richard Clarke said that Bush asked him right after 9/11 to find out if Hussein had some connection with the attack. Clarke was astonished. "But Mr. President," he said, "It was Al Qaeda." "I know, I know," the president responded, "But look into it anyway." Clarke wrote later that the war against Iraq represented colossal misdirection. It was as if the United States, after the attack at Pearl Harbor, had attacked Mexico.

Well, here's what we should have done in Afghanistan. We should have put a lot more troops on the ground during the war itself. We should have made sure the victory was ours, not a victory that could be claimed by the local warlords. Most assuredly we should have allied ourselves with them, but we should have directed the war from the ground, not primarily from the air. After the war, we should have consolidated our position there. We should have put 500,000 troops on the ground there, even if we don't have 500,000 troops on active duty right now. We should have found the people somewhere, and made Afghanistan an outpost, just as we did over the years with Germany, Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines. We could have achieved more progress against Al Qaeda from that outpost than from any other place, and most Afghanis would have welcomed us there. What an opportunity we had to bring peace and prosperity to much of south Asia, and to serve our own interests at the same time.

We didn't do that, though, and my vehemence about what we did instead so often gets the better of me. I have to tell people that I'm not one of those anti-war throwbacks, who recall the days of the anti-war movement during the sixties with a kind of warped nostalgia. Who would wish for that sort of political divisiveness again? Who would wish for a time when patriotism was dishonorable, and our military men and women received mockery and spittle in the face as they arrived home from their tours of duty in Vietnam? The memories of that time are still so vivid, that criticism of the war in Iraq comes under suspicion because the speaker is undermining our troops, not giving them the support they need.

It's not so: opponents of this war believe in the goodness, the abilities and the fortitude of our soldiers as much as ever. Now the families, the moms and dads of those soldiers are beginning to question this war and the reasons for fighting it, and I thank them for it. They've made it possible for others to speak more freely about the horrible thing we've done, without having to apologize because we're making our soldiers' jobs more difficult. Opposition to this war and support of our troops easily go together. In fact, opposition to this war and support of our troops have to go together, because we have to get our fighting men and women out of there. We can't support a government that puts our young people in harm's way for bad reasons. Our young people shouldn't have to pay for other people's mistakes and poor judgment. They shouldn't have to come home in anonymous coffins, victims of a war where, for the first time in our history, we are clearly guilty of aggression. If we have to have victims, let our battlefield casualties come from the mountains in eastern Afghanistan and western Pakistan, where our real enemies are hiding, and fighting.

So I started to say why you should listen to me, why you shouldn't dismiss my opposition as a throwback to the anti-war rhetoric of the sixties. I studied international politics, and the ethics of war and peace, for a long time. I wrote my first book on the logic of conflict, and I spent a long time analyzing the Arab-Israeli conflict to find lessons and insights into international war. I thought, and taught, about mutual perception and misperception, the use of force, the significance of international law, the necessity for violence and the establishment of peace in relations among states.

More than that, I served in the Navy for over four years, during the period when we first sent ships to the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Sea. I served in the Western Pacific when the Iranian hostage crisis began, and my ship was among the first to go to that remote part of the world's oceans. I know what it's like to serve in the military, how dangerous the job is, and the devotion our soldiers and sailors show in the execution of their duties. I joined the Navy in 1977, a year out of college, as a junior officer. This kind of thing was unthinkable among my peers. Our military defeat, loss of men and bitter humiliation in southeast Asia still hung over our culture, and especially over our youth at that time. Joining any branch of the military, especially if you were from the north and from the upper middle class, was not something you did. After the war in Vietnam, people regarded the armed services a little bit as they would a failed cult. It didn't come back to its place of honor and respect until the Reagan years, and Reagan himself can claim credit for that restoration. Patriotism and admiration for our armed forces have burned with a steady light since then.

So that's why the reports of abuse in Iraqi prisons pose such a threat to our self-respect. We don't have to go far in our memories before we encounter My Lai and other unpleasant legacies of Vietnam. It's not going to be enough to say that war is nasty, and that's what happens when you start one. It's not going to be enough to say that the perpetrators were following orders, that they weren't well trained or that they were poorly supervised. They're going to be made into scapegoats, and the self-righteous men and women who committed the greater crime will be self-righteous about these poor soldiers as well. And I don't say poor soldiers because I think what they did is okay, or because I think they don't deserve punishment for what they did.

I say it because at least some of those guards probably did what they did to go along with their buddies. Sadistic leaders wanted to soften the prisoners up for interrogation, or to punish them for getting out of line. They already regarded their prisoners as animals, and they would prove it. Now the only way for an underling soldier to do the right thing is to stand out from the group, to refuse to go along, to make yourself conspicuous for your disobedience. And that's about the hardest thing for anyone to do, because refusal to go along means ostracism, and when you're far away from home, away from your family and other anchors, and the only friends you have are the ones you work with every day, you are not going to stand out, you are not going to refuse to go along. You are going to do what the others are doing.

So I've taken a while to say what we should do now. The most urgent thing to do is change our leadership. Chamberlain had to go after Munich, and Bush has to go after Iraq. I won't say that Kerry is our Churchill, but he's our only choice. We know that Bush and his advisors won't do anything constructive in this situation. They're going to grant fake sovereignty to the Iraqis on June 30, they're going to keep being dishonest with themselves, which means they aren't going to admit they've made any mistakes. Without that admission, we can't begin to put things right. And if we don't put things right, we'll be amazed at how much worse things can get.

If we were to pull out of Iraq tomorrow, a lot of interesting things would happen there. Not all of them would be good. I expect that by and large, and gradually, things would get better than they are now. We probably wouldn't see a lot of unity among the three regions of the country: the north, the center, and the south. We might see more warfare than we care for, and a lot of developments that look threatening to us. Yes, it could turn into the sort of haven for our enemies that Afghanistan became under the Taliban. On the whole, though, it's hard to see that conditions in Iraq would become much worse than they are now. The Iraqis want their country back. I don't think they're going to turn over any part of it to Al Qaeda, the way the Taliban did in Afghanistan. The Iraqis are too smart to do something like that - how's that for a helpful observation about national character? - and they're too smart to start a civil war, too.

That's kind of a flip way of saying they have too much else to do. If we were to leave there, I think we'd see a lot of interesting politics, equivalent in its way to the ten years or so after the British left their American colonies in the early 1780s. You'd see a lot of conflict, and a nation trying to refashion itself. We went through a cruel civil war before we worked things out, and we'd have to be willing to see Iraq go through something like that, too. But it would make a difference that the Iraqis were building a new state with a legitimate government, without an occupying army and foreign administrators around to interfere.

Well, we're not going to leave tomorrow, so we have to ask what would happen if we leave more slowly. And we have to ask what part the UN will play as we get out of there. More than one commentator, from Wesley Clark to a British official with the UN, has said that we need to pay close attention to the political process in Iraq as we try to disengage ourselves from the place. People who know Iraq know this isn't an easy job - they know the chances of failure are pretty good at this point. I won't try to summarize their line of argument right here - I can say though that their remarks on the radio came across clearly enough. We have sophisticated analysts out there who can help us: they serve in the UN and in other posts all over the world. We need their advice.

We are the only country in the world right now that thinks the UN shouldn't play a leading part in the political transition coming up in Iraq. We have given the UN its current advisory role only as a last resort: we couldn't see any other way out of the problems we created for ourselves. The UN is indeed our only way out now - out of our problems and out of the country. If we give real responsibility to the UN and to the Iraqis themselves, now, we could still redeem something from the situation, even if we have to admit our mistakes. But even if isn't the right phrase here: the only way to redeem anything from the situation is if we admit our mistakes.

Most importantly, intelligent disengagement means we would have a real opportunity to resume the war we should be fighting. We wouldn't be distracting ourselves with blame, when the truly big mistakes go unpunished and even unnoticed. We have made a horrible mistake here, and somebody has to say so. I don't hear Kerry saying so. Somebody with stature has to say it: this war is wrong, and we have to confess it. Then we have to seek forgiveness, atone if that's possible, and fight again. When we fight again, let's pick the right enemy.