Category: Politics

Back on June 4th, I posted a piece about Arianna Huffington’s article comparing George W. Bush and England’s King Henry V (as depicted by Shakespeare). Of course politicians, advertisers, journalists and others have always mined the English literary canon for stirring sound-bites. (In Blood, Class and Empire, the alternately brilliant and insufferable Christopher Hitchens notes that William Safire went through a purple patch in which a third of his NYT op-ed pieces included Churchillian references.) And today Scott Newstrom, an assistant professor at Amherst College, sent me a pointer to a fascinating essay in which he looks in some detail at the various (and varied) ways in which Americans have exploited the “Prince Hal” character, particularly with respect to George W. Bush. Recommended.
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The title of this entry is from Emerson. Read Scott Newstrom’s piece for the connection.

If you live outside the US and plan to visit, check the small print on your I-94W (visa waiver) form very, very carefully. If you’re a journalist, even a casual freelance contributor, you are liable to be detained, interrogated, strip-searched, handcuffed, frogmarched through the airport, locked up, and deported. Read this Salon story carefully, and then Elena Lappin’s account in the Guardian of how she was treated when she recently flew in to Los Angeles.
Apparently if you’re a “nonthreatening” reporter (whatever that means) you may be allowed to use a visa waiver – just once. After that, you need a special “I-visa”.

I’m posting this entry in the fervent hope that I will be able to delete it when it’s been shown to be false. But I have a horrible, nauseating feeling that I won’t.
Seymour Hesh spoke at the University of Chicago a little while ago. I haven’t seen a transcript, but according to various reports (including here, citing Rick Pearlstein), “[Hersh] said he had seen all the Abu Ghraib pictures. He said, ‘You haven’t begun to see evil…’ then trailed off. He said, ‘horrible things done to children of women prisoners, as the cameras run.’ He looked frightened.”

Arianna Huffington has just posted a wonderful piece in which she compares George W. Bush with the 15th century English King Henry V, as portrayed in Shakespeare’s play. The parallels are striking. Ex-frat boy ruler engages in a war of choice, in part for revenge (“tennis balls”), in part for reasons of domestic politics:
The dying Henry IV had told his son to engage in foreign wars to distract the people from domestic crises: �busy giddy minds with foreign quarrels.� The invasion of France is supposed to turn frivolous Hal into a strong leader � his youthful indiscretions a thing of the past.
Both men surrounded themselves with those in favor of going to war: Bush with his neocons, and Henry with the churchmen my fellow debater David Brooks dubbed the �theocons.�
Highly recommended.
[Update 2004-06-05 11:32:00] As a writer to Salon commented, there was one big difference between Henry V and George Bush: Henry actually led his troops into battle. He may have been irresponsible, but he was no chicken-hawk.

After reading today’s piece by the New York Times public editor (i.e. ombudsman) entitled Weapons of Mass Destruction? Or Mass Distraction?, I was moved to reply to him by email:
Congratulations to both you and the present NYT editorial staff on the courage to confront the isssue of the Times’ coverage of the WMD issue.
And yet, and yet…. As I read your description of the dysfunctional system, the coddling of anonymous sources, and the lack of scrutiny about the motives of sources, I could not help but be reminded of Whitewater et al. From things like Jeff Gerth’s notorious front-page piece of March 8, 1992 on “Clintons Joined S&L Operator…” through the Starr inquiry and the impeachment, there is (now) substantial evidence that uncritical New York Times reporters were manipulated by “sources,” and that exculpatory or debunking material was supressed.
Is it not time for the New York Times to examine its role in this matter in the same spirit of honest self-assessment?
Geoff Arnold
I was actually a bit hasty in sending this off. On re-reading it, I should have added something like this: Even a skeptical reading of accounts such as Joe Conason’s “The Hunting of the President” would suggest that the New York Times failed to meet the standards which you and the present editorial staff now champion. (The fact that other newspapers such as the Boston Globe and the Washington Post behaved even more recklessly should be irrelevant.)

There’s a transcript here of a speech by Gen. Anthony Zinni, USMC (Ret.), former commander of CENTCOM at the CDI Board of Directors Dinner on May 12, 2004. The whole thing is worth reading, including the Q&A that followed the talk. Here I’ll simply summarize the ten mistakes that he identified.
The first mistake that will be recorded in history [was] the belief that containment as a policy doesn’t work.
The second mistake … is that the strategy was flawed. […] the road to Baghdad led through Jerusalem. You solve the Middle East peace process, you’d be surprised what kinds of others things will work out.
The third mistake, I think was one we repeated from Vietnam, we had to create a false rationale for going in to get public support.
We failed in number four, to internationalize the effort.
I think the fifth mistake was that we underestimated the task.
The sixth mistake, and maybe the biggest one, was propping up and trusting the exiles
The seventh problem has been the lack of planning.
The eighth problem was the insufficiency of military forces on the ground.
The ninth problem has been the ad hoc organization we threw in there.
And that ad hoc organization has failed, leading to the tenth mistake, and that’s a series of bad decisions on the ground.

As Newsday reports,
The Defense Intelligence Agency has concluded that a U.S.-funded arm of Ahmed Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress has been used for years by Iranian intelligence to pass disinformation to the United States and to collect highly sensitive American secrets, according to intelligence sources.
“Iranian intelligence has been manipulating the United States through Chalabi by furnishing through his Information Collection Program information to provoke the United States into getting rid of Saddam Hussein,” said an intelligence source Friday who was briefed on the Defense Intelligence Agency’s conclusions, which were based on a review of thousands of internal documents.
When the history books are written, this may well turn out to be one of the greatest deceptions of all time. How ironic that they chose this moment to release the film Troy, which centres around one of the Barbara Tuchman’s quintessential follies. More from Newsday:
Patrick Lang, former director of the intelligence agency’s Middle East branch, said he had been told by colleagues in the intelligence community that Chalabi’s U.S.-funded program to provide information about weapons of mass destruction and insurgents was effectively an Iranian intelligence operation. “They [the Iranians] knew exactly what we were up to,” he said.
He described it as “one of the most sophisticated and successful intelligence operations in history.”
“I’m a spook. I appreciate good work. This was good work,” he said.
Your tax dollars at work, funding an Iranian disinformation and agit-prop campaign, manipulating a U.S. president into finishing up the Iran-Iraq war. (Didn’t we used to be on the other side of that one – supplying Saddam with intelligence and WMD materials?) This has been a bit like those incidents in Afghanistan where one tribal warlord would tell the US that his rival was “Taliban”, calling down an air strike in furtherance of his vendetta. Instead of calling in an AC-130 gunship, Iran was able to “call in” the entire Imperial might of the U.S. military. Just amazing. When the smoke clears, and the U.S. has been forced out of Iraq, will we find that Iran has won?

From the Guardian newspaper:
It was 10.30pm in the remote village of Mukaradeeb by the Syrian border and the guests hurried back to their homes as the party ended. As sister-in-law of the groom, Mrs Shihab, 30, was to sleep with her husband and children in the house of the wedding party, the Rakat family villa. She was one of the few in the house who survived the night.
“The bombing started at 3am,” she said yesterday from her bed in the emergency ward at Ramadi general hospital, 60 miles west of Baghdad. “We went out of the house and the American soldiers started to shoot us. They were shooting low on the ground and targeting us one by one,” she said. She ran with her youngest child in her arms and her two young boys, Ali and Hamza, close behind. As she crossed the fields a shell exploded close to her, fracturing her legs and knocking her to the ground.
She lay there and a second round hit her on the right arm. By then her two boys lay dead. “I left them because they were dead,” she said. One, she saw, had been decapitated by a shell.
“I fell into the mud and an American soldier came and kicked me. I pretended to be dead so he wouldn’t kill me. My youngest child was alive next to me.”
Mrs Shibab’s description, backed by other witnesses, of an attack on a sleeping village is at odds with the American claim that they came under fire while targeting a suspected foreign fighter safe house.
She described how in the hours before dawn she watched as American troops destroyed the Rakat villa and the house next door, reducing the buildings to rubble.
Another relative carried Mrs Shihab and her surviving child to hospital. There she was told her husband Mohammed, the eldest of the Rakat sons, had also died.
As Mrs Shihab spoke she gestured with hands still daubed red-brown with the henna the women had used to decorate themselves for the wedding. Alongside her in the ward yesterday were three badly injured girls from the Rakat family: Khalood Mohammed, aged just a year and struggling for breath, Moaza Rakat, 12, and Iqbal Rakat, 15, whose right foot doctors had already amputated.
By the time the sun rose on Wednesday over the Rakat family house, the raid had claimed 42 lives, according to Hamdi Noor al-Alusi, manager of the al-Qaim general hospital, the nearest to the village.
It seems that they need to teach the U.S. military about more than just the Geneva Conventions. How about Middle Eastern culture and the nomadic peoples of the region? I wonder if General Mattis will be quite so stupidly gung-ho at his court-martial:
Major General James Mattis, commander of the 1st Marine Division, was scathing of those who suggested a wedding party had been hit. “How many people go to the middle of the desert … to hold a wedding 80 miles (130km) from the nearest civilisation? These were more than two dozen military-age males. Let’s not be naive.”
When reporters asked him about footage on Arabic television of a child’s body being lowered into a grave, he replied: “I have not seen the pictures but bad things happen in wars. I don’t have to apologise for the conduct of my men.”

In this piece, George Will gets to the heart of today’s quagmire in Iraq: accountability:
The first axiom is: When there is no penalty for failure, failures proliferate.
Leave aside the question of who or what failed before 9/11. But who lost his or her job because the president’s 2003 State of the Union address gave currency to a fraud — the story of Iraq attempting to buy uranium in Niger? Or because the primary and only sufficient reason for waging pre-emptive war — weapons of mass destruction — was largely spurious? Or because postwar planning, from failure to anticipate the initial looting to today’s insufficient force levels, has been botched? Failures are multiplying because of choices for which no one seems accountable.
Indeed. And for Rumsfeld, Will summons up the bard….
One question is: Are the nation’s efforts in the deepening global war — the world is more menacing than it was a year ago — helped or hindered by Rumsfeld’s continuation as the appointed American most conspicuously identified with the conduct of the war? This is not a simple call. But being experienced, he will know how to make the call. Being honorable, he will so do.
He knows his Macbeth and will recognize the framing of the second question: Were he to resign, would discerning people say that nothing in his public life became him like the leaving of it?