Friday, February 17, 2006
Competence vs. Incompetence
As leaders and as statesmen, the members of the Bush administration are totally, completely incompetent. The only thing they can do well is carry out criminal acts. Criminally competent and civically incompetent is the only way to put it.
Thursday, February 16, 2006
Connecting the Dots of Cheney's Crimes - Yahoo! News
Connecting the Dots of Cheney's Crimes - Yahoo! News:
"Ultimately, however, it was 'Daily Show' correspondent Rob Corddry who hit the bullseye, when he reported that: 'The Vice President is standing by his decision to shoot Harry Whittington. Now, according to the best intelligence available, there were quail hidden in the brush. Everyone believed at the time there were quail in the brush. And while the quail turned out to be a 78- year-old man, even knowing that today, Mr. Cheney insists he still would have shot Mr. Whittington in the face. He believes the world is a better place for his spreading buckshot throughout the entire region of Mr. Wittington's face.'"
"Ultimately, however, it was 'Daily Show' correspondent Rob Corddry who hit the bullseye, when he reported that: 'The Vice President is standing by his decision to shoot Harry Whittington. Now, according to the best intelligence available, there were quail hidden in the brush. Everyone believed at the time there were quail in the brush. And while the quail turned out to be a 78- year-old man, even knowing that today, Mr. Cheney insists he still would have shot Mr. Whittington in the face. He believes the world is a better place for his spreading buckshot throughout the entire region of Mr. Wittington's face.'"
Connecting the Dots of Cheney's Crimes - Yahoo! News
Connecting the Dots of Cheney's Crimes - Yahoo! News:
"Ultimately, however, it was 'Daily Show' correspondent Rob Corddry who hit the bullseye, when he reported that: 'The Vice President is standing by his decision to shoot Harry Whittington. Now, according to the best intelligence available, there were quail hidden in the brush. Everyone believed at the time there were quail in the brush. And while the quail turned out to be a 78- year-old man, even knowing that today, Mr. Cheney insists he still would have shot Mr. Whittington in the face. He believes the world is a better place for his spreading buckshot throughout the entire region of Mr. Wittington's face.'"
"Ultimately, however, it was 'Daily Show' correspondent Rob Corddry who hit the bullseye, when he reported that: 'The Vice President is standing by his decision to shoot Harry Whittington. Now, according to the best intelligence available, there were quail hidden in the brush. Everyone believed at the time there were quail in the brush. And while the quail turned out to be a 78- year-old man, even knowing that today, Mr. Cheney insists he still would have shot Mr. Whittington in the face. He believes the world is a better place for his spreading buckshot throughout the entire region of Mr. Wittington's face.'"
Quotations from Your Success, a Newsletter
"It takes less time to do things right than to
explain why you did it wrong." ─ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
"There is one quality which one must possess
to win, and that is definiteness of purpose, the
knowledge of what one wants and a burning
desire to possess it." ─ Ronald Reagan
"Let your thoughts be positive for they will
become your words. Let your words be
positive for they will become your actions. Let
your actions be positive for they will become
your values. Let your values be positive for
they will become your destiny." ─ Mahatma Gandhi
explain why you did it wrong." ─ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
"There is one quality which one must possess
to win, and that is definiteness of purpose, the
knowledge of what one wants and a burning
desire to possess it." ─ Ronald Reagan
"Let your thoughts be positive for they will
become your words. Let your words be
positive for they will become your actions. Let
your actions be positive for they will become
your values. Let your values be positive for
they will become your destiny." ─ Mahatma Gandhi
Wednesday, February 15, 2006
Rule of Laws
From The Washington Spectator:
In a 1977 interview, David Frost asked Richard Nixon if he thought the president could act illegally if he believes it is in the best interest of the nation.
Nixon replied, "When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal."
In a 1977 interview, David Frost asked Richard Nixon if he thought the president could act illegally if he believes it is in the best interest of the nation.
Nixon replied, "When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal."
Doonesbury@Slate - Daily Dose
Doonesbury@Slate - Daily Dose
"I think our motto should be, post-9-11, 'Raghead talks tough, raghead faces consequences.'" - Ann Coulter
You have to read it to believe it, don't you? My first impression would be the usual: another quote taken out of context. After hearing this woman talk, though, I think she probably meant it just the way it comes across.
"I think our motto should be, post-9-11, 'Raghead talks tough, raghead faces consequences.'" - Ann Coulter
You have to read it to believe it, don't you? My first impression would be the usual: another quote taken out of context. After hearing this woman talk, though, I think she probably meant it just the way it comes across.
Tuesday, February 14, 2006
Monday, February 13, 2006
Krugman: Weak on Terror
From Krugman's New York Times Article:
"My most immediate priority," Spain's new leader, José Luis RodrÃguez Zapatero, declared yesterday, "will be to fight terrorism." But he and the voters who gave his party a stunning upset victory last Sunday don't believe the war in Iraq is part of that fight.
My brief response:
Here is an article by Paul Krugman in the NYT that agrees with my argument about the larger significance of Bush's war on Iraq. I need to write the arguments, address the opposition, and make the whole case against the war my own.
"My most immediate priority," Spain's new leader, José Luis RodrÃguez Zapatero, declared yesterday, "will be to fight terrorism." But he and the voters who gave his party a stunning upset victory last Sunday don't believe the war in Iraq is part of that fight.
My brief response:
Here is an article by Paul Krugman in the NYT that agrees with my argument about the larger significance of Bush's war on Iraq. I need to write the arguments, address the opposition, and make the whole case against the war my own.
Sunday, February 12, 2006
The Years Ahead
Last summer I wrote a three-part personal essay called The Years Ahead. Here are the entries:
August 7, 2005:
So what does make blogging so attractive? It's private, but it's not private. You write for yourself, but you have the possibility of an audience. You can write anything at all, and even your mother won't read it. But she could. It's fun.
I'd like to write about the years ahead. Perhaps when the years ahead are the years behind, people will read this and say that he (meaning me) laid it all out ahead of time. "It's all here," they'll say. They said that about Mein Kampf, too, and look where Hitler wound up. In a bunker with cyanide down his throat.
Well, that's way off topic. The comparison does show that you have to plan ahead a little bit. And that's what I'm going to do. But I sure don't want to write a book like Mein Kampf.
Where's the best place to start? Should I write about myself, or about things outside of myself? I'll write briefly about myself first.
A lot of people think about becoming president of the United States. Only a few people actually become president. But, whether you become president or not, no one can make fun of you for thinking about it. Plenty of people have thought about it, and some of those run for the office. Of those, a few have won enough electoral votes to win the office. In this country, anything can happen. Nothing is impossible. So I have to get past my self-consciousness about these thoughts. Would people make fun of me if they knew what I was thinking? Would they raise their eyebrows? So what? Why shouldn't I think about becoming president? If it makes me happy, who are you to say I shouldn't occupy my thoughts that way?
Here's a more practical way of stating this goal. We have to start work now to elect a president in 2016 who is not a Democrat or a Republican. I've already committed myself to that goal. Well, in our political system, you can't get elected president without some sort of political organization behind you. Call that organization a political party if you like. In a little less than three election cycles, we need to build an organization that's capable of electing a president. I want to help build that organization. And I know enough about working with groups that if you commit yourself to them and work hard to make them grow, you eventually get to lead them. Leadership in the case of a national political party means running for president.
Now let me write about some things outside of myself. America needs a new political party. The country's first two parties, the Federalists and the Anti-Federalists, were ill-formed groupings. They weren't especially well organized, and the names are more for the labeling convenience of historians than anything else. Out of those two loose groupings, and the conflict that occurred when Jefferson rose to the White House, we had the Democrats - Jefferson's party - and the Whigs - the party that eventually evolved from the Federalists. The Whigs didn't have staying power, though, and as their ability to win votes declined in the years before the Civil War, a new party rose to take their place. That party was the Republican party, and its leader was Abraham Lincoln.
Since the late 1850s, as the country slid toward its awful sectional conflict, we have not had a new, durable political party that was able to win votes in the electoral college.
As much as you like writing this entry, you have to sign off here.
August 8, 2005:
America needs a third party. Actually, it needs a new party that can become a force in American politics, and that can force a realignment in American politics. Let's start with some basics.
America does not have a parliamentary system. You need a parliamentary system with proportional representation for minority parties to flourish. Even in systems with proportional representation, like-minded minority parties tend to form durable coalitions so they can work together and exert more influence on national politics. The Labor and Likud parties in Israel are an example of that phenomenon.
The United States has a federal, winner take all system that favors the formation of two major parties. The basic rules of party competition at the national level won't change, so the structure of party politics won't change either. That means a couple of things. First, the emergence of a new party that can win the only national election we have - the one for the presidency - will cause a realignment in American party politics. We have a lot of instances where three people ran for the presidency and won a lot of votes. We have only one case - Lincoln's victory in 1860 - where the outcome of a three-way race led to a complete realignment. The important point is, even if three-way races are fairly common, the party competition resettles into the familiar two-party pattern pretty quickly. The Civil War disrupted all the usual patterns from 1860 to 1865, and the Republican party came out of the war as an established institution.
The second thing to note in the present situation is that we can't tell what the two parties will look like after the realignment. We don't know who will join what party. The most we can say is that one of the parties - the new one we're talking about here - will coalesce from independents, existing minority parties, disaffected Democrats and disaffected Republicans. The shape of the party that forms in opposition to the new party is anyone's guess. The Republican party is pretty cohesive right now, so a good guess is that the opposition will form from the core of the current Republican party. The realignment won't take place in a week or a month. It'll be a while in coming. But we know that a decade or more from now, party politics in this country won't look the same way they do now.
How do we know that? Some people say that an economic crisis during the next decade will cause profound changes in our party politics. We may in fact have a crisis like that. I would trace the changes we'll undergo to the war. I mean the war in Iraq, of course, but also the broader war that started in September 2001. We are losing the war in Iraq, and we have hardly started to fight the war against Al Qaeda. Lost wars always bring big changes in the politics of the country that loses them. That's what we're going to see here by the election of 2016.
It's a fair bet that the winner of the 2008 presidential election will be a Democrat. It's a fair bet too that the incumbent will lose to a Republican in 2012. That means we'll have Democratic or Republican winners in the White House for the next two election cycles. Then in 2016, our economic weakness and our defeats in war will make people vote for the leader of a new party. They'll say that the old parties have had a chance, and they ddn't come through. It's time for a change. A big one, when they begin to see the consequences of losing the war.
We have to be ready for the election in 2016.
August 9, 2005:
This is getting to be quite a series. Tonight I'm listening to Good Vibrations on the headphones, and I'm sure I may listen to some other songs before the night is done. The question is, can you write while you're listening to the music? Now Daydream Believer is playing, and you want to write about politics?
I told Leslie tonight: "What would you think if I said I wanted to be the leader of a new political party?" She said in her dry way, "Perhaps you should start with some small steps close to home." Yes, I said, that's just the thing, since politics in this country is organized state by state. You try to organize a party in Texas, and they'll say, "What are you doing here? Why don't you go to your own state?" Indeed, Massachusetts is the place to start.
But I added, I'm not sure why: "This kind of thing affects you, you know. I can't go this way and have it not affect you." She looked at me a little funny, and I finished: "I don't like to start anything, you know, and not think about the obstacles that might come up."
So that was it. I have Leslie's blessing now. She won't mind the invasion of privacy and all the things that go with politics. She'll go with me where I go. And she's got indignation to spare.
So let's move on to some practical steps... The writing is slow while you're listening to the music. What can you do here in Massachusetts? Well, you have to network, just as you have in other areas. Can the WTPC site give you any ideas about who to contact?
Yes, the e-mail posted to your Yahoo inbox contains full return addresses.
August 7, 2005:
So what does make blogging so attractive? It's private, but it's not private. You write for yourself, but you have the possibility of an audience. You can write anything at all, and even your mother won't read it. But she could. It's fun.
I'd like to write about the years ahead. Perhaps when the years ahead are the years behind, people will read this and say that he (meaning me) laid it all out ahead of time. "It's all here," they'll say. They said that about Mein Kampf, too, and look where Hitler wound up. In a bunker with cyanide down his throat.
Well, that's way off topic. The comparison does show that you have to plan ahead a little bit. And that's what I'm going to do. But I sure don't want to write a book like Mein Kampf.
Where's the best place to start? Should I write about myself, or about things outside of myself? I'll write briefly about myself first.
A lot of people think about becoming president of the United States. Only a few people actually become president. But, whether you become president or not, no one can make fun of you for thinking about it. Plenty of people have thought about it, and some of those run for the office. Of those, a few have won enough electoral votes to win the office. In this country, anything can happen. Nothing is impossible. So I have to get past my self-consciousness about these thoughts. Would people make fun of me if they knew what I was thinking? Would they raise their eyebrows? So what? Why shouldn't I think about becoming president? If it makes me happy, who are you to say I shouldn't occupy my thoughts that way?
Here's a more practical way of stating this goal. We have to start work now to elect a president in 2016 who is not a Democrat or a Republican. I've already committed myself to that goal. Well, in our political system, you can't get elected president without some sort of political organization behind you. Call that organization a political party if you like. In a little less than three election cycles, we need to build an organization that's capable of electing a president. I want to help build that organization. And I know enough about working with groups that if you commit yourself to them and work hard to make them grow, you eventually get to lead them. Leadership in the case of a national political party means running for president.
Now let me write about some things outside of myself. America needs a new political party. The country's first two parties, the Federalists and the Anti-Federalists, were ill-formed groupings. They weren't especially well organized, and the names are more for the labeling convenience of historians than anything else. Out of those two loose groupings, and the conflict that occurred when Jefferson rose to the White House, we had the Democrats - Jefferson's party - and the Whigs - the party that eventually evolved from the Federalists. The Whigs didn't have staying power, though, and as their ability to win votes declined in the years before the Civil War, a new party rose to take their place. That party was the Republican party, and its leader was Abraham Lincoln.
Since the late 1850s, as the country slid toward its awful sectional conflict, we have not had a new, durable political party that was able to win votes in the electoral college.
As much as you like writing this entry, you have to sign off here.
August 8, 2005:
America needs a third party. Actually, it needs a new party that can become a force in American politics, and that can force a realignment in American politics. Let's start with some basics.
America does not have a parliamentary system. You need a parliamentary system with proportional representation for minority parties to flourish. Even in systems with proportional representation, like-minded minority parties tend to form durable coalitions so they can work together and exert more influence on national politics. The Labor and Likud parties in Israel are an example of that phenomenon.
The United States has a federal, winner take all system that favors the formation of two major parties. The basic rules of party competition at the national level won't change, so the structure of party politics won't change either. That means a couple of things. First, the emergence of a new party that can win the only national election we have - the one for the presidency - will cause a realignment in American party politics. We have a lot of instances where three people ran for the presidency and won a lot of votes. We have only one case - Lincoln's victory in 1860 - where the outcome of a three-way race led to a complete realignment. The important point is, even if three-way races are fairly common, the party competition resettles into the familiar two-party pattern pretty quickly. The Civil War disrupted all the usual patterns from 1860 to 1865, and the Republican party came out of the war as an established institution.
The second thing to note in the present situation is that we can't tell what the two parties will look like after the realignment. We don't know who will join what party. The most we can say is that one of the parties - the new one we're talking about here - will coalesce from independents, existing minority parties, disaffected Democrats and disaffected Republicans. The shape of the party that forms in opposition to the new party is anyone's guess. The Republican party is pretty cohesive right now, so a good guess is that the opposition will form from the core of the current Republican party. The realignment won't take place in a week or a month. It'll be a while in coming. But we know that a decade or more from now, party politics in this country won't look the same way they do now.
How do we know that? Some people say that an economic crisis during the next decade will cause profound changes in our party politics. We may in fact have a crisis like that. I would trace the changes we'll undergo to the war. I mean the war in Iraq, of course, but also the broader war that started in September 2001. We are losing the war in Iraq, and we have hardly started to fight the war against Al Qaeda. Lost wars always bring big changes in the politics of the country that loses them. That's what we're going to see here by the election of 2016.
It's a fair bet that the winner of the 2008 presidential election will be a Democrat. It's a fair bet too that the incumbent will lose to a Republican in 2012. That means we'll have Democratic or Republican winners in the White House for the next two election cycles. Then in 2016, our economic weakness and our defeats in war will make people vote for the leader of a new party. They'll say that the old parties have had a chance, and they ddn't come through. It's time for a change. A big one, when they begin to see the consequences of losing the war.
We have to be ready for the election in 2016.
August 9, 2005:
This is getting to be quite a series. Tonight I'm listening to Good Vibrations on the headphones, and I'm sure I may listen to some other songs before the night is done. The question is, can you write while you're listening to the music? Now Daydream Believer is playing, and you want to write about politics?
I told Leslie tonight: "What would you think if I said I wanted to be the leader of a new political party?" She said in her dry way, "Perhaps you should start with some small steps close to home." Yes, I said, that's just the thing, since politics in this country is organized state by state. You try to organize a party in Texas, and they'll say, "What are you doing here? Why don't you go to your own state?" Indeed, Massachusetts is the place to start.
But I added, I'm not sure why: "This kind of thing affects you, you know. I can't go this way and have it not affect you." She looked at me a little funny, and I finished: "I don't like to start anything, you know, and not think about the obstacles that might come up."
So that was it. I have Leslie's blessing now. She won't mind the invasion of privacy and all the things that go with politics. She'll go with me where I go. And she's got indignation to spare.
So let's move on to some practical steps... The writing is slow while you're listening to the music. What can you do here in Massachusetts? Well, you have to network, just as you have in other areas. Can the WTPC site give you any ideas about who to contact?
Yes, the e-mail posted to your Yahoo inbox contains full return addresses.
The Libertarian Party in the Current Political Environment
Yesterday I received an e-mail request for money from the Libertarian Party to support their current initiatives. I contributed a small amount, and wrote a short note in the online payment form. The party's executive director responded with a short note of his own right away. Here is my response to his message:
I wasn't even sure anyone would read my note. I didn't expect to get a prompt response from the guy in charge!
So, since you wrote that quick note, let me open the gates just a little and write some thoughts back to you. They may or may not be useful to you, depending on how you take them.
First, good work on the letter you sent to solicit donations. The penultimate sentence - "If you have made it this far, I'm relying on you to make a donation of $10 or more" - didn't grab me and make me think, "I have to contribute right now." The small amount requested was a positive factor, and so were your comments about the Democrats. In the middle of the letter, you said they're spineless, and used other severe language. Here's why that language is appropriate, admirable, and motivating, at least in my case.
I've been interested in politics for a long time, and I've been an independent for a long time. I admire Ronald Reagan because I've been a libertarian with a small _l_. I don't admire the Republican party, though. In fact, the Iraq war has made me angrier than I've ever been about our leadership. It's effect on me has been similar to the effect the Missouri Compromise had on Lincoln: it made him want to get involved with politics after attending to his law practice for some years. I sense I'm not the only voter who thinks that way.
The Democrats don't bear the same burden of blame right now that the Republicans do, but their behavior as the opposition party fits your description. How they could fail so miserably in the face of the leadership we have is so strange. It's interesting to see the contrasting reactions people have had to Howard Dean and John Murtha. The stands they've taken are so rare, they easily stand out against the timid backdrop the rest of the Democrats have created.
So what am I getting at here? Like a lot of other voters, I don't feel well represented by either party. Independents and minority party members make up thirty-five percent or more of the electorate, but they don't feel that they have any voice at all. I've been skeptical that the Libertarian party can give people that voice. It's not because I think their ideas are bad, or that they can't overcome some of the real obstacles that minority parties have to face in our political system. I think that the Libertarian party's image is such that not so many people will vote for Libertarian candidates.
My main perspective comes from Massachusetts. It's not my native state, but it's where I live now. (I come from the Upper Midwest, a region that actually has a two-party system.) The two-party system in Massachusetts is not healthy, to say the least. Many, many Democrats, incumbents and new office seekers alike, run unopposed on election day. The Republicans win the governor's race, and that's about it. The latest tally shows that almost fifty percent of the voters in the state are independents - they don't enroll in either party when they register to vote. Yet the Libertarian party lost its ballot access a few years ago because they didn't win 3% of the votes cast.
Why don't the Libertarians win more votes in a state that doesn't feel that comfortable with one-party governance? Well it could be that most voters really are Democrats at heart, and they elect a Republican governor entirely to exercise some restraint on the legislature. Perhaps the Libertarians seem to be extreme here because, given the Democratic sympathies of the electorate, they really are outliers in the state's political belief system.
I keep thinking, though, of the party's tag line - the party of principle - and the message that line conveys to ordinary voters. Its subtext is that Libertarians don't care about winning elections. Or, to put it more precisely: if we have to make a choice between winning votes and sticking with our principles, we'll stick with our principles. We'd rather be right and defeated than wrong and victorious. Well naturally the goal is to be right and victorious, but that's not the message that comes across, either in the tag line or in the rest of the state party's communications.
The Libertarian Party of Massachusetts is only one of fifty state organizations, and I know the flavor of party politics in the other forty-nine states is just as quirky and unique as it is here. You have a hard job, trying to promote the party in a political landscape that's so varied. I much admire the determination the national party has shown over the last several months, to transform itself from a group on the margins of politics into an organization that can compete in elections across the land. I want to believe that it'll be successful, and that the Libertarian party will emerge from the coming political turmoil in a strong position.
To do that, though, I think it has to change the image I've described above. It has to convey that it's open to more than one belief system. The Democrats and Republicans both try to stress, at election time, that their parties are like big tents. They want to welcome as many people as they can. They're right to do that, because in a country that's so pluralistic, and that's bound to have just two major parties because of its election rules, the two major parties have to embrace divergent beliefs and belief systems.
Well, that welcoming attitude only goes so far. A political party is going to have opponents no matter what it does. But the Reagan elections show that people do respond to a well articulated vision. No other president has ever won forty-nine of fifty states, as Reagan did in 1984. That shows that people can be loyal to a certain vision of themselves, and to certain core principles built into our Constitution. It shows that when the circumstances are right, a pluralistic people can achieve a certain degree of unity.
Your remark that the Democratic party is in a panic because it feels so threatened is interesting. The contrasting question is what will happen to the Republicans when people realize what has happened since 9/11 - when the damage the Republicans have done truly sinks in. I said that we're in for a period of turmoil. The grounds for that prediction lie in a pattern of change that's clear from a long view of history. States that lose wars don't survive the loss without going through painful and substantial changes. We've clearly not achieved our aims in Iraq, and we are on the way to losing the other war we should be fighting instead - the war against Al Qaeda that started on September 11.
When these losses begin to have their effects, we'll see changes in our current political system that we can't predict. These changes are already underway, but we can't see their direction yet. The Libertarian party is right to prepare for them, and to see if it can't strengthen itself during the conflict to come. The parties in Washington won't stop sniping at each other, while citizens who aren't part of either party's base get more and more fed up with their representation and leadership. The two parties are so focused on scoring advantages, on finding weaknesses they can exploit, I don’t think they recognize how unhappy their constituents are.
Shortly before the 2000 election, I wrote an article called "Where's a Candidate People Want?" Even then, it seemed to me, the parties had failed in their primary function in national politics, which is to recruit and nominate presidential candidates who can serve and lead Americans well. We have never had leadership as bad as President Bush's has been. Although Gore and Kerry had some strengths, they weren't adequate candidates for the times. That the Republicans managed to put Bush in the office, and then to reelect him, says quite a bit about the ability of the current two-party system to perform well. It is clearly not serving the country.
So what do all of these observations amount to? The Libertarian party has to find some way to appeal to more people. Training candidates, campaign managers and other staff to run effective bids for office is an essential start. The most effective campaign ever can't win votes, though, if people are suspicious or skeptical of the party to begin with. They have to have confidence in the character and competence of their leaders, and they also need to know that their leaders share some assumptions with them about the best way to organize a society. Right now, I think a lot of citizens see Libertarians as people who don't share those assumptions.
We know that the United States will always have two major parties while it has winner-take-all elections in each of the fifty states. We also know that the two-party system has evolved in interesting ways over 225 years, with some dramatic transformations in the system at key points. We are on the threshold of one of those transformations. In ten years, during the presidential election of 2016, we'll be past the threshold and perhaps even past the entry way. It's great that the Libertarian party and its leadership is thinking about how it can grow during the difficult changes that have already started. I hope it succeeds.
I also hope that I and others can lay aside skepticism, and work hard for the changes we want to see. We need hope that the obstacles in our current politics won't always be there: obstacles that block independents' voices, frustrate their efforts before they begin, and make voting seem ineffectual. In this environment, the Libertarian party's bold initiatives to have an effect do deserve respect and support.
I wasn't even sure anyone would read my note. I didn't expect to get a prompt response from the guy in charge!
So, since you wrote that quick note, let me open the gates just a little and write some thoughts back to you. They may or may not be useful to you, depending on how you take them.
First, good work on the letter you sent to solicit donations. The penultimate sentence - "If you have made it this far, I'm relying on you to make a donation of $10 or more" - didn't grab me and make me think, "I have to contribute right now." The small amount requested was a positive factor, and so were your comments about the Democrats. In the middle of the letter, you said they're spineless, and used other severe language. Here's why that language is appropriate, admirable, and motivating, at least in my case.
I've been interested in politics for a long time, and I've been an independent for a long time. I admire Ronald Reagan because I've been a libertarian with a small _l_. I don't admire the Republican party, though. In fact, the Iraq war has made me angrier than I've ever been about our leadership. It's effect on me has been similar to the effect the Missouri Compromise had on Lincoln: it made him want to get involved with politics after attending to his law practice for some years. I sense I'm not the only voter who thinks that way.
The Democrats don't bear the same burden of blame right now that the Republicans do, but their behavior as the opposition party fits your description. How they could fail so miserably in the face of the leadership we have is so strange. It's interesting to see the contrasting reactions people have had to Howard Dean and John Murtha. The stands they've taken are so rare, they easily stand out against the timid backdrop the rest of the Democrats have created.
So what am I getting at here? Like a lot of other voters, I don't feel well represented by either party. Independents and minority party members make up thirty-five percent or more of the electorate, but they don't feel that they have any voice at all. I've been skeptical that the Libertarian party can give people that voice. It's not because I think their ideas are bad, or that they can't overcome some of the real obstacles that minority parties have to face in our political system. I think that the Libertarian party's image is such that not so many people will vote for Libertarian candidates.
My main perspective comes from Massachusetts. It's not my native state, but it's where I live now. (I come from the Upper Midwest, a region that actually has a two-party system.) The two-party system in Massachusetts is not healthy, to say the least. Many, many Democrats, incumbents and new office seekers alike, run unopposed on election day. The Republicans win the governor's race, and that's about it. The latest tally shows that almost fifty percent of the voters in the state are independents - they don't enroll in either party when they register to vote. Yet the Libertarian party lost its ballot access a few years ago because they didn't win 3% of the votes cast.
Why don't the Libertarians win more votes in a state that doesn't feel that comfortable with one-party governance? Well it could be that most voters really are Democrats at heart, and they elect a Republican governor entirely to exercise some restraint on the legislature. Perhaps the Libertarians seem to be extreme here because, given the Democratic sympathies of the electorate, they really are outliers in the state's political belief system.
I keep thinking, though, of the party's tag line - the party of principle - and the message that line conveys to ordinary voters. Its subtext is that Libertarians don't care about winning elections. Or, to put it more precisely: if we have to make a choice between winning votes and sticking with our principles, we'll stick with our principles. We'd rather be right and defeated than wrong and victorious. Well naturally the goal is to be right and victorious, but that's not the message that comes across, either in the tag line or in the rest of the state party's communications.
The Libertarian Party of Massachusetts is only one of fifty state organizations, and I know the flavor of party politics in the other forty-nine states is just as quirky and unique as it is here. You have a hard job, trying to promote the party in a political landscape that's so varied. I much admire the determination the national party has shown over the last several months, to transform itself from a group on the margins of politics into an organization that can compete in elections across the land. I want to believe that it'll be successful, and that the Libertarian party will emerge from the coming political turmoil in a strong position.
To do that, though, I think it has to change the image I've described above. It has to convey that it's open to more than one belief system. The Democrats and Republicans both try to stress, at election time, that their parties are like big tents. They want to welcome as many people as they can. They're right to do that, because in a country that's so pluralistic, and that's bound to have just two major parties because of its election rules, the two major parties have to embrace divergent beliefs and belief systems.
Well, that welcoming attitude only goes so far. A political party is going to have opponents no matter what it does. But the Reagan elections show that people do respond to a well articulated vision. No other president has ever won forty-nine of fifty states, as Reagan did in 1984. That shows that people can be loyal to a certain vision of themselves, and to certain core principles built into our Constitution. It shows that when the circumstances are right, a pluralistic people can achieve a certain degree of unity.
Your remark that the Democratic party is in a panic because it feels so threatened is interesting. The contrasting question is what will happen to the Republicans when people realize what has happened since 9/11 - when the damage the Republicans have done truly sinks in. I said that we're in for a period of turmoil. The grounds for that prediction lie in a pattern of change that's clear from a long view of history. States that lose wars don't survive the loss without going through painful and substantial changes. We've clearly not achieved our aims in Iraq, and we are on the way to losing the other war we should be fighting instead - the war against Al Qaeda that started on September 11.
When these losses begin to have their effects, we'll see changes in our current political system that we can't predict. These changes are already underway, but we can't see their direction yet. The Libertarian party is right to prepare for them, and to see if it can't strengthen itself during the conflict to come. The parties in Washington won't stop sniping at each other, while citizens who aren't part of either party's base get more and more fed up with their representation and leadership. The two parties are so focused on scoring advantages, on finding weaknesses they can exploit, I don’t think they recognize how unhappy their constituents are.
Shortly before the 2000 election, I wrote an article called "Where's a Candidate People Want?" Even then, it seemed to me, the parties had failed in their primary function in national politics, which is to recruit and nominate presidential candidates who can serve and lead Americans well. We have never had leadership as bad as President Bush's has been. Although Gore and Kerry had some strengths, they weren't adequate candidates for the times. That the Republicans managed to put Bush in the office, and then to reelect him, says quite a bit about the ability of the current two-party system to perform well. It is clearly not serving the country.
So what do all of these observations amount to? The Libertarian party has to find some way to appeal to more people. Training candidates, campaign managers and other staff to run effective bids for office is an essential start. The most effective campaign ever can't win votes, though, if people are suspicious or skeptical of the party to begin with. They have to have confidence in the character and competence of their leaders, and they also need to know that their leaders share some assumptions with them about the best way to organize a society. Right now, I think a lot of citizens see Libertarians as people who don't share those assumptions.
We know that the United States will always have two major parties while it has winner-take-all elections in each of the fifty states. We also know that the two-party system has evolved in interesting ways over 225 years, with some dramatic transformations in the system at key points. We are on the threshold of one of those transformations. In ten years, during the presidential election of 2016, we'll be past the threshold and perhaps even past the entry way. It's great that the Libertarian party and its leadership is thinking about how it can grow during the difficult changes that have already started. I hope it succeeds.
I also hope that I and others can lay aside skepticism, and work hard for the changes we want to see. We need hope that the obstacles in our current politics won't always be there: obstacles that block independents' voices, frustrate their efforts before they begin, and make voting seem ineffectual. In this environment, the Libertarian party's bold initiatives to have an effect do deserve respect and support.
Friday, February 10, 2006
Loose Lips Sink Spies - New York Times
Loose Lips Sink Spies - New York Times
What a huge, huge gap exists now! So many things that Goss says in this article make sense, or rather used to make sense. Coming from the head of the CIA in this administration, though, they are scary. Standard arguments about the tradeoff between national security and open democracy don't make sense anymore, when the source of the arguments is the government itself. These guys are willing to commit crimes wherever they look. No crime is too egregious for them. National security justifies anything they want to do. Now the head of the CIA announces his determination to bring criminal charges against anyone who tries to stop them. That's scary.
What a huge, huge gap exists now! So many things that Goss says in this article make sense, or rather used to make sense. Coming from the head of the CIA in this administration, though, they are scary. Standard arguments about the tradeoff between national security and open democracy don't make sense anymore, when the source of the arguments is the government itself. These guys are willing to commit crimes wherever they look. No crime is too egregious for them. National security justifies anything they want to do. Now the head of the CIA announces his determination to bring criminal charges against anyone who tries to stop them. That's scary.
Thursday, February 09, 2006
Tuesday, February 07, 2006
Monday, February 06, 2006
Saturday, February 04, 2006
Thursday, February 02, 2006
Tuesday, January 31, 2006
Monday, January 30, 2006
Friday, January 27, 2006
Thursday, January 26, 2006
Wednesday, January 25, 2006
Tuesday, January 24, 2006
The President's Latest Q & A Session
So now we have to ask, Mr. President, what wouldn't you do?
Say again?
Well, you've authorized warrantless domestic wiretaps, which are clearly illegal. You simply can't do domestic searches without a warrant. When you violate a law that's so clear-cut, I'd like to ask, what wouldn't you do? It's useful to know what you think the limits on your executive power are.
Okay, I'll give you some good examples. I wouldn't authorize torture for people we want to interrogate and intimidate.
You've already done that.
I wouldn't set up a system of prisons outside of the United States where we can keep our prisoners of war.
You've already done that.
I certainly wouldn't leak the name of one our intelligence agents to the domestic press in order to discredit my opponents. You could even call that treason.
You've already done that, too, Mr. President.
Give me a break here. How about this? The president's powers as commander in chief are pretty broad, but to launch an attack on a country that's not an immediate threat to us would go beyond my power. It would violate the UN charter as well.
But sir, you did that, too.
You've got me pinned down pretty well now. Can you think of anything I haven't done yet?
Well, you could drop a nuclear bomb on North Korea to make it give up its nuclear weapons. You'd teach them a lesson.
Yes.
And you could drop another bomb on Harvard University to quiet Alan Dershowitz and all those other people on the faculty who keep criticizing you.
I don't think Ted Kennedy would like that very much.
Mr. President, what's one university in the War on Terror? If it's necessary to protect the American people, you should do it.
How about if I just roll some tanks into Harvard Square? That wouldn't be so drastic. Maybe not as effective, either.
Come on, Mr. President, you have a reputation to maintain here. You don't want Dick Cheney to call you a namby pamby behind your back, do you?
Of course not, but I don't want to destroy America. I want to save it. Pretty soon you and your friends will say that I want to destroy America in order to save it.
You've already done that.
Say again?
Well, you've authorized warrantless domestic wiretaps, which are clearly illegal. You simply can't do domestic searches without a warrant. When you violate a law that's so clear-cut, I'd like to ask, what wouldn't you do? It's useful to know what you think the limits on your executive power are.
Okay, I'll give you some good examples. I wouldn't authorize torture for people we want to interrogate and intimidate.
You've already done that.
I wouldn't set up a system of prisons outside of the United States where we can keep our prisoners of war.
You've already done that.
I certainly wouldn't leak the name of one our intelligence agents to the domestic press in order to discredit my opponents. You could even call that treason.
You've already done that, too, Mr. President.
Give me a break here. How about this? The president's powers as commander in chief are pretty broad, but to launch an attack on a country that's not an immediate threat to us would go beyond my power. It would violate the UN charter as well.
But sir, you did that, too.
You've got me pinned down pretty well now. Can you think of anything I haven't done yet?
Well, you could drop a nuclear bomb on North Korea to make it give up its nuclear weapons. You'd teach them a lesson.
Yes.
And you could drop another bomb on Harvard University to quiet Alan Dershowitz and all those other people on the faculty who keep criticizing you.
I don't think Ted Kennedy would like that very much.
Mr. President, what's one university in the War on Terror? If it's necessary to protect the American people, you should do it.
How about if I just roll some tanks into Harvard Square? That wouldn't be so drastic. Maybe not as effective, either.
Come on, Mr. President, you have a reputation to maintain here. You don't want Dick Cheney to call you a namby pamby behind your back, do you?
Of course not, but I don't want to destroy America. I want to save it. Pretty soon you and your friends will say that I want to destroy America in order to save it.
You've already done that.
Monday, January 23, 2006
Sunday, January 22, 2006
Biographer Richard Reeves examines President Reagan, a masterful rhetorician
Wichita Eagle | 01/22/2006 | Biographer Richard Reeves examines President Reagan, a masterful rhetorician:
"Did Reagan's brainy White House staff members manipulate him? No way, Reeves says. As White House Chief of Staff James A. Baker III commented, 'He treats us all the same, as hired help.' A later chief of staff, Donald Regan, told Reeves that everybody working in the White House 'thought he was smarter than the president.' Reeves responded, 'Including you?' Regan's reply: 'Especially me.' But it was Reagan, not Baker or Regan, who managed to persuade power brokers to more than double the federal tax dollars devoted to the military, to decrease taxation of the wealthy, and to substantially neutralize the Soviet Union's influence in a worldwide Cold War."
"Did Reagan's brainy White House staff members manipulate him? No way, Reeves says. As White House Chief of Staff James A. Baker III commented, 'He treats us all the same, as hired help.' A later chief of staff, Donald Regan, told Reeves that everybody working in the White House 'thought he was smarter than the president.' Reeves responded, 'Including you?' Regan's reply: 'Especially me.' But it was Reagan, not Baker or Regan, who managed to persuade power brokers to more than double the federal tax dollars devoted to the military, to decrease taxation of the wealthy, and to substantially neutralize the Soviet Union's influence in a worldwide Cold War."
Saturday, January 21, 2006
Friday, January 20, 2006
Legal Rationale by Justice Dept. on Spying Effort - New York Times
Legal Rationale by Justice Dept. on Spying Effort - New York Times
This proves it then, that we have an unconstitutional presidency that will operate outside the law. Any person who says that a wiretap in the United States without a warrant is justified can't be right. National security requires some secrecy, but a warrantless wiretap can't be justified under any legal doctrine. To make such a wiretap permissible, we would have to change the law. The president's defense of his actions shows that if the law conflicts with his beliefs about what national security requires, he'll go with his beliefs.
This proves it then, that we have an unconstitutional presidency that will operate outside the law. Any person who says that a wiretap in the United States without a warrant is justified can't be right. National security requires some secrecy, but a warrantless wiretap can't be justified under any legal doctrine. To make such a wiretap permissible, we would have to change the law. The president's defense of his actions shows that if the law conflicts with his beliefs about what national security requires, he'll go with his beliefs.
Thursday, January 19, 2006
Friday, January 13, 2006
Tuesday, January 10, 2006
http://www-internal.mathworks.com: News
http://www-internal.mathworks.com: News
What is the relationship between the war in Iraq and this action by Iran? Do you see one?
What is the relationship between the war in Iraq and this action by Iran? Do you see one?
Monday, January 09, 2006
Sunday, January 08, 2006
Monday, January 02, 2006
Saturday, December 31, 2005
Friday, December 30, 2005
Monday, December 26, 2005
Thursday, December 22, 2005
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.
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.
Monday, December 19, 2005
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."
"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."
Wednesday, December 14, 2005
Tuesday, December 13, 2005
Monday, December 12, 2005
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
experiment. The more experiments you make the better."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
Sunday, December 11, 2005
Wednesday, December 07, 2005
Tuesday, December 06, 2005
Monday, December 05, 2005
Friday, November 25, 2005
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!
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.
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.
Sunday, November 20, 2005
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!
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.
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.
Thursday, November 17, 2005
Tuesday, November 15, 2005
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.
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."
"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."
