Nail Biting

UPDATE: LIEBERMAN CONCEDES!

He’s announcing his third-party run as well, the creep.

More update: It’s official; Ned wins. Right now about 98% of votes are counted, and Lamont is up by about 3.6 points. Lieberman is still going for a general election win. Pathetic.

Kos writes about next steps.

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I’m watching Connecticut returns on four different web sites. The spread between Lamont and Lieberman gets tighter as the votes come in. Grrr.

In other news — Tom DeLay wants his name off the ballot.

More

71.79% of precincts reporting —

Lamont, Ned — 100,425 — 51.61%

Lieberman, Joe — 94,148 — 48.39%

Update:

76.87% of precincts reporting —

Lamont — 109,239 — 51.76%

Lieberman — 101,818 — 48.24%

Update: 80% of precincts reporting, percentage remains the same.

Update: 83.56% of precincts —

Lamont — 120,616 — 51.88%

Lieberman — 111,887 — 48.12%

Update: 89.17% of precincts reporting —

Lamont — 127,786 — 51.60%

Lieberman — 119,867 — 48.40%

Update: 93.85% of precincts reporting —

Lamont — 134,942 — 51.65%

Lieberman — 126,330 — 48.35%

Update: 95.32% of precincts reporting —

Lamont — 138,836 — 51.92%

Lieberman — 128,566 — 48.08%

Only in the Blogosphere

The Talking Dog interviews Erik Saar, who was an Arabic linguist at Guantanamo Bay. You want to read this.

Dave Neiwert comments on those nasty liberal bloggers. Steve G. reminds us to remember Vince Foster.

More: Via Ezra, the Rude Pundit on those nasty liberal bloggers:

Why is it that whenever right-wingers wanna criticize the “viciousness” of the left, more often than not, they use e-mails and blog comments instead of, say, the words of writers (bloggy and non-bloggy) and leaders? Like Lanny Davis in the Wall Street Journal‘s OpinionJournal, making some big and brave statement about “McCarthyism” on the left towards Shoeless Joe Lieberman as indicated by the well-considered and crafted comments on blogs and e-mail responses. The Lieberman-lovin’ Davis writes, “The far right does not have a monopoly on bigotry and hatred and sanctimony. Here are just a few examples (there are many, many more anyone with a search engine can find) of the type of thing the liberal blog sites have been posting about Joe Lieberman” and then quotes the mean meanies of the left, like at Daily Kos. But not, you know, Kos, or Hunter, or McJoan, or DarkSyde, or any of the other posters. Nope, it’s commenter “tomjones.” …

… When the Rude Pundit wants to go trawling for right-wing hate, he doesn’t need to look to his hate e-mails, with their occasional threats of violence. He doesn’t need to point to the comments on right-wing blogs. He can just point to the blogs themselves, or turn on the goddamn radio or the fuckin’ Fox “News,” or open the newspaper to read the vomitous rantings of every other conservative columnist talking about liberals despising and destroying America. They can only pick nits; we have to swat hissing cockroaches.

Exactly.

More more:

Billmon’s Da Man:

This is really quite revealing of the neocon mind set — and the increasingly large gulf between that mind set and what American power and influence can support:

    “The position that we’re taking in the UN is just nuts,” a former White House official close to the US decision-making process said during the negotiations. “The US wants to put international forces on the ground in the middle of the conflict, before there’s a ceasefire. The reasoning at the White House is that the international force could weigh on the side of the Israelis — could enforce Hezbollah’s disarmament” . . .

    A former US Central Intelligence Agency officer confirmed this view: “I am under the impression that George Bush and Condoleezza Rice were surprised when the Europeans disagreed with the US position — they were running around saying, ‘But how can you disagree, don’t you understand? Hezbollah is a terrorist organization.'” (emphasis added)

And a tough and dangerous one to boot. This is supposed to encourage the French to plunk their people down in the middle of a hot LZ?

Ever since 9/11, there’s been this attitude among the Bushies that the most important thing is to convince the world that America’s enemies (who are now identical with Israel’s enemies) represent the ultimate in evil — the Wal-Mart of evil, the Pittsburgh Steelers of evil, the Dr. Evil of evil. Once that goal has been accomplished, why then of course the “free world” will line up and enlist in Uncle Sam’s army. Or so the thinking seems to be.

In other words, the PR strategy is also the diplomatic strategy — and, as we’ve seen in Iraq, the military strategy as well. Mike Gerson (Bush’s chief speechwriter, crafter of all those fine phrases about freedom and democracy) really is running the war. And when you let your speechwriters run your war, you have no right to complain when you lose.

Chamberlain’s Ghost

On last night’s Countdown, Keith Olbermann compared President Bush to the eternally maligned Neville Chamberlain:

On August 4, 1939, the prime minister of Great Britain, Neville Chamberlain, adjourned the British parliament and ordered it reconvened on October 1st. He went on vacation. Eighteen days later, the Russians and Germans signed a non-aggression pact removing the last obstacle to the Nazis rolling through Europe. When Chamberlain was located by his secretary, he was knee-deep in a river fishing. When the secretary told him that Hitler and Stalin had just cut a deal, Chamberlain told him, ‘You must have gotten that wrong somehow.’ Chamberlain was on vacation. World War II started nine days later.

Our fifth story on the Countdown, depending on how you parse it, there barely is or barely isn’t a civil war in Iraq, and the intensity of the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah continues to spiral upwards. But President Bush, right on time, started his vacation today. His close ally, Tony Blair, avoided the direct Chamberlain comparison and cancelled his own time off because of the events in the Middle East. But the President went to Crawford, Texas today anyway. There he announced two new United Nations resolutions to end the conflict perhaps while making it clear he is not actually involved with a lot of the diplomatic legwork that is needed to make either resolution stick, like actually talking to the leaders of Lebanon and Israel about it.

Later in the program, Olbermann brought in Howard Fineman:

Olbermann: “Is it more than a cheap shot to say the President’s on vacation? Is it even possible to stop Israel and Hezbollah without the President at least giving the appearance of being involved in the process?”

Howard Fineman, Newsweek: “Well, I don’t think it’s a cheap shot, although the White House is trying to tell everybody that this is a much shorter vacation than ones he’s taken in the past, more like a campaign year. It’s that much of an emergency. But the key thing is not how many days he spends in Crawford, it’s what he does or doesn’t do when he’s there. Unfortunately for him, his Crawford record of vigilance is not that terrific politically or substantively. Don’t forget in 2001 he got that famous warning about the possible attack of al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden’s interest in attacking the United States just a month before 9/11. And then last year, during Katrina, there was evidence that he wasn’t really on his game and really vigilant the way he should have been, as early as he should have been, and he paid a lot politically for it. Now you got the combination of him being down in Crawford while at the same time saying that he’s not talking to the two most important leaders in the Middle East conflict right now, the leaders of Israel and Lebanon.”

Olbermann: “In the context of the PDB from 2001 and Katrina from 2005, we know that every few weeks the White House tries to change the delivery of the message or how the message is received or to blame reporters about the message. Does anybody there believe in history? Would somebody say to Mr. Bush, ‘Hey, you know, it would mean something, at least symbolically, if you delayed this trip even by a couple of days if there was some sense that it was not business as usual’?”

Fineman: “There may be some people who might say that to him. They’re not in his inner circle. Some measure of August vacation in Crawford is sacrosanct with George W. Bush. They think they’ve made a big sacrifice. He thinks he’s made a big sacrifice by having it only be about 10 to 11 days and not the nearly month that he sometimes takes and would prefer to take. They’re not going to say it to him. This is a guy who operates sometimes stubbornly by delegation, who operates on a rhythm, who cares very much about routine, and he’s not going to change, and I daresay most of the American people have already come to a conclusion about the character and public persona of George W. Bush. They either like him loathe him, and that’s really not going to be changed by the number of days he spends in Crawford.”

The MSNBC transcript of last night’s program isn’t available yet, so I want to thank Brad Wilmouth of NewsBusters for providing it. I take it Mr. Wilmouth disagrees with this analysis, but he doesn’t say why. It seems the comparison of Bush to Chamberlain was so intrinsically outrageous to Mr. Wilmouth that he believed no counterargument was necessary. Perhaps Mr. Olbermann violated the Right’s copyright on Chamberlain, whose corpse they wave incessantly to frighten spineless leftist appeasers. However, as Attaturk says,

Oh, and another thing if one more person uses poor old Neville Chamberlain one more time in justifying a war, let him or her have to enter the front ranks as a penance. The Right, most of whose intellectual ancestors were in “America First” at the time Chamberlain was earning the appeasement moniker, have more than used up their right to the approbation. Being for more war doesn’t make you tough, it doesn’t make you a man — it distracts you from the activity you never matured out of, taking a magnifying glass to ants.

So let’s put Mr. Chamberlain to rest and move on — Juan Cole writes,

Bush is on vacation, his favorite place to be during a major crisis. The August retreat is the only open admission he makes that Cheney and Rumsfeld are actually running the country, and he just doesn’t need to be in his office. The only difference between his stonewalling of Lebanon and the way he let New Orleans drown is that he has put away the banjo this summer, at least in public view. He had someone tie a necktie on him and stopped manically clearing brush for long enough to come out with Condi and hold a press conference. He lied, saying that no one wants to see the violence continue. He wants to see the violence continue. Otherwise he would insist on a ceasefire. You see, if you don’t have a ceasefire, the violence continues. If you oppose a ceasefire, you are saying you want the violence to continue. He does.

I suppose it’s possible he just plain doesn’t give a shit either way. But the man’s actions speak loudly and clearly that he isn’t particularly interested in stopping the violence, don’t they? Bush defends Israel by saying the war is against jihadists. But Professor Cole points out,

… the Israelis are not confining themselves to bombing Muslim radicals. They dropped 3000 bombs on Aitaroun in a single day. They are leveling the towns of the south altogether. They are hitting people who are not Muslim fascists.

In fact, they are hitting Christian areas such as Jounieh.

The Professor links to a Gulfnews article titled “Christian support to Israel dies under hail of bombs.” I really would like the righties to explain why Israel is bombing Christians, since Christians are way unlikely to be jihadists. The righties, however, are in their fourth day of a feeding frenzy over a couple of “doctored” photographs. Some other time, maybe.

Dan Froomkin writes,

As President Bush’s foreign policy oscillates between “cowboy diplomacy” and “post-cowboy diplomacy” and back again, it’s worth pointing out that it’s not really correct to call it diplomacy if he invariably refuses to talk to people who disagree with him.

The U.N. resolution Bush was pushing this morning from his vacation home in Texas bears the hallmarks of non-diplomacy: It’s a supposed cease-fire resolution that the parties most desperate for a cease fire are condemning as unworkable, unsatisfactory and doomed.

Perhaps that’s because the Bush administration is only engaging in direct talks with one party to the hostilities: Israel. The United States refuses to conduct negotiations with Hezbollah or its sponsors, Syria and Iran.

And the views of the democratically-elected government of Lebanon — where the continuing Israeli air strikes have killed more than 550 people, mostly civilians — are being dismissed by the White House as the overly emotional arguments of people who don’t know what’s best for them.

According to the quotations provided by Froomkin, it’s Condi who refuses to countenance “emotional arguments”:

Asked about Lebanese objections, Rice responded dismissively: “I understand how emotional this is for the Lebanese.”

But this is actually my favorite part:

Both Bush and Rice were dispassionate about the carnage in the region, savoring instead what they insist are important geopolitical gains. An unconditional cease-fire three weeks ago, Rice said, “would not have addressed any of these items that both sides know are going to have to be addressed if we’re going to have a sustainable cease-fire in the future.

So this has been time that’s been well-spent over the last couple of weeks.”

I ‘spect there are a lot of Lebanese and also many Israelis who disagree, but they’re just being emotional. Then Condi goes on to talk about those “root causes” again, oblivious to the fact that, with every bomb dropped and every rocket launched, the roots are growing deeper. One could argue the wars in Lebanon and Iraq are jihadist fertilizer.

The Guardian
reports it was a “bloody night” in Beirut last night,

Israel inflicted one of its deadliest attacks on Beirut last night when an air strike on a southern district killed at least 15 people, just hours after the departure of a delegation from the Arab League.

At least 30 were injured in the strike, which capped another day of violence in Lebanon in which more than 50 people died, including three Israeli soldiers.

The Guardian also reports that Israel refuses to cooperate with the UN or international aid groups trying to deliver humanitarian supplies to Lebanon.

Meanwhile, the justifications for the bombs and rockets continue to be debated on the nation’s op ed pages. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen presents Israel’s side in today’s Los Angeles Times:

Hezbollah — in choosing not to return the two soldiers it seized on July 12, and in its bombardment of Israel — has declared that it does not care if its war-making leads Israel to attack Lebanon’s cities, ruin that country’s economy and kill its people. What matters most is inflicting damage on Israel, weakening its morale and goading it to a level of destruction that will incite the world’s wrath. The Palestinians said as much with their second intifada and their suicide bombings. But this is different because Hezbollah’s daily rainfall of rockets in Israel portends an intolerable military assault without end.

What can Israel do — what could any country do? — with such an enemy?

After checking off some options and explaining why they wouldn’t work, Professor Goldhagen continues,

So Israel has adopted the fourth strategic possibility: to devastate its dangerous foe, which also would restore deterrence. Yet Israel has discovered that against combatants who look like civilians and whose rockets are hidden everywhere, it must fight longer and occupy and destroy much more of Lebanon than it may deem moral, wise or feasible. Even a future international force in southern Lebanon — the possibility of which is highly uncertain — may be incapable of thwarting Hezbollah and would still leave northern Israel in Hezbollah’s rocket range.

Professor Goldhagen concludes that Israel’s only viable option is to escalate the war and take it to Iran and Syria.

I’m not even going to comment on this. Make of it what you will (and I know you will).

George Monbiot also looks at the question asked by Professor Goldhagen, “What can Israel do?” But Monbiot’s answer differs.

Whatever we think of Israel’s assault on Lebanon, all of us seem to agree about one fact: that it was a response, however disproportionate, to an unprovoked attack by Hizbullah. I repeated this “fact” in my last column, when I wrote that “Hizbullah fired the first shots”. This being so, the Israeli government’s supporters ask peaceniks like me, what would you have done? It’s an important question. But its premise, I have now discovered, is flawed.

After listing some Hezbollah-Israeli aggressions over the past few years, Monbiot continues,

On July 12, in other words, Hizbullah fired the first shots. But that act of aggression was simply one instance in a long sequence of small incursions and attacks over the past six years by both sides. So why was the Israeli response so different from all that preceded it? The answer is that it was not a reaction to the events of that day. The assault had been planned for months.

The San Francisco Chronicle reports that “more than a year ago, a senior Israeli army officer began giving PowerPoint presentations, on an off-the-record basis, to US and other diplomats, journalists and thinktanks, setting out the plan for the current operation in revealing detail”. The attack, he said, would last for three weeks. It would begin with bombing and culminate in a ground invasion. Gerald Steinberg, professor of political science at Bar-Ilan University, told the paper that “of all of Israel’s wars since 1948, this was the one for which Israel was most prepared … By 2004, the military campaign scheduled to last about three weeks that we’re seeing now had already been blocked out and, in the last year or two, it’s been simulated and rehearsed across the board”.

A “senior Israeli official” told the Washington Post that the raid by Hizbullah provided Israel with a “unique moment” for wiping out the organisation. The New Statesman’s editor, John Kampfner, says he was told by more than one official source that the US government knew in advance of Israel’s intention to take military action in Lebanon. The Bush administration told the British government.

At the Boston Globe, H.D.S. Greenway points out the flaws in Israel’s position:

… Israel’s assault has not just been upon the Shi’ite militia group, but upon Lebanon itself.

For it is hard to reconcile bombing of Beirut’s international airport, petroleum supplies, power plants, fishing fleets, and even attacks upon the Lebanese military, with combating guerrillas. The attacks of Lebanon’s military are especially odd when Israel keeps calling upon Lebanon to take charge and disarm Hezbollah. …

… Israel seems to have two strategies at play in addition to reducing Hezbollah’s ability to rain down rockets upon terrified civilians. The first is that if Lebanon can be made to feel enough pain, then it will finally rein in Hezbollah of its own accord. The choice given Lebanon is: Either you disarm Hezbollah, as the UN has demanded, or we will make life impossible for you.

The fault in this approach is that the Lebanese military hasn’t the ability to disarm Hezbollah, and will be even less able to do so if Israel continues to attack it. More important, the attacks on Lebanon’s civilian infrastructure are convincing Lebanese of all confessions that Israel is a bigger enemy and threat than Hezbollah.

As for the question “What can Israel do?” Greenway says,

The key to disarming Hezbollah has always been, first, convincing Lebanon’s Shi’ites that they no longer need a militia and would be better off without one, and second, building up the institutions of the Lebanese state to the point where the Lebanese government can exert its authority. Unfortunately for Israel, bombing apartment buildings and whole Shi’ite sections of Beirut have strengthened Hezbollah’s prestige among Shi’ites. And the destruction of Lebanon’s economy, which was just getting back to normal, will give terrorists a stronger foothold in that unhappy land than they might otherwise have had.

I haven’t seen anyone arguing that Israel doesn’t have a right, even a duty, to defend itself and do whatever is necessary to provide security for Israeli citizens. Our argument all along has been that Israel’s actions are illogical and counterproductive. I have yet to see a rightie address this.

The second strategy, beyond the reduction of Hezbollah itself, seems to have been borrowed from the old Palestine Liberation Organization playbook: Behave in such a wild manner, causing so much trouble, that the world will have to take notice and do something about it. It also sends a warning to Damascus and Tehran not to count on Israeli restraint. That strategy seems to have been partly successful as the United Nations struggles to find an international force to secure Israel’s northern border.

President Jimmy Carter writes (emphasis added),

… even if the UN Security Council adopts and implements a resolution that would lead to such an eventual solution, it will provide just another band-aid and temporary relief. Tragically, the current conflict is part of the inevitably repetitive cycle of violence that results from the absence of a comprehensive settlement in the Middle East, exacerbated by the almost unprecedented six-year absence of any real effort to achieve such a goal.

Jeez, I wonder what six-year absence he is talking about.

Leaders on both sides ignore strong majorities that crave peace, allowing extremist-led violence to preempt all opportunities for building a political consensus. Traumatized Israelis cling to the false hope that their lives will be made safer by incremental unilateral withdrawals from occupied areas, while Palestinians see their remnant territories reduced to little more than human dumping grounds surrounded by a provocative “security barrier” that embarrasses Israel’s friends and fails to bring safety or stability.

And this is because political solutions are the same thing as “appeasement” to the hawks. They are so terrified of Neville Chamberlain’s ghost that all other lessons of history have been flushed down the toilet. War is the only solution they recognize.

Did I mention President Bush is on vacation?

See also:

Larry Johnson, “Israel’s Looming Defeat

SusanUnPC, “Bush’s Middle East Strategery: For Toddlers”

Billmon, “Whose Line Is It Anyway?

Glenn Greenwald, “Neoconservatives can’t dig their way out of this hole

Update: More Billmon.