Monthly Archives: October 2006

Happy Talk

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Back in October 2002, Condi Rice was certain she knew how to keep North Korea in line.

North Korea’s collapsed economy gives the United States and its allies the diplomatic leverage to convince the communist regime to abandon its nuclear ambitions, Rice said.

“North Korea has been signaling and saying that it wants to break out of its economic isolation,” Rice told CNN’s “Late Edition With Wolf Blitzer.” “It has to break out of its economic isolation.

“This is a regime that in terms of its economic condition is going down for the third time. Its people are starving.”

But Rice said, “It’s not going to break out of that isolation while it’s brandishing a nuclear weapon.”

U.S. officials have launched a “full-court press of consultations” with other countries in the region to convince North Korean leader Kim Jong Il to give up the nuclear weapons effort, Rice said.

The North Korean disclosure comes as the Bush administration faces a possible military confrontation with Iraq over its efforts to develop nuclear, biological and chemical weapons.

U.S. Sen. Bob Graham, D-Florida, told CBS’ “Face the Nation” on Sunday that he considered North Korea’s nuclear ambitions and missile capability a bigger threat to the United States than Iraq.

Graham, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, urged the White House to rethink its priorities.

But Rice said Iraq’s history shows the Baghdad regime is harder to contain than North Korea.

“These are not comparable situations,” she said. “They’re dangerous, both of them dangerous. But we believe that we have different methods that will work in North Korea that clearly have not and will not work in Iraq.”

Now it’s October 2006. North Korea claims it is about to test a nuclear bomb. This morning South Korean soldiers fired warning shots at North Korean troops that had crossed the border, and Pyongyang threatens “catastrophe.”

Where is Secretary of State Rice today, btw? She’s off the radar at the moment. She may be in hiding after her recent trip to Iraq. From an editorial in today’s Los Angeles Times:

AFTER CIRCLING THE BAGHDAD airport for 40 minutes because of mortar and rocket fire, traveling by helicopter to the Green Zone to avoid the deadly bomb-strewn highway into the city and holding a meeting with President Jalal Talabani in darkness because the power was suddenly cut off, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice held a news conference Thursday to talk about all the progress being made in Iraq.

Latest news from Iraq, courtesy of the Washington Post:

The number of U.S troops wounded in Iraq has surged to its highest monthly level in nearly two years as American GIs fight block-by-block in Baghdad to try to check a spiral of sectarian violence that U.S. commanders warn could lead to civil war.

Last month, 776 U.S. troops were wounded in action in Iraq, the highest number since the military assault to retake the insurgent-held city of Fallujah in November 2004, according to Defense Department data. It was the fourth-highest monthly total since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003.

Nicholas Kristof suggests we should listen to the Iraqis.

Iraqis are crystal clear about what the U.S. should do: announce a timetable for withdrawal of our troops within one year. They’re right. Our failure to declare a timetable and, above all, our coveting long-term military bases in Iraq feed the insurgency and end up killing more young Americans.

A terrifying new poll conducted last month found that 61 percent of Iraqis now approve of attacks on Americans. That figure, up from 47 percent in January, makes counter-insurgency efforts almost impossible, because ordinary people now cheer, shelter and protect those who lay down bombs to kill Americans. The big change is that while Iraqi Sunnis were always in favor of blowing up Americans, members of the Shiite majority are now 50 percent more likely to support violent attacks against Americans than they were in January.

The poll, by the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland, also found that 78 percent of Iraqis now believe that the American military presence is “provoking more conflict than it is preventing.”


Fareed Zakaria says it IS civil war:

Over the past three years the violence has spread and is now franchised down to neighborhoods with local gangs in control. In many areas, local militias are not even controlled by their supposed political masters in Baghdad. In this kind of decentralized street fighting, 10,000 or 20,000 more troops in Baghdad will not have more than a temporary effect. Nor will new American policies help. The reason that the Democrats seem to lack good, concrete suggestions on Iraq is that the Bush administration has actually been pursuing more- sensible policies for more than a year now, trying vainly to reverse many of its errors. But what might well have worked in 2003 is too little, too late in 2006.

Iraq is now in a civil war. Thirty thousand Iraqis have died there in the past three years, more than in many other conflicts widely recognized as civil wars. The number of internal refugees, mostly Sunni victims of ethnic cleansing, has exploded over the past few months, and now exceeds a quarter of a million people. (The Iraqi government says 240,000, but this doesn’t include Iraqis who have fled abroad or who may not have registered their move with the government.) The number of attacks on Shiite mosques increases every week: there have been 69 such attacks since February, compared with 80 in the previous two and a half years. And the war is being fought on gruesome new fronts. CBS News’s Lara Logan has filed astonishing reports on the Health Ministry, which is run by supporters of radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. According to Logan, hospitals in Baghdad and Karbala are systematically killing Sunni patients and then dumping their bodies in mass graves.

If I were Condi Rice I’d be off the radar, too. I don’t believe she’s scheduled for the talk shows today; we’ll see.

I want to go back to Korea for a moment. Rightie mythos says that it’s Bill Clinton’s fault that North Korea has nukes. I explained here why this is nonsense; it was Bush who screwed up, not Clinton. See also “Rolling Blunder” by Fred Kaplan and the Blame Bush for North Korea’s Nukes page from The Mahablog archives. I’m not going to re-explain all that this morning, except to say that the series of Bushie blunders that led to North Korea resuming plutonium processing was partly a reaction to diplomatic talks between Japan and North Korea. And why was that a problem? Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi had gone to North Korea to work out a long-range missile agreement without consulting the United States first.

Well, today it appears that Japan and China have stepped into the foreign policy vacuum created by the implosion of U.S. global influence. (And is it significant that Shinzo Abe, Japan’s brand-new Prime Minister, made China his first official overseas destination? China and Japan haven’t had bilateral talks for years.) This seems to me a pretty clear indicator of how much our standing in the world has fallen.

And if you want to hear more about the progress we’re making in Iraq, read Peter Beaumont in today’s Observer: “Hidden victims of a brutal conflict: Iraq’s women.”

All together now — we’re doin’ a heck of a job.

See also: Michael Hirsh, “Ike Was Right.”

Happy Happy Joy Joy

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Meanwhile, the president’s approval rating has fallen to a new all-time low for the Newsweek poll: 33 percent, down from an already anemic 36 percent in August. Only 25 percent of Americans are satisfied with the direction of the country, while 67 percent say they are not. Foley’s disgrace certainly plays a role in Republican unpopularity: 27 percent of registered voters say the scandal and how the Republican leadership in the House handled it makes them less likely to vote for a Republican Congressional candidate; but 65 percent say it won’t make much difference in determining how they vote. And Americans are equally divided over whether or not Speaker Hastert should resign over mishandling the situation (43 percent say he should, but 36 percent say he shouldn’t). [Marcus Mabry, Newsweek]

Hate Speech and Its Consequences

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Michelle Malkin is on the warpath, literally, because YouTube is pulling what she calls “anti-jihad” videos from its servers.

She presents one such video, of which she is clearly proud, on her site. I say it’s not so much “anti-jihad” as “anti-Muslim.” The point of the video is to present Muslims as murderous, violent people who must be “stopped.” As I watched I noticed a photo in which a protester held up a sign calling for the beheading of anyone who insults the Prophet. At least the jihadists are upfront about their intentions. Malkin fervently stirs up hate and fear and says jihadists must be “stopped,” but doesn’t follow through with explicit proposals for how to do the “stopping.” The clear implication of the video is “kill them before they kill us,” but Malkin lacks the intellectual honesty to say that and will, I assume, deny that’s what she meant.

That’s why I say the video is not “anti-jihad.” More accurately, it is “counter-jihad,” albeit with the punches (or beheadings, if you will) pulled. An “anti-jihad” video would be one that proposes peaceful and rational solutions.

As the Buddha said, hate is never appeased by hate, but by metta (loving kindness; Dhammapada 1:3). Jesus had an opinion on this matter also:

Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy. But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you; That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust. For if ye love them which love you, what reward have ye? do not even the publicans the same? And if ye salute your brethren only, what do ye more than others? do not even the publicans so? Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect. [Matthew 5:43-48, King James Version]

Is that not clear? Is there some other passage in the Gospels where Jesus threw in qualifiers (e.g., Thou mayest make hateful videos and post them on YouTube) that I’ve missed?

Awhile back Malkin threw a fit over alleged insults to Christianity. At least she’s speaking out for a religion other than her own, since she clearly isn’t a Christian herself. But let’s go on …

[Update: Right-wing columnist Jeff Jacoby says Jesus was wrong.]

Malkin also alleges that YouTube is being inconsistent with its standards, because videos posted by Islamic jihadists are allowed to remain. I’m going to take her word on that, as I’m not terribly interested in spending the next several hours checking out the content of YouTube. I’m all in favor of consistency in applying standards. However, “they get to do it, so why can’t we do it too?” is not a compelling moral argument.

Sharing of web content — text, music, photographs, or videos — brings up a number of issues touching on intellectual property, fair use, copyrights, and free access to information. I don’t want to get into most of those now, except to say that lots of people have some fuzzy notions about “rights” and “fairness.” As of this morning YouTube is, still, a privately owned company, I believe. It may be aquired by Google soon, which would make it part of a publicly owned company. What it isn’t is a public utility. That means nobody has a right to post whatever they want on YouTube. The owners are perfectly within their rights to restrict content to that which works well with their business model and doesn’t get them into legal trouble.

I feel the same way about blog comments. This blog is my property, I pay for the bandwidth, and I get to decide what stays and what goes. To anyone who gets pissed because I delete their comment, I say: Get your own blog. I am under no obligation to disseminate “information” that I believe is false or opinions with which I do not agree.

Which is pretty much what Tbogg says to Michelle:

Now Michelle could post her videos at her own site or at Hot Air but doing so indicates a lack lack of revolutionary zeal, not to mention that the cost of bandwidth would come out of her own mom pants pocket…. so I won’t mention it. This might cause the Great Leap Forward to become a mere Stumble on the Sidewalk-Crack Forward and those revolutions take way too long and then the proletariat masses get bored and they wander back inside to watch Extreme Makeover: Home Edition and wonder if they could afford one of those refrigerators that has the TV in the door because that would be really cool and besides, if you want money for people with minds that hate, all I can tell is brother you have to wait.

Shooby-do-wah.

Offensive speech was one of the issues discussed at the Clinton Global Initiatives conference, such as in this panel discussion. The discussion was interesting but not entirely satisfactory. For example, at one point Farheed Zakaria asked why protests in the Muslim world about speech — for example, over the Danish cartoons and recent comments by the Pope — so often turn violent, even murderous. Queen Rania of Jordan responded by calling for “more interreligious and intercultural dialogue between all of us,” which is nice, but it doesn’t answer the question. However, in another part of the same discussion she described how violence begets violence —

I would like to say for example, like two months ago, before the war in Lebanon began. Here’s Lebanon, which is made up of a group of people that are peace-loving. They are very moderate and open and modern by nature. They are the natural allies to the global community. Then this war took place. And innocent civilians were seeing, on a daily basis, bodies of babies being put into plastic bags. The vital infrastructure was destroyed. A quarter of the population was displaced. And I can say that over the course of two months, the Arab public became much more radicalized. Because they saw this injustice. They saw this grief. And even the moderates, what we thought was a moderate majority started to shrink, and you can see this shrinking taking place. And the extreme voices came out as the victorious ones. And you could see that the voice of moderation, the voices that called for peace and diplomacy and engagement, they are losing currency. They are being marginalized.

So, if you want to strengthen the moderates, we have to see ― people have to see the dividends of moderation. They have to see the dividends of peace. And now, they are not seeing them. So again, I just want to say that if we want to gain the moderates, if we want to increase ― it’s almost percentages, you know. The percentage of extremists to moderates. If you want to increase and strengthen your moderate block, then people have to really feel an important difference in their lives. They have to see justice. They have to see ― and as I said, an honest engagement and an interest in their cause.

As I explained in this post, at the CGI conference several speakers said we shouldn’t be talking about a war on terrorism, but about a war on extremism. And fighting extremism with military aggression is a bit like using heavy machinery to re-arrange a china shop. The china may indeed be re-arranged, but the end results may still be unsatisfactory.

Further, you can’t reduce extremism with counter-extremism, but with moderation. That’s why we as a society need to discourage extremism in our own midst, just as we wish moderate Muslims would speak out more forcefully about extremism in their backyards. I’m not calling for censorship. I’m just saying, one private citizen to another: The counter-jihadist videos are not helping any of us.

I mean, what is the point? As I say, Malkin doesn’t provide strategies for dealing with Muslim hate and anger; she’s just interested in stirring up hate and anger against Muslims. Does she think people need to be warned about Islamic terrorism? Are we not, in fact, perpetually and robustly being warned about Islamic terrorism?

As an eyewitness to the collapse of the WTC towers, and as someone who spends time in New York City and its public transportation and other infrastructures (likewise my children and friends), believe me, I don’t need to be warned about the dangers of terrorism. I am genuinely worried about train and subway bombings, à la Madrid and London. I worry that eventually we’ll be plagued by suicide bombers in our major cities.

There’s free speech, and there’s irresponsible speech — yelling fire in a crowded theater, and all that.

It seems to me that the video Ms. Malkin is so proud of serves no other function than to fan the flames of hate. If she presented information that is not already very public, or provided some kind of strategy for dealing with Islamic jihadism, that would be different. But she doesn’t. The video is nothing but hate speech, IMO.

Back during the Danish cartoon flap I mused over whether American news outlets were right not to republish the cartoons. Malkin was heading up a crusade to get those cartoons re-published all over America, saying that not publishing the cartoons was giving in to terrorists. I said in the earlier post that solidarity with the free speech of Danish newspapers was certainly a compelling stand.

But then I looked at the cartoons, and for the most part they were crude and hateful and conveyed no other message than Muslims are bad. They were not cartoons most American news editors would choose to publish without the controversy. And it’s not like the cartoons were hidden, as they were all over the web. So what do you call it if newspapers allowed themselves to be bullied by righties into publishing something they didn’t want to publish? Is coercion ever acceptable?

One of the commenters wrote, “Sorry, but I can’t see how cultural sensitivity and respect (which are good) should EVER trump a fundamental value in our own culture.” I respect that. On the other hand, the fact is that news media self-censor themselves all the time for the sake of cultural sensitivity. Racist, sexist, anti-semitic, and other bigoted expression once common in the American press are pretty scarce now. This self-censorship is inspired mostly by marketing — publishers don’t want to drive away readers by offending them. Ah, the magic of free markets …

Freedom of speech is a fundamental value in the West. Yet it has never been absolute, even here in the Land of the Free. The German Opera of Berlin was slammed recently for canceling a production of Mozart’s Idomeneo in which Jesus, Mohammed, and the Buddha are decapitated, a scene not in the original opera. Police had warned the opera company management that the production might incite violence. As a matter of principle I think the production should have been performed, even though (as an opera buff) most artistic revisionism of standard repertoire annoys me. Just get the best singers you can get and put them in pretty costumes and perform the damnfool opera, I say.

But it’s also realistic to assume that few if any opera companies in the U.S. would have scheduled that production at all. That’s because grand opera is so expensive to produce that opera companies cannot support themselves with ticket sales. This is true even of Big Shot companies like New York’s Metropolitan Opera, which consistently sells out performances even though the tickets ain’t cheap. The Met draws more than 800,000 attendees every season, their web site says. Yet the Met seems to be in perpetual telethon mode; I get solicited for donations at least once a month. In fact, this report says the Met gets more of its funds from “contributions and bequests” than from the box office.

I don’t know about the Met, but most opera companies in the U.S. depend in part on government grants to stay afloat. If you care to study it, here’s a financial statement from the Los Angeles Opera Company, for example.

That’s why I doubt any opera company in America would even consider mounting the Idomeneo production that was bounced in Berlin. Beheading Jesus might piss off too many contributors, corporate and private. Forget about selling ads in the program. And as for government grants — the wingnuts still get worked up about the photograph “Piss Christ” that was exhibited in bleeping 1987. They’ve been on a rampage to reduce or eliminate public funding of the arts since, in spite of the fact that public funding underwrites preservation and exhibition of traditional sacred art and objects (including Bibles) and uncounted performances of Handel’s Messiah.

Take also reactions to the Terrence McNally play, “Corpus Christi,” which depicts Christ and the Apostles as gay men living in Texas. These include death threats against actors and arson threats against theaters. What’s not documented are the number of theater companies that might like to produce the play but wouldn’t dare touch it with a ten-foot pool.

I’m rambling on longer than I intended to. My general point is that we’re real good at pointing out the logs in others’ eyes when we’re not so quick to notice the logs in our own (Matthew 7:1-5, sorta). And, really, nobody needs counter-jihadist videos on YouTube.

Update: Reuters reports:

Danish state TV on Friday aired amateur video footage showing young members of the anti-immigrant Danish Peoples’ party engaged in a competition to draw humiliating cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad.

The video images have surfaced little more than a year after a Danish paper published cartoons of the Prophet that sparked violent protests worldwide.

The images, filmed by artist Martin Rosengaard Knudsen who posed as a member of the party for several months to document attitudes among young members, show a number of young people drinking, singing and drawing cartoons ridiculing the Prophet Mohammad.

The faces of the young people were blurred in most of the footage. One cartoon appeared to depict the Prophet Mohammad as a camel, urinating and drinking beer. The competition took place in early August, according to Danish media.

Another cartoon strip aired in the partly masked footage on state TV seemed to show the prophet Mohammad surrounded by beer bottles and included an image of an explosion.

The news story is titled “Danish TV shows cartoons mocking Prophet Mohammad,” but it appears Danish TV was not mocking the Prophet but presenting a news story about young people mocking the Prophet, which is somewhat different.

Some of the children on the blosophere — by which I mean some rightie bloggers — have embraced the cartoons as their newest cause célèbre and are posting as many bits and pieces of the broadcast as they can get their virtual hands on. This is done in the same spirit of concerned interest that you find in any gang of eight-year-olds with a purloined Hustler magazine.

Somebody, please call their parents …

Priorities

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You can learn a lot about what’s on someone’s mind by looking at his priorities. For example, during the famous “military phase” of the Iraq invasion (March 20-May 1 2003), U.S. troops moved quickly to secure oil fields, rip up the floor mosaic depicting George H.W. Bush in the lobby of the Rashid Hotel (visitors had stepped on Poppy’s face), and haul down the statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad’s Firdos Square (staged so that in photos it would appear Iraqis were doing the hauling). They did these things, of course, because these were priorities for the Commander in Chief.

What were the troops not ordered to do? They were not ordered to secure: stockpiles of conventional weapons and explosives; the old nuclear research facilities at Tuwaitha; the offices of the Military Industrialization Commission, where any records of WMDs would likely have been kept; the Iraq National Museum; and many other facilities that were looted and destroyed while U.S. troops looked on. (And note that I do not blame the troops for this. I blame whoever issued the orders.)

What does this tell us about the Bush Administration’s priorities? It tells us that oil and personal revenge were priorities; WMDs and conventional weapons that might have — hell, probably did — fall into the hands of terrorists were not priorities. Finding those pesky WMDs didn’t become a priority until later, when their absence was becoming a political liability for the Bushies.

And what does it tell us about priorities that, before the invasion, the White House was gung ho about handing out contracts to their good buddies in the defense industry, but forgot to plan for an occupation at all? I’m sure I don’t have to explain what this says about priorities.

For that matter, when President Bush finally began to focus on the post-Katrina Gulf Coast, one of his first acts was to suspend the Davis Bacon Act, so that his contractor buddies wouldn’t have to bother about paying prevailing wages to workers. After he was persuaded to reverse the suspension he seems to have lost interest in the Gulf Coast entirely except as an occasional photo op backdrop. If he couldn’t exploit Katrina to devalue labor, the Gulf just wasn’t a priority.

The priority thing came to mind when I read this editorial in today’s Washington Post:

THE BUSH administration has pushed aggressively for expanded surveillance powers, military commissions and rough interrogation techniques. When it comes to fighting the war on terrorism, just about anything goes. Except, that is, those routine steps with no civil liberties implications at all that might significantly interrupt terrorism — such as, say, reading the mail of convicted terrorists housed in American prisons. The federal Bureau of Prisons, Justice Department Inspector General Glenn Fine wrote, “does not read all the mail for terrorist and other high-risk inmates on its mail monitoring lists.” It is also “unable to effectively monitor high-risk inmates’ verbal communications,” including phone calls. So while the administration won’t reveal the circumstances under which it spies on innocent Americans, the communications of imprisoned terrorists, at least, appear sadly secure.

WTF?

This is not a hypothetical problem. Jailed terrorists and organized-crime figures try to communicate with confederates outside of prison walls. Three inmates involved in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, while housed at the federal government’s highest-security prison, managed to exchange around 90 letters with Islamist extremists between 2002 and 2004, including with terrorists in Spain who were planning attacks there. Just last month, federal prosecutors accused a drug lord at the same facility of running a huge distribution network in Los Angeles using coded conversations and messages. Imprisoned people can direct major crimes from behind bars.

The mail isn’t scrutinized, the editorial continues, because there aren’t enough translators available to read it, and those officers who do take a look at the mail are not trained to recognize suspicious content.

This doesn’t seem to be an insurmountable problem. It requires only the allocation of resources to do the job. Somehow, it fell way down the White House priority list, which suggests to me that gathering intelligence on terrorism is not a high priority. Expanding executive power is the priority.

Here’s another one: What does it tell us that Congress has set aside $20 million for an Iraq victory party? This $20 million is in the 2007 budget. The 2007 budget cuts medical and prosthetic research — including research to improve treatment of post traumatic stress disorder, blast-related injuries and Gulf War related illness — by $13 million.

Priorities, anyone?

Before the Fall

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Keith Olbermann called out President Bush for his dishonest and divisive rhetoric in another special comment on Countdown. Here’s a small quote:

Why has the ferocity of your venom against the Democrats, now exceeded the ferocity of your venom against the terrorists?

Why have you chosen to go down in history as the President who made things up?

In less than one month you have gone from a flawed call to unity, to this clarion call to hatred of Americans, by Americans.

If this is not simply the most shameless example of the rhetoric of political hackery, then it would have to be the cry of a leader crumbling under the weight of his own lies.

I’m sure it’ll be up at Crooks & Liars soon. [Update: Here’s the link.] In a nutshell, Olbermann called Bush “unbowed, undeterred, and unconnected to reality.” Bush is playing the straw man game — lying about what Democrats say so he can bash them. And, says Olbermann, for the sake of power for his political party, he is selling out America.

Dan Froomkin wrote yesterday:

President Bush is careening around the country, feverishly campaigning for Republican congressional candidates and unleashing highly provocative accusations against his Democratic critics.

But nobody really cares.

The only thing anyone wants to hear from the president right now is his reaction to the Congressional page-sex scandal revolving around former representative Mark Foley and rapidly enveloping the GOP House leadership.

On top of that, the public doesn’t trust him. A fresh round of polls shows that most Americans think Bush has been intentionally misleading about the progress in Iraq, they oppose his war there, and they don’t think it’s making them safer. His approval rating is back down to a dismal 39 percent.

And establishment Washington has finally and conclusively written him off as being in a state of denial.

Froomkin quotes Peter Baker from yesterday’s WaPo:

President Bush ratcheted up his campaign offensive against Democrats on Tuesday with perhaps his bluntest rhetoric yet as he accused them of being “softer” on terrorists and willing to allow attacks on Americans rather than interrogate or spy on the nation’s enemies.

With his party in serious trouble five weeks before Election Day, Bush shifted into full campaign mode this week, kicking off a month of frenetic barnstorming aimed at drawing disgruntled Republicans back into the fold. As part of the effort, he has escalated the intensity of his attacks with each passing day, culminating with what aides called a “very aggressive” series of speeches Tuesday.

“Time and time again, the Democrats want to have it both ways,” he told donors here. “They talk tough on terror, but when the votes are counted, their softer side comes out.”

He added: “If you don’t think we should be listening in on the terrorist, then you ought to vote for the Democrats. If you want your government to continue listening in when al-Qaeda planners are making phone calls into the United States, then you vote Republican.”

Bush’s tough talk Tuesday came after he suggested at a Monday night fundraiser in Nevada that Democrats were content to sit back until terrorists strike again. “It sounds like they think the best way to protect the American people is wait until we’re attacked again,” he said.

Of course, no one in the Democratic Party has suggested we shouldn’t listen to “al Qaeda planners” or that we should “wait until we’re attacked again,” but truth never stopped Junior before.

Stephen Walt writes in today’s Boston Globe why the Bush foreign policy is such a disaster:

JUST WHEN YOU think that US foreign policy couldn’t possibly get worse, the Bush administration manages to take it down another notch. Iraq is a debacle; the Taliban is resurgent in Afghanistan; and Osama bin Laden is still at large. North Korea has become a nuclear weapons state and Iran’s nuclear ambitions remain unchecked. The quixotic campaign to “transform” the Middle East has fueled several violent conflicts and empowered Islamic extremists in Iraq, Iran, the Palestinian Authority, and Lebanon.

This disastrous record is not just a run of bad luck. These setbacks occurred because the Bush administration’s foreign policy rests on a deep misreading of contemporary world politics. Conducting foreign policy on the basis of flawed premises is like designing an airplane while ignoring gravity: it won’t get off the ground, and if it does, it is bound to crash.

Walt then provides a succinct evaluation of the flawed premises — well worth reading — and concludes,

Fixing our foreign policy would not be that difficult because many states would welcome more enlightened US leadership. To do it, however, Bush will have to ask for a few overdue resignations (such as Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld). He will also have to abandon the core beliefs that have guided his entire foreign policy. Bush has thus far shown little capacity to learn from experience, and he continues to maintain that we are on the right course. Americans had better get used to a failed foreign policy, at least until 2008.

If we live that long.

Dear Conspiracy Theorists

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I have referred to a Alexander Cockburn article about September 11 conspiracy theories in the comments from time to time, but I just now realized that a longer version was published at Counterpunch that is not behind The Nation‘s subscription wall. And here it is.

Before I start quoting Cockburn: Of course, it was a conspiracy that brought down the World Trade Center towers, and all the butt-covering that’s gone on since amounts to conspiracies inside conspiracies. But there are conspiracies, and there are conspiracy theories, and then there are pathological conspiracy theories. Richard Hofstadter said back in 1963 (I’m adding some paragraphs breaks to make it more readable).

What distinguishes the paranoid style is not, then, the absence of verifiable facts (though it is occasionally true that in his extravagant passion for facts the paranoid occasionally manufactures them), but rather the curious leap in imagination that is always made at some critical point in the recital of events. John Robison’s tract on the Illuminati followed a pattern that has been repeated for over a century and a half. For page after page he patiently records the details he has been able to accumulate about the history of the Illuminati. Then, suddenly, the French Revolution has taken place, and the Illuminati have brought it about. What is missing is not veracious information about the organization, but sensible judgment about what can cause a revolution.

The plausibility the paranoid style for those who find it plausible lies, in good measure, in this appearance of the more careful, conscientious and seemingly coherent application to detail, the laborious accumulation of what can be taken as convincing evidence for the most fantastic conclusions, the careful preparation for the big leap from the undeniable to the unbelievable.

The singular thing about all this laborious work is that the passion for factual evidence does not, as in most intellectual exchanges, have the effect of putting the paranoid spokesman into effective two-way communication with the world outside his group–least of all with those who doubt his views. He has little real hope that his evidence will convince a hostile world. His effort to amass it has rather the quality of a defensive act which shuts off his receptive apparatus and protects him from having to attend to disturbing considerations that do not fortify his ideas. He has all the evidence he needs; he is not a receiver, he is a transmitter. [Richard Hofstadter, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” as reprinted in The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays (Harvard University Press, 1964), pp. 37-38]

The boldfaced words fit the “inside job” theorists like a glove. Now let’s go to Cockburn:

My in-box overflows each day with fresh “proofs” of how the WTC buildings were actually demolished, often accompanied by harsh insults identifying me as a “gate-keeper” preventing the truth from getting out. I meet people who start quietly, asking me “what I think about 9/11”. What they are actually trying to find out is whether I’m part of the coven. I imagine it was like being a Stoic in the second century A.D. going for a stroll in the Forum and meeting some fellow asking, with seeming casualness, whether it’s possible to feed 5,000 people on five loaves of bread and a couple of fish.

Indeed, at my school in the 1950s the vicar used to urge on us Frank Morison’s book, Who Moved The Stone? It sought to demonstrate, with exhaustive citation from the Gospels, that since on these accounts no human had moved the stone from in front of Joseph of Arimathea’s tomb, it must beyond the shadow of a doubt have been an angel who rolled it aside and let Jesus out, so he could astonish the mourners and then Ascend. Of course Morison didn’t admit into his argument the possibility that angels don’t exist, or that the gospel writers were making it up.

It’s the same pattern with the 9/11 nuts, who proffer what they demurely call “disturbing questions”, though they disdain all answers but their own. They seize on coincidences and force them into sequences they deem to be logical and significant. Like mad Inquisitors, they pounce on imagined clues in documents and photos, torturing the data –- as the old joke goes about economists — till the data confess. Their treatment of eyewitness testimony and forensic evidence is whimsical. Apparent anomalies that seem to nourish their theories are brandished excitedly; testimony that undermines their theories – like witnesses of a large plane hitting the Pentagon — is contemptuously brushed aside.

I’ve already explained why I think the “controlled detonation” theory is nonsense, here, and followed that up with more comments, here and here. Anyone who wants to argue with me on the merits of the “inside job” should click those links and read those posts, first. (If I have already offered an explanation for your “proof,” I will know you didn’t read the posts, and your comment will be deleted. I’m not your monkey.) And then please note that I am more than cognizant of the remaining mysteries surrounding 9/11 and am open to a wide range of explanations.

The “inside job” cultists, on the other hand, are not open to a wide range of explanations. They’ve made up their minds, and anyone who doesn’t agree with them entirely is (in their view) an idiot and a dupe. If someone were to say, “I think it could have been an inside job, but I’m willing to consider the possibility that it wasn’t,” I could respect that. I still disagree with it, but I respect it. However, the very fact that “inside job” culties are incapable of engaging in two-way discussion of September 11 reveals that something other than dispassionate reasoning is going on.

But that’s not the primary reason I ban the culties from posting comments here. The real reason is that the plethora of fantastical theories makes it less likely, not more likely, the mysteries will ever be properly investigated. And with all my heart I want investigations.

Cockburn again:

What Barrett and Collins brilliantly show [in their book Grand Illusion] are the actual corrupt conspiracies on Giuliani’s watch: the favoritism to Motorola which saddled the firemen with radios that didn’t work; the ability of the Port Authority to skimp on fire protection, the mayor’s catastrophic failure in the years before 9/11/2001 to organize an effective unified emergency command that would have meant that cops and firemen could have communicated; that many firemen wouldn’t have unnecessarily entered the Towers; that people in the Towers wouldn’t have been told by 911 emergency operators to stay in place; and that firemen could have heard the helicopter warnings and the final Mayday messages that prompted most of the NYPD men to flee the Towers.

That’s the real political world, in which Giuliani and others have never been held accountable. The nuts disdain the real world because, like much of the left and liberal sectors, they have promoted Bush, Cheney and the Neo-Cons to an elevated status as the Arch Demons of American history, instead of being just one more team running the American empire, a team of more than usual stupidity and incompetence (characteristics I personally favor in imperial leaders.) The Conspiracy Nuts have combined to produce a huge distraction, just as Danny Sheehan did with his Complaint, that mesmerized and distracted much of the Nicaraguan Solidarity Movement in the 1980s, and which finally collapsed in a Florida courtroom almost as quickly as the Towers.[*]

[*] If you aren’t familiar with the Christic Institute lawsuit against key players in the Iran-contra scandal — very briefly, Daniel Sheehan of the Christic Institute filed a lawsuit against the CIA and key players in the Iran-Contra scandal claiming they were engaged in various criminal acts, and I believe they were. But instead of sticking to core, factual issues that could be proved by evidence, the suit made unsupported allegations of various global conspiracies, shadow governments, and “secret teams” that had been running American foreign policy since about the Eisenhower Administration. And, what the hell, maybe the Christics were right. But they couldn’t prove their allegations in court, and as Cockburn says the lawsuit actually distracted attention from what could be proved. And the perps skipped, and many of ’em are back in positions of power in the U.S. government.

Is that what we want for the Bush crowd? To let them skip and live happily ever after? Or do we want them held accountable?

Cockburn follows up in another article, “Flying Saucers and the Decline of the Left.”

Actually, it seems to demobilize people from useful political activity. I think the nuttishness stems from despair and political infantilism. There’s no worthwhile energy to transfer from such kookery. It’s like saying some lunatic shouting to himself on a street corner has the capacity to be a great orator. The nearest thing to it all is the Flying Saucer craze. ‘Open up the USAF archives!’ It’s a Jungian thing.” …

… Richard Aldrich’s book on British intelligence, The Hidden Hand (2002), describes how a report for the Pentagon on declassification recommended that “interesting declassified material” such as information about the JFK assassination “could be released and even posted on the Internet, as a ‘diversion,'” and used to “reduce the unrestrained public appetite for ‘secrets’ by providing good faith distraction material”. Aldrich adds, “If investigative journalists and contemporary historians were absorbed with the vexatious, but rather tired, debates over the grassy knoll, they would not be busy probing into areas where they were unwelcome.”

By the same token, I’m sure that the Bush gang, and all the conspirators of capital, are delighted at the obsessions of the 9/11 cultists. It’s a distraction from the 1,001 real plots of capitalism that demand exposure and political challenge.

(Please note that I am less allergic to capitalism than Cockburn is.)

Just this morning I banned another cultie, who compared himself to Winston Smith. As I recall, at the end of 1984 Winston Smith learned that his beliefs about the “resistance” were a fantasy. And then they shot him. Not a happy ending.

I’m for anything that will open the doors and reveal whatever plots and plans and conspiracies took place. And if it comes to pass that I’m wrong, and it was an inside job, fine. But the “inside job” culties are standing in the way of investigations. They can’t see that, but they are. And that’s why I don’t allow this blog to be a medium for perpetrating the cult.

We must have more investigations to get to the truth.

We must have more investigations to get to the truth.

We must have more investigations to get to the truth.

And in case anyone still wants to call me a Bush dupe and a member of the Thought Police:

We must have more investigations to get to the truth.

Got that? Thanks.

See also: September 11 Conspiracy Theories

The Condi and Dennis Show

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My sentiments exactly:

It’s a tossup in my mind as to whether it serves one’s interest in greater measure to be incompetent, dishonest, purposely ignorant, ideologically and/or religiously obsessed, cavalier about the loss of human lives and the destruction of tens and hundreds of thousands of families, fiscally promiscuous, or sexually promiscuous with innocent 16-year-olds, and hence, quite possibly guilty of statutory rape, to rise in the modern Republican Party. This sex scandal is a pretty good example of a Big Story to which I have absolutely nothing of use to contribute, though I did receive this kinda funny list in the mail this morning.

What is currently driving me the craziest, however, are the variations on this story. The upshot is this. Tenet briefed Condi Rice about a potentially catastrophic terrorist attack on the United States on July 10, 2001. Rice ignored the briefing, just as she and Bush both ignored the August 6 “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US” memo, when Bush told the CIA briefer who delivered the memo to him that he had “covered his ass” and then went fishing for the rest of the day. Rice not only ignored the briefing, but also misled the 9-11 Commission and then lied when confronted with the evidence by Bob Woodward. Add her name to the long list of Bush administration officials who will leave office with the blood of thousands of innocents on her hands, and who was promoted by Bush for exactly that reason. Greg Mitchell has more here. Of course Rice should be fired, and perhaps tried, but instead she will be given the Presidential Medal of Freedom and Bush will run another campaign on how Democrats cannot be trusted to protect you from the terrorists he’s created.

Be sure to read Eric Alterman’s whole column.

Judging by Memeorandum, at the moment national security issues are being outblogged by the Foley scandal by a wide margin.

I think this could a mistake. I also wonder if someone in the White House (initials K.R.) had a hand in tipping off the press about Foley. Yeah, I know, it’s a stretch, and I’m paranoid. But from the Rove perspective, throwing some congressmen under the bus with a sex scandal might be better than having the nation’s attention on the Bush Administration’s flaming national security incompetence.

Although I also disagree with John Dickerson — Foley’s homosexuality is not the issue. And, at this point, Foley’s behavior is no longer a political issue, since he is no longer a congressman, and out-of-control sexual predation is not an exclusively Republican problem. The issue is whether other Republican congressman tolerated having a sexual predator in their midst. The issue is whether they knew about his behavior and looked the other way, even covered up for him. That cannot be tolerated.

And don’t miss Glenn Greenwald:

In need of moral absolution and support from a respected and admired figure who possesses moral authority among Hastert’s morally upstanding Republican base, to whom does Hastert turn? A priest or respected reverend? An older wise political statesman with a reputation for integrity and dignity? No, there is only one person with sufficient moral credibility among the increasingly uncomfortable moralistic Republican base who can give Hastert the blessing he needs:

Rush Limbaugh.

Too rich.

There’s a social-psychological phenomenon, I read somewhere, in which people who talk a lot about morality are perceived as being moral, even if their behavior says otherwise. Conversely, people who don’t talk much about morality are not perceived as being particularly moral, even if they’re as upright as the Washington Monument. I suspect the same phenomenon applies to people who talk tough.

Bottom line: the Republicans’ reputation as the guardians of moral values and the Republicans’ reputation as the guardians of national security are both so much fluff. All talk, no walk.

And, the more I think about it, the more I believe the Dennis Hastert story and the Condi Rice story are essentially the same story. It’s the story of people who, for whatever reason, were just plain not doing what they should have been doing, either to protect the congressional pages or the nation.

The difference is that, somehow, the Bush Administration managed to hide their failure and incompetence behind a facade of strength and resolve and toughness. And the very people whose foreign policy judgments have proved to be wrong, time and time again, continue to get away with painting their opposition as incompetent and untrustworthy.

The question of why these people failed interests me less than the question of how we change public perception. We can argue endlessly about whether the Bushies failed to act on the pre-9/11 warnings because they were incompetent (my choice) or whether they made a cold calculation that some domestic terrorism would work to their political advantage, or for some other reason we have yet to uncover. And I have no way to know if Dennis Hastert failed to separate Mark Foley from the pages because he didn’t care, or because he was more focused on keeping Congress in Republican hands, or out of the psychological fog that all too often causes people not to notice sexual predation.

What matters is that the Bush Administration has a history of really bad judgments on national security and foreign policy and do not deserve the nation’s trust to guard the nation. What matters is that Republicans are not uniquely virtuous and do not deserve the nation’s trust to guard moral values. (As if guarding moral values were the government’s job, anyway; I say it isn’t.)

Yesterday’s Countdown had a brilliant clip of rightie talking points on Foley (at Crooks & Liars, natch). They’re falling back on their traditional argument — The Dems did it too. The hard-core Right will buy this, of course, but I can only hope the bulk of American voters, looking on, see how truly pathetic this is.

But the most fundamental issue here is the misperception, the myth, of Bush Administration competence and Republican virtue. Are scales truly falling from eyes, or are we liberals still just talking to ourselves?