Author: geoff

This piece in Salon by Sidney Blumenthal (registration possibly required) needs no comment:
Oct. 20, 2004  |  Passing almost without notice earlier this month, the public release of the official staff report prepared by the U.S. Civil Rights Commission on “The Civil Rights Record of the George W. Bush Administration,” whose submission is required by federal law, was blocked by the Republican commissioners. Nonetheless, it was posted on the commission’s Web site. “This report,” the site states, “finds that President Bush has neither exhibited leadership on pressing civil rights issues, nor taken actions that matched his words.”
[more, particularly on the implications for minority voting]

This morning before I left for work I started downloading the film Going Upriver. At 650MB, I figured it would take a couple of hours, even via cable modem. This evening I sat down at my PC to watch it. This may sound like rank heresy, since the Red Sox were playing the Yankees at the culmination of a series which has turned even cricket-loving expat Brits like myself into baseball enthusiasts! (I must admit, however, that I did have a browser window open to keep an eye on the score…..)
The film runs for 90 minutes. The first half hour is about the Vietnam experiences of John Kerry, Max Cleland, Bob Kerrey, and others. It is not for the squeamish: the snapshot of US soldiers grinning over Vietnamese corpses is disturbingly familiar. The remainder of the film is about the Vietnam Veterans Against the War: the Winter Soldier Investigation of winter 1971; the Dewey Canyon III demonstration in Washington a couple of months later, which culminated in Kerry’s appearance before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and the repudiation of medals; and Kerry’s subsequent TV appearances, including the confrontation with O’Neill.
Over the last year or so, I’ve seen many clips from these amateur movies and TV recordings, but this is the first time I’ve seen the material assembled so completely, unhampered by the exigencies of MTV-generation editing. Kerry is remarkably impressive for a man of his age, both in his speech and his actions. One thing that really comes across from the body language of those around him – whether long-haired veterans or pin-stripe-suited Senators – is the fact that he clearly commanded enormous respect. As we now know, this respect even extended to the Nixon White House; the legacy of their response is still with us in the form of John O’Neill’s vicious “Swift Boat” lies. (He learned his dirty tricks from the master.)
Even though the film is playing in theatres, and can be purchased on DVD, you can download it from here, as I did. You can also get it through BitTorrent, eDonkey and Kazaa. Please watch it, and share it. It’s an important part of American history, and painfully relevant today.
And yes – the Red Sox did it! 10 to 3. Who would have believed it? As I finish typing this, people are outside in the street, sounding car horns, letting off fireworks, whooping it up… and this is in a quiet residential area of Brookline. I wonder what it’s like downtown?

Ambitious, but cogent.

Andrew Sullivan just blogged a comment that is so perfectly expressed that all I can do is reproduce it verbatim.
THE MISSING ISSUE: It does strike me as astounding that in four debates lasting six hours, the horrors of Abu Ghraib were never mentioned. Remember when we were reeling from the images? They remain the most spectacular public relations debacle for this country at war since Vietnam. And we know the underlying reasons for the abuse and torture: the prison was drastically under-manned and incompetently managed, the Pentagon had given mixed signals on what constituted torture, the CPA had no idea that it might be dealing with an insurgency and was dragging in all sorts of innocents to extract intelligence in a ham-handed manner. Although the administration has clearly done all it can to stymie Congressional investigations, it has become clear that responsibility for the chaos ultimately stops at Rumsfeld’s desk. No, it wasn’t a systematic policy. It was a function of what wasn’t done, rather than what was done – and, in that, it remains a symbol of everything that has gone so wrong in Iraq. Bush, of course, barely mentioned it at the time. He has no ability to stare harsh reality in the face – especially if it means reflection on himself and his administration. As with everything else on his watch, he was not responsible. In fact, no one was responsible except for those literally caught on camera raping, murdering and abusing prisoners in the care of the United States. And so his silence in the debates is not surprising. But Kerry’s is – and reveals a worrying lack of courage. Kerry is afraid that criticizing Abu Ghraib will make him look like a war critic, or anti-American, or somehow responsible for weakening morale. Vietnam hovers over him. It shouldn’t. What happened was unforgivable negligence and evil, a horrendous blow to American moral standing – as well as simply an outrage on a human and moral level. It didn’t affect Iraqis’ views: they tragically already believed we were as bad as these images portrayed. But it was a fatal blow to domestic morale. I haven’t fully recovered from it in my pro-war heart. I couldn’t believe America could do this. I still wince at the memory. But what I still remember was Dick Cheney’s response to criticism of Rumsfeld at the time. “Get off his case,” he harrumphed. Even after such a blow to the very core of the meaning of America, Cheney was contemptuous of holding anyone in his circle accountable. It says it all, doesn’t it?

There’s an excellent – and sobering – analysis of Bush’s faith and certainty, by Ron Suskind in today’s NYT Magazine: Without A Doubt. (Registration required.)
Two quotes. First, what do we mean by “reality-based”?:
In the summer of 2002 […] I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House’s displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn’t fully comprehend — but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency. The aide said that guys like me were ”in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who ”believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ”That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. ”We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
Second quote, on why Bush’s crew isn’t worried about the opinions of people who think that reality matters:
We don’t care. You see, you’re outnumbered 2 to 1 by folks in the big, wide middle of America, busy working people who don’t read The New York Times or Washington Post or The L.A. Times. And you know what they like? They like the way he walks and the way he points, the way he exudes confidence. They have faith in him. And when you attack him for his malaprops, his jumbled syntax, it’s good for us. Because you know what those folks don’t like? They don’t like you!” In this instance, the final ”you,” of course, meant the entire reality-based community.
Read the whole thing. To this reality-based individual, it was an eye-opener.

During this presidential campaign, one consistent Republican mantra has been that “if Kerry had been President, Saddam would still be in power and blah, blah, blah….” And this got me thinking about counterfactuals, about alternative histories – what might have plausibly happened if the initial conditions had been different.
Naturally I turned to the web, but I was disappointed with what I’d found. For example, Ed Driscoll links to several pre-9/11 alternative scenarios, all of which are equally implausible to anyone that has read Richard Clarke’s book. Most of the other uses of the term (or its cognate “alternate history”) seem to involve alternative accounts or interpretations of what actually happened. (The works of Seymour Hersh and Michael Moore are often described in this way.)
So what kind of alternative am I thinking about? Well, consider a world in which two little things are changed. First, in the summer of 2001, Tony Blair has a heart attack. This is plausible; we know today of his heart problems. His doctors advise him to retire, and he hands over to Gordon Brown. Second, imagine that Project Anaconda had been blown open in the press with Rumsfeld’s fingerprints all over it. (Anaconda really happened; it was a horribly botched operation in Afghanistan in which the military chain of command broke down completely, resulting in dozens of US Army fatalities. See Hersh’s Chain of Command.)
With these changes, let’s run the movie forward. 9/11 happens, and coalition forces hit Al Qaida and the Taliban in Afghanistan. Anaconda blows up, and although Rumsfeld doesn’t resign, his relationship with the military leadership is fatally poisoned.
Now Bush and his team begin to plan for Iraq, as described in Woodward’s Plan of Attack. But there’s a hitch. Unlike Blair, Gordon Brown understands the caveats and codicils to the various intelligence reports, and he asks the hard questions. Hearing only unsatisfactory answers, he declines to offer Bush his unconditional support. Bush and Rumsfeld are willing to push ahead without Britain, but now Powell reaches his limit. A coalition without a single permanent member of the UN Security Council other than the USA has no credibility, he says; the damage to America’s standing in the world from unilateral action would be irreparable. It’s a resigning matter. Meanwhile Rumsfeld is challenged from another quarter: the Joint Chiefs refuse to sign off on a plan for military operations without adequate supplies, body armor, and training.
Faced with these obstacles, Bush realizes that he can no longer push for an early invasion of Iraq… [to be continued]
This feels like an interesting counterfactual. Would Bush have taken the time to build a coalition? What if Blix had had a year to demonstrate that there were no WMDs? How might Bush have approached the questions of Iran, of the Palestinians? Would Saddam have resigned and fled in the face of an inexorable build-up with full UN support? Fascinating to speculate…..