Oklahoma City Memorial — Rainy

Here’s the rainy version of the monument shown in the post below:

I took this photo on my way to a reception that I was surprised to see anyone attended, seeing as how a tornado had (possibly) just struck Oklahoma. Just an hour or two earlier, sirens were blaring, and I saw this kind of stuff on my hotel TV:

They shrug these things off in Oklahoma City, but first they have to go into full-scale panic mode on the TV news. That curled appendage above Britton — what the meteorologist called a “hook echo” — was the alleged tornado, one of two. But my colleagues at this conference never saw this, and blithely got on a bus heading to the Memorial Museum.

I waited til the tornado watch was over, and then took off by foot, carrying a borrowed umbrella. Took me so long to get there, I missed the reception. My friends were surprised when I told them about the tornado, although they admitted hearing a couple of sirens.

I’ll admit it: I’m more afraid of tornados than earthquakes. That’s probably why I live here and not there. I was in a tornado once, when I lived in Barrington, Illinois. Deep in my psyche, I have post-tornado traumatic stress syndrome. I was too young to remember anything about it, but my mother says she took me and my brother, then a baby, into the cellar to wait it out. The cellar was flooded. I stood in the water next to my mother while she held the baby. There was a bare lightbulb hanging from the ceiling, flickering on and off. My mom thought if she could just reach the lightbulb and tighten it, it would stay on.

But she couldn’t quite reach it, and that’s why all three of us are alive today. Happy Mother’s Day!

Oklahoma Monument — Sunny

I’m jumping around the timeline now.  I was in Oklahoma last week.  The day I arrived, within about an hour, Oklahoma experienced a tornado. But a couple days later, all was sunny.  I saw the Memorial to the victims of the Murrah Federal Building bomb attack on both the rainy day and the sunny day.  On the sunny day, I was looking north.

Visiting the memorial museum was, of course, intense. It explores the bombing and its aftermath in very specific, detailed ways, using every medium available. It is the ultimate “found art” museum, and since all the found objects were thrown off by this horrific attack, they connect you directly to the lives of the victims — and their murderers.

I saw a datebook, all scuffed and crumpled, open to April 1995. The owner of the book died. For some reason I found it quite moving that he had put a yellow sticker on April 15 to mark the full moon — the last one he was alive to see.  I saw the famous axle from Timothy McVeigh’s rented truck, the one bearing the VIN number that helped the FBI finger him.  I heard a recording of a water board meeting in a nearby office, which picked up the sound of the loud explosion.  I saw shreds of clothing, shoes, watches, jewelry recovered from the blast, often damaged, and now on display.

These little items are the only way to understand what happened.

This museum has hundreds of such items, plus photos, TV clips, and lots of text explaining the various things that happened. The writing is clear and restrained, and never indulges in the bathos of political posturing. The only place you see that kind of thing is on the contemporaneous video clips — mostly from Bill and Hillary Clinton, whose “feel your pain” exercises apparently worked for them back then, but seem like self-parody from this distance.

When the bombing happened in 1995, my son was 4.  I still remember his little toys from back then.  We got a lot of Disney stuff, some of it from McDonalds, promoting movies like Winnie-the-Pooh and The Lion King.  The last room of the exhibit is for photos of those who were killed, each one inside a clear plastic box with a little ledge for personal items family members might have wanted to include.  Many of the kids from the day-care center who died had Disney toys just like my son’s in their boxes. Seeing those things was a blow to the gut.  Thinking, my boy’s almost 18 now, ready to graduate from high school, thank God, something those Oklahoma children never got to experience.  The whole world was made up of these toys. That’s what they knew.

Here’s What “John From Cincinnati” Means

I get it.  The fact that I get it doesn’t make “John From Cincinnati” a good show, but if you’re wondering what it’s all about, it’s simple.

“John From Cincinnati” tried to answer the question of what would happen if the most potent figures from the New Testament, akin to John the Baptist, Mary Magdalene, Joseph and Mary and of course, Jesus Christ, were to emerge in a contemporary setting.  What would the people around them do? 

The show asks:  Do you believe the New Testament?  Do you take it as a matter of not just faith but fact that Jesus performed miracles like raising the dead and walking on water?  Was the purpose of these miraculous feats to persuade the people of his times to believe he was divine, and that his words were prophecies? 

If you do believe these things, why would you find “John From Cincinnati” implausible? Isn’t there supposed to be a return?  Well, then, it could happen like it does on the show, couldn’t it?

The show was rife with Christian mystical symbolism, but I don’t think the point of the show was to bring us all to Jesus.  It was, instead, a what-if, a fantasy, a film noir Second Coming. And yet, within the universe of the show, we are to believe that this particular Second Coming is a very good thing — for the characters in the show, and for humanity in general.  The crisis precipitated by 9/11 is “huge,” as John says.  Bigger than what we believe it to be already.  An existential threat that will require divine force to save us mere, frail humans from turning it into an apocalypse.

The Anti-Terror Argument for Drug Legalization

Stumbled across this column in the Financial Times. The author, Willem Buiter, is a professor at the London School of Economics. He has two arguments for drug legalization, which he describes as “principled” and “pragmatic.” I’ll reverse their order and start with one of the more compelling pragmatic arguments:

Another important argument for legalising, in particular, all cultivation of poppy and of coca (and their illegal derivatives) is that this would take away a vital source of income and political support for terrorist move- ments, including the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, and Colom- -bia’s Revolutionary Armed Forces (Farc) and various paramilitary groups.

The United Nations estimates that opium production in Afghanistan grew to more than 6,000 metric tonnes last year with a value exceeding $3bn (£1.5bn). It is the origin of more than 90 per cent of the world’s illegally consumed opiates.

A significant portion of the profits flows to the Taliban, who act as middlemen in the opium business. They combine extortion and threats of violence towards the poppy farmers with the sale of protection to these same farmers against those who would destroy their livelihood, mainly the Nato allies and the Afghan central government.

Following legalisation, theallies in Afghanistan could further undermine the financial strength of the Taliban and al-Qaeda by buying up the entire poppy harvest. If a sufficient premium over the prevailing market price were offered, the Taliban/al-Qaeda middle- man could be cut out altogether, and thus would lose his tax base. Winning the hearts and minds of poppy growers and coca growers is a lot easier when you are not seen as intent on destroying their livelihood.

(snip)

If opium and heroin were legalised, the allies’ stash could be sold to regulated producers/distributors of opium, heroin and other formerly illegal poppy derivatives. Our chemical and pharmaceutical industries, and indeed our cigarette manufacturers, would be well-positioned to enter this trade. The profits made by the allies on the sale of the stash could be turned over to the Afghan government. It surely makes more sense for the government to tax the poppy harvest than for the Taliban to do so.

Buiter’s “principled” argument is familiar, but no less persuasive.

The Abyss: Two Versions of War in Iraq

When one person talks about the “war in Iraq,” he or she doesn’t always mean the same thing as another person.  There’s a disconnect, factually and emotionally, an abyss of meaning, a condition of double vision where people see just one and not the other.   

Here’s the “war in Iraq” as seen by the leaders of Congress:

Speaker Nancy Pelosi threw down a new gauntlet Friday before President Bush and Republicans in Congress, saying the House will vote in July on legislation to withdraw almost all American troops from Iraq by April.

In the Senate, Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said there also will be votes on the future course of the Iraq war next month, although he said he is consulting with other top Democrats on exactly what the legislation might entail.

The statements by Congress’ top two Democrats mean that the renewed confrontation with Bush over Iraq won’t wait until September, when the top U.S. commander in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus, and Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Baghdad, are scheduled to issue a report on how the surge of American troops has worked to quell sectarian violence in the Iraqi capital and other cities.

Pelosi and Reid, talking to reporters in the Capitol as Congress left town for its weeklong July Fourth break, made it clear that they want to pressure Republican members on their continued support for the war. They think a major break in GOP support for Bush is possible, after statements this week by senior Republican Sens. Richard Lugar of Indiana and George Voinovich of Ohio, who said Bush’s strategy isn’t working and called on him to start withdrawing the 160,000 U.S. forces in Iraq.

“We will put everyone on record,” Pelosi said. “We’re encouraged by the public demand for this. Hopefully, it will be heard by the president and the Republicans in Congress. I see some signs that that is happening.”

Fundamentally, for Reid and Pelosi, “war in Iraq” is a political issue.  The big event?  “Statements this week by senior Republican senators.”  To Reid and Pelosi and the people who take them seriously, these press releases landed with the force of a shoulder-fired rocket.   After those statements, why, everything is different now!  We can pass different resolutions.  Those who thought we would hold back until September:  Not!   The time to attack is now.

The embedded blogger Michael Yon describes a series of events from a completely different “war in Iraq” in this post:

On 29 June, American and Iraqi soldiers were again fighting side-by-side as soldiers from Charley Company 1-12 CAV—led by Captain Clayton Combs—and Iraqi soldiers from the 5th IA, closed in on a village on the outskirts of Baqubah. The village had the apparent misfortune of being located near a main road—about 3.5 miles from FOB Warhorse—that al Qaeda liked to bomb. Al Qaeda had taken over the village. As Iraqi and American soldiers moved in, they came under light contact; but the bombs planted in the roads (and maybe in the houses) were the real threat.

The firefight progressed. American missiles were fired. The enemy might have been trying to bait Iraqi and American soldiers into ambush, but it did not work. The village was riddled with bombs, some of them large enough to destroy a tank. One by one, experts destroyed the bombs, leaving small and large craters in the unpaved roads.

The village was abandoned. All the people were gone. But where?

Yon presents many photos of Baqubah villagers — men, women, children and their farm animals — after they were murdered by Al Queda during the period of occupation and retreat.  Children and animals that had been rigged with explosives.  Mass graves.  I won’t show the gruesome photos — if you can stomach it, you should go look for yourself – but here’s one caption:

Soldiers from 5th IA said al Qaeda had cut the heads off the children. Had al Qaeda murdered the children in front of their parents? Maybe it had been the other way around: maybe they had murdered the parents in front of the children. Maybe they had forced the father to dig the graves of his children.

And here’s more from Yon’s post:

Later in the day, some of the soldiers from the unit I share a tent with, the C-52, told me that one of their Kit Carson scouts (comprised of some of our previous enemies who have turned on al Qaeda) had pointed out an al Qaeda who had cut off the heads of children. Soldiers from C-52 say that the Kit Carson scout freaked out and tried to hide when he spotted the man he identified as an al Qaeda operative. Just how (or if) the scout really knew the man had beheaded children was unknown to the soldiers of C-52, but they took the suspected al Qaeda to the police, who knew the man. C-52 soldiers told me the Iraqi police were inflamed, and that one policeman in particular was crazed with intent to kill the man who they said had the blood of Iraqi children on his hands. According to the story told to me on 30 June, it took almost 45 minutes for the C-52 soldiers to calm down the policeman who had drawn his pistol to execute the al Qaeda man. That same policeman nearly lost his mind when an American soldier then gave the al Qaeda man a drink of cold water. 

I’m not trying to make Pelosi, Reid, Voinivich or Lugar look bad.  They’re reacting as politicians should to the pleas of the people who elected them.   They’re reacting, one hopes, to their own consciences, which are probably telling them Iraq is a lost cause, and it’s immoral to sacrifice American lives to a lost cause.  The war itself, and the blundering, lying Administration running it — that’s the enemy.  It’s a political enemy, one that can be defeated by press releases.

But the “war in Iraq” they’re talking about couldn’t possibly be the same war Michael Yon describes. Yon’s war is a war against pure evil.  There’s no withdrawing from that war, because it will follow you.

More specifically, Yon describes a war in which US soldiers fight alongside Iraqis, against invaders.  To be sure, Al Queda in Iraq has indigenous supporters, but essentially they are turncoats.  The Iraqi Al Queda members aren’t fighting US invaders.  They’re fighting to destroy any hope of civil peace in Iraq on terms other than their own. They will kill anyone in pursuit of chaos, fear and failure, and then booby-trap the bodies of their victims to kill more.

This vision of the war is not consistent with the one Pelosi, et. al. describe.  Linguistically, to square their policies with the war Yon describes, the politicos would have to say things like:

• “The war against Al Queda is lost.”  
• “Al Queda will control Iraq, and there is nothing further we can do to stop them.” 
• “We must redeploy to other countries where Al Queda is not strong, so we won’t have to fight them.” 
• “Al Queda is killing too many American soldiers, so we have to retreat.”

Are any of these comments untruthful representations of the meaning of a U.S. pullout right now?

If the anti-war members of Congress spoke in those terms, how much would that change the politics around this issue? 

Like Bob Kerrey Says

I’ve just about given up trying to make the case for the Iraq war. Not because I don’t believe it was the right thing to do, because it was. Not because I mind sticking out like a sore thumb among virtually all my friends and family, because I don’t. Not even because Bush and (especially) Rumsfeld repeatedly made bad decisions and blunders that complicated what was already going to be a hard slog, because their mistakes don’t undermine the philosophical or strategic rationale.

No, I’m ready to throw in the towel because it’s obvious nobody cares anymore. I don’t think Democrats and liberals are stupid: They see the peril in ditching Iraq, and the rising tide of blood our departure would cause. They just don’t give a damn.  Republicans are starting to feel the same way.  Their insouciance is the flip side of arrogance, both of them a privilege our vast military might affords us.

I’ve worked for people whose philosophy of life is, “I’ll worry about tomorrow, tomorrow.” If a power vacuum at the heart of the Middle East causes horrible problems there and here, fine. We’ll deal with them when they arise — and maybe score a few points by blaming that idiot Bush. It’s cynical, but it’s not hidden, and people seem to be buying into it.  This question has never been polled but I suspect a majority of Americans believe that if we pull out of Iraq, and that it turns out to be a mistake, well, hell, we can just roll back in.

One of my arguments — one that everybody hates and shoots down — is this: If we hadn’t invaded, and had just waited for Saddam Hussein to die or be overthrown, the warfare between Shi’ite and Sunni militias would have commenced then. And Al Queda would have tried to capitalize on it, as would have Iran. The only way that could have been avoided was if Hussein had successfully gotten a nuclear weapon. Ex-CIA director George Tenet believes that probably would have happened between now and 2009.

So, the Iraq of 2008 would have either been in a state of bloody civil war and in danger of falling into the hands of Al Queda or Iran, or Hussein’s regime would have still been in place, equipped with a nuclear weapon to sustain his rule or the rule of his sons. And we would have been forced to deal with Iraq then, from an even less advantageous position than the one we have now — including, possibly, military action.

I have been told repeatedly this is a stupid argument. And maybe it is. But at least I now have the validation of being joined in my stupid argument by former Nebraska Senator Bob Kerrey, a Democrat, the one-time presidential candidate who is now president of the New School in New York. In Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal he restates the case for the war “from the U.S. point of view”:

The U.S. led an invasion to overthrow Saddam Hussein because Iraq was rightly seen as a threat following Sept. 11, 2001. For two decades we had suffered attacks by radical Islamic groups but were lulled into a false sense of complacency because all previous attacks were “over there.” It was our nation and our people who had been identified by Osama bin Laden as the “head of the snake.” But suddenly Middle Eastern radicals had demonstrated extraordinary capacity to reach our shores.

As for Saddam, he had refused to comply with numerous U.N. Security Council resolutions outlining specific requirements related to disclosure of his weapons programs. He could have complied with the Security Council resolutions with the greatest of ease. He chose not to because he was stealing and extorting billions of dollars from the U.N. Oil for Food program.

No matter how incompetent the Bush administration and no matter how poorly they chose their words to describe themselves and their political opponents, Iraq was a larger national security risk after Sept. 11 than it was before. And no matter how much we might want to turn the clock back and either avoid the invasion itself or the blunders that followed, we cannot. The war to overthrow Saddam Hussein is over. What remains is a war to overthrow the government of Iraq.

Okay, so far, all this does is put Kerrey in the same “wanker” category where netroots bloggers put Democratic Sen. Joseph Lieberman due to his robust support for the war. But then, Kerrey continues with this:

Some who have been critical of this effort from the beginning have consistently based their opposition on their preference for a dictator we can control or contain at a much lower cost. From the start they said the price tag for creating an environment where democracy could take root in Iraq would be high. Those critics can go to sleep at night knowing they were right.

The critics who bother me the most are those who ordinarily would not be on the side of supporting dictatorships, who are arguing today that only military intervention can prevent the genocide of Darfur, or who argued yesterday for military intervention in Bosnia, Somalia and Rwanda to ease the sectarian violence that was tearing those places apart.

Suppose we had not invaded Iraq and Hussein had been overthrown by Shiite and Kurdish insurgents. Suppose al Qaeda then undermined their new democracy and inflamed sectarian tensions to the same level of violence we are seeing today. Wouldn’t you expect the same people who are urging a unilateral and immediate withdrawal to be urging military intervention to end this carnage? I would.

American liberals need to face these truths: The demand for self-government was and remains strong in Iraq despite all our mistakes and the violent efforts of al Qaeda, Sunni insurgents and Shiite militias to disrupt it. Al Qaeda in particular has targeted for abduction and murder those who are essential to a functioning democracy: school teachers, aid workers, private contractors working to rebuild Iraq’s infrastructure, police officers and anyone who cooperates with the Iraqi government. Much of Iraq’s middle class has fled the country in fear.

With these facts on the scales, what does your conscience tell you to do? If the answer is nothing, that it is not our responsibility or that this is all about oil, then no wonder today we Democrats are not trusted with the reins of power. American lawmakers who are watching public opinion tell them to move away from Iraq as quickly as possible should remember this: Concessions will not work with either al Qaeda or other foreign fighters who will not rest until they have killed or driven into exile the last remaining Iraqi who favors democracy.

He closes by saying that a U.S. withdrawal would hand Bin Laden an immense “psychological victory,” and carries his argument one step further with an insight I’ve not read anywhere else — a powerful refutation of those who say our invasion “created terrorists.”

Those who argue that radical Islamic terrorism has arrived in Iraq because of the U.S.-led invasion are right. But they are right because radical Islam opposes democracy in Iraq. If our purpose had been to substitute a dictator who was more cooperative and supportive of the West, these groups wouldn’t have lasted a week.

Right.  The presence of democracy, and its desperate struggle to root itself in Iraqi soil:  That’s what’s drawn the brigades of poisonous wasps that are Islamists into Iraq.  Contrary to Rep. John Murtha’s assertions, if we leave, they won’t leave; not until they can kill secular-based self-government once and for all.  Optimally, they want an Islamist fundamentalist government.  But if that can’t be achieved, then any other option is better than a functioning democracy with a functioning civil society, because that’s a threat to the Islamist movement’s growth, worldwide.

The US is no longer in the business of installing friendly dictators — let’s hope. We’ve chosen a much harder path. It would have been nice if we’d taken that path without all the well-documented mistakes, but we should be proud we took it, and we need to stick to it.

Oh, hell, now I’m back in this debate again.

The Iraq War Books to Come

George Tenet, the head of the CIA from 1997-2004, has just published a book, At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA.  He was interviewed about it on 60 Minutes last night, and will be on Larry King tonight.  I’m sure we’ll see him soon on Charlie Rose, The View, Live with Regis and Kelly, Jon Stewart’s show, and, if it was still on the air, you might see Tenet in animated form on Space Ghost Coast to Coast.

You probably know what this book’s all about, what makes it newsworthy:  Tenet’s claim to have opposed the invasion of Iraq, and his denial that when he told President Bush that evidence of Saddam Hussein’s WMDs was a “slam dunk” that he really meant it was true.  The NY Times’ Michiko Kakutani reviewed the book:

Alternately withholding and aggrieved, earnest and disingenuous, “At the Center of the Storm” is interesting less for any stunning new revelations than for fleshing out a portrait of the Bush White House already sketched by reporters and former administration members. Mr. Tenet depicts an administration riven by factional fighting between the State and Defense Departments, hard-liners and more pragmatic realists, an administration given to out-of-channels policymaking, and ad hoc, improvisatory decision-making.

“There was never a serious debate that I know of within the administration about the imminence of the Iraqi threat,” he writes of a war that has already resulted in more than 3,300 American military deaths, at least 60,000 Iraqi civilian deaths and already cost more than $420 billion. Nor, he adds, was there “a significant discussion regarding enhanced containment or the costs and benefits of such an approach versus full-out planning for overt and covert regime change.”

Mr. Tenet’s book also ratifies the view articulated by former military, intelligence and Coalition Provisional Authority insiders that the White House repeatedly ignored or rebuffed early warnings about the deteriorating situation in post-invasion Iraq. Mr. Tenet writes that the C.I.A.’s senior officer in Iraq was dismissed as a “defeatist” for warning in 2003 of the dangers of a growing Iraqi insurgency, though it was already clear then that United States political and economic strategies were failing. Although the trends were clear, he adds, those in charge of policy “operated within a closed loop.” In that atmosphere, he says, bad news was ignored: the agency’s subsequent reporting, which would prove “spot-on,” was dismissed.

 Tenet’s book has not gone down well with either Bush supporters or Bush foes.  Arianna Huffington is one of many to ask the sensible question, “Why Didn’t George Tenet Just Resign?”

Poor George Tenet. Flogging his book, At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA, on 60 Minutes, Tenet tells Scott Pelley about how his phrase “slam dunk” was misused by the Bush administration. Tenet, you see, didn’t mean it was a “slam dunk” that Hussein actually had WMD, he only meant it was a “slam dunk” that a public case could be made that Hussein had WMD.

I can’t really see that the distinction matters, but Tenet apparently does. “I became campaign talk,” Tenet tells Pelley, “I was a talking point. ‘Look at what the idiot told us, and we decided to go to war.’ Well, let’s not be so disingenuous. Let’s stand up. This is why we did it. This is why, this is how we did it. And let’s tell, let’s everybody tell the truth.”

Great — except he’s about four years too late. Tenet seems to believe there’s a major distinction between lying and standing by silently while others lie, and then proudly receiving a Medal of Freedom from the liars.

And Christopher Hitchens reminds us in his Slate review that Tenet was not just ineffectual and wrong about the invasion of Iraq; he was ineffectual and wrong about 9/11.  Hitchens recalls one of the creepiest things I remember reading about the immediate post 9/11 response. It was in Bush At War by Bob Woodward.  Hitchens uses that quote as a launching pad for an irate attack on Tenet’s credibility and character:

…(I)t was a very favorably disposed chronicler (Woodward) who wrote this, in describing Tenet’s reaction on the terrible morning of Sept. 11, 2001:

“This has bin Laden all over it,” Tenet told Boren. “I’ve got to go.” He also had another reaction, one that raised the real possibility that the CIA and the FBI had not done all that could have been done to prevent the terrorist attack. “I wonder,” Tenet said, “if it has anything to do with this guy taking pilot training.”

Notice the direct quotes that make it clear who is the author of this brilliant insight. And then pause for a second. The author is almost the only man who could have known of Zacarias Moussaoui and his co-conspirators—the very man who positively knew they were among us, in flight schools, and then decided to leave them alone. In his latest effusion, he writes: “I do know one thing in my gut. Al-Qaeda is here and waiting.” Well, we all know that much by now. But Tenet is one of the few who knew it then, and not just in his “gut” but in his small brain, and who left us all under open skies. His ridiculous agency, supposedly committed to “HUMINT” under his leadership, could not even do what John Walker Lindh had done—namely, infiltrate the Taliban and the Bin Laden circle. It’s for this reason that the CIA now has to rely on torturing the few suspects it can catch, a policy, incidentally, that Tenet’s book warmly defends.

So, the only really interesting question is why the president did not fire this vain and useless person on the very first day of the war. Instead, he awarded him a Presidential Medal of Freedom! Tenet is now so self-pitying that he expects us to believe that he was “not at all sure that [he] really wanted to accept” this honor. But it seems that he allowed or persuaded himself to do so, given that the citation didn’t mention Iraq. You could imagine that Tenet had never sat directly behind Colin Powell at the United Nations, beaming like an overfed cat, as the secretary of state went through his rather ill-starred presentation. And who cares whether his “slam dunk” vulgarity was misquoted or not? We have better evidence than that. Here is what Tenet told the relevant Senate committee in February 2002:

Iraq … has also had contacts with al-Qaida. Their ties may be limited by divergent ideologies, but the two sides’ mutual antipathy toward the United States and the Saudi royal family suggests that tactical cooperation between them is possible, even though Saddam is well aware that such activity would carry serious consequences.

As even the notion of it certainly should have done. At around the same time, on another nontrivial matter, Tenet informed the Senate armed services committee that: “We believe that Saddam never abandoned his nuclear weapons program.” It is a little bit late for him to pose as if Iraq was a threat concocted in some crepuscular corner of the vice president’s office. And it’s pathetic for him to say, even in the feeble way that he chooses to phrase it, that “there was never a serious debate that I know of within the administration about the imminence of the Iraqi threat.” (Emphasis added.) There had been a very serious debate over the course of at least three preceding administrations, whether Tenet “knew” of it or not. (He was only an intelligence specialist, after all.)
Despite this assault, Tenet stands to profit handsomely from this book, a fact that will not go unnoticed by others currently still serving the Administration.  If a policy goes wrong or becomes unpopular, Tenet’s success shows that no mea culpas are necessary; anyone can distance themselves from unpopular decisions they helped make, even someone as high up as the Director of the CIA.

Still to come: 

The Army I Wanted Wasn’t the Army I Had: Unknown Unknowns Known, By Donald Rumsfeld

Paul Wolfowitz: It Ain’t All About the WMDs, by Paul Wolfowitz

More Years of Magical Thinking, by Laura Bush

The Audacity of Audacity, by Dick Cheney

and…

A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy President, by George W. Bush

And it turns out none of them wanted to invade Iraq.  Who knew!?

Hollywood, Silicon Valley and Wall Street: Lining Up to Run America

Joel Kotkin sees a new power elite and a new political paradigm emerging from behind the ruins of George W. Bush’s failed administration.   The whole essay is worth reading. Here’s a taste:

How much things have changed in the past few decades! Hollywood once split its loyalties carefully among the parties; its only president came from its right. Now, as much as 80 percent of its largesse flows to the Democrats. The schism between Obama supporter David Geffen and those hanging tough with Clinton is important, not only because of how it reflects Hollywood’s endemic pettiness, but because much of the party, instead of regarding these wealthy prima donnas as deluded minstrels, now treats them as enlightened policy gurus.

Not long ago, Silicon Valley was a bastion of middle-of-the-road Republicans like former Congressman Ed Zschau. But as power once vested in industrial firms like Hewlett Packard has shifted to software and internet-based companies, high-tech politics have shifted both left and dark green. The rising powers of the 21st Century Valley, firms like Google and eBay, generally don’t worry about trifles like groundwater regulations or factory emissions since they don’t manufacture anything. Nor do they worry much about labor laws, because their own employees tend to be young, well-educated and well-compensated. This makes it easier to curry favor with enviro-friendly, left-leaning politicians like former Vice President Al Gore.

Perhaps most important of all have been the changes on Wall Street, whose power extends deeply into both Hollywood and Silicon Valley and which now stands as one of the predominant sources of funds for federal office-seekers and related political action committees. Long the bastion of the old Republican establishment and a backer of Bush in his two presidential runs, Wall Street in 2006 gave more money to the Democrats, and that trend seems to be accelerating along with the implosion of the Republicans.

(snip)

How did this corporate power shift occur so quickly and dramatically? To a large extent, the answer lies in the utter failure of George W. Bush and his administration. Bush came to office with the support of a Sun Belt elite that drew its wealth and power from the great economic surge west and south after World War II and for nearly a quarter-century dominated American political life

Donors from this group of businesses propelled the careers of such substantial figures as Arizona’s Barry Goldwater, and California’s Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. Arguably, their final triumph, helped by the demographic shift to the South and West, lay with Newt Gingrich’s 1994 congressional takeover.

Back in the late 1970s, founding fathers of the Sun Belt power grab, such as oilman Henry Salvatori and Litton Industries founder Tex Thornton, shared with me their conviction that the old Eastern establishment lacked the power and conviction to lead the country. They felt America needed to be guided by more vital, more clear-headed leaders. Economic malaise of the Jimmy Carter years, as well as the perception of America’s weakness both against the Soviet Union and terrorist states such as Iran, lent credibility to these beliefs among a large part of the public.

Like most successful elites, these leaders possessed a relatively coherent agenda. It centered on gaining a free hand over the nation’s natural resources, a low-tax economic policy and support for a strong national defense. The divisive moral agenda, particularly helpful in wooing working-class and Southern voters, was grafted on later but was never widely embraced by the right’s corporate funders.

Bush’s disastrous tenure has pretty much destroyed his backers’ credibility on all three issues. High energy prices and shifting climate-change politics have decimated the traditional agenda of oil and gas companies. An uneven and poorly shared economic expansion has convinced many middle-class erstwhile conservatives that Bush’s low tax, pro-business policies do not really work for them. Finally, the catastrophe in Iraq has undermined support for the overt, aggressive national defense policy long supported by Sun Belt conservatives and their defense industry allies.

(snip)

Once they recover from their post-Bush euphoria, however, traditional liberals should realize that the ongoing power shift does not necessarily signify the rise of a populist agenda. The wealthiest fifth of Americans are now equally likely to be Democrats or Republicans, a shocking shift from the nearly 70 percent Republican cast of this same quintile just two decades ago. The “party of the people” increasingly now must appeal as much to the affluent as the working-class voter.

I’ve been struggling for a “big picture” that explains the changes in politics in the past couple of years that goes beyond the tactical novelties like the netroots and YouTube.  Kotkin’s is pretty coherent. 

A possible flaw, however, is that his analysis completely omits 9/11, the jihad against the West, the “war on terror.”  Or, is he implying that 9/11 is no longer pertinent, the war on terror is quiescent, and that whole policy arena doesn’t cut politically anymore?  That would come as a huge, rude surprise to the blogospheric right, who think the war on terror is the only issue.  But maybe that’s the case.

Europe’s Schizophrenic, Suicidal Left

Picking up the theme of the last post, author Nick Cohen today chronicles the Britain’s left’s incongruous support for radical Islamists.  To join in common cause against America and its remaining allies, socialists and progressives must abandon virtually everything else they purport to believe and have fought for their whole lives:

As al Qaeda, the Baathists and Shiite Islamists slaughter thousands, there is virtually no sense that their successes are our defeats. Iraqi socialists and trade unionists I know are close to despair. They turn for support to Europe, the home of liberalism, feminism and socialism, and find that rich democrats, liberals and feminists won’t help them or even acknowledge their existence.

Why is this happening? Cohen cites three causes.  The obvious one is George W. Bush, whose policies and persona, and especially his flubbing of the Iraq war, have made him a universally derided figure throughout Europe, a disdain that covers almost the entire political spectrum.  As in the US, the real stakes in the Iraq war — indeed the real events taking place — are completely obscured by the rage it has engendered. 

(The milder American form of this phenomenon is playing out now in the House of Representatives, but seems to be ebbing ever since Rep. Murtha made the curious mistake of bragging in public about what was suppoed to be a “stealth” strategy before he’d had the chance to implement it.  That the strategy relied on secret manufacture of a fait accompli is a tacit signal that the U.S. anti-war movement lacks confidence in its political support, the movement’s arrogant rhetoric notwithstanding.)

Cohen also cites another fairly obvious factor:  The corruption of the left by multiculturalism, which saps the movement’s formerly vigorous moral clarity. Nowadays, the left can only attack racism, sexism, homophobia or any other retrograde social ill within one’s own country and culture.  It is insensitive and “culturally imperialist” to do so when these things are practiced by Muslim radicals with their heads in the 12th century and rocket-launchers on their shoulders.

Until very recently our Labour government was allowing its dealings with Britain’s Muslim minority to be controlled by an unelected group, the Muslim Council of Britain, which stood for everything social democrats were against. In their desperate attempts to ingratiate themselves, ministers gave its leader a knighthood–even though he had said that “death was too good” for Salman Rushdie, who happens to be a British citizen as well as a great novelist.  

The third factor Cohen cites is the one I find most chilling — and the one I suspect the left will resent him the most for bringing up:  Fear.

Beyond the contortions and betrayals of liberal and leftish thinking lies a simple emotion that I don’t believe Americans take account of: an insidious fear that has produced the ideal conditions for appeasement. Radical Islam does worry Europeans but we are trying to prevent an explosion by going along with Islamist victimhood. We blame ourselves for the Islamist rage, in the hope that our admission of guilt will pacify our enemies. We are scared, but not scared enough to take a stand.

How sad.  Perhaps leftism as we knew it is really over. 

We underestimate how much influence socialism and left politics has had over the America we now see around us.  Conservatives in our country want to drag us back to the world of the Founding Fathers, but we’ll never go there.  We believe in a vision of a just society with a deep tolerance for diversity because over the past 100 years or so the left has persuaded us to adopt it and it has been woven into the fabric of American life.  Most Americans read the Constitution, the Bill of Rights and the Declaration of Independence through a filter of left-inspired social justice principles — mostly for the better.

We also forget that the dirty word “appeasement” — its negative connotations associated with comforting delusions that some had about Adolf Hitler in the 1930s — was a policy of conservatives largely opposed by liberals and the left. Something has changed at a very deep level if the left is now willing to appease a movement that is objectively just as intolerant and deadly as were Naziism and fascism — and maybe moreso.

Socialism was once “the wave of the future.”  The wave has passed, but has left behind a corps of activists — innately adversarial people — who have been so confused for so long that they now will march for those who want to destroy everything their forerunners built.   They retain a lot of political influence, especially in Europe. What do we do about them?

The Islamismophobe

Novelist and University of Manchester Creative Writing Professor Martin Amis answered some reader questions at the Independent about a month ago — including some questions a journalist seeking to appear even-handed would never dare ask. This is a good thing. Amis seems at his best when provoked.

Along with Salman Rushdie and Ian McEwan, Amis has been accused of being a British literary neo-conservative, or Blitcon for short, in the New Statesman. So some of the questions appear to come from the sector who agrees with that assessment. For example:

The phrase “horrorism”, which you invented to describe 9/11, is unintentionally hilarious. Have you got any more? JONATHAN BROOKS, by email

Yes, I have. Here’s a good one (though I can hardly claim it as my own): the phrase is “fuck off”.

I wasn’t describing “9/11″, as you call it. I was describing suicide bombing or suicide-mass murder. And the distinction between terrorism and horrorism is a real one. If for some reason you were about to cross Siberia by sleigh, you would be feeling “anxiety”; when you heard the first howl of the wolves, your anxiety would be promoted to “fear”; as the pack drew near and gave chase, your fear would become “terror”; “horror” is reserved for when the wolves are actually there.

And in a question referring to Amis’ famous father, Kingsley Amis, author of Lucky Jim:

How do you think you might have ended up spending your working life if your father hadn’t been a famous writer? JOHN GORDON, Eastleigh

Well, John, that would depend on what my father had chosen to do instead. If he had been a postman, then I would have been a postman. If he had been a travel agent, then I would have been a travel agent. Do you get the idea?

But what motivated me to post this colloquy was Amis’ views on a London protest he witnesses shortly after returning to England:

The most depressing thing was the sight of middle-class white demonstrators, last August, waddling around under placards saying, We Are All Hizbollah Now. Well, make the most of being Hizbollah while you can. As its leader, Hasan Nasrallah, famously advised the West: “We don’t want anything from you. We just want to eliminate you.” Similarly, when I went on Question Time the other week, a woman in the audience, her voice quavering with self-righteousness, presented the following argument: since it was America that supported Osama bin Laden when he was fighting the Russians, the US armed forces, in response to September 11, “should be dropping bombs on themselves!” And the audience applauded. It is quite an achievement. People of liberal sympathies, stupefied by relativism, have become the apologists for a creedal wave that is racist, misogynist, homophobic, imperialist, and genocidal. To put it another way, they are up the arse of those that want them dead.

(Emphasis mine.) Thank you, Amis. The self-destructiveness of this mind-set, not to overlook its deadly irony, cannot be exposed enough. I don’t necessarily think there are a lot of U.S. Democratic Party leaders who would join a pro-Hizbollah protest; but they and the “netroots” certainly do invest more time and energy expressing outrage at our own democratically-elected leadership than they ever do against this most illiberal of cults.

Maybe when Bush is out of office, this tendency will fade. I hope.

(Thanks for the tip to DodgerThoughts commenter Andrew Shimmin!)

The Latest Yoo’s*

Check out this search result I got on Daily Kos when I typed in the words “John Yoo.”  Just the titles tell you the kind of demonic role this UC Berkeley law professor plays in the minds of the left’s leading blogger and his acolytes: 

John Yoo: Worst Person in the World

SF Forum on Korematsu w/ John Yoo etc

John Yoo lays groundwork for blaming Congress

Pointing out John Yoo

John Yoo, un-American fascist

Did John Yoo Pass The Bar?

Meet John Yoo (A Short List of Sources)

The lies of John Yoo

John Yoo: torturing language, seeking the jackpot

John Yoo: Bush’s Conscience?

John Yoo’s Falsehoods

John Yoo suggests you ignore the Constitution

John Yoo supports impeachment

John Yoo: Habeas Corpus COSTS TOO MUCH MONEY

John Yoo – Nut Job

John Yoo says surveillance illegal

Editing John Yoo

John Yoo: Deception, False Framing, and the so-called “War on Terror”

Justice Stevens Schools John Yoo

The Most Dangerous Mind in America

Frameshop: Bush’s Permission Slip for Dictatorship (UPDATED 2.0)

Is It Safe? (w/POLL)

Yoo Suck

Yoo Da Man

Yoo on Gitmo Ruling: Supremes ‘Suppress Creative Thinking’

Presidential Adviser Says Bush Can Legally Torture Children

Bush Advisor: A-OK for president to crush children’s testicles

BUSH’S FORTY FIVE DAY CRIME SPREE

Korean researcher admits massive fraud (satire)

Has TIME’s Man of the Year Gone Too Far?

Bush Administration admits deceiving Congress!!

John Dean on Impeachment

Prosecute the Torture Policy Makers at The Hague

Handling the Truth, and Democracy

Letter to John Conyers: Do not give the Bush Administration de facto pardons

Civilized Warfare: How Insane Can You Get?

White House picks pastry chef w/ light touch

URGENT ACTION NEEDED! Stop torture judge confirmation.

What Ever Happened to the Founding Brothers?

The President’s Judicial Power?

 

Well, in case you’re interested in what somebody like that thinks about civil liberties, Professor Yoo has a column in today’s San Francisco Chronicle.  Here’s how it ends:

The threat of an out-of-control, Nixonian executive seeking to harass its political enemies is not what looms before us today. Legitimate political activities and speech by American citizens are not being suppressed. Three elections have occurred during the war on terrorism, with the last one switching control of Congress to the opposition party. Free speech and creativity have exploded on the Internet.

Civil libertarians suggest that any wartime reduction of civil liberties creates a “ratchet” effect that will permanently diminish freedoms in peacetime. Others say that panic always leads government to go “too far.” Some claim that majorities will always abuse power to oppress minorities. Historical precedents provide some support for these claims.

But civil liberties have expanded in peacetime and contracted during emergencies throughout our history. Lincoln suspended habeas corpus, but also liberated the slaves and expanded individual rights against the states. Civil liberties surged in the decades after World War II. Wars sometimes lead to social and economic upheavals that expand individual freedom. Wartime governments have also moderated discriminatory policies to rally all sectors of the nation. War expands executive power. But it does so for a reason — because wars need to be won. Hate, opportunism or greed toward minorities occur outside of war as well. Slavery and Jim Crow were the products of peace, not war.

John Yoo does not scare me as much as he does Kos and many others.  Some of what he has to say makes sense.  I don’t think the left is really listening to him; click on the links above and you won’t find much intellectual meat; just “gotcha”-style rantings. 

But it does strike me as both ironic and misleading that he would use the adjective “Nixonian” to draw a contrast between the powers he claims for the Executive Branch now and the evil doings of past presidents (he also points out that presidents Lincoln, Wilson and FDR committed worse transgressions against civil liberties).  

Let’s buy Yoo’s point, just for the sake of argument:  Bush is not Nixon.  However, the rap against Bush isn’t so much what he’s doing with his presidential authority; it’s the sheer amount of authority he has claimed.  Bush might not have the evil, vindictive qualities of Tricky Dick, but after January 2009, someone else is going to be president, and then later somebody else.  Will none of them be “Nixonian?”  

*Update, 2/12/07:  Professor Yoo must not have had many papers to grade last week. He coauthored an op-ed in today’s NY Times, which draws the only conclusion one can fairly draw from Congress’ willingness to oppose the escalation/redeployment/surge in Iraq, but only symbolically:

The truth is that the Democrats in Congress would rather sit back and let the president take the heat in war than do anything risky. That way they get to prepare for the next election while pointing fingers of blame and spinning conspiracy theories. It is odd to see the Democratic Party turning toward isolationism, bonding with paleoconservatives, and so bitterly averse to the ideals of democratic nation building.

War is not about instant gratification in a hail of klieg lights, our truncated Gulf war notwithstanding. In an interdependent, globalized world, we can’t shrug our shoulders and shirk in the war on terrorism. America made a fundamental change in foreign policy after the 9/11 attacks: to support and spread democracy. The House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, should understand this well. She made her national reputation as a junior representative in the 1980s criticizing the Chinese dictatorship after the Tiananmen Square massacre.

Perhaps it was inevitable that the public would soon tire of war and engage in overheated accusations of bad faith. It is quite right that Congress review, and consider, from its unique perspective, what changes, if any, it now wants to make. If Congress really believes the Bush administration has set us on the wrong course, it can act tomorrow to cut the sinews of war in Iraq. But its failure to do so seems an acknowledgment that the consequences would be far worse than what we face now.

Gimme Sacrifice

Think Progress objects to President Bush’s statement on PBS last night in answer to a question from Jim Lehrer about whether he has demanded enough “sacrifice” from the American people:

Lehrer: Let me ask you a bottom-line question, Mr. President. If it is as important as you’ve just said–and you’ve said it many times–as all of this is, particularly the struggle in Iraq, if it’s that important to all of us and to the future of our country, if not the world, why have you not, as president of the United States, asked more Americans and more American interests to sacrifice something? The people who are now sacrificing are, you know, the volunteer military–the Army and the U.S. Marines and their families. They’re the only people who are actually sacrificing anything at this point.

Bush: Well, you know, I think a lot of people are in this fight. I mean, they sacrifice peace of mind when they see the terrible images of violence on TV every night. I mean, we’ve got a fantastic economy here in the United States, but yet, when you think about the psychology of the country, it is somewhat down because of this war.

Now, here in Washington when I say, “What do you mean by that?,” they say, “Well, why don’t you raise their taxes; that’ll cause there to be a sacrifice.” I strongly oppose that. If that’s the kind of sacrifice people are talking about, I’m not for it because raising taxes will hurt this growing economy. And one thing we want during this war on terror is for people to feel like their life’s moving on, that they’re able to make a living and send their kids to college and put more money on the table. And you know, I am interested and open-minded to the suggestion, but this is going to be–

Lehrer: Well–

Bush:—this is like saying why don’t you make sacrifices in the Cold War? I mean, Iraq is only a part of a larger ideological struggle. But it’s a totally different kind of war, than ones we’re used to.

Think Progress’ take on this answer is that Bush ignores the cost of the Iraq war — $700 billion through 2008 — which the blog writer implies ought to result in higher taxes on the wealthy.  One of TP’s commenters, ”upside 100,” elaborates on this point:

WTF!!!!!

Peace of mind?? WOW, what a great sacrifice, and we sure wouldn’t want those Corporate Scumbags supporting this Cabal to suffer any more.

Let’s just have the troops carry all the death and injury and missed time with families. Wouldn’t want any “real” people to feel it.

What a bunch of elitist crap from Dubya and his whole merry band of NeoCon assholes!

WAKE UP AMERICA!!!

Of course the idea that watching disturbing TV equates to the kind of rationing regime this country experienced in World War II is ridiculous.  (Millions voluntarily watched a nuclear bomb explode near Los Angeles on 24 Monday night.) Although many American soldiers enlisted for WWII, many more were draftees, and this pattern continued through Korea and Vietnam.  I remember my high school economics teacher predicting that Lyndon Johnson’s refusal to raise taxes to pay for the Vietnam War would lead to inflation, and I think it’s common wisdom now that LBJ’s decision was a contributor to the high inflation of the 1970s.  

But there is an inconsistency in the views of Bush’s opponents.  They’re talking about taxes on “the wealthy.”  Does terrorism only affect “the wealthy?”  Do the remaining achievable war aims in Iraq only benefit “the wealthy?”  What if, as many assert, the wealthy already provide a disproportionate share of the government’s tax revenues?  There’s a lot of empirical evidence to this point.  Does that mean the wealthy have paid enough?  And if so, who do we tax next? 

Regardless of the need for them, or the equity of them, taxes are a drag on the part of the economy that is taxed.  There is no argument on this point — it’s classical economics.  You can tax the wealthy, but the wealthy simply will refuse to suffer very much.  They will, instead, reduce or relocate their economic activity, which means someone further down the economic ladder suffers. 

It would be optimal if we could raise taxes on the wealthy, and force them to earn the same amount as they did before the higher taxes, and to buy just as many luxury items as before, so we could be assured that the government’s revenue take would increase, and the economic harm would be forestalled.  But you can’t force a wealthy person to buy another yacht or to add a new manufacturing plant, or come up with another high-tech scheme.  They will react to the potential ROI, the bastards, and because higher taxes raise costs and depress the benefits of investments, they are less likely to do make them.

Another issue re: sacrifice.  What about civil liberties?  The Patriot Act is a direct result of 9/11.  Its critics say we are less free from government intrusion, and its supporters don’t disagree, but say the intrusions are necessary to thwart terrorism.   Increased security thus comes at a significant cost that permeates society — a sacrifice in my book.

Beyond that?  The sacrifice promoters need to make the case for specific sacrifices.  I’m certainly ready to make them.  But first tell me, what do you need? 

During WWII, we needed to ration fuel and meat in order to keep our troops supplied.  Do we need to do anything like that now?  We needed dramatically higher taxes in part because our defense systems were lacking at the outset of the war; we built a modern air force and navy almost from scratch, and we didn’t have a global military infrastructure. None of that pertains now.  Today’s American economy is a powerhouse; while $700 billion is a lot of money, we are apparently absorbing it. The deficit as a percentage of GDP is not especially high, and it’s shrinking.

It’s true; members of our military are paying the heaviest price.  Recruitment goals are being met, but in the future, we might need more than what voluntary enlistment gives us.  When the battles are over, if our country doesn’t do right by these heroes, that would be outrageous.  But my guess is, the leadership of this country in the 2020s and 2030s will heavily come from those who served and from their families. The sacrifice of our soldiers during this era won’t be forgotten.

Don’t just say “sacrifice” as if it’s self-evident.  Do your homework.  We need to sacrifice X for the cause of Y.  Then we’ll have something to debate. 

The Battle of Britain, 2006

It’s pretty clear (to me anyway) that the war in Iraq has not mutated into a civil war, as some say, but into the first major U.S. engagement with Islamism, a complicated battlefield in which we and the civil authorities of Iraq are fighting on multiple fronts against an array of different insurgent terrorist groups that, once we leave, would proceed to killing each other.  The goal is to foment a real civil war, which it’s my belief most Iraqis do not seek.  It is unclear if we can prevent this.

But Iraq is just one front in what to me is rapidly becoming World War III.  Another major front is the United Kingdom.  You have probably already heard this news:

British intelligence and law enforcement officials have passed on a grim assessment to their U.S. counterparts, “It will be a miracle if there isn’t a terror attack over the holidays in London,” a senior American law enforcement official tells ABCNews.com.

British police have been quietly carrying out a series of key arrests as they continue to track at least six active “plots” tied to what they call “al Qaeda of England.”

Officials said they could not cite any specific date or target but said al Qaeda had planned previous operations during the Christmas holidays that had been disrupted.

“It is not a matter of if there will be an attack, but how bad the attack will be,” an intelligence official told ABCNews.com.

Authorities say they are seeking at least 18 suspected suicide bombers.

The British government’s awareness of this unending threat probably explains why Prime Minister Tony Blair declines the many engraved invitations to turn against George W. Bush.  I’m sure he knows he would be better off politically if he could cut the cord that attaches him to our widely-derided president.  But Blair sees a bigger picture for his country, and knows he can’t casually discard his nation’s most important ally for short-term political advantage.  Here’s part of what Blair said to Parliament a few days ago:

The basic point I come back to, again and again and which I have made many times here – is that whether in Iraq, or Afghanistan or indeed combating terrorism here, these battles are inextricably bound together. It is a global issue.  It needs a global response.

Which brings me to the principal consideration of Britain’s foreign policy over the past 10 years.  Global challenges can only be met by global alliances.  A nation like Britain has no prospect – none – in the world as it is developing today, of pursuing its national interest except in close concert with others.  That is why, no matter how tough the test, and these past years since 9/11 have shown how tough it can be – the alliances Britain has with America and within Europe, must remain the cornerstones of our policy. 

Do not misunderstand me.  I support the US willingly.  I believe in the EU for reasons of principle.  I supported the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq because I believed them right.  I have put Britain at the centre of Europe because I am proud that we are part of the largest political union and biggest economic market in the world.  For me these alliances have never been a struggle between individual conscience and duty to my country.  It is a happy marriage of conviction and realpolitik. 

But just for a moment, leave aside the obvious and deep-rooted ties of history with America.  Leave aside the fact that only, together, when the US finally entered WWII, were we able to succeed.  Leave aside the prospect of Britain facing the Cold War for half a century without the transatlantic alliance, an absurd thought.  Leave it all aside and focus on today and the future.

Take any problem Britain wants solving:  global terrorism – (assuming you don’t believe that but for George Bush it wouldn’t exist); climate change; Israel/Palestine; Iran and North Korea’s nuclear programme; world trade; Africa in general, right now Sudan in particular; global poverty.  We may agree or disagree with the US position on some or all of these issues.  But none of these vital British concerns can be addressed, let alone solved, without America.  Without America, Kosovo could not have been attempted.  Without Kosovo, Milosevic might still be running Serbia; and the Balkans rather than stabilising with a potential future in Europe, would have remained the destabilising force it was for most of the 20th Century.   We need America.  That is a fact.

All that, in a sense, is obvious.  But – runs the more sophisticated argument -:  America we like, this American President we don’t.  This is a comforting argument.  It separates anti-America from anti-Bush.  However it is also a cop-out.  Let us not kid ourselves.  9/11 would have changed any American President’s foreign policy.  3000 innocent people dead in the streets of New York; the Al Qaida operatives who did it, trained out of Afghanistan.  Following 9/11, American policy was going to shift.  It was going to get out after the terrorists with all America’s might and any President who didn’t do it, wasn’t going to be President for long.

When I said, after 9/11 that we should stand shoulder to shoulder with America, I said it because I believed it.  But I also thought it was profoundly in Britain’s interests.  I knew this attack wasn’t aimed at America per se; but at America as the leading representative of our values.  Look round the world today; look even just within Europe.  Britain is not the only country that faces a terrorist threat.  We all do, allies and non-allies, anyone in fact that isn’t “them”.  I thought then and I think now that defeating this threat – whose roots are deep and have been a long time growing – was going to take a generation; and I knew then and know now that defeating it, was never going to be done without an America prepared to lead as America, to its credit, has.

And the truth is, for Britain, it is always right for us to keep our partnership with America strong. 

Post 9/11, there were no half-hearted allies of America.  There were allies and others.  We were allies then and that’s how we should stay; and the test of any alliance, I’m afraid, is not when it’s easy but when it’s tough.

I rooted for a Democratic victory in 2006 and, depending on who’s nominated, will root for a Democratic victory in 2008 in part because, for a variety of reasons, a huge and important faction within our own nation — the left — does not recognize or will not acknowledge the threat Blair articulates so clearly (and Bush in-articulates so unclearly).  Perhaps as more of their own people assume positions of responsibility, the acknowledgement will come, and our nation can unite for this long struggle.

There is simply no getting around it, because every value the left holds dear — not to mention the broader American values — will be ground into dust everywhere the Islamists gain control.  To recall a long-forgotten political slogan of Richard Gephardt’s, “It’s Your Fight, Too.”  And that means you: environmentalists, labor organizers, gay activists, fighters for economic equality, multilateralist proponents of the UN, church-and-state separatists, extreme civil libertarians, “living and breathing” constitutionalists, TV and movie producers, sexually frank pop singers — all of you.  All of us.

Iraq Endgame

Over Thanksgiving weekend, a provocative column appeared on The New Republic’s site suggesting a way out of Iraq that, on the surface anyway, appeals to my sense of justice.  Swarthmore Professor James Kurth writes that partition is the solution.  But unlike the conventional notions of an Iraq partition into three semi-autonomous states — one for the Kurds, one for the Shi’ites, one for the Sunnis — Kurth says we should grant the Kurds and Shi’ites their sectors, but not the Sunnis, with whom he says we should deal harshly.

Here’s Kurth’s reasoning:

U.S. troops must leave Iraq–but not just yet, and not in the manner many Democrats have suggested. Islamists in general, and Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda in particular, are always pointing to past U.S. military retreats–Vietnam in 1975, Lebanon in 1984, Somalia in 1994–as evidence that the American will to wage war invariably collapses as conflicts drag on. As a result, retreating from Iraq now would simply encourage Islamists to attack U.S. allies and targets throughout the world. Before it leaves Iraq, then, the United States must inflict a dramatic and decisive defeat upon the Sunni insurgents–one that will demonstrate the unbearable cost and utter futility of the Islamist dream of establishing a Muslim umma under the rule of a global Sunni caliphate. That defeat must be more than military; it must also be political: The United States should divide Iraq into two parts, leaving the Kurds in control of the north, the Shia in control of the south–and the Sunnis stateless in between. 

The Sunni Arabs of Iraq have much to answer for. Since they have always made up a rather small minority–about 15 to 20 percent of the country’s total population–the regimes they created were historically authoritarian ones. They compensated for their small base by employing especially brutal methods against their Kurdish and Shia neighbors. Successive Sunni governments became steadily more repressive, leading eventually to the rule of the Baath Party and culminating in the ferocious regime of Saddam Hussein. 

After elaborating on his idea — addressing concerns about how Turkey will react and whether this strengthens Iran, Kurth concludes:

At the end of the day, the United States would be acting as a balancer–helping to balance the interests of Shia Iraq and Kurdistan and the interests of Shia Iran and Sunni Saudi Arabia. U.S. economic interests in a continuing flow of Persian Gulf oil to the global market would be preserved, and U.S. security interests in containing Iran would be enhanced. But the interests of more than 80 percent of the people of Iraq–that is, the Shia and the Kurds–would be enhanced also. They would be the winners in that tormented country’s new order. The losers, of course, would be the Sunni Arabs of Iraq, who would have to pay for the sins of the cruel regimes that represented them in the past and the cruel insurgents whom they support today. 

Kurth’s writing took me back to the start of this misadventure, and reminded me why I supported it.  Hussein’s dictatorship had become intolerable, in the fullest sense of the word.  His regime’s cruelty: Intolerable.  Its belligerence: Intolerable. His corruption of the UN and his European trading partners: Intolerable.  His dealings with terrorist groups: Intolerable.  His flouting of the UN sanctions and weapons inspection process: Intolerable.  Made all the more intolerable after 9/11, when the legitimate fear of his WMD stash ratcheted up the urgency of eliminating him. 

George Bush lost his way shortly after Hussein’s fall — perhaps because he forgot who the enemy was.   We were not liberating “Iraq” from Hussein, because a portion of Iraq was complicit in his regime.  We were liberating the oppressed Shi’ites and Kurds, along with those Sunnis who opposed the Baath party.  The civil war now underway should end the American dream of a multi-party, multi-sect state governed democratically, which was another misdirection, I fear.  But it doesn’t mean we have to lose sight of the pursuit of justice, and it doesn’t mean we have to accept the war’s end on terms that would result in an Islamist Sunni state.  

I don’t know if Kurth is right — I’m not enough of an expert.  But the thinking here gives me a sense of hope that a solution exists.  

While I was away, I did manage to read Jonathan Chait’s awful, mind-boggling column calling for the return of Saddam Hussein.  I half-expected to see a smiley face at the bottom of it:  Just kidding!  I assume he realizes his foolish proposal will follow him forever.  Everything we write on the internets lasts forever, dude.  So for all eternity, Jonathan Chait will be known as the guy who thought Saddam Hussein, convicted mass murderer, should be given back the keys to all his palaces.  Oh, man.

They’re Not Taking it Well

Most of the conservative websites I look at seem relieved they no longer have to defend the Denny Hastert/Bill Frist boodlefest of a Republican Congressional majority; and sadder but wiser with regard to Donald Rumsfeld, who they reluctantly now admit made a mess of Iraq — to the point where it’s pretty clear the next group of “deciders” is going to focus mostly on the famed “exit strategy” of yore. The conservative websites seem resigned to the election’s outcome, and surprisingly cheerful about it. The left-wing bloggers seem a little disappointed in this reaction — or worried. Nothing brings out the paranoia of the left more than cheerful right-wingers. “What are they smiling about?”

But if you were hoping to kick it with some old school, right-wing red meat, I found it! It’s in the Los Angeles-based financial newspaper Investor’s Business Daily. The paper itself is only for subscribers, but Editor & Publisher has a story about a recent editorial:

NEW YORK The conservative business publication, Investor’s Business Daily, isn’t taking this week’s elections results in stride. In a blistering editorial, the newspaper charges that Rep. John Conyers, soon to chair the House Judiciary Committee, is “leading a Democrat jihad to deny law enforcement key terror-fighting tools” and “is in the pocket of Islamists.”

Proof for this? Conyers, whose district in Michigan holds a large Arab-Amercian population, has a version of his Web site in Arabic and allegedly “does the bidding of these new constituents and the militant Islamist activists who feed off them.” More “evidence”: Conyers opposes the Patriot Act and has called for the president’s impeachment.

In addition he “is one of the top recipients of donations from the Arab-American Leadership PAC. And not surprisingly, he has a long history of pandering to Arab and Muslim voters….Today, Hamas, Hezbollah and the al-Qaida-tied Muslim Brotherhood are all active in the area…..

“Expect Conyers and Pelosi to kick open the doors of Congress to Islamists from the Council on American-Islamic Relations and other militant groups. They will have unfettered access, even though many of their leaders have been tied to terrorism (some CAIR officials have landed in the big house)…

“Conyers led the defense of Bill Clinton in last decade’s impeachment hearings and is clearly out for blood. So are many of the constituents he serves.”

At the same time, IBD went after George McGovern, who spoke out against the Iraq war this week: “The Democrats seem to have a fondness for party leaders and presidents whose policies and positions, when followed, result in the expansion of tyranny, the subjugation and even death of millions, and added threats to U.S. safety and security.”

Donald Rumsfeld, on the other hand, is “a great defense chief and a great man, and deserves a lot better,” a Friday editorial noted. He couldn’t help it if “chaos is endemic to the Arabic culture, of which Iraq is a part.” Rumsfeld’s approval rating in a Newsweek poll released Saturday stands at 24% — seven points less than the president’s.

And as for recently defeated Republican Senator Lincoln Chafee: According to IBD, he “thinks defeat at the polls gives him license to spend his remaining weeks in office wrecking U.S. foreign policy. It’s a final outrage from a traitor to party and president.”

*Update 11/12/06:  I should add that most right wing websites are in revolt against the James Baker/Lee Hamilton study group’s recommendations, with Powerline’s John Hinderaker saying about the reported plan to engage Iran and Syria in a multi-lateral effort to stabilize Iraq:

I sincerely hope I’m wrong, but this sounds like the kind of harebrained scheme that only a team of foreign policy “realists” could come up with. Why on God’s green earth would Iran and Syria, individually or in tandem, help us to pacify Iraq? Both have been doing everything in their power to create disorder in Iraq for the last three years, presumably because they think it is in their interest to do so. How, exactly, do the “realists” expect to change those countries’ assessments of their interests?

About the idea that concessions from Israel on the Golan Heights might induce Syria to help:

What does Israel have to do with the fact that Shia and Sunni Muslims want to tear each other to pieces? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. I’ll say it again: the idea that pressuring Israel to compromise its security will somehow, magically, solve the Iraqis’ problems is delusional. Maybe Baker et al., know something I don’t, but the idea that Iran and Syria will cooperate to bring peace to that region appears equally far-fetched.

So, under the Baker Commission’s recommendations, what will become of the 12 million Iraqis who voted for freedom and for a normal life? President Bush has said more times than I can count, in speeches spanning the last four years, that all people want to be free, and that freedom is God’s gift to all mankind. If he doesn’t believe that, then what does he believe?

If the Iraqis are to be sold out, at least let them be sold out by the Democrats. No one expected anything better from them.

Maybe this is a clue to why the conservatives aren’t so unhappy about the Democrats’ rise.

Foreign Policy Mix-Up

I agree with some foreign-policy hawks that our country needs to get more real about the threat we face from radical Islamists. Though I am a Democrat, I have given the Bush Administration the benefit of the doubt, not because I “agree” with them, but because the Constitution gives them the burden of responsibilty to protect this country, and I believe that there can only be so much political interference with their carrying-out of this responsibility before it becomes damaging to the country. The childishness, cliquishness, hypocrisy and naked partisanship of the Administration’s critics has drained much of whatever ideological sympathy I might have started with. I mean, my God, even the most committed liberals must get bored with the constant “Bushitler asshole” rants — although the evidence is they can’t get enough of it.

All that being said: This is disgraceful, unacceptable and makes we want to impeach all of them:

FOR the past several months, I’ve been wrapping up lengthy interviews with Washington counterterrorism officials with a fundamental question: “Do you know the difference between a Sunni and a Shiite?”

A “gotcha” question? Perhaps. But if knowing your enemy is the most basic rule of war, I don’t think it’s out of bounds. And as I quickly explain to my subjects, I’m not looking for theological explanations, just the basics: Who’s on what side today, and what does each want?

After all, wouldn’t British counterterrorism officials responsible for Northern Ireland know the difference between Catholics and Protestants? In a remotely similar but far more lethal vein, the 1,400-year Sunni-Shiite rivalry is playing out in the streets of Baghdad, raising the specter of a breakup of Iraq into antagonistic states, one backed by Shiite Iran and the other by Saudi Arabia and other Sunni states.

Just to cut to the chase for those who can’t keep it straight: Bin Laden is from Saudi Arabia, and his #2, Ayman al-Zawahiri, is from Egypt. These are Sunni states. Al Queda is a Sunni organization.  The Taliban?  Sunni.  Hezbollah, on the other hand, is Shiite.  The Ayatollah Khomeini?  A Shiite.

And, it goes without saying, there are millions of Sunnis and Shiites who don’t belong to terrorist organizations.  Neither denomination is inherently “more radical.”  There are far more Sunnis than Shiites, by a factor greater than 5 to 1. The origin of the split was the Shiites belief that only the descendents of Ali, Muhammed’s son-in-law, can lead the Muslim people.  But the split occured at the dawn of Islam, and at this point the differences are more the result of how the two sects developed historically over the succeeding 1,400 years.

A complete collapse in Iraq could provide a haven for Al Qaeda operatives within striking distance of Israel, even Europe. And the nature of the threat from Iran, a potential nuclear power with protégés in the Gulf states, northern Saudi Arabia, Lebanon and the Palestinian territories, is entirely different from that of Al Qaeda. It seems silly to have to argue that officials responsible for counterterrorism should be able to recognize opportunities for pitting these rivals against each other.

But so far, most American officials I’ve interviewed don’t have a clue. That includes not just intelligence and law enforcement officials, but also members of Congress who have important roles overseeing our spy agencies. How can they do their jobs without knowing the basics?

The author of this op-ed, Jeff Stein, who writes for Congressional Quarterly, makes a little game out of asking senior FBI officials and members of Congress if they know anything about the Shi’a and the Sunnis, and which forces are allied with which sects. Here’s an example:

At the end of a long interview, I asked Willie Hulon, chief of the (FBI’s) new national security branch, whether he thought that it was important for a man in his position to know the difference between Sunnis and Shiites. “Yes, sure, it’s right to know the difference,” he said. “It’s important to know who your targets are.”

That was a big advance over 2005. So next I asked him if he could tell me the difference. He was flummoxed. “The basics goes back to their beliefs and who they were following,” he said. “And the conflicts between the Sunnis and the Shia and the difference between who they were following.”

O.K., I asked, trying to help, what about today? Which one is Iran — Sunni or Shiite? He thought for a second. “Iran and Hezbollah,” I prompted. “Which are they?”

He took a stab: “Sunni.”

Wrong.

Al Qaeda? “Sunni.”

Right.

I think I could make a lot of money in Washington if I just printed out a palm-sized card that briefly explained the difference between the two denominations, how they started, and which countries and organizations are associated with each one. I’m sure I could sell quite a few to the Democrats who are about to take over the key committees. They must be a little glad that it’s Republican officials whose stupidity is being exposed. This gives them a little time to bone up.

The ignorance — and arrogance defense of such ignorance — is particularly galling at a time when we are fighting a war in Iraq, a country whose primary characteristic is that it contains large populations of both Shiites and Sunnis. If you can’t keep straight which group is closer to Iran, vs. which group is supported by Al Queda…

(I’m sorry, I just fainted.)

Reverse-Engineering 9/11

It amazes me that 9/11 conspiracy theorists can get an audience.

If you think the towers fell as a result of a planned demolition, think about the number of people who would have to be involved to carry out such a scheme. Demolition experts to set up the bombs. Security personnel at the WTC to give them access. Ditto at the Pentagon. Nineteen suicidal Muslims who could fly planes, and who could each be given fake backgrounds implicating Al-Queda. People to teach them to fly. A group of people to coordinate all this activity. This conspiracy would be immediately exposed if either of the WTC planes were delayed by bad weather or maintenance problems — like that never happens. So there had to be people inside the airlines and air traffic control.

To pull off a stunt like this would require the work of dozens, if not hundreds, of trained and educated people. All of them would have to agree to take the secret to their graves. Not one of them could experience a change of heart later, or be tempted by the chance to become a celebrity by blowing the whistle, writing a book, going on Oprah. They would also all have to keep the secret from their families and friends — including their cover stories to explain what they were doing during the years of preparation a plot like this would require. All of them would have to be well-compensated to ensure this silence; a lot of money to obtain and distribute without the notice of any banking regulators or the IRS. You’d have to vigilantly ensure their continued silence. That means you’re paying a crack team of spies and assassins to monitor and control everything these people say and do — forever.

Forever — because who are the suspects in this alleged conspiracy? President Bush? He has an ambitious family that could not survive exposure of this plot. This dynasty does not intend for W to be the last Bush who serves as president. The oil companies? I assume these publicly-traded companies think they’ll be around for a long time in some form, and thus would remain liable for damages into the trillions if they were conclusively fingered. Any powerful person in business or politics would be extremely paranoid about one person leaking the plot — so paranoid that even if they had some yearning for 9/11 to happen to facilitate war or a U.S. takeover of the Middle East’s oil supply, they would probably shy away from the risks.

Anyway…these thoughts came to mind when I came across this study on Science Blog — a Purdue University-sponsored mathematical simulation of what happened when the jet hit the north tower. This quote is from Mete Sozen, the Kettelhut Distinguished Professor of Structural Engineering in Purdue’s School of Civil Engineering:

“Current findings from the simulation have identified the destruction of 11 columns on the 94th floor, 10 columns on the 95th floor and nine columns on the 96th floor,” he said. “This is a major insight. When you lose close to 25 percent of your columns at a given level, the building is significantly weakened and vulnerable to collapse.”

To depict the first half-second after the plane hit the building required 80 hours of a high-performance computer’s time. Many of the same researchers in 2002 conducted a study of the 9/11 Pentagon crash. If I’m reading the following correctly, the presence of 10,000 gallons of jet fuel and other liquids were responsible for much of the damage — even before the fuel caught fire:

“As a result of the Pentagon research, we have a better understanding of what happens when a tremendous mass of fluid such as fuel hits a solid object at high velocity,” Sozen said. “We believe most of the structural damage from such aircraft collisions is caused by the mass of the fluid on the craft, which includes the fuel.

“Damage resulting solely from the metal fuselage, engines and other aircraft parts is not as great as that resulting from the mass of fluids on board. You could think of the aircraft as a sausage skin. Its mass is tiny compared to the plane’s fluid contents.”

The simulation represents the plane and its mass as a mesh of hundreds of thousands of “finite elements,” or small squares containing specific physical characteristics. Like the previous Pentagon simulation, the software tool uses principles of physics to simulate how a plane’s huge mass of fuel and cargo impacts a building.

Do you believe the conspirators had the knowledge or ability to stage explosions that would precisely mimic these effects? That means there’s some fluid-mechanics genius with a high-performance computer out there going, “Mwah-hah-hah, they’ll never be able to tell the difference!”

I think most of the 9/11 conspiracy theorists are actually hucksters. Generally, you have to pay for something — a book, a lecture, a downloadable video — in order to get them to tell you the real story.

Clinton as a Tragic Figure

Like most political junkies nowadays, I knew about ex-President Clinton’s appearance on Fox News Sunday from what bloggers were saying about it before I ever got to see it for myself.

I don’t have all the links at hand anymore, but suffice to say it broke down very predictably along party/ideological lines. To leftists, it was all about Clinton “smacking down” Fox . One site thought Clinton’s assault on Fox was so devastating, Fox might edit those parts out — a remarkably inept bit of paranoid speculation, given that Fox’s real objective is to make money. On TV, conflict equals ratings. “If it bleeds, it leads.”

To conservatives, Clinton’s blowup, combined with his supporters’ misguided attempt to pressure Disney/ABC to pull “The Path to 9/11″ miniseries off the air, meant it’s now open season to say what they’ve always wanted to say: The blood of 9/11 is on Clinton’s hands. Many right-wing bloggers patted themselves on the back for having held their tongues all these years (ha!), but said that the blame game is now fair game, since Clinton decided to make an issue of his culpability.

My view is a little different. When I finally saw the interview, my reaction was, “How remarkable that he’s held this inside him for so long.”

Both right and left agreed that his rant was an example of Clinton’s famous temper, his “purple-faced rage,” that aides saw frequently but the public saw rarely.

I didn’t see that much anger. I saw grief.

The key exchange, copied here from Fox’s transcript, was this:

——-

CLINTON: No, no. I authorized the CIA to get groups together to try to kill him.

The CIA, which was run by George Tenet, that President Bush gave the Medal of Freedom to, he said, “He did a good job setting up all these counterterrorism things.”

The country never had a comprehensive anti-terror operation until I came there.

Now, if you want to criticize me for one thing, you can criticize me for this: After the Cole, I had battle plans drawn to go into Afghanistan, overthrow the Taliban, and launch a full-scale attack search for bin Laden.

But we needed basing rights in Uzbekistan, which we got after 9/11.

The CIA and the FBI refused to certify that bin Laden was responsible while I was there. They refused to certify. So that meant I would’ve had to send a few hundred Special Forces in helicopters and refuel at night.

Even the 9/11 Commission didn’t do that. Now, the 9/11 Commission was a political document, too. All I’m asking is, anybody who wants to say I didn’t do enough, you read Richard Clarke’s book.

WALLACE: Do you think you did enough, sir?

CLINTON: No, because I didn’t get him.

WALLACE: Right.

CLINTON: But at least I tried. That’s the difference in me and some, including all the right-wingers who are attacking me now. They ridiculed me for trying. They had eight months to try. They did not try. I tried.

So I tried and failed. When I failed, I left a comprehensive anti-terror strategy and the best guy in the country, Dick Clarke, who got demoted.

——

Some of this is incoherent. Some of this has been challenged factually. But what remains is this almost plaintive, and undeniably honest, confession: “I tried and failed.”

Now, any chief executive realizes quickly after assuming office that for most of what you try to do, failure is the most likely outcome. You can only follow so many initiatives with the degree of attention required to ensure success. You are at the mercy of events that will throw you off track. Your subordinates are not uniformly competent, and even the best ones can have egos that poison their minds and lead to time-wasting, soul-sucking turf wars.

If you’re both very good and very lucky, you will get some of the big things right. Your most important accomplishments might be invisible, even to you: The decisions that averted crises that no one could foresee. Maybe in time, someone will notice and give you credit. But by that time, you might be dead and forgotten.

Clinton was, to me, a president whose grade point average was a C, but he accomplished that by scoring a lot of A’s and a lot of F’s. (Kind of like my son.) History shows he was prescient about Osama Bin Laden and Al Queda. I believe him when he says he tried to kill Bin Laden. But what is apparently haunting him, and came out in this interview, was whether he tried hard enough.

Every office in America, there is some put-upon exec with a sign on his desk saying “How can I soar like an eagle when I’m surrounded by turkeys?” And: “Don’t let the bastards get you down.” Clinton let the bastards get him down. He envisioned the kind of threat Bin Laden posed, but he let the legalistic mind of his Justice Department, the pinhead intellectuals of the CIA and the feckless leaders of the military back him down. He didn’t quite have the courage of his convictions; and he was surrounded by unimpressive advisers like Sandy Berger and Madeleine Albright who sapped his confidence.

When Clinton left office, the unfinished business with Al Queda was just one item on the list that he didn’t complete. All executives know dozens of these disappointments upon leaving office. But the polls on his presidency were high, the economy was still pretty strong, the deficit was down, Hilary was in the Senate, the impeachment battle had been won — I’m sure Clinton felt pretty good, overall. Then 9/11 happened.

From that day to this one, I’m sure he has replayed in his mind all the meetings where he got talked out of taking the next aggressive step. But, the debate was mostly inside his head. In the political world, I don’t think 9/11 damaged Clinton significantly — otherwise, why would his wife have been considered the shoo-in for the presidential nomination in 2008 until very recently? For every right-winger who said “Clinton didn’t do enough,” you had many more voices like Richard Clarke saying he did a lot more than anyone thought, and that Bush’s neglect of terrorism in the first eight months of his reign was just as decisive.

But surviving politically and surviving your own doubts are two different things.

Because Clinton is so smart, his critics see every move he makes as calculating. It’s a myth. What I saw on Sunday’s show was not Clinton the politician trying to score points. I saw Clinton the human being trying to convince himself that he really did all he could, that his attempts to stop Bin Laden were noble and his failure forgivable.

The political implications seem petty compared to the drama of a once-powerful leader stirring the ashes of his conscience. The burden he must carry now! It was an episode worthy of Shakespeare.

Mars Attacks!, the sequel

There are two kinds of people in the world: Those who think the zany Tim Burton movie Mars Attacks! is incredibly stupid, and those who laugh their heads off through the whole thing.  I’m in category #2. 

The best thing about Mars Attacks! is the clueless president played by Jack Nicholson, his pretentious foreign policy advisor, played by Pierce Brosnan, and his gung-ho military advisor, played by Rod Steiger, debating what to do about the Martian invaders. 

Puffing on a long pipe, Brosnan’s character advises the president that the world will laud him if he greets the Martians as friends.  The First Lady isn’t convinced:

First Lady: I’m not allowing that thing in my house.
President Dale: Sweetie, we may have to. The people expect me to meet with them.
First Lady: Well they’re not going to eat off the Van Buren china.   

The leader of the Martians arrives and delivers a speech that is translated as “We come in peace!  We come in peace!” At almost the same moment, the Martians start firing powerful ray guns that kill everyone.  But the Brosnan character is undeterred, continuing to press the president to offer peace, saying the Martians need to be understood. Repeatedly, the Martians say things like “Don’t run from us! We are your friends,” which always turns out to be a trick.

This op-ed from today’s Wall Street Journal reminded me of Mars Attacks! Even though it’s serious, it makes the diplomatic maneuverings around Iran’s nuclear plans seem just as laughably futile as Jack Nicholson’s attempts to mollify the Martians.   The essay’s author, Michael Rubin, says that as the West tries to negotiate a deal to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons, keep in mind that Iran has a tendency to lie rather brazenly.  His article documents a number of Iranian switcheroos since the seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran in 1979:

In 1986, former U.S. national security advisor Robert McFarlane’s traveled to Tehran. While the Iran-Contra Affair is remembered today for the Reagan administration’s attempts to circumvent Congressional prohibition of funding of the Nicaraguan resistance, it also illustrates the inadvisability of trusting Tehran. President Reagan sought to win the release of American hostages in Lebanon but, as soon as Washington compensated Tehran for its bad behavior, its militias accelerated hostage seizure. Diplomatic enticement–bribery by another name–backfired. But diplomacy is not just about incentives; it is also about trust. What could have been just a failed initiative turned to scandal when, on the seventh anniversary of the embassy seizure, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, today the chairman of the Expediency Council, broke a pledge of secrecy and revealed the meetings to the international press.

Iranian authorities showed diplomatic duplicity once again after Khomeini issued a declaration calling for author Salman Rushdie’s death. Four months before Khomeini’s death, then-president Khamenei demanded that Mr. Rushdie apologize in exchange for cancellation of a religious edict ordering his murder. Mr. Rushdie apologized, but the Iranian government nevertheless kept the bounty in place. President Khamenei was insincere, his diplomacy was a tactic. By winning an apology, he confirmed Mr. Rushdie’s guilt.

Would such a religious group be okay with lying?  Indeed they would, according to Rubin:

During his long exile in Najaf, Khomeini endorsed taqiya, religiously sanctioned dissembling. From his perspective and that of his followers, the ends justify the means. Hence, Khomeini saw nothing wrong when he told the Guardian newspaper, just months before his return to Iran, “I don’t want to have the power of government in my hand; I am not interested in personal power.” Tehran may still conduct diplomacy to fish for incentive and reward but, at its core, Iranian diplomacy is insincere. The Iranian leadership will say anything and do anything to buy the time necessary to acquire nuclear capability.

Throughout the Western diplomatic community, there is a strong yearning to change Iran’s course diplomatically. No one wants more war in the Middle East.  The fear we should have, however, is that we might be lulled into a false sense of security by such an agreement.  If we sign one, we shouldn’t kid ourselves.  Whatever we gain from a deal with Iran will be very temporary, and must be monitored just as closely as if the agreement didn’t exist. 

Part of the joke of Mars Attacks! is the hopelessness of Earth’s situation.  Nothing can really stop the Martians’ gleeful killing spree.  The general who rages at “Intellectuals! Liberals! Peacemongers! Idiots!” and wants to bomb the invaders’ spaceships is, in the end, no more effective against the Martians than is the naive Brosnan. The Martians are just too powerful.  Their only vulnerability?   It is discovered by accident that Slim Whitman music makes their heads explode. 

Oh well, there’s only so much foreign policy guidance you can expect from a Tim Burton movie.

Liberals Who Fear Liberals

Sam Harris, a liberal writer who wrote a provocative book he described as “highly critical of religion,” is now highly critical of liberals, while still trying to be one.  I am familiar with this struggle!

In the wake of my prior post describing the last years of feminist journalist Orianna Fallaci, you must read this op-ed Harris wrote for today’s LA Times.  The response he got from thousands of readers of his last book, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason, inspired him to panic.  Here are a few chunks of what Harris has to say:

On questions of national security, I am now as wary of my fellow liberals as I am of the religious demagogues on the Christian right.

This may seem like frank acquiescence to the charge that “liberals are soft on terrorism.” It is, and they are.

(snip)

Numerous studies have found that the most radicalized Muslims tend to have better-than-average educations and economic opportunities.

Given the degree to which religious ideas are still sheltered from criticism in every society, it is actually possible for a person to have the economic and intellectual resources to build a nuclear bomb — and to believe that he will get 72 virgins in paradise. And yet, despite abundant evidence to the contrary, liberals continue to imagine that Muslim terrorism springs from economic despair, lack of education and American militarism.

(snip)

The truth is that there is every reason to believe that a terrifying number of the world’s Muslims now view all political and moral questions in terms of their affiliation with Islam. This leads them to rally to the cause of other Muslims no matter how sociopathic their behavior. This benighted religious solidarity may be the greatest problem facing civilization and yet it is regularly misconstrued, ignored or obfuscated by liberals.

(snip)

We are entering an age of unchecked nuclear proliferation and, it seems likely, nuclear terrorism. There is, therefore, no future in which aspiring martyrs will make good neighbors for us. Unless liberals realize that there are tens of millions of people in the Muslim world who are far scarier than Dick Cheney, they will be unable to protect civilization from its genuine enemies.

(snip)

While liberals should be the ones pointing the way beyond this Iron Age madness, they are rendering themselves increasingly irrelevant. Being generally reasonable and tolerant of diversity, liberals should be especially sensitive to the dangers of religious literalism. But they aren’t.

The same failure of liberalism is evident in Western Europe, where the dogma of multiculturalism has left a secular Europe very slow to address the looming problem of religious extremism among its immigrants. The people who speak most sensibly about the threat that Islam poses to Europe are actually fascists.

To say that this does not bode well for liberalism is an understatement: It does not bode well for the future of civilization.

There is still time for liberals to find a voice in defense of civilization, but the window is shutting.  It will shut for good in 2008, when they can no longer use “Bush rage” as an excuse for their mindless opposition to waging a war that is being waged against us whether they want to acknowledge it or not.

I’m quite unhappy about a future in which liberalism, the belief system with which I’ve been affliliated for my entire adult life becomes marginalized and irrelevant, and where its adherents are considered unqualified to govern. 

I don’t like the idea of having to choose between candidates with whom I agree on 90 percent of the issues, but who fail to have a supportable position on the single most important issue, and Republicans, who are mostly wrong, but right about the one thing that matters most.

And I’m furiously angry that half-witted partisans who run the left-wing, self-described “netroots” blogs are now seen as arbiters of true liberalism.  They might be speaking for this generation’s liberals, I fear. But they don’t know what liberalism means, historically or intellectually.  They’re so in love with their aggressive tone, they haven’t bothered to notice their positions are incoherent. 

The Democratic Party should look at the liberal netroots like pre-adolescent children. You have to listen to them, because you can’t disown them, and because they’re loud and hard to ignore.  But they shouldn’t be allowed to drive until they grow up.

Burying Fallaci

The obituaries and tributes to Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci, who died of cancer last week, illustrate the gulf between principle and politics.

When I was in college, Fallaci was twice a hero — as a reporter whose portraits and interviews cut to the heart of the arrogance and brutality of power in Interview With History — and as a political activist who took enormous risks to fight fascism, dictatorships, sexism, and the Vietnam War. 

In Margaret Talbot’s recent profile in The New Yorker, she quoted from Fallaci’s preface, words I still remember from 30 years ago:

“Whether it comes from a despotic sovereign or an elected president, from a murderous general or a beloved leader, I see power as an inhuman and hateful phenomenon. . . . I have always looked on disobedience toward the oppressive as the only way to use the miracle of having been born.”  

As a journalism student, I was blown away by her interviews.  Like everyone who fancied themselves a non-fiction writer in the 70s, I was attracted by the highly stylized “new journalism” of Joan Didion, Tom Wolfe, Michael Herr and Hunter S. Thompson.  But Fallaci made them all look silly, soft-headed and obsessed with trivia.   Her writing, at least in the English translations I read, had a Hemingwayish clarity and economy, left nothing to interpretation and engaged the most serious, life-and-death issues of her times.  And the things she got her subjects to say!  Henry Kissinger describing himself as Richard Nixon’s “mental wet nurse,” and agreeing with Fallaci that the Vietnam war was “useless.”  

There’s a mind-numbing cliche now, “speak truth to power,” which is mostly used by self-indulgent politicians to flatter themselves. But Fallaci was the rare example of someone who walked right up into the faces of powerful people, and using a mix of charm and intense honesty, got them to admit what were, essentially, crimes and misdemeanors against humanity.

But in her final years, Fallaci became much more controversial, primarily on the left.  No neo-conservative, Fallaci was a feminist and a Socialist until the day she died.  But she was infuriated to the point of hysteria on the way Europe’s political establishment was turning a blind eye to impact of a growing Muslim population on Europe, in particular Italy.  Again from The New Yorker:

According to Fallaci, Europeans, particularly those on the political left, subject people who criticize Muslim customs to a double standard. “If you speak your mind on the Vatican, on the Catholic Church, on the Pope, on the Virgin Mary or Jesus or the saints, nobody touches your ‘right of thought and expression.’ But if you do the same with Islam, the Koran, the Prophet Muhammad, some son of Allah, you are called a xenophobic blasphemer who has committed an act of racial discrimination. If you kick the ass of a Chinese or an Eskimo or a Norwegian who has hissed at you an obscenity, nothing happens. On the contrary, you get a ‘Well done, good for you.’ But if under the same circumstances you kick the ass of an Algerian or a Moroccan or a Nigerian or a Sudanese, you get lynched.” The rhetoric of Fallaci’s trilogy is intentionally intemperate and frequently offensive: in the first volume, she writes that Muslims “breed like rats”; in the second, she writes that this statement was “a little brutal” but “indisputably accurate.” She ascribes behavior to bloodlines—Spain, she writes, has been overly acquiescent to Muslim immigrants because “too many Spaniards still have the Koran in the blood”—and her political views are often expressed in the language of disgust. Images of soiling recur in the books: at one point in “The Rage and the Pride” she complains about Somali Muslims leaving “yellow streaks of urine that profaned the millenary marbles of the Baptistery” in Florence. “Good Heavens!” she writes. “They really take long shots, these sons of Allah! How could they succeed in hitting so well that target protected by a balcony and more than two yards distant from their urinary apparatus?” Six pages later, she describes urine streaks in the Piazza San Marco, in Venice, and wonders if Muslim men will one day “shit in the Sistine Chapel.”

For saying things like this, Fallaci was excommunicated from the left, with anti-racism organizations working to get her most recent books — all about the threat to Europe she perceived from Islam – banned.  A Milan art gallery, Talbot reported, showed a large portrait of Falacci — beheaded.  Nice. When she died, she was facing trial in Italy for blasphemy.

To her critics, it didn’t seem to register that this lifelong feminist might have a problem with what another recently ostracized feminist, Phyllis Chesler, called “Islamic gender apartheid” — the brutal, total subjugation of women in the more fundamentalist Muslim societies. 

Fallaci’s 1979 interview with the Ayatollah Khomeini must have been a pivotal experience in her intellectual journey.  On reflection, she realized he was “the Robespierre or the Lenin of something which would go very far and would poison the world.” From The New Yorker:

She had followed instructions from the new Islamist regime, and arrived at the Ayatollah’s home barefoot and wrapped in a chador. Almost immediately, she unleashed a barrage of questions about the closing of opposition newspapers, the treatment of Iran’s Kurdish minority, and the summary executions performed by the new regime. When Khomeini defended these practices, noting that some of the people killed had been brutal servants of the Shah, Fallaci demanded, “Is it right to shoot the poor prostitute or a woman who is unfaithful to her husband, or a man who loves another man?” The Ayatollah answered with a pair of remorseless metaphors. “If your finger suffers from gangrene, what do you do? Do you let the whole hand, and then the body, become filled with gangrene, or do you cut the finger off? What brings corruption to an entire country and its people must be pulled up like the weeds that infest a field of wheat.”

Fallaci continued posing indignant questions about the treatment of women in the new Islamic state. Why, she asked, did Khomeini compel women to “hide themselves, all bundled up,” when they had proved their equal stature by helping to bring about the Islamic revolution? Khomeini replied that the women who “contributed to the revolution were, and are, women with the Islamic dress”; they weren’t women like Fallaci, who “go around all uncovered, dragging behind them a tail of men.” A few minutes later, Fallaci asked a more insolent question: “How do you swim in a chador?” Khomeini snapped, “Our customs are none of your business. If you do not like Islamic dress you are not obliged to wear it. Because Islamic dress is for good and proper young women.” Fallaci saw an opening, and charged in. “That’s very kind of you, Imam. And since you said so, I’m going to take off this stupid, medieval rag right now.” She yanked off her chador.

But Fallaci’s intemperate language about the Muslim religion and culture gave license even to supposedly objective journalists to marginalize her as a bigot.  To take just one example, consider Los Angeles Times’ Tracy Wilkinson’s obituary:

It was the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and the Pentagon that jerked her out of semi-retirement and launched her on her final crusade, against Islam. She saw radical Islam — and argued there was no such thing as moderate Islam — as the new brand of Nazi Fascism, “SS and Black Shirts who wave the Koran.” In the book that emerged, “The Rage and the Pride,” she ranted against Islamic terrorists and fundamentalism.

But Fallaci did not stop at terrorists; all Muslims, she wrote, posed a problem for Western civilization. She assailed European officials and the intelligentsia for bending over backward to accommodate Muslim immigrants who she said were hostile and insulting, who refused to adapt to Western values and customs, and who were ruining her city of Florence and much of Italy.

Using derogatory, ugly, distasteful language, she portrayed the “Muslim intruders” who “infest our streets and squares” as drug dealers, thieves, leches and prostitutes spreading AIDS. “They breed too much,” she said.

“The children of Allah spend their time with their bottoms in the air, praying five times a day,” she noted.

She also attacked the Vatican under the late Pope John Paul II, saying that the church appeased Islam and did not do enough to solidify Christian values in Europe.

“Tell me, Holy Father: Is it true that some time ago you asked the sons of Allah to forgive the Crusades that your predecessors fought to take back the Holy Sepulcher?” she wrote. “But … did they ever apologize?”

Does Fallaci’s language make me uncomfortable?  Of course.  Perhaps her zeal caused her to be too sweeping in her judgments and too vivid in her antipathies.  If Wilkinson is right that Fallaci saw “no such thing as moderate Islam,” then of course that’s a falsehood.  She lived in New York during her final years, but apparently didn’t notice the predominance of “moderate Islam” among the US’ millions of Islamic faithful.

But I’m still going to defend Fallaci.  Perhaps her strategy is wrong, but her objective was noble — to remind Europeans and Westerners in general that the culture in which they were born and raised is at war with an enemy.  We will lose this war, Fallaci saw, if we don’t think our way of life is worth defending. 

It strikes me as a fitting irony that an atheist like Fallaci would seek to strengthen the morale of the Catholic Church, inasmuch as she saw in the traditions of that church the seeds of tolerance — paradoxically, in an institution guilty of horrific intolerance during its history.  Neverthelesss, the Judeo-Christian ethic respects diversity of opinion and the integrity of the individual.  It is a culture open to change such that, eventually, after painful struggle, feminists, gays, atheists and other apostates from the fundamental creed, could find places of honor in our society.  At least that was Fallaci’s experience.  She saw all that, and then compared it with the social vision of Khomeini and his followers, and experienced a sense of dread.  She looked around and saw complacency, and it made her want to scream.  

“Forget it Dick, It’s Chinatown”

That might have been a good final line to the ABC mini-series “The Path to 9/11.” Because John O’Neill didn’t survive, it would have had to be spoken to Richard Clarke.

Supposedly this two-part show was a right-wing smear attack on the Clinton Administration. Well, look. If you’re going to tell the story of how the government screwed up in protecting America from this attack, you’re going to feature characters who are part of the permanent government, such as the story’s hero, FBI Special Agent John P. O’Neill. As a rule, such people have contempt for politics, politicians and, above all, political appointees. (This is true at every level of government.  I saw it all the time at City Hall.  Elected officials and their appointees eventually figure out that there are two types of bureaucrats:  The smart, dedicated ones who think the political people are stupid, and the dumb, lazy ones who think the political people are stupid.)

It is part of the story to show there was tension between people like Clarke and O’Neill on one side, and presidential appointees like Madeleine Albright, Sandy Berger and, later, Condi Rice on the other. Especially in the case of O’Neill, a fierce, brilliant Irish bulldog who headed the FBI’s National Security Division.

Barbara Newman, a documentary producer for A&E, interviewed O’Neill in 1997. That interview was included in a 2002 PBS Frontline episode on O’Neill called “The Man Who Knew.” On the PBS website, Newman writes:

I had covered terrorism stemming from the Middle East since 1980, when I was a producer for ABC’s 20/20. John and I shared an interest in this area and a belief that the U.S. could suffer a tremendous blow from those who espoused a hatred of us and our society. Some found his zeal shrill and annoying. I found it reassuring.

John could be utterly charming or totally devastating. He could wither with a look, suffering fools badly. He was openly contemptuous of people he didn’t think pushed the envelope or themselves. He thought so quickly he often finished my sentences. I knew when he disagreed with me by catching an amused flicker in his eyes.

John had old-fashioned values. He was patriotic. He was religious, never missing a Sunday mass. He told me that he was so poor growing up, he had done every job, including cleaning bathrooms. He went to the FBI at age 18 and became a tour guide. The Bureau was his life; they sent him to college at American University.

Behind the bluster, John was a gentle soul. He might not admit it, but I think he would rather light a candle than curse the darkness.

John and I were friends. We were able to communicate directly, without artifice. We trusted each other and knew each other’s limits. For years John had told me that Osama bin Laden was an enormous threat to the U.S. and that I should do a documentary about him. And for years I told him that Americans weren’t interested. We were both right.

Also in 2002, the New Yorker’s Lawrence Wright wrote a posthumous profile of O’Neill, in which Clarke played a prominent role. The whole piece is worth reading — Wright has a new book out about 9/11 that I am anxious to get. This excerpt is telling:

Clarke immediately spotted in O’Neill an obsessiveness about the dangers of terrorism which mirrored his own. “John had the same problems with the bureaucracy that I had,” Clarke told me. “Prior to September 11th, a lot of people who were working full time on terrorism thought it was no more than a nuisance. They didn’t understand that Al Qaeda was enormously powerful and insidious and that it was not going to stop until it really hurt us. John and some other senior officials knew that. The impatience really grew in us as we dealt with the dolts who didn’t understand.”

That’s right: Dolts. It’s obvious both Clarke and O’Neill didn’t like much of anybody in Washington, regardless of party. Maybe they were being unfair, or maybe they were right. But it wasn’t partisan.

“The Path to 9/11″ was primarily the story of these two men and their frustration in trying to protect the nation from a threat they saw clearly and — so they thought — no one else did. “No one” is inclusive of Clinton and his appointees. It would have been untrue to the characters to have them make nice comments about the Administration, or to whitewash the contempt that numerous witnesses say they felt toward them.

The activists and Democratic Party leaders who have interpreted the dramatization of these two characters as a partisan attack don’t get it. Curiously, their furious response underscores O’Neill’s view of the political types as more interested in protecting their rear ends than protecting the country.

My 9/11/01

I woke up five years ago this morning in a room at the Chase Park Plaza Hotel in St. Louis. A colleague was on the other line. I looked at the clock: It was about 9 a.m. I had only gone to bed an hour earlier. My plane arrived in St. Louis about 6:45. I was frustrated because I’d always been able to grab just enough sleep on a red-eye to do my next day’s job, but on this trip I couldn’t sleep at all.

“Hey, I need to sleep a little more.”

“You need to turn on the TV right now.”

What ran through my mind was — our client was buying a local business and today was supposed to be the announcement, and the seller had been squirrelly about how the announcement was going to be handled. He was a prominent local business owner. He wanted to be able to tell his employees before telling anyone else, but that was inconsistent with the announcement strategy that I had been sent to St. Louis to enforce. So I thought, oh crap, the seller is talking about the transaction on some local morning news show.

“Which channel?”

“Any channel. Just watch and call me later.”

She hung up. I’m thinking: Wow, this guy is powerful. He’s got every TV station in St. Louis carrying his announcement. I didn’t think it was that big a deal.

So I click on the TV, just in time to watch one of the Twin Towers fall, crumbling into a giant cloud of dust. Or, it might have been a tape of something that had just happened. I wasn’t sure what was live and what was tape — I was still disoriented from lack of sleep. Buildings were falling and falling — tapes of both towers being played over and over.

I didn’t know until a few minutes later what had caused this. I hoped they had been able to evacuate the towers. I started trying to figure out how many people might have died — it was staggering. Maybe 40,000 people, I figured. By the end of the day, they were saying 10,000. It seems like a miracle that it was “only” about 3,000.

Before I really understood what was happening, I called my wife back in Southern California. We had only been married a few months, and she was home with my 10-year-old son. It wasn’t normally their habit to watch TV in the mornings, so I figured my son would go off to school and find out there. In those days, he was given to horrible nightmares, so that wasn’t how I wanted him to get the information. My wife and I decided she would tell him, they wouldn’t watch it on TV, and he would stay home from school.

I left the TV on, but tried to get a little more sleep, so the information and speculation seemed to swirl around me, not making sense or hanging together, like a blob of mercury in a whirlpool. Eventually I moved into the living room, noticing for the first time that I had been put up in an extremely large and luxurious space — a suite with a big living room and a kitchen. That was also surreal. I was only supposed to be in St. Louis for eight hours. Who thought I needed all this?

I switched to the TV in there, and my colleague eventually joined me to watch the story unfold. By now, I’d said goodbye to Katie and Matt, and hello to CNN. I had a selfish interest in watching. They had grounded all the planes, and here I was, stuck in St. Louis. When would I be able to fly out again? So while the reporters reported and the pontificators pontificated, I was watching the little space at the bottom where words fly by, trying not to miss information from the FAA. Or Amtrak, which was also halted. There was a rumor of terrorists plotting to take over a train, right here in Missouri! My colleague had already checked on rental cars — there were none.

My wife and I were selling our home, and today was the day it was supposed to go on the market. At some point my wife and I spoke and agreed we would probably not be getting any lookie-loos that day. But then the phone rang. We had an offer. Sight unseen! At our price, which our Realtor had defined as “aggressive.” They wanted us to accept today. Today? While our country is in this turmoil? It was a Korean family. Our neighbors in this complex were mostly Korean, and we figured it was a family thing.

“Gosh, maybe we should have named a higher price,” I said.

I wasn’t very experienced in real estate, but it didn’t seem quite ethical that if you set a price and someone met it, you didn’t accept it. We agreed to accept. The day got yet more surreal, as my Realtor tried to fax the 50 pages of the sale agreement, each one of which I had to initial and fax back.

Eventually, I was in touch with my office in LA. After going through all the “how horribles” and “can you believe its” they wanted to talk business. One of our clients was Microsoft’s PC games, including Flight Simulator. Apparently, one of the many speculative comments that had been repeated on, I believe, NBC, was that the hijackers had trained on Flight Simulator. Questions were being raised about whether Flight Simulator — the most popular PC game by far — should still be sold since, after all, anyone who played Flight Simulator could now hijack a plane and fly it into a building! How should this be countered? Especially since a new version had been produced and was about to be shipped!

What you had was about 20 PR people — in-house, at my firm and at another firm, plus some lawyers — with nothing else to do and a sense of unease from which we all wanted to escape. So we all glommed onto this project, and started having conference calls and sending e-mail. I borrowed my colleague’s computer, since I didn’t think I would be away from home long enough to justify dragging mine along. The e-mail chains went on for 50 screens as this PR problem was considered from every conceivable angle, and as every decision-maker weighed in. The fact was, nobody could fly a real plane based on logging even an infinite number of hours on Flight Simulator. But the press didn’t want to hear that. Suddenly, a fun game that lots of geeks liked to play at their desks instead of doing real work was being redefined as a national security threat!

“Couldn’t you reprogram the game so it would be impossible to fly into buildings?” someone asked. Apparently, if you had a creepy sense of humor, you could deliberately crash your plane on Flight Simulator. Maybe that functionality should be, you know, uh, turned off. A fine idea, but it was too late for all the new Flight Simulator boxes being stacked up and ready to ship. Even though it was only September, the product had to be in stores soon for Christmas sales.

Somebody said: “I don’t think America will be celebrating Christmas this year.”

Somebody else said: “Are you kidding? By Christmas, no one will even remember this!”

Meanwhile, CNN was still playing in the living room. I turned the sound off and the closed-caption on, but closed caption reduced everything to nonsense, especially Muslim names like Osama Bin Laden. At one point, I swear, I think the closed-caption typist gave up and just started pounding out letters at random. They didn’t make any less sense than what was being typed deliberately.

There was a brief break in all the Flight Simulator action, so I decided to focus on the news. Normally, I don’t like watching the news in the immediate aftermath of a huge event like this, because in those first 24 hours, facts are few, speculation runs rampant and mostly it’s just the talking heads talking to each other. This, I now realized, was different. There was a rescue underway. The survivors, if any, needed to be found quickly. Some of the missing people were police officers and firefighters who had rushed into the towers with little consideration for their own safety, and apparently no awareness that the fires from the planes might cause the buildings to pancake on top of them.

Plus, people were sharing amateur on-the-scene video. The jumpers — my God. And the Manhattan canyons filling with debris as the towers fell, with onlookers rushing to get out of the way of the cement and steel avalanche. It was starting to sink in.

There was Benjamin Netanyahu on the screen, calmly being interviewed. He said something that has stuck with me ever since: “If they’d had nuclear weapons, they would have used them.”

His statement made a horrible kind of sense to me. So much hatred had to go into these attacks. Boundless, bloodthirsty hatred. Suicidal in the sense that, to this enemy, people didn’t matter, not even their own people; only history and God. It was, I began to realize, a war of revenge against western society, for a thousand years of crimes that could never be atoned for. There was no negotiation possible. The grievances went back a millennium, but were palpable today in the fury they stoked. We were seen as the same people who waged the wars of the Crusades and then went on to blaspheme the Muslim religion by allowing naked women to dance on cable TV. It was all one crime. I had to agree with the fabled Israeli reactionary. If Al Queda could have smuggled a nuclear weapon onto one of those jets, we would be seeing Manhattan or Washington DC in radioactive ruins now.

It was one of those long summer dusks we don’t have in Los Angeles, where the light lingers in the sky long after sunset, when I finally wandered out of the hotel, alone, in search of something to eat. The hotel was in a beautiful old neighborhood. I’d never been to St. Louis before, but it seemed like a real hidden treasure. (Later I was advised that the hotel was in the only good neighborhood in St. Louis. Oh well.) I found an independent record store in what seemed like a collegiate community. The music industry’s new releases were out front. Two interested me: Bob Dylan’s “Love and Theft,” and Nick Lowe’s “The Convincer.” Eventually they became two of my favorite CDs, but I thought the Dylan might be more suitable. Dylan had been prophetic in the past. He couldn’t have known the attack was coming, but it would be interesting to find out what he was tuned into in the months leading up to it. I then found a Chinese restaurant, ordered some to go, and brought my Dylan album back to the hotel.

Well, if you know the album “Love and Theft,” you know it was Dylan’s return to comedy for the first time since the mid-60s. The music was at times hard rocking and blues-y, at other times more like vaudeville of the 1920s and parlour music of the 1890s. The lyrics were as brilliant and madly surreal as “Blonde on Blonde” or “Highway 61 Revisited,” but now from the vantage point of a 60-year-old man who’d seen a lot and was more dispassionate, empathetic and greatly amused; who accepted loneliness and heartbreak as part of humanity’s grand buffoonery, and his own. “Love and Theft” was not a prophetic album; instead it looked back. It was, as Robert Hilburn might say, “quintessentially American.” It didn’t reflect how I felt right at that moment, but in some way it reflected how I felt most of the time. Songs like “Summer Days” wouldn’t have outraged Bin Laden the same way, say, Madonna’s frank sexuality would. But its laughing spirit would have made him uncomfortable:

Wedding bells ringin’, the choir is beginning to sing
Yes, the wedding bells are ringing and the choir is beginning to sing
What looks good in the day, at night is another thing

She’s looking into my eyes, she’s holding my hand
She’s looking into my eyes, she’s holding my hand
She says, “You can’t repeat the past.” I say, “You can’t? What do you mean, you can’t? Of course you can.”

Where do you come from? Where do you go?
Sorry that’s nothin’ you would need to know
Well, my back has been to the wall for so long, it seems like it’s stuck
Why don’t you break my heart one more time just for good luck

I called my wife again and spoke to my son. Their nerves clearly were frazzled and even though they knew it wasn’t my fault, they were both irritated that I couldn’t be home, and couldn’t even tell them when I would be home. “Why can’t your company help you?” I explained that the CEO of my company was also stuck somewhere — Nebraska I think. He’d somehow gotten a car and was driving back to New York.

On TV, the World Trade Center site was glowing in the night sky. The fire had not gone out, plus I think by this time some kleig lights had been erected to help with the rescue. News was starting to filter in about cellphone calls by airline passengers and by people trapped inside the upper floors of the towers — giving reports and saying goodbye. I tried to imagine 10,000 souls all dying in these horrible conflagrations. It was sickening and sad, and paralyzed my heart.

Of course, at that moment, I hated the people who had committed this murderous act. But what was worse was realizing they hated me, and my people, so much more than I could ever hate them. That’s the true nature of asymmetrical warfare. We in America don’t sustain hatreds for very long. We lost hundreds of thousands of soldiers in World War Two, the worst cataclysm in U.S. history, and within a very few years had made our peace, basically, with the Germans and Japanese. Within 20 years, we were joking about the whole thing on shows like “McHale’s Navy” and “Hogan’s Heroes.” We would soon forget the rage about this attack that was not yet called “9/11,” and instead try to figure out what we had done wrong. Or so I predicted, somewhat fatalistically.

I know many people would say my prediction was totally wrong. We went to war almost immediately in Afghanistan, and soon in Iraq, and we have shown our most violent side in atrocities like Abu Graibh. We’ve declared war on what people from Christopher Hitchens to George W. Bush are now calling “Islamofascism.” But I think it’s too early to tell. Bush has a horrible time trying to define this war, and if anything the Democrats are worse. Our political system has failed to rise to the challenge, to say the least. This week’s absurd pissing match over the ABC docudrama served as a perfect illustration of how sadly inadequate our political class is to the task before us.

The Iraq war’s endless denouement has seemingly wearied our nation. It was absolutely a good thing to overthrow Hussein, but now what? All we’ve managed to do is unleash more of what we’re really supposedly fighting against. And many Americans think we should pull out, which means essentially letting the most ruthless of the Islamofascists to take over Iraq. The global Islamofascism war overflows with ironies like that. It is exhausting us already, and it has barely begun.

On the other hand, 9/11 hasn’t happened again on our turf. As tattered as our Homeland Security seems to be, it’s apparently working. Or we’ve been lucky. Or, more likely, we don’t understand the historical framework of our enemy. If it takes another 10 years to stage an apocalyptic attack like 9/11, to them, that’s a blink in the eye of history, barely any time at all from the vantage point of Allah.

Eventually, of course, my colleague and I made it home from St. Louis. It took until Saturday. We had to line up at 4 a.m. at the airport. Everyone was very quiet in that line. It reminded me of the last scene of “The Birds,” where the traumatized people leave as silently as they can, so as not to disturb the flocks of angry birds lining their route. Only we couldn’t see the angry birds. We weren’t even sure whether the angry birds were our ostensible enemy or our own people in hypersecurity mode. I was careful not to make any jokes that morning.

In the days between, I’d eaten a lot of room service until finally discovering a health food store where I could buy some organic soups. On what I thought would probably be my last day, I took trip to see the great St. Louis Arch, and to eat catfish in a restored gaslight district restaurant. I also jogged one evening around Chase Park, and swatted a lot of mosquitos. A friendly hotel employee took my colleague and I clothes-shopping, since neither of us had brought enough to wear for such a long stay. And I had several more conference calls about Flight Simulator. Microsoft ended up releasing the new version, but delayed it about 10 days. Why that was the best solution, I can no longer remember.

I was traveling with a Swiss Army knife that I knew I couldn’t get onto the plane. I asked the hotel desk staff if they could mail it to me, and I gave them all the information. The knife never made it home, but I did. My wife had already started packing to move us into our new place. It was a long time before I agreed to fly anywhere again.

Democrats as Censors?

I get a lot of e-mails from the Democratic party. Howard Dean, Rahm Emmanuel and a guy named Tom McMahon are frequent visitors to my in-box.  This one was from McMahon and it was called “RE: A Despicable, Irresponsible Fraud.” Here’s how it started:

Dear John,

This is it: crunch time for getting the slanderous ABC television docudrama “The Path to 9/11″ yanked off the air. The network schedule has this slanderous attack on Democrats slated to start on Sunday night, September 10, at 8 o’clock — and as long as it stays on the schedule, we have work to do. Take a minute right now and tell Disney president Robert Iger to keep this right-wing propaganda off our airwaves:

http://www.democrats.org/pathto911

Here’s the good news: the suits at ABC and the Walt Disney Company have started panicking under pressure, thanks to your ferocious response to the outrageous decision to put this irresponsible miniseries on the air. But until Disney quits defending its plan to broadcast conservative propaganda — fraudulently presented to Americans as “based on the 9/11 Commission Report” — the company should plan to keep taking every bit of heat we dish out.

I really don’t get the party’s strategy — at all. Here are the problems with it that I see:

1) They’re calling attention to something that they don’t want people to see. Which means curious people are more likely to want to see it. Human nature.

2) They’re associating the Democratic Party with censorship, e.g. boycotts and pressure to push for prior restraint of a program. Why aren’t they mindful of the precedent they’re setting? “If we don’t like it, take it off the air,” is now an official party position. I have a feeling that’s going to come back to haunt them when the right wing objects to a pending TV program that offends them. Dems are supposed to be for free speech.

3) A related point: Will the entertainment leaders so critical to the party’s fund-raising agree that such pressure tactics are appropriate? Has anyone asked Rob Reiner, or David Geffen, or Larry David how they feel about this?

4) The position they’re defending isn’t credible. Clinton turned over the White House keys to Bush in January 2001. The attack was in September 2001. It’s pretty apparent the plannng for the attack started before 2001, and was preceded by a number of Al Queda-sponsored attacks on American assets that all took place during Clinton’s tenure. So why is it out of bounds to criticize the Clinton Administration’s record on this issue? How could you review the “path to 9/11″ and avoid doing so? I don’t hear Bush people complaining about what is supposed to be some very harsh criticism aimed their way in this show. Which leads to…

5) The program is going to air. People will watch it, more than would have because of curiousity. Many will be expecting it to live up to the description: “Right-wing propaganda.” But I bet it won’t strike most viewers that way. “What are they fussing about?” will be the response, I bet. Or worse: “What were they trying to hide?”  The net effect will be to give the show more credibility than perhaps it deserves. If “The Path to 9/11″ isn’t a drooling right-wing fantasy, it will be regarded as fair, and its critics will be taken as over-sensitive.

Could be that the party is once again trying to catch up with the left-wing blogosphere, which has been hysterical on this topic, and probably has been pressuring the party to “stand tough.”  It’s fine for grassroots, independent people to be upset. But the party itself should be above this sort of thing. It should have adopted a more sober “wait and see” approach, keeping powder dry until after the show aired rather than demanding that the show be censored. Really, the Democratic Party, as an institution, should have done nothing whatsoever to call attention to it.

Am I wrong?  If you understand the point of the party’s strategy, please, enlighten me in the comment section below.

Bin Laden’s Crush

The benign word “fan” comes from “fanatic,” and there’s no bigger fanatic than Osama Bin Laden. Now Whitney Houston will know what Jodie Foster and J.D. Salinger felt like. From a wire service story:

Troubled pop diva Whitney Houston has a new fan – America’s most wanted man, Osama bin Laden.

Kola Boof, the terrorist’s former sex slave, claims in her new book that he was obsessed with the troubled How Will I Know singer.

She revealed to Harpers Bazaar magazine: “He told me Whitney was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen.

“He said that he had a paramount desire for her and although he claimed music was evil, he spoke of someday spending vast amounts of money to go to America and try to arrange a meeting.”

I can just picture it. Osama, pulling up to Whitney’s house in a limo…emerging from the back seat with a basket of poppies… and a submachine gun…

Kola – who until recently wrote for US soap opera The Days of Our Lives – also says Osama wanted to shower her with gifts and convert her to Islam.

The 37-year-old explained: “He said he wanted to give her a mansion he owned in a suburb of Khartoum.

“He would say how beautiful she is, what a nice smile she has, how truly Islamic she is but is just brainwashed by American culture and by her husband – Bobby Brown, whom Osama talked about having killed, as if it were normal to have women’s husbands killed.”

Kola added: “He explained to me that to possess Whitney, he would be willing to break his colour rule and make her one of his wives.”

Ned Lamont and “Message Clarity”: A Winning Formula for the Democrats?

A few months ago, I complained about “Lieberman-hatred,” and my bafflement at the virulent rhetoric being aimed at a good man; but I have to admit his critics identified a personality flaw in the Connecticut senator. To paraphrase Peter Beinert: Because Bin Laden and Hussein are clearly worse than George W. Bush, Joe Lieberman believed anyone who criticized the president’s conduct of the war was helping Bin Laden and Hussein. So it was Joe Lieberman’s duty to boost Bush, despite disagreements, despite party differences, despite everything. 

To Lieberman, this was simply patriotic.  To his critics, Lieberman’s stance was craven; moreover, it implicity downgraded the patriotism of his fellow Democratic Party members.

It is probably this perception, more than his position on the war itself, that cost Lieberman the support of his state’s Democrats, and swung the primary election to Ned Lamont.  After all, Lieberman was just one of many Democratic senators and House members who had voted for the war, and have so far declined to demand an immediate pull-out –which many Democrats agree would be irresponsible. 

To the left, Lieberman became a symbol of Democratic capitulation to Bush/Cheney in the years after 9/11 because he seemed so proud of his pro-war position, and even prouder, specifically, that he was supporting this president.  That was not so wise, politically. Any Democrat who fails to speak ill of George W. Bush in 2006 is suspect in the eyes of most Democratic activists. This colorful post, from Americablog.com’s John Aravosis expresses this feeling:

So, if the media and their GOP handlers are correct that bloggers are to the far-left of the Democratic party, and we all opposed Joe Lieberman because we supposedly hate conservative Democrats who support the war on terror, then why is it that we really like Harry Reid (a pro-life, white guy, who supports the flag burning amendment), but we aren’t shedding a lot of tears over last night’s defeat of Cynthia McKinney (a black woman and flaming liberal who was highly critical of George Bush)?And why is it that other Democrats who were supporters of the war in Iraq, and have significant progressive constituencies, and who are up for re-election this year, aren’t facing serious criticism from us, and aren’t facing serious primary challengers?

If we’re all flaming liberals who hate anyone who supported the war in Iraq, then why is Lieberman the only guy we’re upset with?

Or maybe: the Republicans are lying; the media, as usual, fell for their lies hook, line and sinker; and Joe Lieberman lost because he was George Bush’s love child and the American people have had it with this administration; their incompetence; and anyone who blindly enables it.

It’s not just bloggers, by the way. The “netroots” are just a new name for a species of zealous activist that has been around a long time. I’ve been a Democrat all my voting life, and I don’t recall a time when it was ever “okay” with self-identified Democrats to say they agreed with a Republican president about anything until he was safely out of office and preferably dead.

When Democrats start saying things like “We need to be pro-jobs,” or “We’re too weak on defense,” or “We need to be tougher on crime,” that’s normal Democratic angst.  But Democrats who said out loud that Nixon, Reagan or Bush 41 were better on a core issue generally were getting ready to leave the party (except Democrats trying to hold onto a Democratic seat in a very Republican district.)  It is no different in the era of Bush 43.  Democrats don’t agree on everything, but they are united in their eloquent hatred of Republicans in power.

While observing that, I still saw some of the netroot celebrants going down a disturbing and probably self-defeating path. My DD on the “many benefits of Ned Lamont’s victory” was typical of many and more articulate than most:

With Ned Lamont’s victory, we will now see far fewer Democrats in Washington and elsewhere take the easy path to media stardom that the corporate media had provided for Democrats since the mid-1980’s: talk about liberals and/or Democrats in the same way Republicans talk about liberals and/or Democrats. No one will want to be the next Joe Lieberman, and as such this victory will change Democratic behavior. This will now make it much more difficult for Republicans to close Daou’s triangle on a variety of issues, as they quickly will find a shortage of elected Democrats willing to use anti-Democratic Republican talking points. Thus, the more partisan messaging will make it far more difficult for conservatives and Republicans to dominate the conventional wisdom narratives of our national political discourse. This will also mean fewer “Democrats divided” narratives in the media, and help us slowly begin building toward greater message clarity. Today we already have seen how Lamont’s victory this defeat freed up Senator Dodd on Iraq and Emmanuel on Bush. This is just the beginning.

Daou’s Triangle, by the way, refers to this diagram by Peter Daou, which is supposed to show how bloggers (by which he means activists) and the regular party establishment can work in concert to get the “corporate media” to repeat their messages and influence the public.  According to this meme, the Republican triangle works flawlessly — in part because apostates like Lieberman lend more credibility to their messages – but the Democratic triangle is “broken.” 

But the question is:  In service of a PR objective (“fewer ’Democrats divided’ narratives,” “greater message clarity”), should Democrats who take different positions be run out of the party?  This is what he seems to be saying. It’s a peculiar stance for a Democrat, one that seems out of step with the historical nature of the party. 

There is no specific Democratic position on a large assortment of issues, except for disdain for Bush.  How do you decide which of the many Democratic positions on Iraq and the Islamist threat–not to mention Social Security, health care, education, gay marriage, the environment, gun control, etc. etc.–should be purged for the sake of “message clarity?”  ”I don’t belong to an organized party; I’m a Democrat,” Will Rogers’ famous remark, was uttered just as the party entered its period of greatest dominance.

Is it so different today?  Must the nature of what it means to be a Democrat really become so narrow in order for the party to succeed?

“Message clarity” is not a virtue unto itself.  It is a PR technique, and generally a defensive one. Straying from the “key messages” is usually seen as dangerous for a CEO or corporate spokesperson dealing with a crisis, or anticipating criticism.  It is not a confident stance, nor is it a way to foster the kind of creativity that — in my opinion — the Democratic party really needs more than anything right now. 

Obeying, I guess, the iron law of Daou’s Triangle, the left- and right-wing bloggers are now furiously, frantically spinning to claim not who “won” yesterday’s vote — clearly, that was the left — but which party gains.  Republicans say Republicans, because the election proves that left-wing wackos have taken their party down the McGovernite road. Democrats say Democrats because the election reflects dwindling support for the Iraq war that is the most prominent Republican policy.

My take is that the Lamont victory gives the Democrats an opportunity, but only an opportunity.  They’ve got the public’s attention.  They’ve done something novel, tossing out a respected party veteran — no matter what else you might think about him, Joe Lieberman is no hack — who was their VP candidate six years ago. They have, I think, captured the zeitgeist of a public that is weary of the war and wondering whether Bush has a clue what to do next. 

When you’ve got the microphone, however, you better have something to say.  ”Message clarity” won’t be good enough if the message fails to persuade or enlighten the troubled American public.      

Newt Goes Global, Hugh Goes Postal

Former Vice President Al Gore, star of the environmental blockbuster “An Inconvenient Truth,” is not the only 90s’ icon to make a strong comeback in 2006. Newt Gingrich is pursuing a similar strategy — frightening everyone about global catastrophe — to get people talking about him.

Clearly, we are being maneuvered into a Gore vs. Newt presidential election in 2008. Who do you pick? Gore fears rising seas. Gingrich fears rising hordes. Gore fears it might be too late to reverse global warming. Gingrich fears it might be too late to reverse World War III!

According to David Postman’s Seattle Times-hosted political blog:

Gingrich said in the coming days he plans to speak out publicly, and to the administration, about the need to recognize that America is in World War III.

He lists wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, this week’s bomb attacks in India, North Korean nuclear threats, terrorist arrests and investigations in Florida, Canada and Britain, and violence in Israel and Lebanon as evidence of World War III. He said Bush needs to deliver a speech to Congress and “connect all the dots” for Americans.

He said the reluctance to put those pieces together and see one global conflict is hurting America’s interests. He said people, including some in the Bush Administration, who urge a restrained response from Israel are wrong “because they haven’t crossed the bridge of realizing this is a war.”

“This is World War III,” Gingrich said. And once that’s accepted, he said calls for restraint would fall away.

Already, Hugh Hewitt is reading “appeasers” out of the blogosphere, even those conservatives who want to stop and think about this for a second before we start blasting away at Syria and Iran. World War III is the message of the week. Hewitt likes to cite the William Manchester biography of Winston Churchill, “The Last Lion,” which documents British appeasement of Hitler in the 1930s, and Churchill’s lonely, failed efforts to reverse it before the Nazi military strength grew to the point where it threatened all of Europe. I’ve read that book, and it’s great, and it has nothing to do with today.

The British appeasers thought Hitler could be Britain’s ally against the Communist Soviet Union, or if not an ally, a kind of vanguard who would do the dirty work that the deeply anti-Red British establishment didn’t want to do themselves. Also, the British establishment thought many of Hitler’s demands were quite reasonable; it was still an embarassment to Britain that it supported the draconian punishment of Germany demanded by France after WWI.

These positions look ridiculous now, and those who held them are responsible for hundreds of millions of avoidable deaths. That’s why “appeaser” is such a blood insult for Hewitt to toss around so carelessly.

But reviewing the news coverage of Israel’s fight with Hezbollah, I see virtually no sentiment out there to “appease” the terrorist group’s sponsors, Syria and Iran. There is little confusion about the hostile status of these countries with respect to Israel and the U.S. The argument is over how to deal with them, and there are many approaches being debated. The problem is legitimately complex.

Patience, Hugh! It’s still okay to have a debate in this country.

One perhaps relevant observation: The left-wing blogs haven’t really said anything much about the fighting in the Middle East, nor about the Syria/Iran aspect of the issue, and seem to want to steer the conversation back to more tried and true topics.

The most important thing Arianna Huffington found to say about the war was that Bush’s use of the word “shit” in a conversation with Tony Blair is yet more proof that Bush is blah blah blah blah. Joshua Micah Marshall doesn’t think the president’s s-bomb is such a big deal, but he does allow a guest blogger to enjoy the irony of columnist David Brooks being inconsistent because before the Iraq war he was blah blah blah blah blah. Daily Kos announced he won’t have anything to say about the war at all, and Kevin Drum has taken the same position (which prompts a comment on his site that “A political blog will be pretty lame without an opinion on an active war.”) I get the feeling that the unstated fear among this side of the blogosphere is the war might — darn the luck — help Joe Lieberman.

So I really don’t know what Hugh Hewitt is worrying about. The conservatives have the field all to themselves.

But if Newt Gingrich wants Bush to declare World War III, I sure want a debate about that first, if it’s okay with you all. I mean, sheesh. I’m pretty hawkish, but the right has gone a bit giddy! The unfolding of the Iraq war has tempered my enthusiasm. I can’t believe it hasn’t made people of Gingrich’s and Hewitt’s ilk a bit more humble about making demands for war with no debate and no restraint.

Challenging Times, Challenged Tribunes

On the one hand, you’ve got the New York and Los Angeles Times’ publication of information on how the U.S. government seeks to monitor the international flow of money that might fund terrorism through SWIFT, the “financial industry-owned co-operative supplying secure, standardised messaging services and interface software to 7,800 financial institutions in more than 200 countries.” The Bush Administration performs its investigations pursuant to lawful subpoenas, and there was no evidence that, as of yet, this program has abused anyone’s legitimate rights to privacy.

Were it not for the high stakes involved, these stories would have provoked giant yawns. I’m sure the reporters involved would have preferred these stories be accompanied by some ominous-sounding movie music to give them the sense of drama they otherwise lacked. It would have been far more newsworthy — far more scandalous — if these reporters had come across SWIFT and learned that the U.S. had failed to examine its data.

The most disturbing thing about these stories was, to me, the fact that the government pleaded with the newspapers to withhold the story on national security grounds, and the newspapers refused. As NY Times editor Bill Keller explained it:

We weighed most heavily the Administration’s concern that describing this program would endanger it. The central argument we heard from officials at senior levels was that international bankers would stop cooperating, would resist, if this program saw the light of day. We don’t know what the banking consortium will do, but we found this argument puzzling. First, the bankers provide this information under the authority of a subpoena, which imposes a legal obligation. Second, if, as the Administration says, the program is legal, highly effective, and well protected against invasion of privacy, the bankers should have little trouble defending it. The Bush Administration and America itself may be unpopular in Europe these days, but policing the byways of international terror seems to have pretty strong support everywhere. And while it is too early to tell, the initial signs are that our article is not generating a banker backlash against the program.

(snip)

A secondary argument against publishing the banking story was that publication would lead terrorists to change tactics. But that argument was made in a half-hearted way. It has been widely reported — indeed, trumpeted by the Treasury Department — that the U.S. makes every effort to track international financing of terror. Terror financiers know this, which is why they have already moved as much as they can to cruder methods. But they also continue to use the international banking system, because it is immeasurably more efficient than toting suitcases of cash.

Keller’s defense seems King Canute-like. The government’s concerns aren’t valid because we say so. There’s no banker backlash. The terrorists know you’re watching them. What’s the big deal? It’s all so “puzzling.” The description of the government’s argument as “half-hearted” sounds like the kind of thing a teenager says. “Yeah, Dad, I heard you, but I didn’t think you really meant it.”

Either Bill Keller is out of his depth, or he’s being less than honest. Is he suggesting that if the Administration had been more “full-hearted,” he would have withheld the story? As it happens, Treasury Secretary John Snow violently disagrees with Keller’s characterization, but either way it’s absurd.

If the SWIFT surveillance program were unlawful, abusive of legitimate privacy expectations, or some kind of subterfuge with an illegitimate purpose, an editor would be perfectly within his or her rights to have dismissed the Administration’s concerns and exposed the wrongdoing. But the Times fails to provide such a justification.

As Keller himself says, “A reasonable person, informed about this program, might well decide to applaud it. That said, we hesitate to preempt the role of legislators and courts, and ultimately the electorate, which cannot consider a program if they don’t know about it.” By the logic of that rationale, any classified program the news media comes to find out about should be publicized, on the sole basis that it is secret.

So, the stories were a bad idea, and are being defended disingenously. But on the other hand, the backlash is disingenous, too.

If you have listened to right-wing talk radio or read any of the affiliated blogs, there is a consensus among this crowd that the NY Times, LA Times and anyone else who published this story should be prosecuted for espionage. Or — the more moderate position — that the reporters and editors should be subpoenaed to provide the names of the leakers, and the leakers should be prosecuted. Resolutions are being issued in Congress condemning the release of the information — and then are being condemned by the bloggers as insufficiently tough. Some have called for the Congress and White House to revoke the press credentials for the NY and LA Times.

As The Nation’s Scott Sherman reports, the notion of prosecuting the press originates from an literal reading of a Red-baiting-era amendment to the U.S. Espionage Act by Commentary writer Gabriel Schoenfeld.

In his research into the 1917 Espionage Act and subsequent espionage statutes, Schoenfeld discovered Section 798 of the US Criminal Code, enacted by Congress in 1950, which reads, “Whoever knowingly and willingly communicates, furnishes, transmits or otherwise makes available to an unauthorized person, or publishes…any classified information…concerning the communication intelligence activities of the United States…shall be fined not more than $10,000 or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both.” (His italics.) This, Schoenfeld believed, was the “completely unambiguous” smoking gun he needed against (reporter James) Risen and the Times–both of whom, he felt, had “damaged critical intelligence capabilities” and undermined national security with the NSA story. Schoenfeld knew when he wrote the essay that no journalist had ever been prosecuted under Section 798, but his purpose was to stiffen the spine of the Justice Department. “The laws governing what the Times has done are perfectly clear,” he concluded. “Will they be enforced?”

Schoenfeld said he unearthed and publicized his interpretation of the law in hopes he would “set in motion a ‘chilling effect,’ however slight….” Schoenfeld is a scholar with a think-tank background, who has said he doesn’t anticipate there will be, in fact, any prosecutions. But his legal theory has become a rallying cry for the right-wing; not just the professional tub-thumpers, who recognize the danger of this approach, but to their loyal readers — the people who vote and who fight for our country.

Hugh Hewitt proudly cites an Iraq-based military blogger, Sgt. T.F. Boggs, who wrote Keller saying this:

You have done something great in your own eyes-you think you have hurt the current administration while at the same time encouraging “freedom fighters” resisting the imperialism of the United States. However, I foresee a backlash coming your way. I wish I had a subscription to your paper so I could cancel it as soon as possible. But alas, that would prove a little tough right now since I am in Iraq dealing with terrorists financed by the very men you are helping.

Thank you for continually contributing to the deaths of my fellow soldiers. You guys definitely provide a valuable service with your paper. Why without you how would terrorists stay one step ahead of us?

Talk about waving the bloody shirt! Sgt. Boggs is perfectly entitled to feel this way, but the way Hewitt and others are using his words clearly is designed to stir up hatred of the NY Times, LA Times and the news media in general. Do they realize that when you start a fire like this, how quickly it can get out of control?

John McIntyre of Real Clear Politics, perhaps incautiously, gives away the game and reveals what this furor really means to the right:

Politically, this is a clear winner for Bush and the GOP. The issue plays to Bush’s strengths and continues to paint the picture of the President as a stalwart fighter, protecting America’s safety while the left-wing press does their best to undermine as many successful anti-terror programs as possible.

The Times and the far left are so completely out of touch with where the country is on national security and terrorism issues they probably thought this disclosure would hurt Bush politically. They are clueless.

It serves the interests of the right-wing to keep this pot boiling until November. Democrats who thought they could win back Congress this year by “nationalizing” the election will now face the same strategy aimed at them — Republicans equating a vote for Democrats to a vote for the traitorous, law-breaking media.

All of this damages the country, and the institutions of liberty that distinguish our country from all others. It seems clear to me that the root of the problem is the carelessness and arrogance of the folks at the top of the media pyramid today. A responsibility comes with the job of running the nation’s most powerful journalistic entities to think through the consequences of the actions one takes — not just on one day’s newspaper, but on the fragile web of rights and permissions that keep a free press free.

History shows that it is all too easy to persuade Americans to give up on these rights. Given the open-ended nature of the war on terror, we could lose those rights for a generation or more. Condemn the right-wing for all that they do to push America in the direction of less freedom, but condemn the intellectually shallow media for giving the right-wing all the ammunition it needs.

This is ‘New Media’ Advice? It’s SO Last Century

Hugh Hewitt, the articulate Republican cheerleader, syndicated radio host and blogger, portrays himself as consultant to all "center-right conservatives" in their battles against enemies in the media, politics and academia. He writes at least one book a year, in which he provides unsolicited advice to Republican candidates, conservative activists, high-school students and born-again Christians. He's been on the radio somewhere or another for at least 15 years, and spent time as co-host of KCET's "Life and Times." He flogs his books so mercilessly on the air, it's apparent that he believes his book sales figures are an indicator of the nation's well-being.

In addition to being a committed activist, churchman and attorney, Hewitt claims to know something about communications — trumpeting himself as an avatar of the new media as it triumphs over the liberal-biased "old" media. One of his most popular books is "Blog: Understanding the Information Reformation That's Changing Your World."

So I was struck by this post of a few days ago, "Secretary Rumsfeld and the New Media." In it, Hewitt discusses an interview with Rumsfeld, focusing on the advice he gave the secretary about communications in the new media era:

The SecDef has staked everything on transforming the way the American military fights wars. I worry that all those efforts will be at least compromised unless the Pentagon gets its best minds thinking about how to explain the conflict and its many dimensions to the American public.

(snip)

The information war –fought not just by the Pentagon, but also by the White House the Department of Justice, the intelligence community–has become, like logistics, the realm of professionals*. Let's hope the U.S. gets as serious about it as it is about logistics.

Some suggestions:

The Secretary of Defense and the Chair of the Joint Chiefs are the two most important voices in the military. They need to engage media in lengthy, one-on-one question-and-answer sessions at which other journalists are allowed to attend but not participate.

Volume is not a substitute for quality. The DoD does in fact put out an avalanche of information every single day –too much, in fact. The Pentagon all too often steps on its lead story, and all too often does not respond to breaking information that the terrorists lob on to the battlefields of the information war. The rapid response of the military to such disinformation has to improve.

Finally, the particulars of any day's battles does not matter nearly as much as the strategic overview of the course of the war. Repetition is hated by the Beltway press corps, always eager to get a scoop or at least a new lede.

But repetition is the core of information war.

Finally, new media is far more powerful in its reach than the credibility-challenged and ideologically-compromised old media. The old press rules from the days when the New York Times or the Washington Post made the weather are still in place. They can be upended.

How is this advice — basically PR advice — any different from what Edward Bernays might have suggested to Rumsfeld 80 or 90 years ago at the dawn of the public relations industry? How is it any different from how politics was conducted under under Reagan or Clinton, the two most successful practitioners of the Pat Caddell/Mike Deaver/James Carville "permanent campaign" model that was engineered based on the PR-advertising principles formed when TV networks and a handful of newspapers dominated the news ecosystem?

Isn't this approach precisely what new media acolytes rebel against? That whole "message of the day," "don't step on your own story," "rapid response," top-down media management? What I thought new media is about is transparency, providing more not less, and showing faith in the ability of news consumers–"prosumers" in Alvin Toffler's lexicon–to do their own filtering and editing.

A "new media" approach would have Rumsfeld communicating constantly and candidly, the good news with the bad. Don't have a message of the day, don't shade anything to gain a specific headline. Most Americans have stopped reading newspapers anyway. Instead, use the media tools now available to transmit a body of knowledge about the war to engaged members of the public, who will then be motivated to educate their peers. Rumsfeld or a trusted, high-level spokesperson could do this actively, identifying bloggers with a sympathetic viewpoint and beginning an on-the-record conversation with them. They could be bolder still, and carry on conversations with unsympathetic bloggers, too.

Like most PR problems, Rumsfeld's is not really a PR problem, it's a fact problem. In the initial weeks of the Iraq war, the news was good, thus the PR was fabulous. Now, three years on, the war is a bloody grind, the news is mixed and the significance of each development murky. You can't change that reality with a new policy on granting interviews!

But Hewitt is worried about the enemy's propaganda, and so is Rumsfeld. In the SecDef's words (from his interview transcript):

This is the first war that's ever been conducted, in the 21st Century, in an era of these new media realities, where you have the internet and 24 hour talk radio and news and bloggers and video cameras and digital cameras and instant communications worldwide. And the enemy understands that they can't win a battle out on the battlefield in Iraq or Afghanistan. The only place they can win a battle is in Washington, D.C. So they have media committees, and they get up in the morning and figure out how they're going to manipulate the American media, and they do a very skillful job.

This is a misdiagnosis. It might be the first war in a time of blogging, but it's certainly not the first war in which an enemy deployed propaganda through whatever media channels were available at the time to frighten, demoralize or mislead.

The Nazi takeover of Europe derived from a series of expert bluffs, until finally the bluff became reality. But it goes back much farther than WWII, to past millenia when the media of choice were memorized lines of poetry and the misinformation spread, virally you might say, by clever spies. Sun Tzu, writing in the 6th century B.C.: "Hence to fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting." And, his Strategy 7: "Create something from nothing." Propaganda is not new, and it would surprise me to find out that our nation's war planners were unprepared for it.

Will a "message of the day" media strategy stop the Iraqi insurgents from using the media to broadcast terror and convey a sense of futility to the American public? I don't see how. But the public reaction to scenes of bombs going off and kidnapped reporters isn't the problem anyway. It's the political reaction to the presumed public reaction, of which Hewitt's commentary is symptomatic. He apparently thinks the public's dwindling support for the war stems from the enemy's manipulation of the news media, while with his next breath he claims the news media's influence is waning.

The fact is, Bush and Rumsfeld are quite lucky that the public has tolerated the Iraq war for as long as it has, and it's a testament to the public's sophistication that the media manipulation, the staged acts of terror, have had so little impact on policy. Despite Bush's low poll ratings, I see little to resemble the Vietnam-era public anguish with regard to Iraq. Sure, the war has many critics, but back then, average middle-class people were urgently demanding the end of our involvement in Vietnam, and politicians of the president's own party responded by promising immediate troop withdrawal.

The Vietnam war was an atrocious mistake, but the public's abandonment of it was in large part the result of enemy propaganda. The North Vietnamese were successful in making the militarily disappointing Tet offensive appear to be a rout. Thanks to the perception that Tet succeeded, Walter Cronkite famously declared the war unwinnable. In 1968, that meant a lot.

Who is today's Walter Cronkite? Who pretends to speak for Mr. and Mrs. America? If anyone tried, they'd find Mr. and Mrs. America leaving some nasty comments on their website. Friends of Donald Rumsfeld do the SecDef no favors by telling him to lead a PR effort to combat enemy propaganda, if that effort will distract him from his real job, organizing a winning strategy so America can get its troops home soon. Because, as Sun Tzu says, "There is no instance of a country having benefited from prolonged warfare."

The Good Idea Shortage

Frances Fukuyama is getting great publicity for his new book, "America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy," in which he parts company with his former neocon allies. I don't have the book, nor the time to read it now, so I was glad the Wall Street Journal published an essay he co-wrote that would present the meat of his argument.

The piece, by Fukuyama and Adam Garfinkle, is called, modestly, "A Better Idea." Given the morass Iraq has become, given the continued fears of a major terrorist attack, I'm not alone in hoping a better idea is out there somewhere, and that one of the 2008 presidential candidates finds it.

Bush was the post-9/11 firefighter. He reacted to the horrible tragedy of that morning, and his reactive stance has rippled through all his policy decisions — for better and for worse. He and his administration were in the battle, day-by-day, trying this, trying that. Everything was done with utmost urgency, with no pause for considered strategy. It was not the way to win a war.

If John Kerry'd had a better idea, he could've beaten Bush in 2004, and given us a fresh start on a more comprehensive strategy. To say the least, Kerry proved a terrible disappointment, both intellectually and as a political craftsman. So the fireman is still on duty. He deserves some credit. But we need a new approach.

So that's what was in the back of my mind in approaching Fukuyama. I didn't care that he was turning his back on former allies. That's a good press angle to sell books, but just frosting from my point of view.

Unfortunately, Fukuyama's got no game. I'll paste in a few quotes, but overall, his WSJ essay reminds me of a speech by Kerry: 'I'd pursue the same policies, but differently.' (That's not a quote — it's just my summary of every Kerry speech on the war and the battle against Islamo-fascism.) Here's what I mean:

That better idea consists of separating the struggle against radical Islamism from promoting democracy in the Middle East, focusing on the first struggle, and dramatically changing our tone and tactics on the democracy promotion front, at least for now.

The essential problem with the administration's approach is that it conflates two issues that are separate. The first has to do with violent, antimodern radical Islamism (on display both in the reaction to the Danish cartoons and in the mosque bombing in Samarra); the second concerns the dysfunctionality of political and social institutions in much of the Arab world.

(snip)

What the administration sees as one problem ought to be seen as two. Radical Islamism needs to be dealt with separately from democracy promotion. This involves doing everything we can to ensure the political success of the governments in Afghanistan and Iraq. It also involves killing, capturing or otherwise neutralizing hard-core terrorists in many parts of the world, and keeping dangerous materials out of their hands, in what will look less like a war than like police and intelligence operations.

(snip)

To put it mildly, the Iraq war has not increased the prestige of the U.S. and American ideas like liberal democracy in the Middle East. The U.S. does not have abundant moral authority for promoting the rule of law, since the first thing people in the region associate with America today is prisoner abuse at Guantanamo, Bagram and Abu Ghraib. Many Americans have explained these events to themselves by saying that the abuse was an aberration that has been hyped by enemies of the U.S., and that in any event such things just happen during wartime. Perhaps; but the fact remains that Guantanamo is still open, and nobody except for a couple of lowly enlisted soldiers have been prosecuted for prisoner abuse by the Bush administration. Fair or not, American insistence on rule of law and human rights looks simply hypocritical.

(snip)

Democracy promotion should remain an integral part of American foreign policy, but it should not be seen as a principal means of fighting terrorism. We should stigmatize and fight radical Islamism as if the social and political dysfunction of the Arab world did not exist, and we should shrewdly, quietly, patiently and with as many allies as possible promote the amelioration of that dysfunction as if the terrorist problem did not exist. It is when we mix these two issues together that we muddle our understanding of both, with the result that we neither defeat terrorism nor promote democracy but rather the reverse.

How empty. How lacking in new thought or vision. Much of what he recommends is basically already happening on a tactical level. The rest is just repurposed criticism of Bush's war plans–criticisms that Bush, among others, have long accepted.

Does this mean there really aren't any better ideas out there?

This is why the Democratic party is so frustrating. They are the opposition. But they've interpreted that role like the Monty Python character who advertises he'll give you an argument but just provides contradiction. "Gotcha" is not a philosophy. "Told ya so" is not a strategy. Liberals used to be seen as the intellectuals in public policy, but they've run dry at the worst possible time.

I have a fearful suspicion that 2008 will end up ratifying Bush's strategy instead of changing it, and that this will be true whichever party wins. There just might not be any better ideas out there.