Category: Politics

A useful reminder by Leon Hadar in The American Conservative:

The benchmarks to measure success in Iraq should be the ones that Bush, McCain and the other cheer-leaders had provided before Congress authorized Bush to go to war. That should be the context for the debate on Iraq during this election:

1. We would discover weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

2. We would uncover the ties between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Ladin.

3. The war in Iraq would be as short and relatively costless in terms of American lives and U.S. dollars as the war in Afghanistan.

4. “Liberated” Iraq would be a unified nation-state and free of ethnic and religious rivalries as well as of foreign occupation.

5. A democratic and secular Iraq would become a political model for the entire Broader Middle East and would create the conditions for a political and economic liberalization in the Arab world.

6. Iraq would not require American economic assistance since it economy would grow and the country would become prosperous thanks to its growing oil revenues.

7. The U.S. military victory in Iraq would strengthen U.S. strategic position in the Middle East

(a) encouraging other global and regional powers to jump on the American bandwagon,

(b) weakening the power of anti-Americans governments (Iran) and terrorist groups,

(c) helping revive the Palestinian-Israeli peace process (”The road to Jerusalem leads through Baghdad”),

and (d) putting pressure on North Korea and Iran to end their nuclear military programs.

Now…based on these high standards set-up by the Bush Administration, it has failed in achieving all these seven goals (and related others). Seven F’s. Time to switch that kid to another school.

From Marty Kaplan’s HuffPo piece, Beyond Sicko:

“I had a colonoscopy the other week,” the CDC’s Dr. Gerberding told the 400 public health officials, business leaders and nonprofits she was hoping would sign on to a “healthiest nation alliance.” “Actually,” she added, “I was billed for two colonoscopies, though I’m sure I only had one.”

The David Davis by-election has been about more than the “42 days” rule, and those politicians like Tony McNulty who dismiss it as “vanity” are simply reinforcing Davis’ point. But almost has important has been the opportunity for other voices to be heard – from Bob Geldorf, to the 7/7 survivor Rachel. Here’s the first paragraph from her brilliant speech. Read the whole thing:

Three years ago I was on the way to work when a 19 year old British man detonated a suicide bomb in the carriage I was travelling in, killing 26 innocent people and wounding over a hundred more. So I understand first-hand how terrifying terrorism is. But I now know that the real aim of the terrorists is not to kill hundreds but to terrify millions. To terrify us so much that we forget who we are and what we stand for and become like frightened children begging only to be kept safe. To use our own nightmares against us and to amplify them through the media and news cycle’s endless feedback loop of fear. But as any parent knows, it is not always possible to keep those you love safe, and a person who is always safe is a person who never knows freedom – and who has no life.

See the whole speech here at Rachel’s blog. [UPDATE] And for an excellent assessment of Davis’ stand on principle, and why most politicians and journos seem to be clueless about it, I recommend this piece by Iain Dale over at CiF.

My last posting was of a man who doesn’t understand the Constitution of his own country. Here, by way of contrast, is a man who understands extremely well:

PZ thinks that this speech dates back to June ’06. My (reluctant) guess is that Obama won’t be able to express himself this clearly between now and November 4, but I have no reason to doubt that this is what he really believes. I hope so.

First George Bush senior, now John McCain:

I would have to say that the Constitution established America as a Christian nation.

Since calculated pandering would presumably be more deliberate and less incoherent, I guess he really is as ignorant as he sounds.

(H/t to Jim Lippard.)

I don’t get to vote in the forthcoming elections, but I can’t avoid the zeitgeist. And I agree strongly with Robert Reich, who just endorsed Barack Obama. My emphasis:

“I saw the ads” — the negative man-on-street commercials that the Clinton campaign put up in Pennsylvania in the wake of Obama’s bitter/cling comments a week ago — “and I was appalled, frankly. I thought it represented the nadir of mean-spirited, negative politics. And also of the politics of distraction, of gotcha politics. It’s the worst of all worlds. We have three terrible traditions that we’ve developed in American campaigns. One is outright meanness and negativity. The second is taking out of context something your opponent said, maybe inartfully, and blowing it up into something your opponent doesn’t possibly believe and doesn’t possibly represent. And third is a kind of tradition of distraction, of getting off the big subject with sideshows that have nothing to do with what matters. And these three aspects of the old politics I’ve seen growing in Hillary’s campaign. And I’ve come to the point, after seeing those ads, where I can’t in good conscience not say out loud what I believe about who should be president. Those ads are nothing but Republicanism. They’re lending legitimacy to a Republican message that’s wrong to begin with, and they harken back to the past 20 years of demagoguery on guns and religion. It’s old politics at its worst — and old Republican politics, not even old Democratic politics. It’s just so deeply cynical.”

From Juan Cole, we get various perspectives on the recent upsurge in violence in Iraq. First, John McCain:

Republican presidential hopeful John McCain said Sunday that Iraq’s military performed “pretty well” in its recent Basra assault despite the “mixed” results of the battle… “Overall, the Iraqi military performed pretty well… eight or nine months ago, it would have been unthinkable.”

But from those on the spot….

Stephen Farrell and James Glanz of the New York Times estimate that at least 1,000 Iraqi soldiers and policemen, or more than 4% of the force sent into Basra, “abandoned their posts” during the fighting, including “dozens of officers” and “at least two senior field commanders.”
Other pieces offer even more devastating numbers. For instance, Sudarsan Raghavan and Ernesto Londoño of the Washington Post suggest that perhaps 30% of government troops had “abandoned the fight before a cease-fire was reached.” Tina Susman of the Los Angeles Times offers 50% as an estimate for police desertions in the midst of battle in Baghdad’s vast Sadr City slum, a stronghold of cleric Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army militia.
In other words, after years of intensive training by American advisors and an investment of $22 billion dollars, U.S. military spokesmen are once again left trying to put the best face on a strategic disaster

Like a number of other bloggers, I’ve pretty much stopped postings about the U.S. occupation of Iraq. Re-reading my blog entries from three or four years ago, the most common tag was “Politics” ((I didn’t add the “Stupidity” and “Violent world” categories until recently.)), and there was a constant stream of new outrages to get worked up about. And we did.
Five years on, everybody seems numb. There’s nothing new to write about: no political breakthroughs, no strategic shifts, no new insights. But the most telling thing is that people – politicians, press, candidates, the military – just keep steadily lowering expectations. Even the “Magic pony”, the marvellous “Surge” that would stabilize things to give politics a chance, is crumbling. There’s been no political progress, the US body count is up to 4,000, and yesterday the death toll was nearly 60. Remember John McCain’s jaunty walk through the Baghdad market last April? Not this time. And as Juan Cole reports, even the Green Zone isn’t safe:

The Green Zone was subjected to repeated mortar and rocket attacks on Sunday, which killed 1 American and 4 others inside, and at least a dozen on its edges (because those firing them were bad shots). The Green Zone is where the US Embassy and major Iraqi government buildings are. It had been a little safer recently, or at least the Pentagon was peddling that line to CNN during last week’s commemoration of the 5th anniversary of the war (see the CNN piece below). It is a measure of how the war objectives keep being defined down, that for the Green Zone to be relatively safe was trumpeted as an accomplishment. The “green zone” was always supposed to be safe, since it was heavily guarded and surrounded by blast walls.

The most ironic aspect of all this is that Bush has been trying to talk up the situation in Iraq, and how the surge has “turned things around” ((By about 360°, as far as I can see.)), in order to distract people from the state of the economy. I imagine he’s trying to help McCain, who probably needs it: as Josh points out at TPM:

John McCain’s primary economics advisor, former Sen. Phil Gramm (R), is probably as responsible for setting the stage for this crisis as anyone in the country through his legislative role in the deregulation of the financial services industry.

UPDATE: For those who are not completely numbed, this piece on the reality of the “surge” is well worth reading.

Via Sully, a sobering assessment by Judah Grunstein: (My emphasis.)

… I’ll preface it by emphasizing that I’m not drawing a moral or methodological equivalency here, but simply a structural and functional one. Namely, as the glue that holds Iraq’s disparate parts together, the U.S. is now playing the role that Saddam Hussein formerly played in Iraq, and we’re playing it for the same reason that we were willing to tolerate Hussein for as long as we did: to contain Iran’s regional influence. What’s more, it’s a role that has once again led us to ally ourselves with some unsavory and unpredictable characters, all of whom have their own agendas that don’t always correspond to ours. And short of the improbable appearance of an Iraqi strongman in the structural, functional (and moral) image of Saddam Hussein, it’s a role that only we can play.

Is this what Cheney wanted – to bind the hands of his successors?

Nice piece by John Scalzi on The Worst Presidents?. I agree with his ranking, and was amused by the P.S.:

I don’t really have an extensive ranking system for worst vice presidents, but I will note that the two vice presidents I consider to be the worst, Aaron Burr and Dick Cheney, both shot people while in office. Coincidence?