Category: Politics

I keep running across links to quotations from recent emails by the WSJ reporter Farnaz Fassihi in Baghdad. Here are two sobering excerpts:
Iraqis say that thanks to America they got freedom in exchange for insecurity. Guess what? They say they’d take security over freedom any day, even if it means having a dictator ruler. I heard an educated Iraqi say today that if Saddam Hussein were allowed to run for elections he would get the majority of the vote. This is truly sad.
I asked a 28-year-old engineer if he and his family would participate in the Iraqi elections since it was the first time Iraqis could to some degree elect a leadership. His response summed it all: “Go and vote and risk being blown into pieces or followed by the insurgents and murdered for cooperating with the Americans? For what? To practice democracy? Are you joking?”
After reading this, and watching Bush and Kerry debate Iraq, all I can say is, “Don’t promise what you can’t deliver.”

Three pieces caught my eye today with a common theme: the personal consequences of Bush’s elective war in Iraq.
First, there was a piece in today’s NYT about an ex-reservist who’s been activated for duty in Iraq.
[M]y cousin Alan – the youngest – joined the Ohio National Guard after graduating from high school in 1997. […] My primary concern was whether Alan was in good enough shape to get through the arduous training. Once that was over, he had to train with his unit for only one weekend a month and two weeks a year for the next six years. His name would then be placed on an inactive list for another two years, unless – as the recruiter who visited his high school had explained – our country needed his skills during a natural disaster or a college riot. […] But two-day weekends became four-day weekends, two weeks stretched to three weeks, and full college tuition shrank to half the tuition for vocational school. Alan grew disenchanted with the National Guard, and […] he was given a general discharge. His name was still placed on an inactive duty list – a roster he was told was only for an unprecedented national disaster that active-duty soldiers couldn’t handle alone. […] He packed away his uniform, and none of us ever thought about it again. Until last month. Alan received orders to report for “involuntary” duty on Sept. 12. In Iraq. For a year and a half: 545 days to be exact, with two possible extensions.
Next, I was reading PlanetSun, the aggregation of blogs for folks at Sun Microsystems, and I came across a piece by David Kordsmeier about his thoughts on coming across his (fairly unusual) name in the list of US casualties in Iraq. It’s a moving piece, worth reading slowly and thoughtfully.
And then, as so often, I turned to Terry, and read his short piece on the moral issue at the core of sending someone to war. This is from an interview with Stephen Fry, quoting Bertrand Russell, as cited in Neil Gaiman’s blog (and that pretty much captures the magic of the web right there):
“Don’t you understand? The sacrifice we’re asking of our young is not that they die for their country, but that they kill for their country.” That’s the sacrifice. To ask a child to kill someone else, whom you’ve never met. That’s a moral choice, pulling a trigger. Having a bullet hit you is not a moral choice. You don’t decide to be killed. It’s a terrible thing that happens to you. But killing something is something you do and that’s a desperate sacrifice.
Exactly. (See also my earlier piece on War and Morality.)

River is back with two new blog entries from Baghdad. Her thoughts on viewing a (bootleg copy of) Fahrenheit 9/11 are essential reading. Speaking about Lila Lipscomb, the mother of the US soldier killed in Iraq, River says:
I can’t explain the feelings I had towards her. I pitied her because, apparently, she knew very little about what she was sending her kids into. I was angry with her because she really didn’t want to know what she was sending her children to do. In the end, all of those feelings crumbled away as she read the last letter from her deceased son. I began feeling a sympathy I really didn’t want to feel, and as she was walking in the streets of Washington, looking at the protestors and crying, it struck me that the Americans around her would never understand her anguish. The irony of the situation is that the one place in the world she would ever find empathy was Iraq. We understand. We know what it’s like to lose family and friends to war- to know that their final moments weren’t peaceful ones… that they probably died thirsty and in pain… that they weren’t surrounded by loved ones while taking their final breath.
As for her comments on watching Bush and Allawi on television…
The elections are already a standard joke. There’s talk of holding elections only in certain places where it will be ‘safe’ to hold them. One wonders what exactly comprises ‘safe’ in Iraq today. Does ‘safe’ mean the provinces that are seeing fewer attacks on American troops? Or does ‘safe’ mean the areas where the abduction of foreigners isn’t occurring? Or could ‘safe’ mean the areas that *won’t* vote for an Islamic republic and *will* vote for Allawi? Who will be allowed to choose these places? Right now, Baghdad is quite unsafe. We see daily abductions, killings, bombings and Al-Sadr City, slums of Baghdad, see air strikes… will they hold elections in Baghdad? Imagine, Bush being allowed to hold elections in ‘safe’ areas- like Texas and Florida.
Sad to say, I actually can imagine the latter. Maybe I need to get out more.

I know, I know: you see “CD of the week” and you expect music. Not this time. An Audience with Tony Benn is a double CD that I picked up in Oxford recently. It’s simply a recording of the former MP and Labour politician Tony Benn on stage, speaking about politics and answering questions from the audience over the course of a couple of hours. Sounds boring? Anything but.
Tony Benn retired from Parliament a few years ago “to spend more time with politics”, and listening to him one remembers that politics is about ideas – big ideas, about how we organize and govern our lives, and how power is acquired, transferred, and controlled. It’s a refreshing – and somewhat wistful – realisation. To most people, he’s identified with the label “left-wing extremist”, or “socialist”. While that may have been his assigned role in the bizarre game of day-to-day politics, here he simply talks about common-sense, uncomplicated ideas, with the clarity that marks a superb thinker and orator.
A couple of years ago, while visiting England, I turned on the TV late one evening and found myself watching an hour-long conversation between Tony Benn and Michael Portillo, the former candidate for the leader of the Conservative Party. Here were two prominent politicians from opposite ends of the political spectrum, having a quiet, civilized discussion about the state of politics in Britain over recent years. Obviously they disagreed about many things, but they agreed on many more – on the responsibility of those in government, and the dangers of the “politics of personality”, among other things. They clearly liked and respected each other, and enjoyed the interplay of ideas. Voices were not raised, slogans and sound-bites were eschewed. It was wonderful. I thought of American politicians, and tried to imagine such an exchange occurring. Mario Cuomo and Newt Gingrich? Ted Kennedy and Bob Dole? Alas, my imagination wasn’t up to the task.

Sobering reading from The Guardian, also available here:
According to the US military’s leading strategists and prominent retired generals, Bush’s war is already lost. Retired general William Odom, former head of the National Security Agency, told me: “Bush hasn’t found the WMD. Al-Qaida, it’s worse, he’s lost on that front. That he’s going to achieve a democracy there? That goal is lost, too. It’s lost.” He adds: “Right now, the course we’re on, we’re achieving Bin Laden’s ends.”
And the politicians can’t blame the military for this.
After the killing of four US contractors in Fallujah, the marines besieged the city for three weeks in April – the watershed event for the insurgency. “I think the president ordered the attack on Fallujah,” said General Hoare. “I asked a three-star marine general who gave the order to go to Fallujah and he wouldn’t tell me. I came to the conclusion that the order came directly from the White House.” Then, just as suddenly, the order was rescinded, and Islamist radicals gained control, using the city as a base.
As David J. Morris writes in Salon:
The mainstream press has largely overlooked the fact that in the case of Fallujah, the White House unnecessarily injected itself into the military’s tactical decision-making process in Iraq, ignored the informed opinions of ground commanders, and in effect micromanaged the battle. According to many observers, the seemingly contradictory U.S. military actions over the course of the siege were largely the result of the wishy-washy directives being issued by the Bush administration and its failure to appreciate the implications of sending in a large Marine force to seize a notoriously hostile town.
To both outside observers and former high-placed officials, including former U.S. Central Command chief Anthony Zinni and historian Robert Kaplan, it appeared as if the Bush administration had ordered the punitive campaign out of anger and then lost nerve when Arab outrage over civilian casualties rose to a fever pitch.
I don’t care about Bush’s ANG career, or even that he was a pathological liar at college. I care about the fact that he’s demonstrated that he’s totally incompetent, and that his bad judgment has caused thousands of deaths. He deserves impeachment, not re-election.

Respectful of Otters just posted a piece about so-called “partial birth abortion”. It cites an article in Ms. about a woman whose baby died in utero at 19 weeks. She was forced to spend a week carrying a dead fetus inside her – bleeding steadily, at risk of hemorrhage – before she could be treated. Quite simply, no-one was willing to treat her, because the safest procedure for removing the fetus was proscribed under the “partial birth abortion” ban.

Please read Juan Cole‘s piece on September 11 and its aftermath. I doubt anyone who reads my blog actually believes Bush’s blatherings about the perpetrators “hating freedom”, so I may be preaching to the choir, but this piece explains the real strategic thinking involved.

Last night I watched part two of The Grid on BBC. This is a joint BBC/TNT/Fox drama that “explores both sides of the escalating war on terror”. Call me a cynic, but it seemed to me that the main effect that the producers were looking for was to convince the viewing public that (a) the law enforcement and counter-terrorism forces in the US and UK are mostly incompetent, and (b) we should all be VERY, VERY, AFRAID of everyone and everything. Carl Rove (Bush’s choreographer of campaign dirt and panic) must have been delighted.

Yesterday the faux-Democrat Zell Miller spoke at the Republican Convention, and lambasted John Kerry mercilessly and with visible anger. He ranted that “For more than 20 years, on every one of the great issues of freedom and security, John Kerry has been more wrong, more weak and more wobbly than any other national figure.”
Yet a scant three and a bit years ago, the same Zell Miller lauded Kerry as “one of this nation’s authentic heroes, one of this party’s best-known and greatest leaders – and a good friend”. In a speech introducing Kerry at the Democratic Party of Georgia’s Jefferson-Jackson Dinner in March, 2001, Miller waxed lyrical:
“In his 16 years in the Senate, John Kerry has fought against government waste and worked hard to bring some accountability to Washington. Early in his Senate career in 1986, John signed on to the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Deficit Reduction Bill, and he fought for balanced budgets before it was considered politically correct for Democrats to do so. John has worked to strengthen our military, reform public education, boost the economy and protect the environment.”
Yes, it’s amazing how people can change – and I’m not referring to John Kerry! Zell Miller should be bloody well ashamed of himself, if you ask me.
Thanks to Mark M. for the tip.
UPDATE: Apparently Jimmy Carter was also upset with Zell, and wrote to him to say so.

I’m confused. Dubya told an NBC Today Show interviewer that “had my unit been called up, I would have gone (to Vietnam).” But according to his Air Guard application (the one released by the Pentagon but not the White House), Bush checked the “No Overseas Service” box when he pulled strings to avoid the draft. Can someone explain?
(This is courtesy of William McTavish at Capitol Hill Blue; they have a mixed reputation, but this is irrefutable.)