Wednesday, December 21, 2005

Opponents of the War in Iraq Need a Strategy

Telegraph | News | I have been beaten and tortured, says tyrant

Did Americans torture Hussein? He's getting what he deserves, you say? Remember that the important matter isn't really what Hussein says, or even what Americans did to him. It's what people believe about what he says that counts. After Abu Ghraib and everything else they've heard, people in the region will believe that Hussein is probably telling the truth. The Butcher of Baghdad has become the Lion of Baghdad in a few short weeks, and we have lost another propaganda skirmish. Did you expect three years ago that Hussein would accuse us of torture, and that people would believe him? Did you expect three years ago that Hussein would have more credibility in the region than we do? And we think we're going to lead the way to democracy?

I still wish I could remember what I wrote about torture a few weeks ago. It wasn't meant to be, I guess. The character of these pieces is that I explore what's on my mind now. I won't be able to reconstruct what was on my mind then. Remember this argument, then, because it's the thread that runs through all of the debate about whether or not the CIA or any other agency of the United States ought to be able to mistreat prisoners of war. The United States needs the help of other countries to win this war. It can't win the current war in Iraq alone, but here I'm talking about the larger war against Al Qaeda. If the United States mistreats the people it captures in the course of that war, it won't get the assistance it needs. We are in a new world here. We cannot win the war that started on September 11 alone.

For over three years now, I've been angry about the war in Iraq. I was angry about it the day Bush first intimated that the overthrow of Saddam Hussein was his vaunted goal, the feted next step in the so-called war on terror. I must realize now that anger, now vented, won't do much to change our policy. We don't have that many fence-sitters anymore. People have made up their minds about the war, and the country is roughly two to one against it. The people who think the war will advance our goals won't change their minds at this point. The big problem now is that the people who are against the war don't have much cohesion. They can't agree about what we should do next, and they haven't gathered their ideas and their political force around a strong set of leaders. As a result, their anger and their desire to effect a change of course have not had much influence. It's like a pot of boiling water evaporating to steam: lots of heat and turmoil down below, and not much effect from the steam above. The steam, not pressurized, can't exert any force. Somehow the anti-war movement has to exert some force.

My belief is that as long as we talk about timetables for withdrawal and the like, the people who oppose the war will continue to be ineffectual. People who speak against the war in Iraq need to fashion a strategy for prosecuting the war against Al Qaeda. The administration has such a strategy. Victory in Iraq will bring democracy to the region, and that will so weaken Al Qaeda that it won't be a threat to us anymore. It doesn't matter that the strategy is based on the false premise that democratic politics will make Al Qaeda ineffectual. It's a strategy nevertheless. If the Democrats, Republicans, and independents who oppose the war don't formulate a broad strategy to counter the administration's, they'll be stuck in a reactive mode. If all the war's opponents can offer is a timetable for withdrawal, they won't have a plan that anyone can get behind. Though people don't say it, everyone feels uncomfortable about leaving Iraq having no idea about what's next. If we leave Iraq without any kind of plan at all for what's next, that really will be a defeat.

So you want to ask now, what would such a strategy look like? I've said these things about what we should do so often that I think it must be boring by now. Yet mostly I say these things in private, and it's been a while since I wrote them down in one place. The first thing we need to do is admit to the rest of the world that the invasion of Iraq was a huge mistake. We can find a way to do that without losing face. We can maintain the honor of our armed forces and also admit to our allies, in the Middle East and elsewhere, that the war in Iraq ought not to have occurred. The second part of this plan is to withdraw from Iraq in a way that takes political factors into account. This process is a complicated one, and requires us to work closely with our allies, and with many different groups inside Iraq. Our current political leaders have shown no willingness or ability to engage in this process, so talking about it in detail is a discouraging exercise.

The third part of this strategy is to renew the war against Al Qaeda. To do that, we need to reestablish our military strength in Afghanistan. We also need to go to work in Pakistan. The earthquake there gives us an unmatched opportunity to do good there. We need their friendship. They deserve our help. If we can establish a political, military, and humanitarian presence in Afghanistan, and a humanitarian presence in Pakistan, we will have done so much to correct the mistakes of the last three years. Let's make the first non-quake related project the construction of an interstate highway system in Afghanistan. We need the transportation network for our own purposes, and the whole region would benefit from it. What a symbol of success we'd have. If we help the Pakistanis who lost their homes and livelihoods in the earthquake, we'll have another good reason to be active in the area, and a multitude of good deeds to create good will. We badly need to talk with people in that area. We can't win the war against Al Qaeda without bringing American goodness to south Asia. American goodness is precisely the opposite of what we've shown during the occupation of Iraq.

Gloomy conservatives of the present - Michael Barone

Gloomy conservatives of the present | csmonitor.com

If America Left Iraq - Nir Rosen

If America Left Iraq

Sunday, December 18, 2005

Bush Says U.S. Is Winning in Iraq, Sacrifices Ahead

Bloomberg.com: U.S.

All the talk is about troop levels, a timetable for troop withdrawals, and the cost of the war. We're also talking about torture, limits to surveillance in the United States, and democratization in Iraq. Before you try to reach a judgment about any of these issues, ask yourself about the author of the situation we are in now. Ask yourself you have confidence in this leader, who is trying so hard to vindicate himself. He says that we are winning the war in Iraq, and he asks you to have confidence that he is right. But we have no reason to believe anything this man says. He says that to give up his project in Iraq now would be an act of recklessness. The act of recklessness right now is to believe that our president knows what he is doing.

Ask yourself these questions as you decide whether or not to believe Mr. Bush. The questions are not designed to be fair to the president. They highlight what he has actually done, as opposed to what he thinks he has done.

What do you think of a president who, a year and a half after 9/11, attacked a country that had nothing to do with 9/11?

What do you think of a president who authorizes the NSA to spy on American citizens without judicial oversight?

What do you think of a president who thinks it is alright to imprison the citizens of other countries in secret? Who wants to mistreat prisoners in order to force them to give us information?

Here is the most troubling question of all. What confidence can you have in a leader who does not understand the relationship between political and military problems? Who cannot coordinate political and military initiatives in order to solve problems in both areas? Bush has outlined a strategy for victory, as he calls it. The only path to victory, even on his own terms, requires a high degree of competence and sophistication in the handling of political and military processes in Iraq, in the region, and in the entire world. Yet Bush and his team have shown nothing but incompetence and simple mindedness ever since Bush announced that he wanted to overthrow Hussein by force.

He cannot ask for our loyalty and confidence now, and expect to get it. He has no record to stand on. In three years he has managed to make our country an object of fear, contempt, and hatred in one country after another. The entire world stood ready to help us take on our enemies in the fall of 2001, for our enemies were their enemies. Everyone not already against us was already for us. No one questioned our leadership, or doubted our willingness to fight. All counted themselves lucky to be fighting alongside us.

Now survey the state of the world at the end of 2005. The people of no country, not even Great Britain, want to fight with us now. People suspect us of dirty politics at every turn. No one has confidence in our judgment, or in our ability to fight any war - the one in Iraq or the one against Al Qaeda, to a successful conclusion. No one thinks any longer that our success and their success are linked.

Now the president asks for our support as he continues along the path that he has set out. He does not deserve our followership any more than he deserves to be our leader. He has proven his incompetence, his dishonesty, and his inability to accomplish what he says he is going to accomplish. We have to find a way to make this man irrelevant. If we go the way he says we ought to go, if we follow him as we have followed him in the past, we will keep failing.

Mr. Bush may be curiously right about one of his arguments. He says that to turn our back on Iraq now would be disastrous. We can say with some confidence that anything we do under his leadership is going to be disastrous. Yes, our failures under his leadership may be irreversible, so serious that we will crash no matter what we do. But the fight isn't over yet. We may find better leadership, and our opponents may make serious mistakes, too. If we continue to fight under incompetent leadership, though, we will find a collapse at the end of this path that no one could have conceived during the period of unity after 9/11.

Saturday, December 17, 2005

Editorial: Iraq war was wrong

asahi.com Iraq war was wrong:

"Including Japan, all nations that have supported or participated in the Iraq war ought to admit their mistakes now. Only then will it become possible to reorganize the framework of global cooperation with Iraq's reconstruction."

The Seattle Times: Nation & World: Patriot Act renewal stalls after spy report

"We need to be more vigilant," Sununu said, paraphrasing Benjamin Franklin: "Those that would give up essential liberty in pursuit of a little temporary security deserve neither liberty nor security."

Monday, December 12, 2005

Former Sen. Eugene McCarthy Dies

http://www-internal.mathworks.com: News

Emerson

“Don't be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an
experiment. The more experiments you make the better."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

Thursday, November 24, 2005

The Intelligence Issue - Another Pass

On Saturday I wrote a few paragraphs, then lost them when I cleaned the keyboard! Tip: always save your work before you do anything else. It happens to all of us.

Anyway, here is one of the main points from the original. If we had not failed in Iraq, we would not be so concerned with the intelligence issue now. Since we have failed, we want to find out who is responsible for the failure, and this seems a promising path, both for Bush's political opponents and for people who are simply dismayed by how things have turned out.

Here's another way to put it. This perspective highlights the irrelevance of the issue to the central problem, which is what we should do now. If Bush's operations in Iraq had turned out great, we wouldn't care how dishonest he was in getting us there. Because his operations there have turned out horribly, we'll rightly hold him responsible, and that's true even if he were totally honest in the arguments he used to get us there. Yes, it was maddening to listen to the way he argued his case back when the war was still in the future. Bush lost his credibility with me a long, long time ago. Now, though, we don't need to make judgments about what he says he's going to do. We've seen it. Now we can make judgments about what he has already done. We can see that what he has done is a complete failure.

That's not to say that Bush's honesty is a non-issue. We need to make judgments about his trustworthiness all the time. We don't need to hash out WMD and the CIA's intelligence for the hundredth time, though. We can judge Bush by his own statements here. All of the reasons Bush gave for going into Iraq were false. He has one left, the one that he clings to all the time now. We're going to bring democracy to Iraq and to the region. We're going to prevent a civil war, and help the Iraqi people secure their country. Who believes that anymore? Bush has failed by his own standards. That's the only standard you can judge a leader by. Has the leader achieved what he said he would achieve? Has he made things better, or worse? You answer that for yourself.

Reagan said that heroes aren't braver than the rest of us, they're just braver five minutes longer. I think abou that saying pretty often. It seems that success often comes from the fortitude that let's you stick it out just a little bit longer. You keep going even when you think it's not worth it anymore. Your dream seems further away then ever, but you persevere. That does take courage. Does this principle hold here? Will we succeed in Iraq if we hold on a little longer? Do you think that our current leadership has the capacity to achieve success, given their past record? You answer that for yourself.

Someday, the war in Iraq will end, and the Republicans will take credit for it. They'll say, "See, we told you that peace would come to that country eventually, if we just saw it through." They'll say that even if the end of the war eventually comes about because we left the country. It's not going to end while we're there, that's for sure.

For a long time, defenders of the war kept saying that if we left, a civil war would break out. We had to stay there to prevent that. Now the country's anarchy has deteriorated into civil war: a war of all against all, it seems, except that the country's ethnic groups do keep the conflict more organized than that. Now even the war's most vigorous defenders can't deny what we see all around us there. We have a civil war there now, and we have not been able to prevent it.

Now the war's defenders say that we can't fail in Iraq. We can't signal defeat to our opponents. We can't let the terrorists, as we like to call them, show the world that they can beat us. Soon we'll see that we've been failing in Iraq from the start. Yes, we removed Hussein from power, but that's not what we need to be doing. Saddam Hussein did not attack us on September 11. Let me say that again. Saddam Hussein did not attack us on September 11. He did not help those who did attack us. Let me say that again. He did not help those who did attack us. We cannot go around attacking countries because we think that some people in those countries might want to attack us in the future. Bush has said the opposite: if we think someone in another country might attack us in the future, we have to take action right now. After September 11, preemptive war is a necessity.

Well let's get something straight: the Iraq war was not preemptive and it certainly is not necessary. The commentators' idea that this was a war of choice is absurd. The war is both unnecessary and foolish. If you want to call a foolish mistake a choice, that's fine. It makes you look that much worse, if you admit that your crime was the result of a deliberate choice.

All right, I want to say this part as clearly as I can. The war in Iraq is a crime. That doesn't make criminals of the brave soldiers fighting the war. You can draw your own conclusions about the people who started the war. It doesn't matter what reasons they give to defend their aggression. They believe that the September 11 attacks justify any acts of self-defense they deem necessary. They believe that they have to undertake measures, even measures that violate the United Nations charter, in order to protect the United States from more attacks. They'll never admit that they've done something wrong. But even though the Democrats have been gutless wonders, and have declined to call the war a crime, historians will not be quite as bland. Let's hope they do have the courage to tell the truth. Maybe they'll read these essays someday after I'm gone, and they'll agree. They'll wonder why so few commentators said the truth - that the war is a crime. The only explanation is that no one is willing to say such things in the midst of a war, since it harms morale, and injures our fighting strength.

We have to do whatever is right and just and effective to absolve this crime. We can't win the war that started on September 11 from where we are now. We can't win the war in Iraq, either. To win the first we have to stop fighting the second. To win the first we have to pull out from Iraq and regroup. That is not cutting and running. Regrouping accomplishes a lot of practical tasks on the battlefield. When an army regroups, it readies itself for the next stage of the battle. It takes units that are scattered, leaderless and ineffective and makes them effective again. Weapons and water are distributed, assignments given, and leaders are connected with troops that need new orders. We need to regroup after the Iraq fiasco. We night to regroup in order to fight effectively again. Regrouping is not defeat.

That's not going to happen for the next three years, though, so we have to be patient. In the meantime, we have to find leaders who can help to plan the next stage of the war even though they do not hold power in our government. We have to be ready for the changes that are coming. We may not have hope now of rapid progress anywhere, but we have to act quickly when the time comes. We have to prepare.

That's all for tonight. Please visit The Last Jeffersonian, and please sign up for the journal on the home page if you haven't already!

Tuesday, November 22, 2005

Cheney too divisive to right Bush’s ship?

"Any suggestion that prewar information was distorted, hyped, fabricated by the leader of the nation is utterly false," Cheney said, decrying the "self-defeating pessimism" of many Democrats. He added that to begin withdrawing from Iraq now, as some lawmakers have suggested, "would be a victory for the terrorists."

We handed our enemies a huge victory when we dropped the first bomb on Baghdad in March 2003. In everything we have done since then, and in everything we have not done, we have made our enemies stronger. The purpose of warfare is to weaken your enemies until they cannot fight you anymore. As long as we follow Mr. Cheney, the opposite will hold: we will become weaker and our enemies will hold the initiative. We have one way to avoid the defeat that Mr. Cheney fears: follow Mr. Murtha.

Saturday, November 19, 2005

House Erupts in War Debate - Los Angeles Times

House Erupts in War Debate - Los Angeles Times

I need to add a few remarks about WMD to the previous remarks about torture.

The debate about intelligence failures and WMD in Iraq are non-issues. We have other problems to solve now. Let the historians analyze this issue.

It is an issue in that we need to know if Bush is trustworthy. He was dishonest in the arguments he made for war. But he adopted a whatever-it-takes approach, and he believed he was doing the right thing. He didn't think that what he was saying was dishonest.

Results are what count. No amount of honesty at the beginning would protect Bush now, when the results are so bad. And no amount of dishonesty at the beginning would matter much now if the results had been good. We're attacking Bush because the war has clearly failed. The arguments he used to justify the mistake won't help us decide what to do now.

So that's the three parts of the argument: (1) It's not an issue now, when we have other problems to solve. (2) Bush's honesty is an issue, but we already know about his dishonesty because he tied Hussein to al Qaeda in the planning and execution of the 9/11 attacks. (3) The key question now is results, not the nature of the arguments used to justify the war in the first place. The results have been bad, and we want to figure out what to do now.

That's all for now!

Iraq War Criticism Stalks Bush Overseas

Iraq War Criticism Stalks Bush Overseas

So the debate about the war grinds on here. Thanks to John Murtha for his courage and forcefulness. Here's a note I wrote to my spouse about Murtha's stand:

Hi Leslie,

I read a little more about Representative Murtha's remarks, and the White House's reaction. We can just pray now that we really have reached what people call the tipping point on this matter.

The trouble is, pulling out requires people who are adept at dealing with the political situation in Iraq. The administration has proven itself equally incompetent in both political and military matters over there. So we would be pulling out with no plans or preparations for our subsequent policy in Iraq, or elsewhere.

If we can start to look to Congress for leadership, that's great. But people certainly aren't accustomed to looking there.

Steve

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Take yourself back to September 11, 2001, and to the week that followed. What did you think about the future then? We all had different thoughts, in the midst of our shock and unity. Our thoughts about the future were certainly different from those we had on September 10. I've remembered my main thought many times since then: We need someone like Winston Churchill to lead us now, and I don't see any Winston Churchills around. Everyone hoped for the best from President Bush, but instead they got the worst.

Our unity at the time was a good thing. We needed it, both for comfort and to fight back. Now we're divided, so divided that it's hard to recall from day to day how cohesive we were in the days that followed September 11. Good leadership would have taken that cohesiveness and shaped a powerful force to deal with our enemies. Everyone wanted to serve, to do what was necessary. We wanted to do our part. The energy was palpable. I wanted to be an intelligence analyst, because I knew I'd be good at that. The entire country, and the rest of the world with us, was ready to go to work to defeat our enemies.

We dissipated that energy and broke that unity in Iraq. The desire to serve is gone. We don't know what's going to happen, and we certainly don't want to fight any more wars. We still need good leadership. Could you have predicted this unhappy division at this point in the war, this level of divisiveness just four years after the towers went down? What kind of leadership must it take to waste the patriotic response that welled up after the initial attack? If the response had dissipated gradually over the course of a generation or two, one could understand that. People who were too young to remember September 11 might not have the same instinctive feelings about it. But everyone who remembers what happened that day might have been united by that experience. Instead, we're fighting with each other now, just fifty months later. That's due to poor leadership, and terrible mistakes.

More significantly, could you have predicted that one of the main divisive issues would be whether or not we can torture our prisoners of war? The issue speaks for itself. Congress wants to pass a resolution that would prohibit torture: cruel and inhuman treatment, as the current phrase goes. The president and the vice-president say that they need freedom to use methods that will help us obtain information we need. Retired Admiral Stansfield Turner rightly calls Richard Cheney the vice-president for torture in a speech he delivers in England. Who could imagine, on September 12, 2001, that we would stumble on an issue like that only four years later? We cannot fight our enemies when we expend so much energy on an issue like this. We don't need to torture our prisoners, or mistreat them in ways that look like torture, in order to defeat our enemies. The only real motives for torture are revenge and a sense of control, not information. Our leaders believe that the resolution in Congress will tie their hands, make it so much more difficult to prosecute the war successfully. But we all know, again instinctively, that we can succeed in this war without treating our prisoners brutally. We all know it, and we're dismayed that our leaders have brought us to this point.

I've been saying this for so long now, and we must act on it: we need new leadership. We haven't ever tried to ignore our president before, certainly not in wartime, but we need to do that now. We need to find leadership elsewhere. Yes, our president holds a lot of power, but most of it depends on our willingness to follow. Absent that willingness, the president can't lead. We know now that he's unable to lead, and that he does not deserve our loyalty. It's not unpatriotic now to say, "Thank you very much, but we'll find our leaders elsewhere." We have to do it if we want to survive the war, let alone win it. I'd like to say that no mistake is so serious that it's irreparable, but I'm not sure about that. At least we can try to repair this mistake, but we have to do it soon. We can't wait.

Sunday, November 13, 2005

The Intelligence Issue

I can't believe we are still hung up on the issue of intelligence two and a half years into this war. The Democrats say that the Bush administration misled the country into the war by claiming a threat from weapons that didn't exist. Bush responds that the Democrats who voted for the war had access to the same intelligence he did. He says they're hypocrites and ready to rewrite the history of the origins of the war. The war was wrong as a moral decision, and it was wrong as a strategic decision. It was also illegal. The war was wrong on all three grounds, and the arguments required to make that case don't depend on the quality of the intelligence, or on our judgments about its signigicance. Iraq could have possessed all of the weapons materials that Bush said it possessed, and going to war would still have been a huge mistake. The debate about intelligence works to Bush's advantage, because it let's him respond with the kind of arguments he made in his Veteran's Day speech. When I hear the president call his critics deeply irresponsible, I know we have reached the bottom in this discussion.

Opponents of the war should remember something about this discussion. The president is sure he has done the right thing, and he's not going to change his mind. Yet many critics, including Democrats in Congress, talk as if they can change his mind. Remember that reporters and others have challenged Bush on the grounds for war for a long time now. They asked him less than a year into the war how he could justify the attack, given that we had not found any weapons. Bush responded, "What difference does it make?" He continued with the argument we have heard so many times since: The man was a threat. We had to get rid of him. Period.

Well, Bush was right when he said, "What difference does it make?," but not in a way he ever imagined. The weapons issue, and the intelligence issue, don't make a difference, The war was wrong whether or not Hussein had the weapons, or the materials, or the programs, or the desire. The war was justified only if Hussein posed an imminent threat. So rather than analyze the intelligence with hindsight, let's do a little threat analysis. Rather than ask how we could have blundered into a war we can't win because of bad intelligence, let's ask how we can win the war we should be fighting once we understand the threat better.

An imminent threat is one that's real and about to be carried out. It can't be imaginary, or doubtful, or far in the future. A fear is not a threat. A child is afraid of many things that aren't actually dangerous. After September 11, people became afraid of things that weren't actually threats. Iraq was one of them. The Bush administration argued after September 11 that we had to reconceive the threats around us. Before 9/11, we underestimated the potency of our enemies - we underestimated their ability to do us harm. We would not make the same mistake again. Now we would preempt our enemies. We would attack them before they could attack us. We had to redefine our idea of what counted as an imminent threat in the new world that existed after September 11.

Whenever someone argues that it's time to revise a tested principle, watch out. The person is going to advocate a course of action that's unsound. That's not to say that the bits conventional wisdom we use to help us make decisions are the only or the best guides available. Some principles, though, rise above conventional wisdom. They're carefully reasoned and tested through time. They have to do with decisions where a lot is at stake. They're anchored with the lessons and experiences of many generations of people just like us. The principles that tell us when a preemptive war is justifed are among these higher-level rules. They tell us that you can't attack someone simply out of fear. You can't attack someone because you think they might attack you sometime in the future. The threat has to be real and present.

We didn't think that Hussein's military activies justified a preemptive war before 9/11. The only way to argue that Iraq posed an imminent threat after 9/11 was to make a connection between Hussein and Al Qaeda. If Hussein actively cooperated with Al Qaeda, and he had the weapons we said he had, then he was an imminent threat. That's exactly the argument that Bush and his advisors made. They actually tried to convince people that Hussein had helped Al Qaeda carry out the 9/11 attacks. The argument was ridiculous on its face, but enough people believed it that the administration carried the day, and won approval from Congress to go to war. He might have found a way to launch the war even if he had not had enough votes in Congress, and that sense of inevitability about the fighting may have led some Democrats to vote for what they regarded as a foregone conclusion anyway.

Remember, Bush sincerely believes that he's doing what's best for the country. People sometimes admit their mistakes, but they're much less likely to admit incompetence. Bush clearly does not know what he is doing. That's why he says things like, "What difference does it make?" A debate about intelligence makes no logical sense because it really doesn't matter whether or the intelligence was bad or good. He only posed an imminent threat if he was in league with bin Laden, and that charge was laughable. It was so clearly cooked up that only people carried away by fear could believe it. And Bush played upon fear. He's the first president we've had who could accurately be called a fear monger.

A debate about intelligence makes no practical sense either, because no one who launched the war will admit the mistake. No one on the Bush team will say, "Whoa, you're right - we over-estimated the threat from Hussein and attacked the wrong guy as a result. Better go back and rethink this one." If the administration won't rethink its actions, why try to persuade it to do so? The citizenry already believes that Bush blew it. How do the Democrats gain by saying, "You misled us into war"? They don't gain any advantage in the debate, and they give Bush an opportunity to counter-charges. The only reasonable thing to do is to make Bush irrelevant, and to find leadership that's both competent and courageous enough to do everything we need to do. It may take three years or more to do that, but that's okay.








Saturday, November 12, 2005

Bush Contends Partisan Critics Hurt War Effort - New York Times

Bush Contends Partisan Critics Hurt War Effort - New York Times:

"The stakes in the global war on terror are too high, and the national interest is too important, for politicians to throw out false charges," Mr. Bush said. "These baseless attacks send the wrong signal to our troops and to an enemy that is questioning America's will. As our troops fight a ruthless enemy determined to destroy our way of life, they deserve to know that their elected leaders who voted to send them to war continue to stand behind them."

Sunday, October 23, 2005

Patriotism

Back in 1975 or so, William Appleman Williams came to give a lecture at Reed College. I only knew that he was a well-known historian, and I wanted to hear him mostly because I hadn't heard many lectures by well-known historians. I didn't know much about his or his writing. I didn't know he was from the South.

When we was well into the talk, he criticized Abraham Lincoln for his war of aggression against the South. Williams didn't mount a lengthy attack, but it was clear that he wasn't mispeaking, that his remarks weren't open to misunderstanding. I had never heard such a thing before.

Naturally in my schooling, Abraham Lincoln was next to God and Jesus in the hierarchy of good people. I hadn't thought that anyone, least of all a thoughtful, well-known historian, could think that Abraham Lincoln was a bad guy. But sectional bitterness persisted, a century after Reconstruction.

I wanted to recall Williams' talk because it's related to current discussions of patriotism. I don't think Williams was unpatriotic to criticize Lincoln's war policy. And it's not unpatriotic to criticize Bush's war policy. When Cheney attacks the war's critics as unpatriotic, he makes a huge error. Patriotism is not what's at issue here.

Tuesday, October 18, 2005

Bush to Visit Reagan Library

Ventura County Star: "President Bush is scheduled to attend the ribbon-cutting ceremony of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library's Air Force One Pavilion in Simi Valley Friday. Invited by officials at the library, President Bush and his wife plan to attend the 11 a.m. ceremony and a 1 p.m. lunch...."

Look at this one. Recently I read that the Reagan Library sent a cease and desist letter to a political candidate who wanted to display his own photographs of himself with Reagan at his website. The Library forced him to remove the photographs because they implied an endorsement from Reagan, even though they did not hold the rights to the photographs. As the keepers of Reagan's memory and legacy, they reason, they have final say over how Reagan's image is used.

But now look what they've done in connection with an upcoming ceremony at the Library. They think they look good when they have the president of the United States come to the ribbon-cutting ceremony for Air Force One. Instead, they associate Reagan's memory with the living image of the worst president we have ever had. What a double standard! An unknown, aspiring candidate who wants to show a picture of himself shaking hands with Reagan receives a cease and desist order. That's an unauthorized use of Reagan's image, they say? But if the Reagan Library can brush up its own image with a presidential visit, no travesty is too great. Who gave the Reagan Library authority to stain the legacy of this great man with the squalor and crimes of our current president? How can they think that having a president like this one present during this significant ceremony will benefit Reagan's legacy? Bush brings shame with him wherever he goes.

No scandal or neglect of Ulysses Grant or Warren Harding equals the horrible mistake that Bush has made. No paranoid spying or dirty tricks by Nixon approximates the discredit that Bush has brought on this great nation. Certainly no disgrace of Clinton's second term comes close. With one war in the spring of 2003, Bush proclaimed to the world, "We don't care to lead you anymore. We don't even consider you worthy of our leadership. We intend to throw off responsibility for the world system of law and politics we've created. We'll do what we want." The results of that proclamation were predictable enough, and we see the seeds of those results around us now. No country looks to us for leadership now. No country expects us to act in anything but our own interests. No country can feel safe in a system where the powerful attack the weak. In this case, the attacker is not only powerful: the very guarantor of peace and security broke loose and wreaked death out of an elemental surge of fear and a lust for revenge.

I gave a speech at the Reagan Library once. It was in the spring of 2002. Mark Burson, the executive director of the Reagan Foundation, invited me to come to the Library to talk about Reagan. Not so long after that visit, the Library's leadership changed. The current director of the Reagan Foundation is Duke Blackwood. According to the Ventura County Star, he played hardball with the docents that the library dismissed on the grounds that they were too old to carry out their duties. He said in a letter that if they talked with the press, they would suffer consequences. I'm not sure how you can threaten volunteers you've just dismissed, but he did it.

Anyway, Mr. Blackwood now thinks he as a big event going with the opening of the pavilion that houses Air Force One. They've been preparing for this important gathering for a long time. They've raised lots of money for the pavilion, and the opening ceremony is a good way to say thank you for your contributions: and we hope to see more of you and your checkbook. What a victory the Library thought it had achieved when the president accepted its invitation to speak at the ceremony! We are proud to present ...the president himself! The young, vigorous and handsome George W. Bush, president of the United States. The true bearer of Reagan's bright vision into our country's hopeful future.

It's not bright anymore, and hope's going to disappear fast when our citizens discover what this president has done to our reputation. Keep him far away from Reagan and his memory. Keep him far away from the Reagan Library and anyplace associated with Reagan's name. Send a cease and desist letter: no person of such low stature, who brought shame upon his country, shall associate himself with the memory of this great leader. No person who ruined Reagan's strong, hopeful vision, who razed the bright city on a hill and replaced it with pyramids of naked prisoners, shall set foot on the ground where Reagan is buried. It could imply an endorsement.

Saturday, October 08, 2005

What's Wrong With Cutting and Running? - by Gen. (ret.) William E. Odom

What's Wrong With Cutting and Running? - by Gen. (ret.) William E. Odom

The Fallacy of Cut and Run vs. Stay the Course

Well we've heard the president speak again about the war on terror. A couple of days ago he addressed the National Endowment for Democracy about why we should continue the fight. His speechwriter did a good job smithing the words, but he wrote the whole argument based on a false premise. The premise comes in two parts: if we pull out of Iraq, we'll walk away from the war on terror, and if we want to prosecute the war on terror, we have to stay in Iraq.

Why don't the Democrats challenge Bush on this argument? Why won't anyone look closely at the false logic Bush uses to support his claim that we have to fight on in Iraq? Before we look at the premise, we need to get the terms right. Bush's favored phrase is the war on terror. But terror is a method, not an enemy. It's like saying the war on bombing, or the war on stabbing, or the war on subversion. Our enemy is Al Qaeda, not terror. Al Qaeda is a difficult enemy to fight, and it uses a lot of different methods. But at least we should be clear about who we're fighting, and what we're fighting.

Let's return to the president. He does get to set the terms of debate. This president, though, has had a lot of freedom. He's a fear mongerer and a panderer, and his opponents don't call him on it. All of his speeches set up choices and outcomes that make his opponents look terrible if they disagree with him. Rather than forcing him to change the logic of his argument, his opponents just keep quiet and hope people don't notice. They're not quiet all the time, but they don't speak loud enough or long enough. The White House's propaganda operation easily overwhelms the tiny squeaks that occasionally emerge from the opposition.

Having addressed those throat-clearing items, lets return to Bush's bad logic. What's wrong with setting Cut and Run against Stay the Course as the two options available to us now? Cut and Run means we admit defeat and give up the fight. Stay the Course means we show resolve and pursue the fight to the end. But those aren't the only choices, or the only outcomes. Cut and Run actually means we fight where we should be fighting. Stay the Course actually means we continue a futile and weakening struggle amongst a population that does not want us. Bush says that his opponents want to admit defeat, and that his policies are the only road to victory. If you look at what he's done, though, Bush led us into defeat and characterized the calamity as a long hard struggle for democracy.

Here's the problem: if you define your options too narrowly, you essentially operate with blinders on. If you misperceive the structure of your situation, you can't even start to think productively about the best strategy. That's what has happened to our thinking about Iraq. We can't get past timetables, defeat, retreat, morale, credibility, staying the course, and democracy for all in the region. We judge our options as acceptable or unacceptable based on the wrong criteria.

The most general criteria would be: What's in our interests? What's in the interests of the Iraqi people we'd like to help? What's in the interests of the entire region, from Morocco in the west to Pakistan in the east? What's in the interests of the smaller region, Iraq and its neighbors? What's in the interest of world peace and a good life for all of us? Now I know the Republicans say they are asking those questions, but they've had bad results with their actions. So we have to ask if their strategy is any good.

General Odom asks why we don't cut and run. What would be so bad about that? His article is a good one. You can find the link for it above this entry in the weblog. If I had more time, I'd like to summarize his points and offer my own comments on them. Right here, I'll distill the main strategy he suggests: withdraw from Iraq, repair relations with our friends, and fight the war we should be fighting. General Odom's strategy reveals the fallacy of Bush's current argument, that if we withdraw from Iraq, we stop fighting, and if we want to continue fighting, we have to stay in Iraq.

Success in the war against Al Qaeda does not require that we stay in Iraq. Success in the war against Al Qaeda requires that we scale down our operations in Iraq, regroup, and figure out the best way to prosecute the war against our enemies. Iraq has absorbed so much of our energy and resources that we don't even think about the war against Al Qaeda, except in connection with the conflict in Iraq. The administration thinks that winning the war in Iraq and winning the war against Al Qaeda amount to the same thing. But they're not the same thing. If we achieve our goals in Iraq, we will not have won the war against Al Qaeda. It's not clear now how we can defeat Al Qaeda, but we know from experience how not to do it. We know we can't do it by continuing our current operations in Iraq.

Here's a quotation, paraphrased from Einstein: The definition of insanity is to keep doing what you have been doing, and expect different results. It's time for a new strategy in the war against Al Qaeda. The beginning of a new strategy is recognition that the war in Iraq and the war against Al Qaeda are not the same thing. Victory in Iraq does not mean victory over Al Qaeda. We have to recognize that, at this moment, Iraq has to solve its own problems. That's what they want to do, and letting them do it serves our own interests. When we recognize that, we'll begin to see how to prosecute the war against Al Qaeda. Until we end this great diversion in Iraq, our blinders will prevent us from seeing the next steps we should take in the real war.

Thursday, October 06, 2005

3rd Party National Conference

3rd Party National Conference

Geography Lesson - Bush plans 'major speech' on Iraq, terrorism - Oct 6, 2005

CNN.com - Bush plans 'major speech' on Iraq, terrorism - Oct 6, 2005:

"It's time the president tells us how he plans on getting us out of the hole he's dug us so deeply into. And just to stop digging, as the old saying goes, is not enough," said Sen. Joseph Biden, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

The senator from Delaware urged Bush to convene a summit of Iraq's neighbors to hammer out a broader peace for the region, as the United States did in Afghanistan and during the Balkan wars of the 1990s.

Has Reagan Deserted the Conservatives? - Flashback by NR Editors

Flashback by NR Editors on Reagan on National Review Online

Wednesday, October 05, 2005

Quotes on Failure and Adversity - Favorite Quotes - Random Terrain

Quotes on Failure and Adversity - Favorite Quotes - Random Terrain

Center for Small Government: Carla Howell

How Could I Live Without Filing Taxes?
Copyright 2001 by Carla Howell
All rights reserved.

I love doing my taxes
when each spring time comes, don't you?
Instead of garden walks and ball games,
I get to work my weekends too.

How could I live without filing taxes?
What would I do with my free time?
Where would I go on a beautiful Sunday?
Good thing there's someone to make up my mind.

Subtract line 6 from line 5, and if that's more than zero.
Then enter the amount from Schedule A line 21.
Multiply line 7 by .03 and if that is smaller than .8 of line 4.
Then deduct that from your deduction. Isn't this fun?

How could I live without filing taxes?
What would I do with my free time?
Where would I go on a beautiful Sunday?
Good thing I won't have to make up my mind.

My favorite part of filling out my tax forms
is when I get to write a check for whatever is due.
'Cuz the government can get such incredible bargains with my money
like a billion-dollar bridge or a forty-dollar metal screw.

How could I live without filing taxes?
What would I do with my free time?
How could I spend all of my money?
Good thing there's someone who can spend it just fine - for me.
Lucky, lucky, lucky, lucky me!

Center for Small Government: Carla Howell

Tuesday, October 04, 2005

Sunday, October 02, 2005

Two Definitions

Callow - Lacking adult maturity or experience; immature.

Clown - a. A buffoon or jester who entertains by jokes, antics, and tricks in a circus, play, or other presentation. b. One who jokes and plays tricks.

Thursday, September 29, 2005

Civil War in Iraq

So how is the conflict in Iraq not a civil war? More and more in the news now, you read the dread phrase: Iraq is slipping into a civil war. It used to be, if we pull out Iraq will slip into a civil war. Well we stayed there and Iraq is slipping into a civil war anyway. But the phrasing is strange, because Iraq slipped into a civil war a long time ago. And let's stop using the word slip here. We administered a sudden shock to Iraq in the spring of 2003. We removed its government, disbanded its army and its civil service, and failed in our efforts to rebuild these institutions. The civil war began the day the first oil pipeline was bombed and the first arms depot was looted. Iraq suddenly descended into civil war two and a half years ago, and we haven't wanted to recognize it.

So what shall we do about that? The answer is the same as it has been from the beginning. Replace our leadership with leadership that recognizes the truth. You can't expect competence from leaders who use dishonesty to advance their goals. It doesn't matter here whether the self-deception we see in our president and his advisors is at all purposeful or not. It doesn't matter whether or not our leaders know they are being dishonest. They just are. A comparison between what they say and the evidence on the ground shows it. Leaders who practice dishonesty, and who display the incompetence that liars always display, have to be replaced.

"Well, how do we do that?", you're going to ask. We just reelected our leaders, and the inauguration was only eight months ago. We aren't going to impeach our president, and we can't ignore his power. We can do something to make him irrelevant, though. We can reduce his influence. We can find other leaders who are honest, who are willing to make plans and say things that that they know will bring vituperation down on them. So far we have not found those leaders in the Democratic party. We have not found them in the military, and the military is in a complicated position when it comes to politics. It took Cindy Sheehan, a citizen with no standing at all in the eyes of our leaders in Washington, to give voice to the anguish and anger that so many Americans feel now. But her voice isn't going to change our policies unless people with power act now.

The only institution with power to counteract the president is our Congress. Congress has been unbelievably craven about this war so far. A few of our representatives - Senator Byrd comes to mind - have expressed strong protest against this war, but for the most part the institution has been mushy, quiet, compliant, and hopeless in its ability offer any leadership that opposes the unbelievably bad policies coming out of the executive branch. They've been so quiet that voters just seem to expect more of the same: they don't even look to their representatives anymore to give voice to their anger. What an institution. What a failure.

So that leaves the bloggers, the demonstrators, and the voters who elect new representatives in 2006. No one seems to expect that the Democrats can take either house a year from now, when we have our midterm elections. I have just one letter from Edward Kennedy to indicate that the Democrats even want to win a majority in the Senate in 2006. Party politics has become so bad that I think the Democrats want to remain out of power until 2008, so they can blame the Republicans for every bad outcome and have a better shot at winning the White House. Another winning strategy from a party that seems to have no direction to begin with!

Well I have to be careful not to renew my bitterness here. Time to sign off for now!

Wednesday, September 21, 2005

Telegraph | News | Your view: civil war in Iraq?

A clearly stated response from a reader of the Telegraph (http://telegraph.co.uk):

"The withdrawal of troops should not be a point of discussion in my mind. Britain and the US, together with some other allies, invaded Iraq with the expressed intention of ousting an evil dictator who oppressed his people and plundered the country's rich resources. As defined, this was a noble thing to do. There may have been other underlying agendas. However plausible these may be they remain the subject of speculation. From the start, it should have been obvious to all that removing one system of government results in a state of disorder, into which the invading parties must move to avoid chaos. Having taken on the saviour role, whether invited or not, the action of invasion carries with it a moral commitment to support and help the invaded country until a stable government is created that can take over. As one of the invading parties our elected leaders chose the invasion route and committed Britain to this responsibility. So the question is not whether we should pull out or not, as the answer has to be no until a stable and functioning government is created, and duly elected. If Britain and its allies were to withdraw now, the region would definitely fall into civil war and chaos. I feel for our brave soldiers and their families and loved ones. Maybe we should be careful with whom we allow to make such decisions on our behalf in the future." - Adam Jackson

Monday, September 19, 2005

The Writings of Burt Prelutsky

The Writings of Burt Prelutsky

"A Few Words By and About Ronald Reagan" by Burt Prelutsky

"A Few Words By and About Ronald Reagan" by Burt Prelutsky

A Chapter in Chesterton

Read this chapter in G. K. Chestertons' The Everlasting Man: The War of the Gods and Demons. Compare his remarks about war with the psychological elements that affect the war we are in now.

Keywords for this chapter: Hannibal, Punic Wars, Rome, Carthage

Tuesday, August 30, 2005

Get Results from Good Political Judgment

Bush's critics criticize so many things about him: he's not smart, he looks goofy, he takes a long vacation at his ranch when he should work in Washington. He mixes religion and politics too freely. His supporters mix religion and politics too freely. He's not articulate. Okay, so we know you don't like the guy. None of these criticisms is relevant. None of them gets at the question of results. None of them evaluates the president's performance with the single standard that matters: do his policies accomplish what the president himself says he wants to accomplish?

Let's take Bush's predecessor for purposes of comparison. A lot of people didn't like Clinton. He played around with an intern in the White House while his wife was traveling and lied about it. He did a lot of other dumb things before and after he became president, mostly because he couldn't keep his pants zipped up. Clinton admired Kennedy's leadership, and he seemed to emulate Kennedy's treatment of women, too. But no one that I know of ever said that Clinton was incompetent. Whatever you thought of his private missteps, he clearly knew how to do the job. It didn't matter whether he was a Baptist or a Catholic, whether he'd been a Rhodes scholar or a C student, whether he took long vacations or short ones. Not once during the impeachment proceedings did Clinton's opponents in Congress claim that he was incompetent.

Bush as a leader is clearly out of his depth. He cannot reason his way from the situation we are in to a desired outcome. The people he has selected to help him cannot do it either. The things he says are not true. He makes things up. Few people trust him. He's untrustworthy not because he's a schemer and a double-crosser, but because he doesn't know how to make judgments about the information he receives. He's energetic and he's shrewd about how to appeal to people's fears and prejudices, but he has poor political judgment. Poor judgment leads to a host of failures and deficiencies. Among other things, it explains why Bush's statements about the war in Iraq have so little connection with what's real.

Wednesday, August 17, 2005

Cult of Death Revisited

Hello Steve,

It is interesting to revisit what you wrote in Sept/04. Some comments: The enemy has no "organisation" - just separate little cabals of fanatics - except they are larger in Iraq - we are fighting them where they are - and thus we are attracting them to where we are in Iraq - including here in the US and UK - they will come here anyway - they have not been at all deterred from that - so we wait.

We effectively destroyed any willingness of other countries to help us - the fanatics are too separate to destroy their arms - they have no central base except maybe a supply of explosives - we would be surprised I believe to find out who is supplying them - you cannot destroy a fanatic's morale - they have cell fones and the internet to communicate - and they can act wherever and whenever they please because they are not cohesive - and finally - we know very little about who - when - where - etc, and no way of finding out anything definitive.

We are in a terrible mess - I don't think even 500,000 troops on the ground in Iraq would solve it - things would have been solved to some extent had we stayed in Afghanistan and neutered Osama.

Al Greffenius


This article by David Brooks on the attack in Beslan is good. So is the article by Paul Krugman, also published today at http://nytimes.com.

If our enemies are as Brooks describes them, and he describes them accurately, here are the implications for the war we are in:

- We have to destroy our enemies' organization, not arrest or kill them one by one.

- We have to fight our enemies where they are, not wait for them to come to us.

- We have to have much assistance from other countries and other organizations to fight and destroy our enemies where they are.

- To defeat this enemy, we have accomplish the same things that warfare has always had to accomplish: disarm the enemy fighters, destroy their morale, destroy their ability to communicate and to act. Usually success in these activities involves killing many fighters, but it also involves sustained operations against the entire enemy organization.

- Lastly, to be successful in any of these things, we have to know our enemies well: where they are, who they are, how they operate, what their plans are, what their strengths and weaknesses are, where their resources are.

All five of these points are so obvious that it feels awkward to write them down. But, since we finished the war in Afghanistan and launched the attack on Iraq, we have not paid attention to any of them.

Tuesday, August 16, 2005

Some Bumper Stickers for Our Times

Pro-Democrat Progressive Anti-Right Wing Products











CBS News | A Bad Week For Protesting Mom

CBS News | A Bad Week For Protesting Mom | August 16, 2005:

"The campsite has close to a thousand white crosses, each representing GIs who, like Sheehan's son Casey, were killed in Iraq.

While Sheehan has gotten a lot of support in her vigil, and has been joined by dozens of sympathizers, she's also sparked some opposition.

Monday night, a pickup truck tore through the rows of white crosses.

The crosses stretched along the road at the Crawford, Texas, camp, bore the names of fallen U.S. soldiers."

Sunday, August 14, 2005

Someone Tell the President the War Is Over - Frank Rich

Someone Tell the President the War Is Over - New York Times

What lies ahead now in Iraq instead is not victory, which Mr. Bush has never clearly defined anyway, but an exit (or triage) strategy that may echo Johnson's March 1968 plan for retreat from Vietnam: some kind of negotiations (in this case, with Sunni elements of the insurgency), followed by more inflated claims about the readiness of the local troops-in-training, whom we'll then throw to the wolves. Such an outcome may lead to even greater disaster, but this administration long ago squandered the credibility needed to make the difficult case that more human and financial resources might prevent Iraq from continuing its descent into civil war and its devolution into jihad central.

Thus the president's claim on Thursday that "no decision has been made yet" about withdrawing troops from Iraq can be taken exactly as seriously as the vice president's preceding fantasy that the insurgency is in its "last throes." The country has already made the decision for Mr. Bush. We're outta there. Now comes the hard task of identifying the leaders who can pick up the pieces of the fiasco that has made us more vulnerable, not less, to the terrorists who struck us four years ago next month.

Post at http://blog.radioleft.com

Radio Left :: Will the Media Marginalize Cindy Sheehan At Some Point?: "Re: Will the Media Marginalize Cindy Sheehan At Some Point?

by iluvbush at 04:16PM (CDT) on Aug 13, 2005

Re: Will the Media Marginalize Cindy Sheehan At Some Point?

by iluvbush at 04:16PM (CDT) on Aug 13, 2005

this woman cimdy is mentally ill it is against the law to exploit such persons you left winged animals have also lost your minds as well your promoting such a thing is just wrong and unjust it is clear by most people that she is in fact mentally ill how does one sit there placing irational demands on our great president as far as her son being killed in the war that is the chance that all americans take when they infact join the military at times people die during a war thousands of people have died for many centuries in the usa fighting in war how many people do you actually think have reacted the way in which cindy is acting none besides her this is an outrageous example of your liberal stance on all things you liberals are so non reality based that it is just unamerican we as americans when we are small children are generally taught that tamtrums are not appropriate nor are demands i mean what will you and other lib organizations encourage next her to take someone hostage i am just annoyed and now on your homepage you are asking for air time on the media why would you promote such crap that is in fact what you are doing

most importantly cindy will soon end up in the psych ward as she clearly needs to be now and later she will lawyer up and sue all of you who have exploited her that is just the way you libs work once you do not get your demands met you then sue i will bet everything i have on the lawsuit happening then again you will all blame our great president for that as well you people are just sick to encourage this woamn who is clearly mentally ill to continue her outrageous behaviors you as humans should be encouraging her to be seen by a shrink instead of promoting your own agenda of bush bashing i also saw no where on your site where you have made any mention of the fact that bush has met with her why has noone mentioned that but that is so typical of you libs to not promote the truth i am so annoyed by your site and failure to state the truth and failure to protect this womans rights as a mentally ill person shame on all involved who continue to exploit her

tina vasudeva-ny email iamsosnobby@aol.com

A shot in the arm for protesters

A shot in the arm for protesters: Mother's vigil raises hope that anti-war sentiment will fuel a national momentum

Friday, August 12, 2005

Why No Tea and Sympathy? - Maureen Dowd

Why No Tea and Sympathy? - New York Times:

"The White House used to be able to tamp down criticism by saying it hurt our troops, but more people are asking the White House to explain how it plans to stop our troops from getting hurt. "

Thursday, August 11, 2005

George F. Will on the 1980 Presidential Debate

George F. Will: Carter wrong to accuse me of stealing his briefing book: "Even though, as a columnist, my support for Reagan was well-known, my participation in his debate preparation was as inappropriate as it was superfluous -- after three decades of public advocacy, Reagan was ready. "

Monday, July 11, 2005

Quotations

“We hold these truths to be sacred & undeniable; that all men are created equal & independent, that from that equal creation they derive rights inherent & inalienable, among which are the preservation of life, & liberty, & the pursuit of happiness.”

Thomas Jefferson
Declaration of Independence
Signed July 4, 1776

“Every new opinion, at its starting, is precisely in a minority of one.”
- Thomas Carlyle

“We have it in our power to begin the world over again.”
- Thomas Paine

“Much as we may wish to make a new beginning, some part of us resists doing so as though we were making the first step toward disaster.”
- William Bridges

"If ethics were easy, everyone would be a saint. The real test of character is whether you do the right thing even when it costs more than you want to pay."
- Michael Josephson

“The problem of liberal/conservative bias (in the news media) is a red herring. The real bias is toward laziness, toward entertainment, toward confrontation, toward that which will drive the ratings. The real story is this incredible laziness. It seems like the whole institution has lost its way.”

David Javerbaum
Head writer for “The Daily Show”
Quoted in The Holmes Report
Monday, May 30, 2005

"Without philosophy man cannot know what he makes; without religion he cannot know why."
- Eric Gill

"The fact is that a man who wants to act virtuously in every way necessarily comes to grief among so many who are not virtuous."
- Niccolò Machiavelli

"Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up."
- Thomas Edison

"The only things we keep permanently are those we give away."
- Waite Phillips

“The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.”
- Albert Einstein

"Only entropy comes easy."
- Anton Chekhov

“If I were asked under what sky the human mind has most fully developed some of its choicest gifts, has most deeply pondered on the greatest problems of life, and has found solutions, I should point to India.”
- Max Mueller

"The soul would have no rainbow if the eyes had no tears.”
- Native American proverb

The Message of the Good Samaritan Story Is, "Get involved."

"The only thing that is necessary for evil to triumph is that good people do nothing." - Edmund Burke

Friday, July 08, 2005

Friday, July 01, 2005

America Held Hostage - Paul Krugman

America Held Hostage - New York Times:

"The Iraq that emerges once U.S. forces are gone won't bear much resemblance to the free-market, pro-American, Israel-friendly democracy the neocons promised. But it will pose less of a terrorist threat than the Iraq we have now.

Remember, Iraq wasn't a breeding ground for terrorists before we went there. All indications are that the foreign terrorists now infesting Iraq are there on the sufferance of a homegrown insurgency that finds them useful for the moment but that, brutal as it is, isn't interested in an apocalyptic confrontation with the Western world. Once we're no longer targets, the foreign terrorists won't be welcome."

Third Parties Unite Petition

Third Parties Unite Petition

The Atlantic Online | July/August 2005 | Countdown to a Meltdown | James Fallows

The Atlantic Online | July/August 2005 | Countdown to a Meltdown | James Fallows

Thursday, June 30, 2005

More Comments on the War: Leslie G.

I believe, too, that the Iraqis would probably like freedom. It would be really interesting to go there, to conduct interviews among the people to see what "they" really think. As it is a bit dangerous at present, I think I will forego the trip...I am reminded, though, that some years ago, an acquaintance of mine from high school who writes for the NYT, conducted a radio interview about the middle east. Listening to him speak about the various points of view, I felt that I was getting the real scoop on the people's minds instead of just impressions. Interestingly, my business partner (from Iraq, btw) came to work that day raving about this columnist she had heard interviewed. It was the same guy - named Stephen Kinzer. I got in touch with him and we had a short exchange. I would like to find out what he says now about what is really going on there....and what the people think. From what I gather, everyone is glad to be rid of Sadam, but, even though they don't have a single enemy now to contend with, people's lives are far worse now that no one is in control. I have a lot of skepticism about whether you can actually hand freedom and democracy to people if they can't (or couldn't) do it for themselves. You pointed out that the Saudis are a deeply divided nation and that it took this strong kingdom to subdue the threat of its enemies. It used to be a safe place, but not anymore. The iron grip of the King is no longer so strong.The Iraqi sects, too, are deeply divided from each other. While they may want democracy in theory, I am not at all sure they understand it or can trust each other enough to allow it.


Which brings me to our president's glowing praise of democracy. He is another person who, I think, doesn't understand the concept. It disturbs me greatly - doesn't it you?- that while George Bush and his coterie say "let freedom ring" in Iraq, they are trying fairly desperately, to paint those who speak against the war, or even those who question any aspect of it, as unpatriotic. Bush's strategy -like Sadam's in Iraq - seems also to be to divide our country and rule as he wishes. He can talk all he wants about democracy and freedom, but letting Karl Rove give speeches to the effect that all those who question this war are terrorist sympathizers, trying to force (and succeeding!) Newsweek to rescind its reporting on the treatment of the Koran (when, as you know, many other observers, including Amnesty International, have noted the truth of the Newsweek content) encourages people NOT to speak, NOT to tell the truth for fear of being branded as terrorists, and is in effect, an effort to get rid of democracy even in our own country. His administration's attitude towards democracy here bespeaks no great love of it.

You wrote: We have now been attacked once again in a fashion on a par with Pearl Harbor. A similiar response is in order.

Yes, definitely a similar response! But, how does it help to invade Iraq when our enemies are and were all over the world? How did invading Iraq do anything to get our enemy? It's as if (I think Howard Dean said this) the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and we marched resolutely into Mexico. We did a sane thing by going into Afghanistan, where the Taliban and Al Quaeda were in cahoots with each other, but then we just left it to fester again in order to go into a country that was no danger at all. There is so much circumstantial evidence that George Bush, the man born with the silver spoon in his mouth, wanted to get Saddam and that 9/11 gave him his opportunity. Regardless of his words, the Downing Street memos and his switching justifications for invading make it seem as if he is using the bodies of our citizens (soldiers) as cannon fodder. Our enemies are, as I write, re-organizing all over again, even in Afghanistan, and we don't have the troops there to stop them.

I agree that, now that Saddam is gone, there seem to be a lot of freedom haters fighting against us in Iraq. But what makes you think that, just because they are fighting us there, they won't fight us here, too? There are plenty of them to go around, plenty of them to blow up trains in Spain and attack the twin towers, and etc. Why do you think fighting them there is doing anything at all for our cause?

It seems to me that we have a worldwide menace that has discovered it can bring any people and any government to its knees by attacking civilians when they least expect it. We should have gotten together with the world governments and put as much money and energy and even blood if necessary into cooperating to stop terrorism wherever it festers.

Dangerous Incompetence: Bob Herbert

Dangerous Incompetence - New York Times:

"On July 2, 2003, with evidence mounting that U.S. troop strength in Iraq was inadequate, Mr. Bush told reporters at the White House, 'There are some who feel that the conditions are such that they can attack us there. My answer is, Bring 'em on.'

It was an immature display of street-corner machismo that appalled people familiar with the agonizing ordeals of combat. Senator Frank Lautenberg, a New Jersey Democrat, was quoted in The Washington Post as saying: 'I am shaking my head in disbelief. When I served in the Army in Europe during World War II, I never heard any military commander - let alone the commander in chief - invite enemies to attack U.S. troops.' "

Wednesday, June 29, 2005

President Bush's Speech at Fort Bragg: More of the Same

Okay, I know the phrase more of the same isn't original.

Okay, I know it's easy to rip into this president and savage the poor man.

Okay, I know I shouldn't have called him a fucking donkey in a previous article. He's a foolish man, not a fucking donkey.

Now let's consider the title of this article, which is descriptive enough. The commentary on Bush's speech this morning uses the word strategy a lot. People were looking for a strategy from the president: a strategy for winning the war in Iraq, a strategy for winning the war against our enemies beyond Iraq. What did we hear instead? To sum it up, he said: I didn't have a strategy for winning the peace going into this conflict, and I don't have one now. Well I never liked the phrase winning the peace very much, but it seems appropriate enough now. Whatever you call the last two years - it's certainly not peace - it's clear the White House had no strategy for what to do after the first three weeks of fighting. Ever since they removed Hussein's regime from power and replaced it with near anarchy, they have improvised. Improvisation is not always a bad thing, but two things are obvious: the crew in the White House is not good at it, and this conflict does require a good strategy, not improvisation.

I heard a Brit on the radio yesterday. The Brits seem to be the only ones who can analyze this conflict: the debate here seems unable to rise above riffs on partisan bickering. The Democrats and Republicans go at it in Washington, and the rest of the discussion in the media seems to echo what's happening there. We should all go to London for a few weeks and find out what they're saying. I'd like to summarize some of the ideas expressed during the radio show, but I don't have time now.

So let's return to Bush's speech. Why can't this gentleman talk like he has a grasp on reality? The surest sign that he's still out there in fantasy land is his use of the phrase clear path. He actually sees a clear path to success in Iraq? And he thinks his speech showed that clear path to the rest of us? His credibility is low enough to begin with, but clear path is in there with last throes for believability. Can he possibly know how foolish he sounds when he talks like that, after all the other foolish things he has said? Who writes this stuff for him? Do his speechwriters know how bad they're making him look? We expect a president's remarks to be grounded. This president is oddly practical in what he says: figure out what's likely to go over well, and say it as seriously as possible. But you can't keep treating people like idiots and expect to get away with it over and over again. After a while people understand that you actually don't have anything valuable to say.

One thing did come out in the president's speech. He still thinks that the best way to defeat Al Qaeda is to defeat them in Iraq. From the evidence in the speech, he has given no thought whatever to the prosecution of this war after the conflict in Iraq is over. Democracy and stability in Iraq will lead to democracy and stability in the entire region. With freedom throughout the Middle East, the swamp, as we say, will dry up, and Al Qaeda won't be able to survive. So if we can win the war in Iraq, we'll win the larger war. Conversely, if we lose the war in Iraq, we'll lose the larger war.

This argument doesn't hold. President Bush said in his speech, "When people write the history of our time...." Well that's not a bad way to think. The president said that future generations will be grateful that we stood for freedom in Iraq, that we held our ground against the terrorists. I believe on the contrary that the president led his country into the largest strategic mistake it has ever made. Future generations will see this war as the turning point: the point when our irreversible decline began. That's not to say that Al Qaeda will win the war. We may well win it eventually. But if we do win the war, it won't be because we went to war in Iraq. Even if democracy spreads from Baghdad to Islamabad in the east and to Tripoli in the West, Al Qaeda can still do fine. What Bush really means when he refers to democracy in the Middle East is a regional consensus about basic values that are friendly to the West. And he's not going to get that by doing what he's doing in Iraq.

The last point is that if even if we win the war in Iraq, and win the war against Al Qaeda, we'll still lose our position of leadership in the world. It took nearly two generations to recover from our Vietnam debacle, and at that time the poor Soviet Union was our only competitor. Now we are involved in a debacle much worse than Vietnam - not in terms of lives lost but in terms of our position of leadership - and our primary competitor is China. China is a wealthy country now, and getting wealthier. China is a powerful country now, and getting stronger. China is a respected country now, and becoming more admired with each passing month. While our soldiers get blown up by roadside bombs, picked off by snipers, ripped to pieces by car bombs, and become altogether demoralized because they don't see a clear purpose to what they're doing, China's waiting patiently. It'll take our place without ever having to fight us.

President Bush said that in the past, whether during the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812 or the Civil War, we have prevailed because we were steadfast in the fight and did not lose our way. We lost our way in the war against Al Qaeda when we invaded Iraq. President Bush will not recognize that he's responsible for that. He will not recognize that future generations will blame him for a huge misjudgment, no matter how the war in Iraq turns out in its particulars. Nothing President Bush does can redeem this mistake. The speech he made last night confirms that: it confirms that he has no clear vision of the future, no practical goals or realistic plans to reach them, no feel for the kind of situation we're in, and no ability to think outside the categories he's constructed for himself. Failure doesn't mean anything for someone like that. It doesn't lead him to rethink his actions in the past, his policies in the present, or his plans for the future. He just insists that he's been doing the right thing, and that's that.

President Bush said in the speech that he told us shortly after the September 11 attacks that the road would be hard: the fight would require much sacrifice and take a long time, with the outcome uncertain while we are in the midst of it. Then he made the connection between the war against Al Qaeda and the war in Iraq even tighter than ever. The current war is an essential phase of the larger war he talked about when he addressed the nation after September 11. I think some people still believe that. They won't accept that their president could make such a gargantuan mistake. But he did. What if Franklin Roosevelt had declared that December 7, 1941, was a day that would "live in infamy," then had sent an invasion force across the Rio Grande to overthrow the government in Mexico City? What would future generations say about that? They could not understand incompetence on that scale. The march of folly, Barbara Tuchman called it. President Bush isn't the first leader in history to do something so foolish, but he's the first American leader to do it.

The Brit on the radio said we need to realize how much is at stake here. We could have a civil war in Iraq that makes the civil war in Lebanon in the 1980s look like a "picnic for teddy bears." If you want to see how bad it can get, look to the warfare in Zaire that ensued shortly after the genocide in Rwanda. The Shia and the Kurds still have armed militias that can contest the authority of the forces we are training. Syria, Iran, Turkey, Al Qaeda, Saudi Arabia, and Sunnis in and out of Iraq all have a high level of interest in the conflict that's developing in the central, northern, and western provinces of Iraq. We could easily become spectators to a civil war that our government argued would occur only if we left. The Brit on the radio is correct: we have a lot to lose here, and we've only seen the beginning.

So the people who call for a reasonable, realistic plan for Iraq are correct. We need a plan that meets the requirements of the situation. Instead we hear two extremes in the debate in Washington. In one corner is President Bush's position: stay the course until the Iraqis can take over security for themselves. In the other corner is the Democrats' position: set a timetable for withdrawal, which really means: tell us you'll begin drawing down our troops in 2006, and once you've started, pull out most of them as quickly as you can. These two positions do not represent a useful debate about our future policy. Focusing on when the troops come home doesn't do us much good now. Our focus has to be on what we want our troops to accomplish over there, and how are they going to accomplish it. To suggest that our goals are clear and our methods effective is just stupid. No one who looks at our government's record of performance in Iraq over the last two years could argue that. The government has improvised, and the results speak for themselves.

So here's the first thing we have to do to resolve the mess, and to bring about an end to the civil war that has already started in Iraq. We need to go to the international community and say that we made a terrible mistake when we invaded Iraq. We need to explain openly why it was a mistake and apologize for it. And we need to ask for assistance to overcome the consequences of our mistake. A big part of our mistake was to go our own way, without the international community. If we acknowledge that mistake openly, we'll get some tentative support from countries that have withheld it. They won't send troops to Iraq, but they will help us.

We need to say these things in the United Nations, the forum for the international community. We need to ask for help from the United Nations in Iraq. In fact, we need to turn the entire civil war in Iraq over to the UN. The standard reply to that suggestion now is that doing such a thing would be worse than defeat. The United Nations is corrupt: the oil for food scandal proves it. Well, I can write more on the United Nations another time. Right now, I'll hold with the argument that the United Nations is the only body that can bring about an end to the civil war in Iraq in a way that serves the aspirations of the Iraqi people - the well meaning citizens of Iraq who want to live in peace and freedom from fear.

Naturally President Bush is not going to do such a thing. That's why the election last November was so discouraging. It assured four additional years of speeches like the one we heard last night. The end of our difficulties and the beginning of success is new leadership. That was our hope before the presidential election, and it's our hope now. The difference now is that we have three and a half years to go in President Bush's second term. That's a long time.

Meanwhile, it does seem we've come closer to a tipping point here. As Secretary Rumsfeld and General Casey give ever more frequent press conferences, it's a sign that they're concerned about the opposition they face here in the United States. That opposition needs as much vigor as it can muster. Everyone who opposes the government's policy in Iraq has to press the advantage now. Hearten your congressmen. Give them a good reason to speak for you on this issue. Make them see that you regard this issue as the most important one on the government's agenda. Make them see how much is at stake here. We should not be steadfast in a mistaken war in Iraq, but we should be steadfast in the love we have for our country. In this time of great trouble, when we are losing brave men and women every day in Iraq, we have to stand by our country and help her find her way again. That means we have to show President Bush that we reject his leadership. We'll find our own way.

Monday, June 27, 2005

The End of the War in Iraq

Bombing Attacks on Iraqi Forces Kill 38 in North - New York Times:

Four suicide bomb attacks struck Iraqi police and an army base in a 16-hour wave of insurgent violence in the northern city of Mosul on Saturday and Sunday, killing 38 people and wounding scores more. One American commander said the violence continued a trend in the past few weeks of insurgent attacks intensely focused on Iraqi security forces.

The attacks came as Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld echoed remarks by his advisers in recent months suggesting that the insurgency could last as long as a dozen years and that Iraq would become more violent before elections later this year.

The rate of insurgent attacks remains steady, but the typical attack has grown more lethal, Mr. Rumsfeld said on 'Fox News Sunday.' 'They're killing a lot more Iraqis,' he said.

Bush administration officials have been at odds with military leaders over the strength and resiliency of the insurgency. Gen. John P. Abizaid, the top commander in the Middle East, said last week that the insurgency was undiminished, seemingly countering a remark days before by Vice President Dick Cheney, who asserted it was in its "last throes."

With polls showing that support for the war is dropping, President Bush is expected to use a prime-time speech on Tuesday at Fort Bragg in Fayetteville, N.C., to press his case for a large continued military presence in Iraq and explain why the administration's strategy will eventually work.

The success of Iraqi forces is the linchpin of the United States' exit strategy from Iraq, as many battle commanders contend that the country will slip into a civil war if the United States withdraws large numbers of troops before Iraqi forces are ready to take over.

"There's only one way for the insurgents to win: that's to drive us out before the Iraqis are ready to assume the battle space," General Abizaid said Sunday on the CNN program "Late Edition." "If that's what happens, they could win. But it's very, very clear to me that we're going to stay the course."


It's getting too easy to take pot shots at these guys. Rumsfeld says that the insurgency could go on now for another dozen years. Cheney says that the insurgency is in its last throes. Cheney's remark is even more laughable than Bush's much ridiculed Mission Accomplished visit to the USS Abraham Lincoln. No one in this administration has any credibility, and the interesting is, the officials themselves don't seem to know it. It doesn't matter what they say now - a dozen years, last throes, gonna be hard work - no one believes anything they say anymore. Crying wolf about WMD did it for them, but they're acting like they still have sheep that will follow them.

Did people follow President Bush nine months ago, during the election, because they're stupid, as some people think? Two other possibilities come to mind. They voted for Bush because they're scared. A related reason is that they recognized Bush is pursuing a bad policy, but judged that Kerry would be worse. They would have liked someone better than Bush, but they found Kerry not acceptable. Still another possibility is that people gave more weight to domestic policy than to the war, and they liked Bush better in that area. An election compiles well over a hundred million individual decisions, so even with lots of polls we won't be able to make sound generalizations about why people voted the way they did.

Here is something that becomes more and more clear as this war drags out to its uncertain end. It'll end someday, and the Republicans will take credit for it. Someday Iraq will find some sort of peace, under some sort of government other than the one they had when we invaded, and the Republicans will call it a success. Victory may have taken longer than we expected, and it may have cost more than we predicted, but we stuck it out, and our policy is vindicated. The Iraqis have a freely elected government, they'll say, and it wouldn't have happened without us. If the current pattern holds, the Democrats won't even have an answer.

So tell me this: If the Israelis, with all their advantages, haven't been able to stop a campaign of guerrilla warfare and suicide bombings for decades, how do we think the Iraqis can stop the same kind of warfare? Israel is a very small country, a little slice of land where most people live in an area smaller than the size of Connecticut. It's military is highly capable, its intelligence services unmatched in their ability to gather information and conduct undercover operations. Yet the war in Israel has continued year after year after year. The United States has not been able to deal with the same kind of warfare in Iraq. How do we expect the Iraqi armed forces to do what we can't?

You might say that the Iraqi forces can obtain better intelligence than we can. People are more willing to give information to the Iraqi soldiers than they are to the American forces. Well let's see about that. The Israeli example suggests that in a country divided deeply along ethnic lines, no amount of intelligence leads to decisive victories or defeats.

Let's not hear any more references to an Iraqi civil war in the future tense. The latest phrase is that the country will slip into civil war if we leave before the Iraqi armed forces are ready. The civil war has already started. We could not prevent it. The Iraqi forces can't prevent it. The so-called coalition, back when it existed, couldn't prevent it. So the argument that the country would slip into a civil war were we to leave has no weight. The only future oriented questions now are when the civil war will end, and how.

Yes, pulling out now means a defeat for us and victory for the other side. So far, that by itself has been enough to stamp out suggestions that we set a timetable for withdrawal. The Democrats demand a timetable, the Republicans say that we will not pull out before the Iraqis are ready to take over. To do so before that would mean defeat. And that's the end of the discussion. What sophisticated policy planning we have in this conversation! The administration's policy for over a year now has been to prepare the Iraqi forces to take over from the American forces, and the enemy has only become stronger and more effective during that time. The enemy becomes stronger, and the vice-president says that the insurgents are in their last throes. What total incompetence.

Do you know why people hold the Congress in such low regard right now? I haven't read any analyses, but I can venture a guess. They think members of Congress are gutless wonders because they haven't had the courage to stand up to the administration. People admire courage, even if the stand taken disagrees with their own. Congress as a body hasn't shown any courage in its relations with the White House. Individual members have. It's true too that the Republicans have a disciplined operation in both houses, so that leaves the Democrats to get organized and speak up. Hilary Clinton says that it's hard to oppose the administration when the Republicans are so shameless in their dishonest tactics. Perhaps. Then she criticizes the media for folding so easily when they're criticized by the administration. She might have directed her judgment toward her own party. The Democrats, especially since the election and even during last year's campaign, seemed unable to counter the Republicans' aggressive campaign with one equally agressive. They were outfought last year, and the Republicans are outfighting them again this year.

That opens the question, why are the Democrats so weak? Or, why do they appear so weak, if they're not in actuality? We can take up that question another time, perhaps. I don't know that much about what's going on inside the Democratic party, so it's hard to frame an answer from that point of view. The best answer, lacking that perspective, is the reluctance we have to appear unpatriotic, unsupportive of the troops, inconsiderate of the memory of the people who died on September 11.

Well, you know you won't find any restraint on that score here. The administration's policies are unfaithful to our dear American traditions: they have destroyed our tested Constitution by waging this so-called war of choice, the worst euphemism for aggressive war I've ever heard. If you want to find someone who is unpatriotic, who wears an American flag in his lapel, look to the person who currently lives in the White House. If you want to find an administration that's willing to let our brave men and women die for nothing, look at the incompetents who are still sending our soldiers to Iraq. If you want to find people who are so thoughtless that they would start a war that has nothing to do with the September 11 attacks, look to our current leaders.

We will not win this war because we do not deserve to win. We are the aggressors, and the war as it is currently playing out will stop when we leave. The so-called insurgents have three primary goals, to judge by their pronouncements and their tactics. They want to expel American forces from their country, they want to destroy the fighting ability of the Iraqi forces we've sponsored, and they want to prevent the formation of a government in Iraq by people allied with us. We know the insurgents are not strong enough to achieve these goals under current conditions. The insurgents know that, so far, they're strong enough to prevent us from achieving our goals of establishing security, building a democratic, unified government, and rebuilding Iraq's institutions and economy. No one can see a way out of this balance, but the insurgents can see correctly that time is on their side.

Does that sound like defeatism to you? Who wants to say that I'm unpatriotic, a traitor, just as people said that Jane Fonda was a traitor? Well, I read an article on Jane Fonda, following her recently published memoir, that contained a worthy reminder about what she did back in the sixties and seventies. The reminder is that Jane Fonda was right to oppose the Vietnam war, just as John Kerry was right to oppose it. She opposed it out of her own patriotic sense that her country was on the wrong path, and that she should do what she could to change our policy. The problem occurred with the means she used to voice her opposition to the war. She should not have gone to Hanoi and hooked her celebrity up to their propaganda machine. When Kerry threw his medals away in Washington DC after he returned from the war, he did something that he can be proud of. When Jane Fonda turned her visit to Vietnam into a photo-op, she made a big mistake. She acknowledges that mistake in her book, but she's right to insist the cause was good.

Who wants to be the last man to die for a mistake? Who wants to be the last woman to be blown up in a country where only our stooges in the government want us around? Who will have the stomach to fight the war we should be fighting when this one finally ends? Will it end in a dozen years? Two dozen? How about if the war were to end tomorrow? What if the insurgents stopped fighting and joined Iraq's constitutional process next week? Would we have a plan for how to fight the war against Al Qaeda, the enemy that attacked us? Who would want to fight that war at this point? No, if the war in Iraq were to end tomorrow, the administration would claim success. It'd say that our victory in Iraq seals our ultimate victory over the perpetrators of the September 11 attacks. They consider victory in Iraq so important in the war against Al Qaeda, so critical to success in that other war, that they don't even have a plan for conducting that other war when this one is over.

I think they expect Al Qaeda to fold when the war in Iraq is over. But how can that be? They didn't fold when they suffered a direct defeat in Afghanistan. They didn't fold when we pursued them into Pakistan. They didn't fold when we leveled Fallujah and attacked them again and again all over Iraq. Why should they fold when we withdraw our forces from that troubled place? And why should Americans want to fight another war, when this one has proven so unproductive? We'll pull out of Iraq sometime down the line, and that'll be it. We'll be back to our usual preoccupations after that, and if anyone suggests at that point that we fight the war we should have been fighting, people will say: "What war? We just finished fighting a war. And we won it. Why should we fight another one?" Ask yourself whether that response gives proper respect to the people who died on September 11.