Monthly Archives: October 2006

Why I Love Harold Meyerson

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This made me laugh.

It is a mark of the sheer panic sweeping the ranks of Republican congressmen that one of their most levelheaded members, Ray LaHood of Illinois, has suggested that Congress abolish its page program altogether in the wake of the Mark Foley scandal.

What conclusion are we supposed to draw from LaHood’s proposal? That members of Congress cannot be trusted in the company of adolescents? …

… If LaHood believes that pages pose an irresistible temptation to his peers, there are surely solutions straight out of the Republican playbook that wouldn’t punish the victims. How about building a 700-foot fence around all Republican members of Congress?

Sounds like a plan.

Denial of Denial

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Knee slapper du jour: George Will writes of the new Bob Woodward book:

The book does not demonstrate that the president is in a state of denial. His almost exclusive and increasingly grating reliance on the rhetoric of unwavering resolve may be mistaken. It certainly has undermined his reputation as a realist.

Reputation as a realist? Lordy, what does that man smoke?

Juan Cole calls it:

The right wing of the Republican Party has a problem with the truth. The American press corps has an addiction to euphemisms.

Bob Woodward called his book “State of Denial.” The press around the book raises the question of whether President George W. Bush and his highest officials–Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Condi Rice– are unable to face the truth (“in denial”).

Yet the sort of anecdote Woodward tells, and the new information surfacing on Tenet’s briefing of Rice and Hastert’s inaction on Foley– all these do not point to denial or lack of realism. They point to lying and to deliberately spinning and misleading the US public.

I say there’s lying, there’s denial, there’s lying about denial, and there’s denial of denial, and thus one walks the road from simple ignorance to complete and utter fantasy.

Make no mistake; the Bushies were already halfway down that road when they took power. The people who marched into the White House in January 2001 were mostly ignorant of the world. Even their foreign policy “experts” lacked direct, hands-on knowledge of the world, but instead were “expert” in academic and ideological theory about the world. But they were so certain of the superiority of their own judgments they brushed aside the warnings from the outgoing Clintonites about al Qaeda. Instead, the Bushies re-focused American foreign policy on “state sponsors” of terror and considered “personal,” stateless organizations like al Qaeda to be minor threats.

Josh Marshall wrote in Foreign Affairs, November/December 2003:

A key example [of Bush foreign policy] is the belief that states, rather than individuals or groups, remain the essential force in international affairs. It is now widely known that the incoming Bush administration initially downgraded its predecessor’s focus on al Qaeda and other nonstate terrorist groups. To the extent that it was concerned about unconventional weapons and asymmetric threats, its focus was on rogue states and state-centric policy solutions such as missile defense. The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon altered those priorities overnight, putting al Qaeda and Islamist terrorism at the top of the nation’s agenda. But according to the authors, the epochal events failed to alter how most high administration officials understood the world. The emphasis on states, for example, remained. As Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith said, the reliance of terrorists on state sponsors was the “principal strategic thought underlying our strategy in the war on terrorism.”

So, by the time they got into power, the Bushies already had transformed simple ignorance into a dangerously delusional worldview. And in the months after September 11, they transformed the coverups of their failure into a shining fantasy of wisdom, strength, and (Dubya’s favorite word) resolve.

The Washington Pundit Corps, and most reporters covering national events, got swept up into the fantasy. Now that a few of the lies have been exposed, some of them are having moments of clarity. Some are stumbling about in wonder at what, to them, is an utterly transformed landscape that in fact had been under their feet all along.

George Will is a good example. He has come to understand that the Bush Administration is Seriously Screwed Up. Some parts of today’s column are actually quite sharp.

While leading the hunt for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq in the summer of 2003, David Kay received a phone call from “Scooter” Libby, Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, who wanted a particular place searched: “The vice president wants to know if you’ve looked at this area. We have indications — and here are the geocoordinates — that something’s buried there.” Kay and his experts located the area on the map. It was in the middle of Lebanon.

This story from Bob Woodward’s “State of Denial” would be hilarious were it not about war. The vignette is dismaying because it seems symptomatic of a blinkering monomania that may have prevented obsessed persons from facing facts.

Well, yes. But then Will pulls back into comfortable aphorisms about dysfunctional government, and he wonders what has become of the President’s “reputation” as a “realist.”

I want to mention Will’s last paragraph before I move on:

“Where’s the leader?” Bush, according to Woodward, has exclaimed in dismay about the Iraqi government’s dithering. “Where’s George Washington? Where’s Thomas Jefferson? Where’s John Adams, for crying out loud?” For a president to ask that question about Iraq, that tribal stew, is enough to cause one to ask it about the United States.

Bush’s is the voice of a child crying that the Easter Bunny forgot to hide the eggs, or whatever the Easter Bunny does (tell you the truth, I was never clear about what the Easter Bunny is supposed to do). And this is the same guy who today calls his critics “naive.”

Juan Cole’s post makes a vital point — that coverups are coverups, and a coverup is not evidence of self-delusion, but of lying. But sometimes coverups are part of the denial process, too. As Professor Cole also points out, Bush’s refusal to acknowledge the growing insurgency had policy implications —

If you can’t announce that there is an insurgency, then you cannot order an effective counter-insurgency policy. The failure of the Bush administration all along in Iraq to publicly acknowledge how bad the situation was has cost thousands of US soldiers’ their lives. They died because Bush was treading water instead of coming on television and saying, there is an insurgency, and here are the five practical things we are going to do to combat it.

I think that in 2003 the Bushies could easily have gotten away with taking immediate counterinsurgency measures without acknowledging the insurgency. They could have called it something else, anything else, but an insurgency. They could have pretended that whatever counterinsurgency measures they were taking were part of their plan all along. In 2003, they could have gotten away with that, easily.

And if Bush was fully cognizant of the insurgency in 2003, even if he wouldn’t admit to it in public, one would think he would have been keenly interested in getting it under control before the 2004 election campaign heated up. Instead, the Bushies launched the “transfer of sovereignty” farce — play-pretend progress, if you will — to misdirect the public and press from the insurgency.

For example, the Bushies could have immediately stepped up training of Iraqi military and police forces. Instead, after John Kerry made an issue of such training, and after it was revealed the Administration’s claims about the readiness of Iraqi self-defense forces were, um, lies, then the administration overhauled the training program to get Iraqis trained faster. They announced this in January 2005.

‘Course, we saw this on Sixty Minutes last Sunday:

Wallace: President Bush says over and over, as Iraqi forces stand up, U.S. Forces will stand down. The number of Iraqis in uniform today, I understand, is up to 300,000?

Woodward: They’ve stood up from essentially zero to 300,000. This is the military and the police.

Wallace: But U.S. Forces are not standing down. The attacks keep coming.

Woodward: They’ve stood up and up and up, and we haven’t stood down. And it’s worse.

Well, so much for troop training. But the point is that just because the Administration is dishonest with us doesn’t mean they aren’t doin’ a job foolin’ themselves, too.

I want to go back to the Josh Marshall article in Foreign Affairs (a review of America Unbound: The Bush Revolution in Foreign Policy by Ivo H. Daalder, James M. Lindsay):

Days before the United States launched Operation Iraqi Freedom this past March, a well-known intellectual close to the White House walked me through the necessity and promise of the coming invasion. Whatever rancor it caused in the short term, he said, would pale in comparison to the payoff that would follow. In the months and years to come, Iraqis who had suffered under Saddam Hussein’s tyranny would write books and testify to the brutality of the regime, the bankruptcy of the Arab nationalism that stood idly by while they suffered, and the improvement of their lives. That testimony and the reality of an Iraqi state where basic human rights were respected would shatter the anti-Americanism that fills the Muslim Middle East and start a wave of change that would sweep over the region.

It was a breathtaking vision, and one that was difficult to dismiss out of hand. But from the vantage point of late 2003, it seems little better than a fantasy. To be sure, the war did eliminate a dangerous and evil regime. But the Bush administration greatly exaggerated the scale and imminence of the danger Saddam posed, while dramatically underestimating the cost and burden of the postwar occupation. The prewar links between Iraq and terrorism proved to be as minimal as skeptics had charged. And the Iraqis’ feelings toward their liberators turned out to be more ambivalent than Washington had assumed, the regional ripple effects less extensive, and the diplomatic damage of the whole episode worse and longer lasting.

There’s not-knowing, and then there’s delusion. Yesterday some flaming idiot claimed we anti-war liberals were guilty of “hindsight bias” — “Liberals’ assertion that they ‘knew all along’ that the war in Iraq would go badly are guilty of the hindsight bias.” — meaning we didn’t really predict how badly the war would go, we just think we did. I quickly found an old Paul Krugman column from 2002 that laid out some pretty stark predictions. A commenter added a Howard Dean speech from February 2002 in which Gov. Dean warned “there is a very real danger that war in Iraq will fuel the fires of international terror.” This Molly Ivins column from early March 2003 presents what has proved to be a realistic assessment of the pre-war situation. This suggests to me that at least some anti-war liberals had a realistic understanding of how badly the occupation might turn out.

True, not everyone opposed to the war realized how badly it would get. But neither did they predict the effort would end well. Can you show me people who were gung-ho for the invasion who were fully cognizant of the risks? From the Right, we mostly got predictions that the Iraqis would greet us with flowers, and the invasion would pay for itself from oil revenue. Another pre-invasion Molly Ivins column reported,

The long, shifting rationale for war with Iraq advanced by the Bush administration changes almost weekly — regime change, weapons of mass destruction, disarmament, already-seen-this-movie, non-compliance (of how many U.N. resolutions is Israel now in “material breach?” And what a meaningless phrase that is), zero tolerance, the liberation of Iraq and the recently popular connected-to-Al Qaeda. But the capper in the whole bunch, the one just advanced by Bush last week, is: We’re going to war with Iraq in order to achieve peace between Israel and Palestine. I know we have some advanced thinkers in Washington, but put me down as a skeptic on that one.

For the past several years our nation has been hamstrung by rightie psycho-pathologies. Al Qaeda was no big deal, until suddenly it was. Then rightie delusions stampeded us into Iraq and got us stuck there. Rightie denial refused to consider the reality of insurgency until it was too late to get it under control. Rightie ideology stands in the way of solutions to global warming and pressing domestic concerns like our failing health care system. We, the People can’t even have a calm, rational, fact-based discussion about anything because we are drowned out by the shrieking, irrational hysteria of the Right. Their lies, spin, delusions, and denial are riding us all to ruin.

Sometimes I think not only are the lunatics running the asylum, but they’ve also rounded up anyone who seems sane and locked them up in the basement.

Even now, faced with some pretty bare-assed (so to speak) evidence that a Republican congressman solicited sex from teenage boys, too many righties are shutting their eyes and refusing to acknowledge the screwup. See, for example, this rightie blog post and the comments to it; beyond pathetic.

According to Buddhist teaching we’re all cocooned in many layers of delusion. The meditation practices of many sects are intended to peel away the layers. Here’s a common experience — a monk or lay student peels away one layer of bullshit and discovers … more bullshit. When he asks the senior monks if there isn’t something else in there that isn’t bullshit, they smile serenely (or giggle) and advise the newbie to just keep peeling.

I think the nation needs to do some peeling, as well.

Moment of Truth?

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[Big update below.]

I’d hate to be George Tenet or Cofer Black right now. I’m betting the full weight of the White House is bearing down on them now to watch what they say.

At issue is the truth about the meeting of July 10, 2001, in which (Bob Woodward says) Condi Rice brushed off warnings of an imminent terrorist attack in the U.S.

Just now on Countdown, Roger Cressey told Keith Olbermann that he had seen the same Tenet-Black presentation that was shown to Condi Rice on July 10, and Cressey confirmed that the presentation was mostly an explicit warning that al Qaeda was about to carry out a major terrorist attack in the U.S. In 2001 Cressey was the National Security Council staff director.

[Update: Here’s the transcript from Monday’s show. Just a snip:

OLBERMANN: My first question, you‘re now consulting within a firm with Richard Clarke, who was at that meeting on July 10, on the central question of whether Rice was warned then of an attack on the U.S. Do we know who‘s right here, Woodward or Secretary Rice?

CRESSEY: Yes, she was warned. I mean, there was a meeting. It was George Tenet, Dick Clarke, another individual from the agency, Cofer Black, and Steve Hadley. And what it was, Keith, was a briefing for Dr. Rice that was similar to a briefing the CIA gave to us in the situation room about a week before, laying out the information, the intelligence, laying out the sense of urgency. And it was pretty much given to Dr. Rice and Steve Hadley in pretty stark terms.

Cressey also said the transcript of the July 10 meeting are part of the 9/11 Commission collection in the National Archives. If so, could someone dig it out so we can all have a look at it? Or is access restricted?]

Dan Froomkin:

If the omniscient narrator of Woodward’s book is to be believed, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice waved off warnings that should by any reasonable standard have put the government on high alert for an al-Qaeda attack.

And in what looks like a potential administration cover-up, Rice and the other participants in that meeting apparently never mentioned it to anyone, including investigators for the 9/11 Commission.

Condi Rice denies she was told about a critical threat. Froomkin continues,

On Sunday, White House counselor Dan Bartlett issued a new rebuttal on ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos.” Here’s the video ; here’s the transcript .

Speaking for Rice, Bartlett said: “I spoke to her this morning. She believes this is a very grossly mis-accurate characterization of the meeting they had.”

Stephanopoulos: “So this didn’t happen?”

And here’s the money quote from Bartlett: “That’s Secretary Rice’s view, that that type of urgent request to go after bin Laden, as the book alleges, in her mind, didn’t happen.”

Get that? In her mind, it didn’t happen.

Robin Wright, Washington Post:

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice Sunday vehemently denied that she ever received a special CIA warning about an imminent terrorist attack on the United States, angrily rebutting new allegations about her culpability in U.S. policy failures before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks by al Qaeda.

I guess the August 6, 2001, memo titled “Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States” doesn’t count, either.

She said it was “incomprehensible” that she would have ignored such explicit intelligence or appeals by senior CIA officials.

I have to agree with her on that. It is incomprehensible. Yet, apparently, that’s what happened.

At TPM Muckracker, Justin Rood points out that Time magazine reported on the July 10 meeting back in 2002. This is from Time:

In mid-July, Tenet sat down for a special meeting with Rice and aides. “George briefed Condi that there was going to be a major attack,” says an official; another, who was present at the meeting, says Tenet broke out a huge wall chart (“They always have wall charts”) with dozens of threats. Tenet couldn’t rule out a domestic attack but thought it more likely that al-Qaeda would strike overseas.

Roger Cressey, however, said tonight that the meeting did focus on possible strikes within the U.S.

Cressey said Andrea Mitchell reported today that the 9/11 Commission was, in fact, briefed on the July 10 meeting, even though none of the members seem to remember it now. I can’t find details on this on the web, but it’s mentioned in this Andrea Mitchell interview of Bob Woodward. Cressey believes not including the meeting in the final 9/11 Commission report was an “oversight.” Maybe.

In any event, a great deal rides on whether Tenet and Black confirm or deny the Woodward story. If they shoot the story down, it will no doubt negate everything else Woodward says in his book that the Right doesn’t like. However …

Update: Jonathan Landay, Warren Strobel, and John Walcott write for McClatchy Newspapers —

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and former Attorney General John Ashcroft received the same CIA briefing about an imminent al-Qaida strike on an American target that was given to the White House two months before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Hmm, and in July 2001, John Ashcroft began to avoid commercial flights in favor of chartered government jets.

The State Department’s disclosure Monday that the pair was briefed within a week after then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice was told about the threat on July 10, 2001, raised new questions about what the Bush administration did in response, and about why so many officials have claimed they never received or don’t remember the warning.

One official who helped to prepare the briefing, which included a PowerPoint presentation, described it as a “10 on a scale of 1 to 10” that “connected the dots” in earlier intelligence reports to present a stark warning that al-Qaida, which had already killed Americans in Yemen, Saudi Arabia and East Africa, was poised to strike again.

Apparently there’s been a crack in the facade:

Ashcroft, who resigned as attorney general on Nov. 9, 2004, told the Associated Press on Monday that it was “disappointing” that he never received the briefing, either.

But on Monday evening, Rice’s spokesman Sean McCormack issued a statement confirming that she’d received the CIA briefing “on or around July 10” and had asked that it be given to Ashcroft and Rumsfeld.

“The information presented in this meeting was not new, rather it was a good summary from the threat reporting from the previous several weeks,” McCormack said. “After this meeting, Dr. Rice asked that this same information be briefed to Secretary Rumsfeld and Attorney General Ashcroft. That briefing took place by July 17.”

Just how many warnings did Condi get, anyway?

The CIA briefing didn’t provide the exact timing or nature of a possible attack, nor did it predict whether it was likely to take place in the United States or overseas, said three former senior intelligence officials.

They spoke on condition of anonymity because the report remains highly classified.

The briefing “didn’t say within the United States,” said one former senior intelligence official. “It said on the United States, which could mean a ship, an embassy or inside the United States.”

Yet in July Ashcroft was avoiding commercial flights. Domestic commercial flights.

And on August 6, this information was followed up by a memo titled … all together, now … “Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States.”

But after the July 10 meeting, Condi sprang into action and called a Principal’s Meeting for September 4 … oh, wait …

Welcome

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Justme sends a photo of the newest Mahablog reader, Paulie. Justme writes,

He drinks from the cup you see him holding. He leaves the cup in his water dish, picks it up with his beak when he wants a drink and tilts his head back and chugs…then he says”bottoms up!”.. AND he has only been here a few days…who knows what he will do once he comes out of his shell and starts to feel at home…Yikes, now I am afraid!

I’m glad it’s water and not Kool-Aid. Anyway, Justme hopes Paulie will learn to say BUSH SUCKS! like the famous Sammy.

Hindsight Bias?

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Echidne quotes some guy who says antiwar liberals have hindsight bias:

One of the most systematic errors in human perception is what psychologists call hindsight bias — the feeling, after an event happens, that we knew all along it was going to happen. … “Liberals’ assertion that they ‘knew all along’ that the war in Iraq would go badly are guilty of the hindsight bias,” agreed Hal Arkes, a psychologist at Ohio State University, who has studied the hindsight bias and how to overcome it. “This is not to say that they didn’t always think that the war was a bad idea.”

If we didn’t think it would go badly, why did we think it was a bad idea?

Echidne dug out of her archives a prediction from April 2004 that “the net effect of the war and occupation in Iraq is to increase the forces of international terrorists, not to somehow make the world safer.” But was anyone predicting disaster before the war began?

A five-minute web search turned up a Paul Krugman column from September 24, 2002:

Of course the new Bush doctrine, in which the United States will seek ”regime change” in nations that we judge might be future threats, is driven by high moral purpose. But McKinley-era imperialists also thought they were morally justified. The war with Spain — which ruled its colonies with great brutality, but posed no threat to us — was justified by an apparent act of terror, the sinking of the battleship Maine, even though no evidence ever linked that attack to Spain. And the purpose of our conquest of the Philippines was, McKinley declared, ”to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them.”

Moral clarity aside, the parallel between America’s pursuit of manifest destiny a century ago and its new global sense of mission has a lot to teach us.

First, the experience of the Spanish-American War should remind us that quick conventional military victory is not necessarily the end of the story. Thanks to American technological superiority, Adm. George Dewey destroyed a Spanish fleet in Manila Bay without losing a single man. But a clean, high-tech war against Spain somehow turned into an extremely dirty war against the Filipino resistance, one in which hundreds of thousands of civilians died.

Second, America’s imperial venture should serve as an object warning against taking grand strategic theories too seriously. The doctrines of the day saw colonies as strategic assets. In the end, it’s very doubtful whether our control of the Philippines made us stronger. Now we’re assured that military action against rogue states will protect us from terrorism. But the rogue state now in our sights doesn’t seem to have been involved in Sept. 11; what determines whose regime gets changed?

Finally, we should remember that the economic doctrines that were used to justify Western empire-building during the late 19th century — that colonies would provide valuable markets and sources of raw materials — turned out to be nonsense. Almost without exception, the cost of acquiring and defending a colonial empire greatly exceeded even a generous accounting of its benefits. These days, pundits tell us that a war with Iraq will drive down oil prices, and maybe even yield a financial windfall. But the effect on oil prices is anything but certain, while the heavy costs of war, occupation and rebuilding — for we won’t bomb Iraq, then wash our hands of responsibility, will we? — are not in doubt. And no, the United States cannot defray the costs of war out of Iraqi oil revenue — not unless we are willing to confirm to the world that we’re just old-fashioned imperialists, after all.

I’m sure if I had more time to look I could find a lot more. Until then, here’s something I wrote on the eve of the invasion that, IMO, holds up pretty well.

Principles: Not What You Do, But What You Say?

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Win or lose, the GOP talks about three core principles: less government, lower taxes, and a strong military. It doesn’t matter that, when in charge, Republican politicians have been known to grow government, raise taxes, and stretch the military too thin. Party leaders have decided that less government, lower taxes, and a strong military is what they stand for and what they run on. That’s their story and they’re sticking with it for good reason — because more often that not, it has helped them win. [Bill Scher, Wait! Don’t Move to Canada! (Rodale, 2006), p. 13.]

I’m starting off with a quote from Bill Scher’s new book to contrast it with what Sebastian Mallaby writes in today’s Washington Post:

After years of single-party government, the prospect of a Democratic majority in the House ought to feel refreshing. But even with Republicans collapsing in a pile of sexual sleaze, I just can’t get excited. Most Democrats in Congress seem bereft of ideas or the courage to stand up for them. They clearly want power, but they have no principles to guide their use of it.

The implication is, of course, that Republicans do have principles to guide their use of power. And Mallaby’s error is, of course, to confuse principles with talking points.

In today’s New York Times Paul Krugman writes,

At its core, the political axis that currently controls Congress and the White House is an alliance between the preachers and the plutocrats — between the religious right, which hates gays, abortion and the theory of evolution, and the economic right, which hates Social Security, Medicare and taxes on rich people. Surrounding this core is a large periphery of politicians and lobbyists who joined the movement not out of conviction, but to share in the spoils.

This is an example of what we call “reality,” as opposed to “appearance,” a.k.a. “bullshit.”

Many argue that the impact of “values voters” in recent elections is greatly exaggerated. But I think it’s plain that people who have marched to the polls to vote against abortion, evolution, and gay marriage have handed many victories to Republicans. Professor Krugman continues,

… the religious and cultural right, which boasted of having supplied the Bush campaign with its “shock troops” and expected a right-wing cultural agenda in return — starting with a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage — was dismayed when the administration put its energy into attacking the welfare state instead. James Dobson, the founder and chairman of Focus on the Family, accused Republicans of “just ignoring those that put them in office.”

It will be interesting, by the way, to see how Dr. Dobson, who declared of Bill Clinton that “no man has ever done more to debase the presidency,” responds to the Foley scandal. Does the failure of Republican leaders to do anything about a sexual predator in their midst outrage him as much as a Democratic president’s consensual affair?

Brian Ross of ABC News found a former congressional page who says he was warned about Rep. Foley’s, um, predilections back in 2001. The “principled” party has been tolerating an alleged sexual predator in their midst for quite some time.

What was that you said about principles, Mr. Mallaby? I think the only Republican principle is “say anything that will get you elected.”

I’m not letting Dems off the hook. As Mallaby says,

On Friday, Harry Reid, the Democratic leader in the Senate, correctly denounced a border-fence bill as a concession “to the radical anti-immigrant right wing” of the Republican Party. It’s absurd to fence off 700 miles of the border and leave the other 1,300 miles open; besides, the government lacks the manpower to prevent migrants from defeating the fence with tunnels or ladders. But if blowing billions on this symbolism is a sop to right-wing nuts, why did 26 Senate Democrats vote for the bill while only 17 opposed it?

And the answer is, they don’t want to give the GOP grist for their talking point mill. And I would like to know how many of the Republicans who pushed for the fence have supporters and contributors who hire illegal aliens. But how many times have we discussed why support Democrats when we can’t trust them to support our values and principles? There are reasons for doing so, but they aren’t reasons that the Party would want to put in its campaign literature. “Because we don’t have a choice” isn’t all that inspirational.

[Update: Brad DeLong has a better answer:

As Sebastian Mallaby knows well–but hopes to keep his readers from realizing–the Democratic Senate leaders judged, correctly, that no Republicans save possibly Chaffee would join them in a filibuster, and that they could not hold enough Democrats to make a filibuster stick. What they decided to do, again correctly, was support Arlen Specter’s effort to amend the bill, as their best chance to make it better. That attempt failed by three votes.

There was not “allow[ing] it through” on the part of the Democratic Senate leadership. As Mallaby knows as well as anybody.]

Bill Scher explains,

There is no clear consensus within the Democratic Party on how to address fundamental policy matters such as the role of government, the ideal level of taxation, and the proper direction for our foreign policy, not to mention how to approach hot-button social issues such as abortion and gay rights. And that makes it harder to be defiant in the face of defeat. How can you confidently jump back into the fray if you can’t be sure that your buddies have your back? If Democrats clearly and consistently articulated a set of principles, and if they supported those principles in good times and bad, people would know what they were fighting for and be willing to fight that much harder.

We liberals tend to rate our candidates on campaign performance, which mostly boils down to how effectively our candidates smack down whatever lies the Right is spreading about them. It can be hard to explain to voters who you are when most of your time is taken up explaining who you aren’t. But that’s how it is, and we need to be better prepared for it. One way we could be better prepared is if the Democratic Party collectively used the time between elections to articulate a short list of basic principles. And, once articulated — repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat. Until every voter in America can recite that list by heart.

It’s been a long time since Democrats have done that. Even Bill Clinton won mostly on conservative talking points about ending welfare and reducing deficits, not on uniquely Democratic Party principles.

I’m not saying that the short list of principles should be just words without conviction, as are Republican talking points. The Dems can’t copy the GOP and say anything that sounds good, because the Dems do not have a base of robot followers who will believe everything they’re told and ignore reality. Dems will have to deliver, and fast, or they’ll find themselves in the minority again very quickly.

As soon as Dems get some power in Washington (assuming they ever do), a clock will start ticking. And that clock will be marking a short period of time the Dems will have to prove themselves. They will have to deliver something tangible, something big, something Americans can plainly see with their own eyes, that they can point to and say, look, we did this. Republicans had their chance and didn’t do it, but we did it. That something might be getting out of Iraq, providing national health care, or making significant progress in rebuilding the Gulf Coast. What’s important is that it has to be something that voters can see is real so that it can’t be explained away with lies and fuzzy math by the VRWC.

I have long believed that clarity of language and clarity of thought go hand and hand; muddy writers tend to be muddy thinkers, and vice versa. You can impress some people with sheer volume of verbiage (this explains Victor Davis Hanson’s following). But I find that putting thoughts into words sharpens the thoughts. For this reason the exercise of articulating principles should not be contracted to speechwriters and PR people. The list must present genuine core convictions and the most basic expectations We, the People, have of our government.

Most of Mallaby’s soft-headed column is spent criticizing Dems for refusing to enter into new “bipartisan” talks on Social Security reform. Of course, the Dems are right to refuse; it’s an obvious trap. It takes a pundit not to see that. It also takes a pundit not to notice that right-wing “principles” are all smoke. Let’s hope voters are smarter. A new McClatchy Newspapers / MSNBC poll suggests maybe they are. But it would be nice if the Dems could say something more for themselves than “we promise not to screw up as bad as the GOP.” As we see from the Republican example, what you say about yourself matters a lot.

Now, what should be on the list? Please add your ideas to the comments.

Update: See also TAPPED.

Cooked

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Henry Porter writes for The Observer about Patrick Cockburn’s new book, The Occupation.

Cockburn describes a visit to Dhuluaya, a fruit-growing region 50 miles north of Baghdad, where, early on in the occupation, the American military cut down ancient date palms and orange and lemon trees as part of a collective punishment for farmers who had failed to inform them about guerrilla attacks. This vandalism will be remembered for generations because it was senseless and to the Iraqi mind powerfully symbolises the malice of the occupiers.

‘At times,’ Cockburn says of the period just after the invasion, ‘it seemed as if the American military was determined to provoke an uprising.’ Well, now they’ve got it, a ferocious war that in the last three months alone has cost 10,000 lives, most of them Iraqi. There seems no end to it and as Cockburn writes in his conclusion, instead of asserting America’s position as the sole superpower, the occupation has amply demonstrated the limits of US power.

The precise opposite of the desired effect was also achieved in the idiotically named ‘War on Terror’. By the admission of intelligence services on both sides of the Atlantic, Iraq has galvanised terrorism. Sections of a US National Intelligence estimate that were declassified last week say the war has become the ’cause celebre for jihadist’ and that ‘jihadists regard Europe as an important venue for attacking Western interests’. This is not the view of a few CIA desk officers, but the shared verdict of 16 branches of US intelligence.

That’s so disappointing. I expect that kind of arrogance from the righties, but I thought the professional military knew better. I’m so naive sometimes.

In his radio address yesterday, President Bush refuted the NIE: “We do not create terrorism by fighting terrorism.” Any minute how we’ll all be ordered to write that on a blackboard 500 times. But, of course, Bush doesn’t have a real counterargument. He has misdirection and straw men. He also has A Lot of Capital Letters.

Evan Thomas and Richard Wolffe write for Newsweek:

When “State of Denial” arrived at the White House Friday morning, a team of aides went to work deconstructing the 576-page volume. Some of Woodward’s revelations, like the scenes of Bush rejecting pleas for more troops in Iraq, the White House tried to dismiss as old news. Woodward’s depictions of tensions within Bush’s inner circle were played down or denied. It was not true, White House aides told reporters, that First Lady Laura Bush wanted to see Rumsfeld fired. Harder to slough off was Woodward’s account of the role played by former chief of staff Andy Card. The White House made no serious attempt to refute Card’s campaign to unseat Rummy. (Card himself quibbled over the word “campaign,” telling reporters that the discussions about Rumsfeld’s future needed to be seen in a “broader context.”) Instead, White House spokesman Tony Snow took a dismissive, this-too-will-pass tone. Woodward’s book is like “cotton candy,” Snow said. “It kind of melts on contact.”

They needn’t have bothered; the White House could issue a banana cream pie recipe labeled “The Truth About Woodward” and the rightie base would embrace it as proof of Bush’s innocence — “Place egg yolks in mixing bowl and beat on medium speed of electric mixer, gradually adding sugar. So true. Eat that, leftie scum.”

Frank Rich:

Having ignored the facts through each avoidable disaster, the White House won’t change its game plan now. Quite the contrary. Its main ambition seems to be to prop up its artificial reality no matter what the evidence to the contrary. Nowhere could this be better seen than in Ms. Rice’s bizarre behavior after the Bill Clinton-Chris Wallace slapdown on Fox News. Stung by the former president’s charge that the Bush administration did nothing about Al Qaeda in the eight months before 9/11, she couldn’t resist telling The New York Post that his statement was “flatly false.”

But proof of Ms. Rice’s assertion is as nonexistent as Saddam’s W.M.D. As 9/11 approached, both she and Mr. Bush blew off harbingers of the attacks (including a panicked C.I.A. briefer in Crawford, according to Ron Suskind’s “One Percent Doctrine”). The 9/11 commission report, which Ms. Rice cited as a corroborating source for her claims to The Post, in reality “found no indication of any further discussion” about the Qaeda threat among the president and his top aides between the arrival of that fateful Aug. 6 brief (“Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.”) and Sept. 10.

That the secretary of state would rush to defend the indefensible shows where this administration’s priorities are: it’s now every man and woman in the White House for himself and herself in defending the fictions, even four-year-old fictions, that took us into the war and botched its execution. When they talk about staying the course, what they are really talking about is protecting their spin and their reputations. They’ll leave it to the 140,000-plus American troops staying the course in a quagmire to face the facts.

Speaking of which, a New York Times editorial says,

Even if there were a case for staying the current course in Iraq, America’s badly overstretched Army cannot sustain present force levels much longer without long-term damage. And that could undermine the credibility of American foreign policy for years to come.

The Army has been kept on short rations of troops and equipment for years by a Pentagon more intent on stockpiling futuristic weapons than fighting today’s wars. Now it is pushing up against the limits of hard arithmetic. Senior generals are warning that the Bush administration may have to break its word and again use National Guard units to plug the gap, but no one in Washington is paying serious attention. That was clear last week when Congress recklessly decided to funnel extra money to the Air Force’s irrelevant F-22 stealth fighter.

As early as the fall of 2003, the Congressional Budget Office warned that maintaining substantial force levels in Iraq for more than another six months would be difficult without resorting to damaging short-term expedients. The Pentagon then had about 150,000 troops in Iraq. Three years later, those numbers have not fallen appreciably. For much of that time, the Pentagon has plugged the gap by extending tours of duty, recycling soldiers back more quickly into combat, diverting National Guard units from homeland security and misusing the Marine Corps as a long-term occupation force.

Yet the Pentagon and Congress remain in an advanced state of denial. While the overall Defense Department budget keeps rising, pushed along by unneeded gadgetry, next year’s spending plan fails to adequately address the Army’s pressing personnel needs. Things have gotten so badly out of line that in August the Army chief of staff held up a required 2008 budget document, protesting that the Army simply could not keep doing its job without a sizable increase in spending.

A bigger army does not fit into Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s version of a technologically transformed military. And Congress prefers lavishing billions on Lockheed Martin to build stealth fighters, which are great for fighting Russian MIG’s and Chinese F-8’s but not for securing Baghdad. Army grunts are not as glamorous as fighter pilots and are a lot less profitable to equip. …

… America’s credibility in that fight depends on the quality, quantity and readiness of our ground forces. If we go on demanding more and more from them while denying the resources they so desperately need, we could end up paying a terrible price.

In today’s Los Angeles Times, Philip Gold and Erin Solaro predict that one of these days we’ll be talking about reinstating the draft.

There is a process in American political life by which the unthinkable becomes the inevitable. Ideas and proposals float around for decades, going nowhere. Then events demand, or seem to demand, quick action. We act. And then we wonder how it ever came to this.

Today, the issue of conscription is deader than last week’s roadkill. But it will not stay dead much longer. Iraq will continue to fester. Our armed forces are imploding when they should be expanding — the Army and the National Guard, especially. The world is not getting less dangerous. A year or two from now, a disaster or two from now, expect the issue to re-emerge.

I’d be very surprised if the issue re-emerges while George W. Bush is president, however. Admitting the army is being destroyed and conscription, however, unpopular, might be necessary would require the President to face reality and take responsibility. As they say … when pigs fly.

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I dearly love a good Victor Davis Hanson smackdown.

VDH also has the chutzpah to call Carter “historically ignorant”, a fascinating charge coming from a man whose grasp even on his specialty is tenuous, and the bulk of whose professional career has been an (often successful) effort to make Americans MORE ignorant of the history of military affairs.

More Psychopathology and Denial

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From Woodwards’s new book, in today’s Washington Post:

For months, Tenet had been pressing Rice to set a clear counterterrorism policy, including specific presidential orders called “findings” that would give the CIA stronger authority to conduct covert action against bin Laden. Perhaps a dramatic appearance — Black called it an “out of cycle” session, beyond Tenet’s regular weekly meeting with Rice — would get her attention. …

Tenet and Black felt they were not getting through to Rice. She was polite, but they felt the brush-off. President Bush had said he didn’t want to swat at flies.

As they all knew, a coherent plan for covert action against bin Laden was in the pipeline, but it would take some time. In recent closed-door meetings the entire National Security Council apparatus had been considering action against bin Laden, including using a new secret weapon: the Predator unmanned aerial vehicle, or drone, that could fire Hellfire missiles to kill him or his lieutenants. It looked like a possible solution, but there was a raging debate between the CIA and the Pentagon about who would pay for it and who would have authority to shoot.

Besides, Rice seemed focused on other administration priorities, especially the ballistic missile defense system that Bush had campaigned on. She was in a different place.

Tenet left the meeting feeling frustrated. Though Rice had given them a fair hearing, no immediate action meant great risk. Black felt the decision to just keep planning was a sustained policy failure. Rice and the Bush team had been in hibernation too long. “Adults should not have a system like this,” he said later. …

… Afterward, Tenet looked back on the meeting with Rice as a tremendous lost opportunity to prevent or disrupt the Sept. 11 attacks. Rice could have gotten through to Bush on the threat, but she just didn’t get it in time, Tenet thought. He felt that he had done his job and had been very direct about the threat, but that Rice had not moved quickly. He felt she was not organized and did not push people, as he tried to do at the CIA.

Black later said, “The only thing we didn’t do was pull the trigger to the gun we were holding to her head.”

Editor’s Note: How much effort the Bush administration made in going after Osama bin Laden before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, became an issue last week after former president Bill Clinton accused President Bush’s “neocons” and other Republicans of ignoring bin Laden until the attacks. Rice responded in an interview that “what we did in the eight months was at least as aggressive as what the Clinton administration did in the preceding years.”

Right now I need to take a time out and, I don’t know, throw some plates at the wall, or smash pumpkins, or something.

This morning the fine point under discussion is what did the 9/11 Commission and other investigators know about this meeting, and when did they know it? Another paragraph from Woodward:

The July 10 meeting between Tenet, Black and Rice went unmentioned in the various reports of investigations into the Sept. 11 attacks, but it stood out in the minds of Tenet and Black as the starkest warning they had given the White House on bin Laden and al-Qaeda. Though the investigators had access to all the paperwork on the meeting, Black felt there were things the commissions wanted to know about and things they didn’t want to know about.

In yesterday’s WaPo, Peter Baker wrote,

The July 10 meeting of Rice, Tenet and Black went unmentioned in various investigations into the Sept. 11 attacks, and Woodward wrote that Black “felt there were things the commissions wanted to know about and things they didn’t want to know about.”

Jamie S. Gorelick, a member of the Sept. 11 commission, said she checked with commission staff members who told her investigators were never told about a July 10 meeting. “We didn’t know about the meeting itself,” she said. “I can assure you it would have been in our report if we had known to ask about it.”

White House and State Department officials yesterday confirmed that the July 10 meeting took place, although they took issue with Woodward’s portrayal of its results. State Department spokesman Sean McCormack, responding on behalf of Rice, said Tenet and Black had never publicly expressed any frustration with her response.

“This is the first time these thoughts and feelings associated with that meeting have been expressed,” McCormack said. “People are free to revise and extend their remarks, but that is certainly not the story that was told to the 9/11 commission.”

Tenet and Black did not respond to messages yesterday.

Yesterday Greg Mitchell at Editor & Publisher reported on Peter Baker’s story. This rightie blogger accuses Mitchell of a cover up because he left out the part about “Though the investigators had access to all the paperwork on the meeting, Black felt there were things the commissions wanted to know about and things they didn’t want to know about.”

Reading the excerpt and the Peter Baker story together, my impression is that because no one spoke of the July 10 meeting in testimony before the commission, the commissioners overlooked it. There may be nothing remarkable in the paperwork, nothing that calls out Tenet and Black’s concerns, and such paperwork would have been part of several truckloads of paperwork the commissioners were given.

Or, maybe Tenet and Black are exaggerating the significance of the meeting now because they’re trying to cover their own butts for the record.

Or, maybe the commissioners were doing their best to be “fair” to the White House, meaning they didn’t follow up information that made Bush and his team look bad unless it got into public record.

Many things are possible. Certainly there are a lot of questions that remain unanswered about 9/11. I strongly suspect that if we were to wade through all the little details in all the documentation given the 9/11 commission, we would find lots more interesting stuff.