Elevator Ideology

The New York Review's account of how Bush won the election is well worth reading. The key point, in terms of what the Democrats need to focus on moving forward, is this paragraph:

Many well-known facts—on which Kerry, in his campaign, had laid such stress—were either irrelevant to it (the missing weapons of mass destruction, which went unmentioned) or directly contradicted by it (the failure to demonstrate connections between Iraq and the attacks of September 11). But the facts did not matter—not necessarily because those in the stadium were ignorant of them, though some certainly were, but because the President was offering in their place a worldview that was whole, complete, comprehensible, and thus impermeable to statements of fact that clearly contradicted it. The thousands cheering around me in that Orlando stadium, and the many others who would come to support Bush on election day, faced a stark choice: either discard the facts, or give up the clear and comforting worldview that they contradicted. They chose to disregard the facts. (Emphasis added)

Many Democrats, particularly intellectual Democrats, will likely read this passage and console themselves with feelings of superiority, by asking, as some foreigners did right after the election, "How could 62 million people be so stupid?" But read properly, this account should make Democrats realize what's at work here isn't (just) stupidity; rather, it's the power of ideology.

One thing intellectuals typically fail to recognize about ideology is that while politically influential ideologies -- I'm thinking here, for example, of classical liberalism, Communism, or Nazism -- always produce highly intricate manifestations as they are developed into policies and as their internal tensions are thrashed out, what makes these ideologies politically effective is that they are always reducible to a clear, simple core. E.g., markets are better than governments at allocating goods and values; letting workers rather than capitalists control the means of production will yield a more just society; national greatness depends on race purification. You get the idea.

As I argued in an article published last Spring, for the Democrats to mount a return from the wilderness, they must first recognize that the Republicans have become America's first coherent ideological party since the Civil War, and then respond by developing a counterideology of their own. In other words, Democrats must work on discovering what keeps people in the party, and how that relates to some core, probably almost preconcious, conception of themselves and their country. Moreover, as I've said earlier, to be effective, this counterideology will have to be expressable in the length of time it takes to ride an elevator with someone. Until the Democrats figure that out, the Republicans are going to run circles around them. (I've already stated my own view as to what this "elevator ideology" might look like.)

Dissembling about the Social Security "crisis"

One reason I haven't blogged at all about the upcoming fight over Social Security is that Josh Marshall has done such a fantastic job of covering this topic that I've found myself with little to additional say -- call me a Marshall dittohead. His basic point has been that the Bush regime is greatly exaggerating the alleged "crisis" facing Social Security, which is actually a macro-deficit problem -- one created (perhaps even intentionally created) by Bush himself. The implied solution to the alleged future crisis in Social Security funding is, basically, to rescind the tax cuts.

Josh's posting from last night, however, is worth a special read, and I reference it here because it directly addresses one of the main themes I have treated in this blog, namely the way that the Bush regime treats evidence and fact with contempt. Like Marshall, I am leery of using the word "lie," not because it's not an accurate description of what Bush is doing, but rather because the term has been used so often, with so little impact on a large proportion of the electorate, that continuing to use the term risks marginalizing the speaker as a cassandra or a broken record. Moreover, what makes the word "lie" more difficult to use with regard to Bush, is that he specializes in lying about the future, something which is very difficult to prove. When things consistently turn out differently than he predicted -- such as budget surpluses forever or Iraqi WMDs, to use the two most obvious examples -- he covers himself by saying that "no one could have known," which is also false, but less provably so. Now we're getting the same treatment with regard to the alleged "crisis" facing the national retirement program.

Here's Marshall on the complicated rhetorical trickery Bush uses to represent the Social Security Administration's future solvency:

According to the Trustees, using very pessimistic estimates of future economic growth, Social Security will be able to pay full benefits until 2042. After that, incoming revenue, they say, will be able to pay for at least 70% of my benefits. In other words, I'm good until I'm 73, after which my benefits could drop by as much as 30% if the US economy does really poorly over the next 35 years and no one does anything whatsoever with Social Security until then.

On the other hand, the Congressional Budget Office, under the leadership of former Bush White House senior economist Douglas Holtz-Eakin, says I'll have no problem until 2052, when I'll be 83. After that, they say, there will be a reduction, but again not an overwhelming one.

As we've said again and again, if the US economy just keeps growing at the rate it has for the last hundred years or more, any problems are likely a good deal further out into the future.

So, what does this tell us? According to relatively pessimistic forecasts, two government agencies -- one of which is part of a Republican administration and the other under the oversight of a Republican congress -- say I'll get my full benefits for either the first five years of my retirement or the first fifteen years. After that, if nothing changes at all, I'll probably keep drawing three-quarters of my benefits. And even if I'm only drawing that three-quarters it'll still be more than today's retirees draw even in inflation-adjusted dollars.

This disconnect suggests one of three possibilities.

One is that the president has been briefed on certain highly classified budget projections which show a far more dire situation than the government's non-classified budgeting estimates would have us believe. We'll call this the secret evidence hypothesis.

Another possibility is that President Bush believes that the US government will default on the Treasury notes held by the Social Security Administration. Let's call this the Harken Energy hypothesis. If it's neither of these we can only conclude that as he has done repeatedly before, this president is deceiving the people he has sworn to serve and defend in order to achieve a policy goal he cannot manage by honest means.

Indeed, it is still more cynical and deliberate than that. The president knows he can't say, "No one will get any benefits after 2030, so help me replace Social Security with private accounts." So, just as he and his associates did during the build up to the Iraq war, he uses paraphrases, work-arounds and slippery repetitons to communicate the intended falsehood while still providing himself with sufficient wiggle room to evade being tagged as a liar.

So here, for instance, he states that young people think they'll never collect Social Security benefits. Then he says that's "probably an exaggeration to a certain extent." And then he goes on to say that it's precisely the young people who are knowledgable about Social Security who think this. The clear implication, the meaning he intends to convey, is that this dire prediction is at least more true than not, when in fact, as we've noted, to the extent we can know anything about the future, it's not even close to being true.

Is it a lie if one insinuates something you know to be false -- or which by any reasonable expectation of the future one should expect to be false? Especially if you make the expectably-false statement to scare the listener into doing something highly unpleasant to themselves?

Of course, what Marshall doesn't fully spell out above is that Bush's statements about Social Security's future insolvency are perhaps best seen not as a lie but rather an evasion of responsibility. If Bush's first term tax cuts, especially the estate tax cuts, are made permanent, then we may indeed have a fiscal crisis on our hands which will severely jeopardize Social Security's solvency. What's particularly cynical (but not precisely a prevarication) about Bush's stance is that he represents this potential future insolvency as if it were some lamentable but essentially natural state of affairs, a result of the unfortunate way in which the program was designed. He avoids any suggestion that his own macroeconomic policies have radically increased the risk of future insolvency.

(What's the right word for this? As I say, I am not sure "lying" or "prevarication" is exactly the right word. Dissembling? Double-dealing? Deceit? Duplicity? Is the nature of this pitch more of a swindle, a con, a fraud, or a snow job? Put another way, what is the character of a person who behaves this way? Insincere? Faithless? Tricky? Unscrupulous?)

All of which suggests that the Democrats put forth a very clear case to the American people: do you want to make the tax cuts permanent (cost: $11.3b)? Or do you want to keep the Social Security and Medicare programs intact (cost: $3.7b and $8.1b, respectively)? You could even ask the question more pointedly: has your paycheck increased enough as a result of the George Bush tax cut that you're happy giving up Social Security and Medicare?

What getting hit by an IED looks like

Gnarly footage of a US convoy in Iraq getting hit by a car bomb. It's not gruesome, but does give a clear sense of what we're up against in Iraq.

Looking at those pictures reminds me of the scene in "The Godfather, Part II," when Michael explains to Hyman Roth why, after all, investing in Cuba (this is 1958) might not be such a swell idea:

Michael: I saw a strange thing today. Some rebels were being arrested. One of them pulled the pin on a grenade. He took himself and the captain of the command with him. Now, soldiers are paid to fight; the rebels aren't.

Hyman: What does that tell you?

Michael: It means they could win.

Could win, hm, yes...

Aphorism 125: The Madman

Richard Holloway, former Anglican bishop of Edinburgh, has has a succinct and extraordinary piece in today's International Herald Tribune on the challenge of salvaging religious liberalism. The problem, he admits, is that Nietzsche was right -- God is dead:

He died the death of a thousand cuts inflicted by some of his own followers. Decent people, they could not resist the attractive freedoms of secular society, so they tried to teach their ancient god new tricks. They wanted him to go easy on women, for instance, and to stop beating up gays: a courageous thing to attempt when the old monster had already set down his opinion on those subjects in the Bible. The attempt to liberalize Christianity was honorable, but when you subject a religion to meticulous historical and scientific analysis you expose all its violent absurdities and doom it in the eyes of the very people to whom you are trying to commend it. This is why the most humane and tolerant species of religion on earth today, Liberal Protestantism, is also the most endangered.

The Pope, a fervent champion of the old god, understands this, which is why he resists any attempt to adapt Roman Catholicism to the emancipatory values of secular democracy. The popes of Evangelical Protestantism understand this, which is why they crow with delight at the death of Liberal Christianity and gloat over their capture of the citadel of American democracy.

What neither group realizes is that they are themselves dancing on the grave of God. The fact that humans are at war over religion is evidence that there no longer is a single, absolute and universally compelling meaning to life. There no longer is a unifying authority to which humanity can submit or against which it can rebel. In other words: God is dead.

Even the confident religions know this.

What Holloway doesn't do is ask why religious illiberalism, i.e. fundamentalism, has arisen with renewed force now, when for so long, in the middle portions of the twentieth century, it seemed clear that fanatical religiosity was headed for the proverbial dustbin.

In my view, the return of illiberal religion can only be understood as part of the aftermath of the slow death of chiliasm's only significant secular challenger, namely socialism. As the Communist God slowly shrivelled and died -- and it doesn't much matter whether you date that death to 1917, 1921, 1934, 1938, 1956, 1968, 1989 or 1991 -- people were left with only two options: either to live for materialist consumerism (for a while, in the 1990s, the American media treated "markets" almost as a new kind of god), or to return to the older, angrier gods.

Holloway rightly rejects the latter option, mostly on cognitive grounds: the fact remains that God is still dead, no matter what Osama bin Laden or James Dobson or George Bush or Tony Blair think. Eppur si muove. But Holloway also presumes that all material consumerism must inevitably veer into ugly, soulless excess -- which is why, despite his effort at uplifting verse, his essay comes off as so pessimistic.

But is it true that the material world created by capitalism is necessarily ugly and soulless? Am I automatically an over-sophisticated cynic if I find sufficient happiness in the minutiae of my daily life? The joy I get from hearing my daughter's shriek of delight when she hears me enter the front door in the evening? The pleasure I get from eating a delicious dinner with my wife? The sense of workmanship I get from doing my job well?

These things are enough for me, but perhaps there is a class bias at work here. A sense of upward mobility as a Silicon Valley middle manager no doubt helps to fend off the existential malaise, or at least to mitigate a larger sense of meaninglessness. If the best job I could ever imagine getting was working check out at Wal-Mart, I might feel the need for something more.

For many people, the collapse of social modernism -- the idea that a meliorist, rationalizing, benevolent, technocratic state could solve all social, economic and perhaps personal ills -- has left in its wake nothing but a spiral of downward mobility, and for such people, the traditional opiate provides a haven. In a world in which most people's economic prospects are in steady decline, the need for metaphysical redemption becomes ever more compelling. In other words, the crisis of the humanist dream of redeeming the material world explains the reemergence over the last thirty years of politicized fundamentalism in both Muslim and Christian societies.

Just as many French and English Romantics of the 1800s-20s returned to Catholicism in the 1830s-1850s when their youthful dreams petered out, so as the "romance of economic development" died in the 1980s, many would-be economic romantics returned to religion.

This dynamic explains both the nature of Republican Party in the United States today, and the rise of militant Islamic fundamentalism in the Middle East over the last three decades.

Time is not on our side

David Ignatius's op-ed piece in today's WaPo points out, rightly enough, that looking at the historical record suggests that you can only beat an insurgency by convincing the insurgents that nothing they can do will convince you to leave. This process, according to American military planners Ignatius cites, takes an average of nine years.

The problem is that convincing Iraqi insurgents that nothing they can do will convince us to leave is directly at odds with Bush's stated exit strategy -- "We will stay as long as necessary to get the job done, and then we will leave." Indeed, convincing insurgents that you're not leaving is, by definition, at odds with any exit strategy.

You can only beat insurgents if they believe, they really believe, that you don't plan ever to exit. Of course, if Bush were to tell the American public that the goal was a neverending occupation of Iraq, the collapse of the last shreds of public support would be instant. (This, incidentally, is what the neocons are referring to when they wring their hands about the American people not having the "character" necessary to be "good imperialists.") But unless we say that, we can't beat the insurgency.

Then again, as Igantius goes on to point out, even if you have the absolute commitment to stay forever, you still may not win. An absolute commitment is, in short, a necessary but not a sufficient condition for victory against an insurgency. Even when the occupiers are in fact absolutely committed to staying -- think of the French in Algeria -- they often lose anyway.

With all this in mind -- basically, having accepted that we are losing and in fact cannot win against the iraqi insurgency -- Ignatius goes on to propose a recalibration of goals, boiling down to three points:

• To keep the country de jure intact, learn to live with a regime with an anti-American ideology, since anti-Americanism is the most likely unifying ideology sectarian lines
• To have the best shot at avoiding a civil war, learn to live with de facto partition, more or less along the lines of the antebellum Northern and Southern "No Fly Zones"
• To prevent an Islamist takeover, learn to live with an Iraqi regime that makes Islamists "up each morning afraid that they will die" -- i.e. a regime with a ruthlessly murderous secret police

If you look at those three conditions, it sounds an awful lot like... replicating Saddam's old regime. You can see why the Bush regime is loathe to go down this path, which will be ugly no matter how much spin and gloss is applied.

Then again, perhaps there is a way to square this circle: perhaps Bush can exercise what we might call "the Caeserist option," to declare forthrightly that America is an empire and not a republic. Neocons like pop historian Niall Ferguson actually advocate something like this . He says that American should accept that they are an imperial nation and indeed embrace this role. The desirte to believe that "America just doesn’t do empire. After all, we threw off the colonialist yoke in order to establish our free institutions," is, in his view, "precisely the problem." The people of the United States, in his view, need to get over the romantic idea that other people have the right to self-determination, and just instead set the world straight. "Having undertaken the overthrow, the regime change in Iraq," Ferguson argued, "there is no alternative but to follow through successfully with the project of nation-building, no alternative other than a chaotic and miserable end."

But Ferguson is wrong. Not because the end won't be chaotic and miserable -- it will be. He's wrong because his assumes that successful nation-building is actually still an option, that all we need is the will to do it. But that's not true. Moreover, there is an alternative to nation-building, and it's one that will soon be exercised.

When that happens, the world won't come to an end when this alternative gets execrised. What will come to an end, however, are the neocons' Cromwellian fantases of creating an empire of righteousness. And that's the real reason they're hysterical about the prospect of American withdrawal from Iraq.

From Bosnia to Baghdad: How the U.S. ended up alone with the mess in Iraq

How did we arrive at this heinous, insuperable mess in Iraq? More precisely, how did the U.S. ended up on the hook, all but alone, for dealing with the disaster in Iraq? These questions have been answered, mostly, with question-begging partisan platitudes. On the left, these platitudes consist of claims that Bush's recklessness pushed us into a war that was illegitimate from the start. On the right, when the disaster is even acknowledged (as it increasingly is), the answer has been to ventilate mightly about alleged Parisian perfidy.

While both of these answers contain an element of truth, each alone fails to constitute a complete answer to the question of how we ended up in Iraq, by ourselves and increasingly desperate straits. What follows is an attempt to construct a first draft of how historians may explain how the U.S. ended up in this situation.

Great Power Consensus-Making in the 1990s
To begin this explanation, we need to go back to the geopolitical situation that emerged in the wake of the Cold War. Over the course of the 1990s, it became increasingly apparent that international terrorism and state failure were the primary strategic challenges facing the Great Powers, the United States in particular. The bombings of the World Trade Center in 1993, the African embassies in 1998, and the U.S.S. Cole in 2000 underscored the terrorist threat. And the Balkans, Central and West Africa, Timor, Somalia and Afghanistan exemplified the problem of state failure.

The policy response to these crises by the Great Powers—and here I am thinking of the permanent members of the Security Council, as well as sometimes the European Union collective or the NATO political command structure—emerged fitfully over the course of the 1990s, not through the exposition of foreign policy doctrine, but rather through de facto arrangements and a series of consistent patterns.

This emergent policy pattern may be described as one of "do nothing until there is Great Power consensus." The principle was quite straight-forward: as a crisis unfolded, the Great Powers would bicker and struggle among themselves to reach a consensus on what was to be done. Until that consensus was reached, nothing would happen. While this manner of approaching post-Cold War conflicts gave the impression of foreign ministers fiddling while Srebrenica or Kigali burned, it did have the advantage of preventing conflicts in small states from, 1914-style, precipitating conflicts between the Great Powers.

This consensus-seeking approach had an additional benefit. If things turned out to be more difficult in the post-conflict situation than anticipated, the solidarity among the Great Powers created by the initially painful process of consensus-building tended to stiffen collective resolve about long-term commitments—the notable instance being Bosnia and Kosovo, where tens of thousands of U.N. and NATO forces remain in situ, keeping the peace and (we may hope) building institutions.

The Internationalist Division of War Labor
When the Great Powers did manage to reach consensus on what to do about a given crisis, moreover, the way the chose to implement policy in the 1990s was remarkably consistent: the United States would lead a military campaign, with some support from Britain, while the post-conflict situation would be handed off to the U.N. or EU, with post-conflict funding supplied by a somewhat wider group.

This division of labor made sense given the relative skills and proclivities of the different powers. On the one hand, the U.S. military had developed such a technology lead that its allies could no longer effectively contribute to U.S. combat modalities. On the other hand, handing off peacekeeping duties to international agencies allowed the U.S. to avoid long non-combat commitments of American armed forces that were increasingly specializing in a very rarified (and expensive) form of combat.

This division of labor also made sense in terms of the domestic politics of the Great Powers. Whereas the U.S. public warmed to a muscular, martial self-image but disliked long foreign entanglements, European publics preferred to imagine their military engagements as warm and fuzzy efforts to improve the quotidian experience of civilians. Each of these military policies reflected internal political projects on both side of the Atlantic: the Americans wanted bounded engagements where they could kick ass and get out, while the Europeans liked the idea of their military being part of a wider, long-term project of institution-building.

"Transformation" Assumes the 1990s Division of Labor
When George Bush assumed office in 2001, he inherited this manner of conflict-confrontation. In the Pentagon, Don Rumsfeld set about engaging in what he called "Transformation," an effort to make the entire preponderance of American military might capable of engaging in operations which a generation ago would have been the purview of the Special Forces: a highly technologized style of combat, heavily reliant on remote sensing, and capable of extremely accurate application of overwhelming force.

While the bulk of the commentary on Rumsfeld's efforts at Transformation have focused on how it denigrated the traditional full-frontal applications of military force, what has been less remarked on is that Transformation also completely shunted aside any focus on specialization in training the military to manage post-conflict situations. The unstated but crucial underpinning of the success of Transformation as a military doctrine was the assumption that someone else would manage the post-conflict situations created by the application of American military force. The policy success of Transformation, in other words, depended heavily on the American military being used only in a political context in which American policy-makers had ensured that other institutions or groups would manage the clean-up. Shutting down the Army War College's Peacekeeping Institute -- the nation-building and post-conflict studies group -- was emblematic of how Rumsfeld was thinking about the increasingly specialized role of the American military. Ironically, Transformation can thus be said to have made the United States actually far more dependent on our Allies.

Enter 9-11
The immediate response of the European Great Powers to the September 2001 attacks in New York and Washington was to declare solidarity with the United States, with NATO invoking Article V, the collective self-defense clause, for the first time. The internationally shared horror about 9-11, and the fact that the Taliban was unrepentant about housing its planners, relieved the Bush regime from having to do the "hard work" of international consensus building. International leaders (and publics) might be uncomfortable with Bush's evangelically-inspired intonations, might disliked the brutal simplifying of the "Axis of Evil" concept, and were positively appalled by his use of the word "crusade" to describe the U.S.'s approach to spreading democracy. But despite these caveats, none of the Great Powers dissented from the right of the U.S. to wage the war in Afghanistan.

Thus it was that the Great Powers, without serious discussion, agreed to run the campaign against the Taliban according the 1990s playbook: the U.S. would lead the military assault, committing itself to staying on the sharp end of the combat situations; after the fall of the Taliban in November 2001, the U.N. and the E.U. would send in peacekeeping forces to manage the post-conflict situation.

Had Bush's exuberance for military force as the means by which to pursue the campaign against Islamist terrorists ended with the victory over the Taliban (as almost certainly would have happened under a President Gore), we might still find ourselves in the decision-making world of the 1990s. But as we all know, Bush had no intention of stopping with the Taliban. Instead, almost a year to the day after September 11, the Bush regime's National Security Strategy promulgated the infamous "doctrine of preemption," or more accurately, doctrine of preventive war. It was this doctrine that would rupture in the Osama-and-Taliban-forged international consensus, setting the stage for America's current devastating solitude in Iraq. (For more on the "preemption" concept, check out this Brookings report.)

In this doctrine, the Bush regime set out the right of the United States to wage war whenever and wherever it reached the conclusion that it was necessary to do so, without the need to consult with international agencies. The doctrine furthermore stated not just that immediate (or even medium-range) security threats would constitute sufficient grounds for military action, but also that an active project of promoting democracy might well also constitute grounds for the application of American military force. Most importantly, the Bush Doctrine suggested that the threat matrix facing the world was so severe, and often so reliant on covertly-gathered intelligence, that in many cases there might be no time for diplomatic consensus building. The doctrine was one of action, not talk.

Whatever merits one may or may not ascribe to the Bush Doctrine's assessment of the threat matrix facing the United States, what is absolutely clear is that the doctrine of preemption, combined with the right of the U.S. to make unilateral decisions about which wars to fight, put the Europeans and international nation-building agencies in a pickle. If it was one thing to agree with the U.S. on a de facto division of labor for resolving international crises, it was another thing altogether for the U.S. to arrogate to itself the sole right to pick the fights, and still expect to have others come in and do the clean-up work. The Bush doctrine assumed that the Americans would have the unilateral right to pick the battles, while the international agencies and foreign peacekeepers were expected to fall into line to do their usual 1990s post-conflict tasks.

For the Europeans, the Bush Doctrine sounded like the U.S. arrogating the right to commit its allies' troops to conflicts (or rather, to post-conflicts), without the need for the U.S. to consult with those allies in advance. Just as the U.S. would never given any other country the right to commit (or not commit) our troops somewhere, several of the other Great Powers had no intention of letting the U.S.'s claim of a similar right stand.

Putting the Bush Doctrine to the Test in Iraq
The very first test case after the promulgation of the Bush Doctrine that brought the issue to a head. Not only did the Europeans did not want to allow the Bush regime to set a precedent legitimating the Bush Doctrine, but a shattered post-totalitarian Iraq was in any event a mess the Europeans did not want responsibility for cleaning up.

Even as the Europeans, led by France, insisted on this point through the winter of 2002-2003, Bush began to mass American troops for an invasion of Iraq. At Colin Powell's behest, Bush in fact pursued a less unilateralist approach to diplomacy than his doctrine might have suggested, continuously keeping up the pressure at the U.N. to have the Security Council explicitly authorize an American-led invasion of Iraq.

It was apparent all winter, however, that the French would veto such a vote. But the Bush regime kept up the U.N. efforts with the hope that, if they at least gained a majority vote of the Security Council, then that would be enough to claim international moral legitimacy for the invasion. (An additional reason for pursuing this ruse was that, had it been successful, it would have had the salutary benefit of de facto stripping the other Great Powers of their Security Council veto.) But when the final political push in the U.N. came in February-March 2003, it became apparent that the Bush regime was going to fail to get even a bare majority of the U.N. Security Council to explicitly authorize the pending War in Iraq. Though the American right-wing establishment singled out French foreign minister Dominique de Villepin, as the chief organizer of the opposition to the war, the humiliating fact was that the Bush regime, despite bribes and threats, had failed to convince even close allies and neighbors like Canada or Mexico to vote its way.

The "Pottery Barn" Rule
And so, as we all know, the American invasion of Iraq, Gulf War II, ensued, without the support – though, it must be clearly noted, also without the active opposition – of other Great Powers (Britain excepted). Essentially, the result of the winter 2003 Security Council dickering was that Old Europeans said to the Americans: go ahead and invade, but postwar Iraq will be your problem now, not ours. Thus was born what Colin Powell called "the Pottery Barn rule," which he explained to the President meant that "If you break it, you own it." Whereas previously, when American military might had broken something (like the Taliban or Serbian nationalist will), the U.N. ended up owning it, in the case of Iraq case, it was going to be all America, all the time. As the proverb goes, be careful what you wish for.

The problem was, however, that the U.S. military had over the course of the 1990s ceased to be designed (if, indeed, it ever was designed) to deal with post-conflict situations - a tendency only exacerbated by Rumsfeld's push for Transformation. On the contrary, the U.S. military had systematically deemphasized any effort to develop institutional competency in post-conflict management and institution-building. The American military had not led a nation-building project anywhere since the Somalia disaster of the early 1990s, and instead had come to expect that it could outsource post-conflict management to the Europeans and the U.N.

In the heat of the initial phase of the war, however, none of this was top of mind. Instead, the American military focused on the task at hand, a task for which it had become orders of magnitude better than anything before seen in history. The initial course of the military campaign was, to no one's great surprise, a smashing success. In six weeks or so the U.S. ran roughshod over the (admittedly defanged) Iraqi military. Some mistakes may have been made, like not properly securing ammo and weapons dumps, but overall the military earned the plaudits Bush bestowed it aboard the aircraft carrier in San Diego in May 2003: the Mission, in purely military terms, had certainly been Accomplished. At first blush, it seemed like a dramatic vindication of both the Bush Doctrine, and Rumsfeld's Transformation.

Ignoring the Dependency between Means and Ends
Then the postwar reality began to set in. While the major combat operations might have been successfully concluded, we still needed to build a nation (or, more properly, a democratic state) in Iraq, and unfortunately, the guys we usually invited in to do that part of the job had turned down the invitation. Everything from the get-go about the way the postwar situation was handled was, in retrospect, a complete disaster. Which was hardly a surprise, given that complete amateurs the Bush regime put in charge. We might have the most amazing army in the world for fighting wars, but for nation-building the American army was second-rate at best, and the civilian free-market ideologues were even worse.

Imagine if a Hollywood producer had spent a huge amount of money to bring an all-star cast to film in a remote location, only to discover that the people in he was expecting to building the sets and cook the meals and manage the trailers hadn't signed their contract, and weren't showing up. Of course, that would only cost the producer a few tens of millions of dollars. In the case of the Iraq war, Bush's decision to "go into production" without the full competencies required to succeed was about to cost hundreds of billions of dollars and tens of thousands of lives.

Of course, Bush chose to ignore this dependency, and to go into the fight without the capacities necessary to succeed -- capacities which, much to his current chagrin, were only available in consultation with his allies.

At the root of the insuperability of the current conflict is thus the fact that the process of military Transformation is fundamentally at odds with the insistence of the Bush regime on diplomatic unilateralism – our Transformed army is simply not designed to take on the holistic nation-building requirements implied by "going it alone." In short, Rumsfeld's Transformed military is not a suitable vehicle for the solo 21st century imperial projects that the likes of Bill Kristol, Max Boot, or Niall Ferguson yearn for. A military suited for such projects would have to be one equally (perhaps more) adept at various kinds of post-conflict stabilization, as at actually hard-toothed fighting.

Many commentators, especially on the right, have excoriated Rumsfeld for saying that, "You go to war with the army you have" – and rightly so, since as head of the DoD, he is responsible for "the army we have." But at the same time, the Commander-in-Chief has to be held responsible for not engaging us in conflicts for which our military is ill-suited. In other words, he should not get us involved in conflicts in which nation-building would be part of the requirement imposed on the Transformed U.S. army. With his Texas-style diplomacy, Bush failed to rally the relevant Allies (that is, the Allies with nation-building expertise), but then decided to go to war anyway. Political leaders who choose to fight wars they cannot win deserve the blame for the losses.

Pace Niall Ferguson, and more akin to Robert Nye's "soft power" thesis, the U.S. does not have an army suited for imperial adventures abroad. The stupidity of the war in Iraq is that this was actually a known fact, a fact that had been produced by design, on the assumption that the internationalist division of labor from the 1990s would hold. Bush thought he could keep the division of labor, which had been built into the battle strategy of the American army itself, but jettison the diplomatic aspect of it. Hence the mess in Iraq.

Exit Iraq?

What are the feelings this morning of all those who voted for Bush, because they believed he (unlike Kerry, supposedly) had the stones to stick it out in Iraq, as they read that Washington is awash with rumors of the Bush regime planning a quick exit from Iraq after the January 30 election? What are the feelings of liberal hawks, who supported the war because they thought it would mke Iraqi lives better, when they read that many forecast that the best case scenario is for the U.S. to withdraw to the sidelines and just allow the inevitable Civil War to ensue?

Stay posted for a longer note on how we ended up in this mess.

Truman, on the uses of government

"The use of the powers of Government to achieve a higher living standard and a fair deal for all the people is not statism and it is not socialism. It is part of the American tradition." – Harry S Truman, May 10, 1950

Iraqification not coming any time soon

So, we're already losing the war in Iraq. But the stated plan has been to turn the place over to the new Iraqi forces themselves, so that the loss can happen on their watch. Apparently even that weak plan now may be off the table, according to a new State Department report chronicling the sorry state of the Iraqi forces. Money quotes:

In some of the most violent areas of the country, Iraqi forces have been ''rendered ineffective," the State Department wrote in the report dated Jan. 5. Due to intimidation and attacks by insurgents, ''large numbers" of police, highway patrol, and border enforcement personnel ''have quit or abandoned their stations," it said. And many units are still waiting for key equipment such as rifles and ammunition, the report said....

Pentagon officials now acknowledge, however, that most of the 121,000 Iraqi security forces that have been trained so far are substandard and have little chance of standing up to insurgents seeking to upend plans for the Jan. 30 vote. Some say a wholesale restructuring of the training process may be required -- what one unnamed official described as ''starting from square one." Training is now divided among various agencies and tasks, and some police are being put on the streets after just two weeks of preparation.

Yet President Magoo keeps claiming that Iraqis are assuming "more and more responsibility for their own security." Dancing elephants, pigs on the wing, bears doing their thing on toilets....

AG nominee implies that President can authorize torture

Slate's Chris Suellentrop has a compelling take on Attorney General-nominee Alberto Gonzalez's confirmation testimony before the Senate today. Members of the Judiciary Committee asked in various ways whether Gonzalez believes the president has the power to authorize torture by immunizing American personnel from prosecution for it.

The short story is that Gonzalez refused to answer with a simple "No." Instead, he preferred to reiterate fatuous platitudes about the the United States being "a nation of laws and not of men," and that the President doesn't believe in torture, and that Abu Ghraib made him sick. Even if Congress authorized the President to immunize torture, Gonzalez said, Bush wouldn't do it because Bush doesn't believe in torture. Note that this is very different from saying that the President doesn't have the legal right to immunize torture.

Now, Americans may or may not be interested in the Attorney General's opinion of the President's character or ethical beliefs; but what we certainly should be extremely interested in is the AG's opinions about the legality of various acts. For example, we ought to be interested in the AG's opinion of the legality of such momentous acts as whether the President can and should authorize the torture captured foreigners (some but inevtiably not all of whom are terrorists). And it was precisely this question that Gonzalez dodged by gesturing towards the alleged good character of the people running our government.

Charming.

George Bush, AKA President Magoo

Things are going great in Iraq, according to the President, who today rejected a prediction by Brent Scowcroft (his dad's National Security advisor) that the January 30 elections in Iraq will merely be a prelude to "an incipient civil war." As evidence to the contrary, Bush noted that in 14 of Iraq's 18 provinces things "appear to be relatively calm."

Problem is, the 4 provinces where things are "relatively uncalm" contain half of Iraq's population. Moreover, if the U.S.'s military planners are right, the violence is only going to get worse between now and the end of the month. The all but inevitable result will be that the elections will be widely viewed as illegitimate. And that cannot help but spur sectarian (and possibly ethnic) discord.

Two new reviews of "Kansas"

In a basically flattering review, New Left Review discusses Thomas Frank's book What's the Matter with Kansas and comes to conclusions similar to my own:

For all his spirited retorts to hucksters like David Brooks, Frank flinches from acknowledging the core of cold truth in their legends and demagogic stereotypes. In the recent Presidential election, the Democrats picked the wealthiest individual since George Washington ever to run for the White House as their candidate, outgunned the Republicans 59 to 41 per cent among donors with assets over $10 million, outspent Bush in every swing state of the Union, and hit an all-time financial record for a senatorial campaign: $17 million in a failed attempt to get Daschle back on the Hill. Moreover, there is little that is new in this: since the nineties virtually all of the richest electoral districts in the country have been Democratic bastions, Clinton's cash-mountain easily topped Dole's in 1996, and the Democrats have regularly received larger individual donations than Republicans, whose strength has been among smaller donors. In this situation, workers who vote Republican may be less deluded than Frank seems to believe. Putting it in sociological language, since there is so little to choose 'instrumentally' between the two parties, each of them dedicated to capital unbound, why not at least get the satisfaction of voting 'expressively' for the one which seems to speak for their values, if not their interests?

In other words, that fact that Clinton remade the Democratic Party into"the other party of big business" makes it perfectly reasonable for working class populists to vote Republican. These populists want to vote against some elite group. The Republicans give them the option of voting against intellectual and cultural elites; whereas the Democrats, having eschewed any systematic critique of the depredations of the filthy rich, don't take a stand against any elites whatsoever.

Then there's also this piece in BE Press, in which Brian Glenn contextualizes Frank's description of the rightwing neopopulist backlash as part of what historians refer to as the Fourth Great Awakening.

The term "Great Awakenings" refers to an upsweep of evangelical protestant fervor, which has periodically befallen the United States; the first happened in the middle of the eighteenth century; the second ran from the 1840s through the 1870s; the third at the end of the nineteenth century, and the fourth began in the 1970s and is (we can only hope) currently at its apogee.

Glenn points out that at the core of each Great Awakening has been "a question of equality," with each Great Awakening leading "to a more egalitarian society as members of the lowest end of the socioeconomic spectrum found in their religious beliefs a justification for their demanding a more equal footing with the elite they saw above them." But whereas earlier Great Awakenings focused their egalitarian impulses on things like racial hierarchies (the abolitionist movement was part of the Second Great Awakening) or economic hierarchies (as with William Jennings Bryan's "Cross of Gold" speech), the current Great Awakening is focused on tearing down intellectual and cultural hierarchies. (Glenn argues that this is because the poverty of the poor in America is no longer abject, freeing them to focus on their "spiritual poverty.")

Years ago, Tom Lehrer pointed out that taking the American egalitarian ideal to its logical conclusion meant prohibiting discrimination not only on the grounds of race, creed and color, but also on ability. Lehrer's bon mot yields a deep insight the nature of the "egalitarianism" propounded by the neopopulist right today. Its profound anti-intellectualism and anti-scientism is in fact an egalitarianism of the intellect: expertise is just another opinion.

Where our tax dollars go

An eye-opening graphical depiction of how the government divvies up our tax (and debt) dollars.

Diebold and ES&S

As readers of this blog should by now be aware, I am not by inclination inclined toward conspiracy theories. But given the astronomically unlikely discrepency between the exit polls and the actual polls in the November election, some kind of explanation is required.

With that in mind, this site puts a lot of dots on the page that collectively suggest that something fishy is taking place with how votes get counted in the United States. Specifically, over 80% of the votes in this country are counted by two firms (Diebold and ES&S), at least one of which is run by a fervent Bush supporter who hired a convicted hacker to help write the program. Judge for yourself....

Kirkuk, the new Krajina?

Juan Cole argues that partition is not a solution to the unfolding disaster in Iraq. He argues that since Iraq's ethnic and religious divisions are not neatly geographically divided, any attempt to draw new borders would merely make the designation of those borders a new casus belli.

Then again, maybe the U.S. will "pull a Balkan," and facilitate regional ethnic cleansing in Iraq the same way it allowed Croatia to displace a couple hundred thousand Serbs from the Krajina in August 1995 (and four years later helped the ethnic Albanians in Kosovo to do something similar). The unpleasant truth, which no one except the Israeli settler movement likes to say out loud, is that ethnic cleansing works -- if by "work" we mean resolve claims over the division of territory between competing ethnic groups.

However, Cole is right that the situation in Iraq is made more complicated by the fact that partition would almost certainly drive the Sunni Arabs into the arms of al-Qaeda in large numbers. And notes, ominously, that "Some Iraqi guerrillas are already talking about hitting back at the US mainland." It's one thing to create resentful Serbs; it's another to create resentful Islamic fanatics.

Then again, we're already doing that....

More insurgents than U.S. soldiers?

At least one Iraqi expert thinks so. The head of Iraq's intelligence service estimates that more than 200,000 Iraqis are involved in the insurgency against the U.S.:

The number is far higher than the US military has so far admitted and paints a much grimmer picture of the challenge facing the Iraqi authorities and their British and American backers as elections loom in four weeks.

"I think the resistance is bigger than the US military in Iraq. I think the resistance is more than 200,000 people," General Muhammad Abdullah Shahwani, director of Iraq's new intelligence services, said....

General Shahwani said that there were at least 40,000 hardcore fighters attacking US and Iraqi troops, with the bulk made up of part-time guerrillas and volunteers providing logistical support, information, shelter and money.

"People are fed up after two years without improvement," he said. "People are fed up with no security, no electricity, people feel they have to do something. The army [dissolved by the American occupation authority] was hundreds of thousands. You'd expect some veterans would join with their relatives, each one has sons and brothers."

The strategy behind Bush's judicial renominations

The Democrats appear not to understand the point of Bush's exhumation of failed judicial nominees from his first term. Most of the Democrats seem to think that Bush is trying to use the new Republican majorities to ram through nominees who failed earlier.

But that's not the point at all.

On the contrary, what's at work here is a political strategy focused not on the lower courts, but on the Supreme Court. The Republican leadership is very much expecting (perhaps even hoping) that the Democrats will filibuster each and every one of these re-nominees. In setting up this spectacle, the Republicans' goal is to develop a narrative line that focuses not on the extremist view of the judges, but on the procedural issue of the Democrats' "obstructionism." The goal is to manufacture evidence that provides a pretext for invoking the "nuclear option" of killing the filibuster, just in time for the truly crucial nominations to the Supreme Court.

The Democrats need to understand that this is the larger political strategy, and respond accordingly. The DNC need to develop talking points on this topic that every member of the caucus can repeat from memory. They need to mount a concerted media campaign explaining the extremism of each of the candidates they oppose, that consistently points to the huge majorities that favor their social positions, and that focuses on how out of touch with the values of ordinary Americans the Republican establishment is. In short, the Democrats need to keep the media firmly fixed on the larger picture.

More evidence of Iraqi state failure...

The Economist has an article (password req.) which will makes sobering reading for anyone who thinks things are moving our way in Iraq. The lede is disturbing enough:

There is only one traffic law in Ramadi these days: when Americans approach, Iraqis scatter. Horns blaring, brakes screaming, the midday traffic skids to the side of the road as a line of Humvee jeeps ferrying American marines rolls the wrong way up the main street. Every vehicle, that is, except one beat-up old taxi. Its elderly driver, flapping his outstretched hand, seems, amazingly, to be trying to turn the convoy back. Gun turrets swivel and lock on to him, as a hefty marine sergeant leaps into the road, levels an assault rifle at his turbanned head, and screams: "Back this bitch up, motherfucker!"

The old man should have read the bilingual notices that American soldiers tack to their rear bumpers in Iraq: "Keep 50m or deadly force will be applied." In Ramadi, the capital of central Anbar province, where 17 suicide-bombs struck American forces during the month-long Muslim fast of Ramadan in the autumn, the marines are jumpy. Sometimes, they say, they fire on vehicles encroaching within 30 metres, sometimes they fire at 20 metres: "If anyone gets too close to us we fucking waste them," says a bullish lieutenant. "It's kind of a shame, because it means we've killed a lot of innocent people."

And not all of them were in cars. Since discovering that roadside bombs, known as Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs), can be triggered by mobile telephones, marines say they shoot at any Iraqi they see handling a phone near a bomb-blast. Bystanders to an insurgent ambush are also liable to be killed. Sometimes, the marines say they hide near the body of a dead insurgent and kill whoever comes to collect it. According to the marine lieutenant: "It gets to a point where you can't wait to see guys with guns, so you start shooting everybody...It gets to a point where you don't mind the bad stuff you do."

One shudders to think how these soldiers will adjust when they get back home to an American society that still obsessing away about holiday shopping and "Girls Gone Wild." Then there's this:

American marines and GIs frequently display contempt for Iraqis, civilian or official. Thus the 18-year-old Texan soldier in Mosul who, confronted by jeering schoolchildren, shot canisters of buckshot at them from his grenade-launcher. "It's not good, dude, it could be fatal, but you gotta do it," he explained. Or the marines in Ramadi who, on a search for insurgents, kicked in the doors of houses at random, in order to scream, in English, at trembling middle-aged women within: "Where's your black mask?" and "Bitch, where's the guns?" In one of these houses was a small plastic Christmas tree, decorated with silver tinsel. "That tells us the people here are OK," said Corporal Robert Joyce.

According to army literature, American soldiers should deliver the following message before searching a house: "We are sorry for the inconvenience, but we must search your house to make sure you are safe from anti-Iraqi forces [AIF]." In fact, many Iraqis are probably more scared of American troops than of insurgents.

Whether or not the insurgency is fuelled by American clumsiness, it has deepened and spread almost every month since the occupation began. In mid-2003, Donald Rumsfeld, America's defence secretary, felt able to dismiss the insurgents as "a few dead-enders". Shortly after, official estimates put their number at 5,000 men, including many foreign Islamic extremists. That figure has been revised to 20,000, including perhaps 2,000 foreigners, not counting the thousands of hostile fighters American and British troops have killed; these are the crudest of estimates.

With insurgents reported to be dispensing criminal justice and levying taxes, some American officers say they run a "parallel administration". Last month in Mosul, insurgents are reported to have beheaded three professional kidnappers and to have manned road checkpoints dressed in stolen police uniforms. In Tal Afar, farther west, insurgents imposed a 25% cut in the price of meat.

What differentiates the state from mere gangsterism is legitimacy, specifically a monopoly on legitimacy. The Americans don't have such a monopoly, and neither do the insurgents. In short, what we've created in Iraq is a failed state in which gangsterism is the dominant flavor of life.

A beautiful word portrait of Theo Van Gogh

From Ian Buruma, one of my favorite writers:

Theo van Gogh--fat, blond, absurdly generous toward his friends and madly vindictive toward his enemies, a worshipper of Roman Polanski, a talented filmmaker who never had enough patience to produce a masterpiece, a heavy smoker and consumer of cocaine and fine wines, a columnist of some style and shocking vulgarity, a doting father, a disgusting slob adored by many women, a provocateur, and a man of principle--had embarked on a very different kind of war: a war against what he regarded as hypocrisy and cant.

The whole piece is worth reading to understand how Western European nations are allowing fundamentalist fanatics to take advantage of the spirit of tolerance and laws of free assembly and speech to organize against the societies they occupy.

Something similar is happening in the United States.

Not much to celebrate

Life became worse for large numbers of Iraqis in 2004. Suicide car bombings, gun battles, kidnappings, beheadings and assassinations killed thousands of people, sometimes more than a hundred on a single day....

Karim Wamidh, 54, an employee at the Ministry of Agriculture in Tikrit, about 90 miles north of Baghdad and the home town of deposed president Saddam Hussein, said he had high hopes for the country when 2004 began.

"We thought with the coming of the new year, we could have a new life, freedom, justice and security," he said. "But what happened during the year was very disappointing. A high level of unemployment, terrorism increased and poverty spread."

Wamidh said he would hope for better days in 2005.

"Maybe the situation will change after we get the elected government," he said, referring to elections scheduled for Jan. 30, "although I don't think anything would change with the existence of occupation in the country."

Speaks for itself.