Category: Politics

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…..

Try these all season Flipflops. Click on image to progress forward.
(Thanks, Kate.)

OK, so this is really contrarian thinking. In the midst of an election campaign in which one of the main issues is how to prosecute “the War on Terror”, along comes a documentary which argues that al-Qaida may not really exist. In today’s Guardian, Andy Beckett reviews the series The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear which begins on BBC2 next Wednesday. In this three-part series, the director Adam Curtis:
… points out that al-Qaida did not even have a name until early 2001, when the American government decided to prosecute Bin Laden in his absence and had to use anti-Mafia laws that required the existence of a named criminal organisation.
Curtis also cites the Home Office’s own statistics for arrests and convictions of suspected terrorists since September 11 2001. Of the 664 people detained up to the end of last month, only 17 have been found guilty. Of these, the majority were Irish Republicans, Sikh militants or members of other groups with no connection to Islamist terrorism. Nobody has been convicted who is a proven member of al-Qaida.
In fact, Curtis is not alone in wondering about all this. Quietly but increasingly, other observers of the war on terror have been having similar doubts. “The grand concept of the war has not succeeded,” says Jonathan Eyal, director of the British military thinktank the Royal United Services Institute. “In purely military terms, it has been an inconclusive war … a rather haphazard operation. Al-Qaida managed the most spectacular attack, but clearly it is also being sustained by the way that we rather cavalierly stick the name al-Qaida on Iraq, Indonesia, the Philippines. There is a long tradition that if you divert all your resources to a threat, then you exaggerate it.”
Bill Durodie, director of the international centre for security analysis at King’s College London, says: “The reality [of the al-Qaida threat to the west] has been essentially a one-off. There has been one incident in the developed world since 9/11 [the Madrid bombings]. There’s no real evidence that all these groups are connected.”
Good heavens – maybe Bush was right to dismiss Osama bin Laden as he did. But in that case, who are we supposed to be fighting? Iraqi patriots insurgents? Or perhaps – and even more terrifying – it’s….

Thomas Friedman’s op-ed Addicted to 9/11 today was right on the money. He addresses Kerry’s hope that America can get back to a state where “terrorists are not the focus of our lives, but they’re a nuisance”, and says, “The idea that President Bush and Mr. Cheney would declare such a statement to be proof that Mr. Kerry is unfit to lead actually says more about them than Mr. Kerry. Excuse me, I don’t know about you, but I dream of going back to the days when terrorism was just a nuisance in our lives.”
I would certainly like that, and having lived in England through the IRA’s mainland bombing campaign I can remember what it felt like. I can still recall the moment when I caught myself looking at a package in the sidewalk and, for the first time in years, didn’t immediately think panic “Bomb…?”. It’s a good feeling. Naive? I don’t think so; just getting things into proportion and being careful rather than obsessive.
Friedman concludes, “Lastly, politicizing 9/11 put a wedge between us and our history. The Bush team has turned this country into The United States of Fighting Terrorism. […] I want a president who can one day restore Sept. 11th to its rightful place on the calendar: as the day after Sept. 10th and before Sept. 12th. I do not want it to become a day that defines us. Because ultimately Sept. 11th is about them – the bad guys – not about us. We’re about the Fourth of July. Just so.

After a series of mind-bogglingly inept op-ed pieces in the New York Times, David Brooks came up with what seemed like a reasonably interesting column today. Under the heading Not Just a Personality Clash, a Conflict of Visions, he argues that there is a relationship between political orientation and geography:
We’re used to this in the realm of domestic politics. Politicians from the more sparsely populated South and West are more likely, at least in the political and economic realms, to champion the Goldwateresque virtues: freedom, self-sufficiency, individualism. Politicians from the cities are likely to champion the Ted Kennedyesque virtues: social justice, tolerance, interdependence.
Politicians from sparsely populated areas are more likely to say they want government off people’s backs so they can run their own lives. Politicians from denser areas are more likely to want government to play at least a refereeing role, to keep people from bumping into one another too abusively.
And he goes on to wonder if this dichotomy is related to the way people think about international affairs. (He cites a recent article by Adam Wolfson in the Weekly Standard, at which point my interest started to wane. C’mon, there has to be a better source than that rag.)
However before Brooks gets to that point, he tosses in the following throw-away line:
Neither group lives up to its ideals with perfect consistency, but this is what both groups say.
And that got me thinking. Brooks clearly intends this as an even-handed characterization, in true journalistic style, but is it accurate. Are liberals and conservatives equally inconsistent when it comes to living up to their ideals?
I think not. My sense if that, by and large, conservatives are much more likely to be “closet liberals” than are liberals to be “closet conservatives”. The newspapers report many arch-conservatives who denounce the Federal government one moment and then turn around to lobby for a contract, or a tax break, or a subsidy. Taxprof Blog published an analysis of government spending and subsidies last month that showed:
…that of the 32 states (and the District of Columbia) that are “winners” — receiving more in federal spending than they pay in federal taxes — 76% are Red States that voted for George Bush in 2000. Indeed, 17 of the 20 (85%) states receiving the most federal spending per dollar of federal taxes paid are Red States.
On the other hand, I can’t remember a single case of a prominent liberal politician displaying “closet conservative” tendencies. (Apart from Zell Miller, I guess, though he’s out of the closet these days.) Of course you may regard the efforts of Clinton, Rubin, Kerry and others to balance the budget in the 1990s as rather conservative behavior. I thought so at the time, but after four years of Bush and his runaway deficits I’m thoroughly confused.
Naturally I’m not talking about campaign fundraising or pandering to special interests. Those are equal-opportunity failings, neither liberal nor conservative.
The bottom line: Brook’s simplistic ideas about geography and politics do illustrate a point – but not necessarily the point that he intended to make.

Recommended: my colleague Alec’s recent piece on America, Terrorism, and the Power of Nightmares.

The Guardian has an article today in which they show some of the letters that Michael Moore has received from soldiers and contract workers in Iraq. All are bitterly angry with George W. Bush.
And yes, I’m sure Moore’s received other letters from people who support Bush. But with the election less than a month away, it’s worth paying attention to the soldier who wrote: “People’s perceptions of this war have done a complete 180 since we got here. We had someone die in a mortar attack the first week, and ever since then, things have changed completely. Soldiers are calling their families urging them to support John Kerry. If this is happening elsewhere, it looks as if the overseas military vote that Bush is used to won’t be there this time around.”
Update: The letters are taken from Moore’s new book, Will They Ever Trust Us Again?

During the tenure of the current President, many people have compared him with his father. Herewith a few bon mots from George Senior. Make of them what you will.
27 Oct 1984 “Let me assure you of one thing: the United States under this administration will never — never — let terrorism or fear of terrorism determine its foreign policy.”
28 Jan 1987 [On selling weapons to Iran] “On the surface, selling arms to a country that sponsors terrorism, of course, clearly, you’d have to argue it’s wrong, but it’s the exception sometimes that proves the rule.”
Maybe this explains why his son prefers other counsel. But sometimes they seem too much alike. More from Bush pere:
2 Aug 1988 [When the USS Vincennes shot down an Iranian airliner] “I will never apologize for the United States, ever. I don’t care what the facts are.”
4 Dec 1990 “I know what I’ve told you I’m going to say, I’m going to say. And what else I say, well, I’ll take some time to figure that all out.”
12 May 1991 “I’ve got to run now and relax. The doctor told me to relax. The doctor told me to relax. The doctor told me. He was the one. He said, ‘Relax.'”
4 Mar 1992 “Somebody asked me, what’s it take to win? I said to them, I can’t remember, what does it take to win the Superbowl? Or maybe Steinbrenner, my friend George, will tell us what it takes for the Yanks to win… one run. But I went over to the Strawberry Festival this morning, and ate a piece of shortcake over there — able to enjoy it right away, and once I completed it, it didn’t have to be approved by Congress — I just went ahead and ate it.”
More here.