Remember the stories about how Enron set up a fake boiler room that it used on guided tour for investors, to show that sales were booming?
Well the military under Ken Lay's former best friend may have been doing something similar, this time to fool members of Congress into thinking interrogations at Guantanamo were producing something useful.
Friday, April 29, 2005
The fruit of the GWOT: global terrorism increases
Any rightwingers want to comment on the terrorism statistics released Wednesday? 2003 saw 175 incidents that killed 625, whereas 2004 witnessed 651 such attacks that killed 1,907. Mission Accomplished!
Actually, it's not hard to guess the spin that the wingjobs will put on these facts. They'll argue two contradictory things. First, they'll argue that you can't really compare the two numbers because the methodology for counting terrorist attacks has changed. Second, they'll say that this proves we need to double-down on our current bets, that the need for a full-frontal assault on terrorist states is clearly greater than ever. Since they obviously would also have taken credit if the terror statistics had decreased, this is clearly nothing more than the usual heads-we-win-tails-you-lose intellectual style the pro-GWOTters have taught us to love.
But the fact is, global terror is on the rise on Bush's watch. There's the legacy, baby.
Actually, it's not hard to guess the spin that the wingjobs will put on these facts. They'll argue two contradictory things. First, they'll argue that you can't really compare the two numbers because the methodology for counting terrorist attacks has changed. Second, they'll say that this proves we need to double-down on our current bets, that the need for a full-frontal assault on terrorist states is clearly greater than ever. Since they obviously would also have taken credit if the terror statistics had decreased, this is clearly nothing more than the usual heads-we-win-tails-you-lose intellectual style the pro-GWOTters have taught us to love.
But the fact is, global terror is on the rise on Bush's watch. There's the legacy, baby.
"Yosemite Sam" Bolton
More people coming out the woodwork to testify that Bolton punishes dissenters. Then again, if punishing dissent is a crime, then most of the Bush team needs to go. Call it the Ann-Coulterization of the rightwing political culture, where the distinction between dissent and treachery is aggressively denied.
Housing bubble
Mike Davis offers an ominous article (does he write any other kind?) on the Great American housing bubble. As a San Francisco homeowner, this is a topic of considerable personal interest and anxiety. Based on quick tours of local open houses from the last few weekends, however, I sure don't see much evidence to support Davis's claim that "the bubble has already burst in San Francisco."
Although I don't doubt that we are in the middle (or perhaps at the end) of a housing bubble, it's not clear to me that the housing bubble will necessarily unwind with a massive bust. It's certainly possible that it will unwind not through a crash in nominal prices, but rather via a sustained period of nominal-price stagnation, perhaps twinned with a new permissiveness toward inflation. These quibbles aside, Davis's diagnosis of the relationship between the twin deficits (trade and budget) and the housing and asset bubbles is clearly correct.
The point of this post, however, is not to discuss the economics of the housing bubble, but rather to make an observation about the political geography of the housing bubble--something I haven't seen discussed much elsewhere. Start with an interesting observation: if you go down the list of cities usually mentioned as sitting on the outer edge of the housing bubble (places like Washington DC, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, New York, Boston, Las Vegas, Miami, etc.), it's striking to note that these cities are all Democratic strongholds. By contrast, if you go down the list of strongly Red cities (e.g. Dallas, Houston, Oklahoma City, Memphis, Charlotte, etc.) there's been very little housing inflation.
Curious, no?
One of the few articles I've seen that tries to interrogate this odd conjuncture appeared a couple months back in the American Conservative. In this article, Steve Sailer noted that, "Bush won the 26 states with the least inflation in housing prices between 1980 and 2004" and that instead of looking the Red-Blue split as a rural-urban split, "there's a far better fit between Bush's share of the vote and lack of real estate inflation." Sailer concludes that, "While the arrow of causality no doubt points in multiple directions, it's plausible that the price of a house with a yard can sometimes make the difference between whether or not young adults start down the road to marriage, children, and voting Republican."
Then Sailer's argument takes a different turn. Although he argues that "the Law of Supply and Demand" (note the obeseiant capitalization) explains the divergence of housing market bubbliness, his analysis focuses almost exclusively on the supply variable. Like most Red-versus-Blue state analysts, he places a comparison of Texas and California at the center of his argument, with Houston and San Francisco taken as the emblematic cities. Cities like San Francisco, he argues, simply have nowhere to expand. (What places there are to expand into are less naturally attractive than the urban center. As I say, "flyover country begins at the Altamont Pass.") By contrast, Sailer argues, "in comparison to California, the immense eastern half of Texas is all about equally mediocre. Unlike the western half of Texas, it has enough water and the climate is survivable with air conditioning, but that's about all you can say for it (other than there is some pleasant hill country around Austin, which, not surprisingly, is the scenic blue dot in the middle of the broad red plains of Texas.)"
No doubt there's something to Sailer's argument. Places like San Francisco and Manhattan have nowhere to expand but up, and that's a more expensive proposition than expanding out into as-yet-minimally-developed ranchland. But what's curious about Sailer's argument is that even though he bows furiously at the supply side of the equation, he almost doesn't mention the demand side at all. In fact, a major reason why places like New York and San Francisco have been bid up furiously, whereas places like Houston have not, is that places like New York and San Francisco are exceedingly nice, whereas places like Houston really are not. And in fact, given the politics of the people who live in places like Houston, these places are continuously getting worse (e.g., more and more polluted, fewer and fewer social services), which has helped to keep demand in check. By contrast, the politics of places like New York and San Francisco (encouraging tolerance, diversity, etc.) ensure that these cities are continuously getting nicer, thus driving demand (and prices) ever higher.
At least, that's one interpretation.
Let me make another (somewhat contradictory) observation, which relates to John Jay Chapman's bon mot that "politics is organized hatred." Could it be that the reason that the Bush regime has allowed housing prices to be driven sky-high in the Blue cities is that they don't care about the eventual pain that the crash will cause in those places? The way they look at it, there's been some moderate housing inflation in their favorite towns, which is all to the good, and if those liberals have allowed themselves to get worked up into a frenzy, well, they'll get what's God's got coming to them.
Actually, I don't believe this, because I think the idiots running Bush's economic policy really believe that there's no such thing as a bubble. It's all politics to them. The way they actually look at it, I suspect, is that they've got the liberals on the run into a few enclaves on the Coast, and if the liberals want to bid up the prices there to get away from the Great Red Masses, well, screw 'em.
Although I don't doubt that we are in the middle (or perhaps at the end) of a housing bubble, it's not clear to me that the housing bubble will necessarily unwind with a massive bust. It's certainly possible that it will unwind not through a crash in nominal prices, but rather via a sustained period of nominal-price stagnation, perhaps twinned with a new permissiveness toward inflation. These quibbles aside, Davis's diagnosis of the relationship between the twin deficits (trade and budget) and the housing and asset bubbles is clearly correct.
The point of this post, however, is not to discuss the economics of the housing bubble, but rather to make an observation about the political geography of the housing bubble--something I haven't seen discussed much elsewhere. Start with an interesting observation: if you go down the list of cities usually mentioned as sitting on the outer edge of the housing bubble (places like Washington DC, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, New York, Boston, Las Vegas, Miami, etc.), it's striking to note that these cities are all Democratic strongholds. By contrast, if you go down the list of strongly Red cities (e.g. Dallas, Houston, Oklahoma City, Memphis, Charlotte, etc.) there's been very little housing inflation.
Curious, no?
One of the few articles I've seen that tries to interrogate this odd conjuncture appeared a couple months back in the American Conservative. In this article, Steve Sailer noted that, "Bush won the 26 states with the least inflation in housing prices between 1980 and 2004" and that instead of looking the Red-Blue split as a rural-urban split, "there's a far better fit between Bush's share of the vote and lack of real estate inflation." Sailer concludes that, "While the arrow of causality no doubt points in multiple directions, it's plausible that the price of a house with a yard can sometimes make the difference between whether or not young adults start down the road to marriage, children, and voting Republican."
Then Sailer's argument takes a different turn. Although he argues that "the Law of Supply and Demand" (note the obeseiant capitalization) explains the divergence of housing market bubbliness, his analysis focuses almost exclusively on the supply variable. Like most Red-versus-Blue state analysts, he places a comparison of Texas and California at the center of his argument, with Houston and San Francisco taken as the emblematic cities. Cities like San Francisco, he argues, simply have nowhere to expand. (What places there are to expand into are less naturally attractive than the urban center. As I say, "flyover country begins at the Altamont Pass.") By contrast, Sailer argues, "in comparison to California, the immense eastern half of Texas is all about equally mediocre. Unlike the western half of Texas, it has enough water and the climate is survivable with air conditioning, but that's about all you can say for it (other than there is some pleasant hill country around Austin, which, not surprisingly, is the scenic blue dot in the middle of the broad red plains of Texas.)"
No doubt there's something to Sailer's argument. Places like San Francisco and Manhattan have nowhere to expand but up, and that's a more expensive proposition than expanding out into as-yet-minimally-developed ranchland. But what's curious about Sailer's argument is that even though he bows furiously at the supply side of the equation, he almost doesn't mention the demand side at all. In fact, a major reason why places like New York and San Francisco have been bid up furiously, whereas places like Houston have not, is that places like New York and San Francisco are exceedingly nice, whereas places like Houston really are not. And in fact, given the politics of the people who live in places like Houston, these places are continuously getting worse (e.g., more and more polluted, fewer and fewer social services), which has helped to keep demand in check. By contrast, the politics of places like New York and San Francisco (encouraging tolerance, diversity, etc.) ensure that these cities are continuously getting nicer, thus driving demand (and prices) ever higher.
At least, that's one interpretation.
Let me make another (somewhat contradictory) observation, which relates to John Jay Chapman's bon mot that "politics is organized hatred." Could it be that the reason that the Bush regime has allowed housing prices to be driven sky-high in the Blue cities is that they don't care about the eventual pain that the crash will cause in those places? The way they look at it, there's been some moderate housing inflation in their favorite towns, which is all to the good, and if those liberals have allowed themselves to get worked up into a frenzy, well, they'll get what's God's got coming to them.
Actually, I don't believe this, because I think the idiots running Bush's economic policy really believe that there's no such thing as a bubble. It's all politics to them. The way they actually look at it, I suspect, is that they've got the liberals on the run into a few enclaves on the Coast, and if the liberals want to bid up the prices there to get away from the Great Red Masses, well, screw 'em.
No Child Left Behind
I didn't listen to Bush's whole press conference yesterday, but in the one snipet I did hear, I was surprised to find myself in profoundly agreement with Bush:
Personally, I'm also not against vouchers, I must say, if they were implmented with certain clear provisos: (1) they should be portable across school-district lines; (2) all school districts should provide the same amount; and (3) they should not be portable to schools that promote a specific religious faith.
The first two provisions would render school districts into bureaucracies geared exclusively at managing and defining curricula, rather than a mechanisms for hiving off rich kids from poor. The last provision is to ensure the constitutionality of the vouchers (state funding of parochial schools being an unambiguous example of the government making a law with respect to "an establishment of religion"). If vouchers were instituted along with an across-the-board 40 percent pay raise for all teachers, and a rigorous program of testing and evaluation, it would do this country a world of good. Sadly, however, there is broad bipartisan opposition to this good sense.
The Republicans have gotten out in front of the Democrats on education, no question about it.I know some people are trying to unwind No Child Left Behind. You know, I've heard some states say, Well, we don't like it.
Well, you know, my attitude about no liking it is this: If you teach a child to read and write, it shouldn't bother you whether you measure. That's all we're asking.
The system for too long had just shuffled children through and just hoped for the best. And guess what happened? We had people graduate from high school who were illiterate. And that's just not right in America. It wasn't working.
And so I came to Washington and worked with both Republicans and Democrats -- this is a case of where bipartisanship was really working well -- and we said, Look, we're going to spend more money at the federal level.
But the federal government only spends about 7 percent of the total education budgets around the country.
But we said, Let's the change the attitude. We ought to start with the presumption every child can learn. Not just some. And therefore, if you believe every child can learn then you ought to expect every classroom to teach.
I hear feedback from No Child Left Behind, by the way, and admittedly I get the cook's tour sometimes. But I hear teachers talk to me about how thrilled they are with No Child Left Behind. They appreciate the fact that the system now shows deficiencies early so they can correct those problems.
Personally, I'm also not against vouchers, I must say, if they were implmented with certain clear provisos: (1) they should be portable across school-district lines; (2) all school districts should provide the same amount; and (3) they should not be portable to schools that promote a specific religious faith.
The first two provisions would render school districts into bureaucracies geared exclusively at managing and defining curricula, rather than a mechanisms for hiving off rich kids from poor. The last provision is to ensure the constitutionality of the vouchers (state funding of parochial schools being an unambiguous example of the government making a law with respect to "an establishment of religion"). If vouchers were instituted along with an across-the-board 40 percent pay raise for all teachers, and a rigorous program of testing and evaluation, it would do this country a world of good. Sadly, however, there is broad bipartisan opposition to this good sense.
Bush's legacy
So Bush finally takes off the mask, and as he does so, the shape of his legacy is becoming clearer. On the economic side, it will be massive cuts in the country's social insurance program; massive economic restratification (via abolition of the estate tax); and a couple trillion added to the deficit (possibly setting up a massive bout of inflation, or a devaluation of the dollar, or both). On the social policy front, the jury is still out on how successful he will be, but he seems set to at least try to inscribe Christian fundamentalist tenets into the country's basic law. And on the foreign policy front, he will be largely remembered for his quixotic effort to institute a new "Bush doctrine" of preemptive war -- with a quagmire in Iraq as its main fruit (keep in mind that Afghanistan was not the fruit of the Bush doctrine, having taken placed before the doctrine was promulgated).
Thursday, April 28, 2005
More elevatoring pitching
Back in February, a few folks responded to my call for a good Democratic elevator pitch... but then my son went and got himself born the next night, and I never got around to responding.
Now Kevin Drum has made a similar call for ideas, and predictably gotten a few more responses than I did. (Oh, to be among the blogopshere gliterati!)
My own revised suggestion, in part based on the comments I got earlier, is that the basic principles of a revitalized liberalism should be to
- keep the government out of my private life
- promote a level playing field
- build alliances to stop terrorism, global epidemics, and other international scourges
Wednesday, April 27, 2005
"The smell of napalm in the morning" Dept.
The GOP ignominiously retreats on the changes it made to the ethics rules to protect its sleaziest members, above all, Tom DeLay.
With that said, I still have to agree with Kevin Drum and Jonathan Alter that the smartest thing the Democrats can do is keep DeLay twisting in the wind for as long as possible: the Democrats should do everything they can to make the midterms a referendum on the Bug Man's America. Let's investigate this guy to death.
Unfortunately, I didn't have a chance to blog yesterday, but I remember thinking how odd it was that the press was buying the President's line that his plane ride with the Bug Man was meant as a show of support for his embattled Majority Leader. For me, though, I couldn't help but wonder if the real conversation that Bush planned on reminding DeLay about Pentageli's explanation to Tom Hagen in The Godfather, Part II, about how goodfellas sometimes have to go home and take a hot bath....
And indeed, today, less than twelve hours after President's "show of support" for the Bug Man, the GOP retreats on the ethics issue, which likely spells a political death sentence for DeLay....
With that said, I still have to agree with Kevin Drum and Jonathan Alter that the smartest thing the Democrats can do is keep DeLay twisting in the wind for as long as possible: the Democrats should do everything they can to make the midterms a referendum on the Bug Man's America. Let's investigate this guy to death.
Unfortunately, I didn't have a chance to blog yesterday, but I remember thinking how odd it was that the press was buying the President's line that his plane ride with the Bug Man was meant as a show of support for his embattled Majority Leader. For me, though, I couldn't help but wonder if the real conversation that Bush planned on reminding DeLay about Pentageli's explanation to Tom Hagen in The Godfather, Part II, about how goodfellas sometimes have to go home and take a hot bath....
And indeed, today, less than twelve hours after President's "show of support" for the Bug Man, the GOP retreats on the ethics issue, which likely spells a political death sentence for DeLay....
Monday, April 25, 2005
Fisking Friedman
Crooked Timber has a hilarious parody of Thomas Friedman. The mockery is well-earned, but still, by the time you can get parodied, it also means you've found a voice -- annoying though that voice may be.
The Arafat of Midland, Texas
Don't miss this fascinating article on how Bush is radically changing his personal style toward Congress in his attempt to persuade them to abolish Social Security.
Say what you will about the substantive merits of abolishing Social Security, what this article shows is Bush's flexibility as a politician. In his first term, with the Republican ideological movement at its most unified and forceful, Bush laid his proposals on the table and told Congress, in so many words, "I'm not here to debate you." Bush recognized when it came to things his Party was unified around and knew how to sell to its constituents -- such as appropriations for wars of choice (a "war on terror"!) or tax cuts for the rich ("middle-class tax cuts"!) -- it made no sense to engage in consulting sessions: one could get a lot more done by simply giving firm orders. He expected the rubber stamp, and he got it
But now that he's pushing himself and his Party into doing things that the vast majority of the country opposes, like abolishing Social Security and an independent judiciary, Bush is proving himself capable of (at least attempting) the art of persuasion. In short, in addition to being able to strongarm people, it turns out that he's also capable of wheedling and cajoling.
There's a couple ways to look at what this tells you about Bush as a leader and as a human being. First, you can look at it in a positive light. While no one's ever going to claim Bush is the sharpest ax in the shed, he is also undeniably a shrewd political operator, capable of taking different approaches to different problems. He's not simply a hammer who only sees nails in the world, but in fact has a number of political tools on his belt. It shows he's flexible.
The flip side (or rather, the "flip-flop" side) of that flexibility is that compromising with Bush is idiotic. Bush considers a conciliatory attitude -- like the one the Democrats had in much of the first term with Bush -- an invitation to executive imperiousness, an open offer to let him (very literally) lay down the law. He sees people who come to the table willing to negotiate as weaklings who can and should be told what to do. On the other hand, if you stand firm against the guy, then it is he who adopts the compromising, flexible attitude.
In the hood, there's a term for people who behave like this. To paraphrase Bush's momma, it rhymes with rich.
Say what you will about the substantive merits of abolishing Social Security, what this article shows is Bush's flexibility as a politician. In his first term, with the Republican ideological movement at its most unified and forceful, Bush laid his proposals on the table and told Congress, in so many words, "I'm not here to debate you." Bush recognized when it came to things his Party was unified around and knew how to sell to its constituents -- such as appropriations for wars of choice (a "war on terror"!) or tax cuts for the rich ("middle-class tax cuts"!) -- it made no sense to engage in consulting sessions: one could get a lot more done by simply giving firm orders. He expected the rubber stamp, and he got it
But now that he's pushing himself and his Party into doing things that the vast majority of the country opposes, like abolishing Social Security and an independent judiciary, Bush is proving himself capable of (at least attempting) the art of persuasion. In short, in addition to being able to strongarm people, it turns out that he's also capable of wheedling and cajoling.
There's a couple ways to look at what this tells you about Bush as a leader and as a human being. First, you can look at it in a positive light. While no one's ever going to claim Bush is the sharpest ax in the shed, he is also undeniably a shrewd political operator, capable of taking different approaches to different problems. He's not simply a hammer who only sees nails in the world, but in fact has a number of political tools on his belt. It shows he's flexible.
The flip side (or rather, the "flip-flop" side) of that flexibility is that compromising with Bush is idiotic. Bush considers a conciliatory attitude -- like the one the Democrats had in much of the first term with Bush -- an invitation to executive imperiousness, an open offer to let him (very literally) lay down the law. He sees people who come to the table willing to negotiate as weaklings who can and should be told what to do. On the other hand, if you stand firm against the guy, then it is he who adopts the compromising, flexible attitude.
In the hood, there's a term for people who behave like this. To paraphrase Bush's momma, it rhymes with rich.
Sunday, April 24, 2005
It's personal...
I just spoke with one of my closest friends. It turns out that the soldier killed yesterday morning in Iraq (mentioned in the story I linked to this morning) is his brother-in-law: "In al-Haswah, west of Baghdad, a U.S. soldier assigned to the 155th Brigade Combat Team, II Marine Expeditionary Force was killed when a roadside bomb exploded Saturday near the convoy in which he was traveling, the U.S. military said."
My heart goes out to his wife and child. I'm too upset to say anything more about it right now.
My heart goes out to his wife and child. I'm too upset to say anything more about it right now.
Smoking gun on DeLay
Turns out that DeLay's golf trip to Scotland was paid for by a lobbyist's credit card. That's not even ambiguous.
Bush vindicated in Iraq?
There he goes again, crowing at the dawn.
Meanwhile, Fox News's lede on what's actually happening in Iraq is, "Insurgents executed a number of attacks across Iraq on Saturday, with bomb blasts killing at least 16 people, including an American soldier."
Those incorrigibles over at Fox; I guess they must have joined the vast left-wing conspiracy.
Meanwhile, Fox News's lede on what's actually happening in Iraq is, "Insurgents executed a number of attacks across Iraq on Saturday, with bomb blasts killing at least 16 people, including an American soldier."
Those incorrigibles over at Fox; I guess they must have joined the vast left-wing conspiracy.
Friday, April 22, 2005
Rove on the free press
At least as his views are presented in this article, Karl Rove is absolutely right about what's gone wrong with the media in this country, especially in his claim that the media are "less liberal than... oppositional." He's also right that the deadline pressures created by excessive for-profit competition leads media outlets to focus on the negative and the conflictual, and to fail to be sufficiently factually rigorous.
Wednesday, April 20, 2005
The epistemology of Iraq
The London Review of Books has a great article by Rory Stewart on how impossible it is for foreigners to really know what is going on in Iraq. The situation is just too chaotic, too dangerous, too complex and too fluid for any outsider to comprehend, much less control. Along the way, without ever arguing the point explicitly, Stewart renders absurd the notion that Iraq would serve as a blueprint for democratization elsewhere, or that anyone outside Iraq can claim positive credit for what is going on there.
If Bob Dylan was certainly right to admonish the rebels of the 1960s, "Don't criticize what you don't understand," then the parallel lesson for the pro-war sorts is that you shouldn't take credit for what you can't comprehend.
Hat tip: WAB.
If Bob Dylan was certainly right to admonish the rebels of the 1960s, "Don't criticize what you don't understand," then the parallel lesson for the pro-war sorts is that you shouldn't take credit for what you can't comprehend.
Hat tip: WAB.
Tuesday, April 19, 2005
It's the sleaze, stupid
I'm surprised we haven't heard more about this exchange last Sunday between Steny Hoyer, the House Minority Whip, and the Roy Blunt, the House Majority Whip, on the three rebukes Tom DeLay received last year from the House Ethics Committee. Here's Blunt being, well, blunt:
If we were talking about law, then Blunt's position would make sense: in criminal law, either you are guilty or you are not guilty -- it's binary. But in the case of DeLay's behavior in the House we are not talking about criminal violations (although a criminal spectre does hang over Delay's behavior back home in Texas); what we're talking about are ethical violations. And in ethics, in addition to black and white cases, there are all sorts of shades of gray. Those areas of gray constitute the great realm known colloquially as "sleaze."
If there's one thing we learned from the Clinton years, it is that once you try to wriggle out of ethics questions by referencing legal niceties, you have already crossed the point of ethical no return.
This idea that Tom DeLay was admonished by the Ethics Committee, that's not even something available to the Ethics Committee. The Ethics Committee is supposed to say you violated the rules of the House or you did not. They're not supposed to say publicly: You're too close, we think you should be more careful about the rules. That's why the rules, that's why the lines are drawn where they are. This has never been a committee that evaluated how a member acted within the rules, and in fact, by saying you're not over the line but we think you're a little close, they're actually saying you're in the rules of the House.Leave aside the amazing suggestion that some conclusions of the Ethics Committee should not be aired "publicly." What Blunt's statement mainly shows is a total misunderstanding of (or perhaps brazen contempt for) what ethics are all about.
If we were talking about law, then Blunt's position would make sense: in criminal law, either you are guilty or you are not guilty -- it's binary. But in the case of DeLay's behavior in the House we are not talking about criminal violations (although a criminal spectre does hang over Delay's behavior back home in Texas); what we're talking about are ethical violations. And in ethics, in addition to black and white cases, there are all sorts of shades of gray. Those areas of gray constitute the great realm known colloquially as "sleaze."
If there's one thing we learned from the Clinton years, it is that once you try to wriggle out of ethics questions by referencing legal niceties, you have already crossed the point of ethical no return.
Ringing endorsement for Bolton
Colin Powell's former chief of staff Lawrence Wilkerson gets quoted in the New York Times today, stating the following about our soon-to-be-confirmed U.N. ambassador, John "10 stories" Bolton:
"Under Secretary Bolton was never the formidable power that people are insinuating he was in terms of foreign policy, or blocking the policies that Secretary Powell wished to pursue.... But do I think John Bolton would make a good ambassador to the United Nations? Absolutely not.... He is incapable of listening to people and taking into account their views. He would be an abysmal ambassador."Ouch.
"'It reminded me of 'Lethal Weapon."
Check out this riveting description of a recent battle in Iraq, won decisively by the Marines. Yes, we won this fight, but reading this description, it seems pretty uncertain to me that the enemy is nearly as demoralized as our political leadership maintains.
Monday, April 18, 2005
The "temporary" suspension of civil liberties in a war without end
A key argument that the Bush regime's defenders have made in favor of keeping captured terrorist suspects under indefinite lock and key is that (to quote Richard Samp of the Washington Legal Foundation, which has filed briefs on behalf of the Bush regime), "At the beginning of World War Two nobody knew how long that war might continue. Yet we never decided to allow German POWs to go free simply because they might be serving an indefinite sentence. At some point the war will be over. It will not go on forever."
At "some point" the GWOT will end... but under what circumstances? This is question which has hardly be asked, and certainly has not been answered, not least by those promoting the war. This is a point Steven Bodzin made with devastating wit in this weekend's San Francisco Chronicle:
One major difference between terror and say, poverty or drug use, however, is that terror is something that can happen to nice rich white folks in the suburbs, even though they do nothing to bring it on themselves. In this sense, the personal fear factor associated with terrorism is for the typical American voter much higher than that associated with poverty or drug use. At the same time, it's precisely this inability to personally ward against terrorism that makes its specter so perfectly designed to create a pemanent siege mentality -- a mentality exploitable by the political powers that be to provide justification for continued rule even as they massively mismanage the economy and the budget, disfigure the environment, and attempt to impose nauseating social mores on the country.
With all that said, I think Bodzin overstates his case. One might reasonably answer "Yes" to his rhetorical question, "Have we really burned through our treasury, devastated civil liberties and killed thousands of people to diminish the morale of suicide bombers?" As Susan Sontag rightly if impoliticly pointed out in the New Yorker just a few days after 9-11, "whatever may be said of the perpetrators of Tuesday's slaughter, they were not cowards." With that in mind, attempting to break the morale of America's enemies to the point where they are incapable of actions like 9-11 is an undeniably worthwhile goal for our foreign policy. A better point to make, therefore, is that the tactics that the Bush regime has adopted to achieve this goal have been abysmal failures, if not downright counterproductive.
Then again, Bodzin is right to point out the vagueness (not to say vacuousness, or downright bullshit) of the "goals" set forth in Bush's second inaugural. And this, in turn, brings us back to all these accused terrorists that were are holding indefinitely. If victory is defined as the time at which tyranny has been extinguished from this earth, and if these "detainees formerly known as POWs" are to be held until that time... then does anyone think they will ever be let out? The failure to define unambiguous terms for victory (or defeat) in the GWOT exacerbates the dire civil liberties implications of the Bush regime's prisoner detentions.
At "some point" the GWOT will end... but under what circumstances? This is question which has hardly be asked, and certainly has not been answered, not least by those promoting the war. This is a point Steven Bodzin made with devastating wit in this weekend's San Francisco Chronicle:
Bodzin then gets the run-around from the State Department, the NSC, and the CIA, before giving up on the government bureucracy and turning to what you would think would be a better bet, the pro-GWOT pundits.I wanted to know what constituted the administration's vision of victory in the
GWOT.So I dug up tens of thousands of pages of strategy objectives from government agencies and think tanks filled with negative goals like "disrupt and destroy terrorist organizations," "conquer this enemy" and "defeat the forces of evil wherever they are."
But a definition of victory was nonexistent. Even the word "victory" was surprisingly rare in the documents of the National Security Council, the CIA, the State Department and the FBI. Dozens of online databases, articles and speeches brought me no closer to discovering the war's goal.
Then, late one night, I thought I had it. Plowing through Acrobat and PowerPoint files in the government's vast network of Web sites, a search for the words "victory" and "war on terror" led me to a 30-page booklet titled "The National Strategy for Combating Terrorism."
It too crackled with negatives: "Interdict and disrupt material support for terrorists." "End the state sponsorship of terrorism."
One tantalizing subsection was labeled "Victory in the War against Terror. " But it proved to be a tease -- just two paragraphs, the first warning that victory would take a long time, the second instructing readers to remain vigilant.
Then, I turned to page 13. That's when I thought I had finished my quest. It was a printout of what looked like three PowerPoint slides bearing the kind of bold arrows used on World War II maps to show troops sweeping toward victory. But rather than marching across a physical landscape, these arrows pushed to decreasing levels of terrorist activity.
The page also included a goal: If all went well in the GWOT, terrorists would become unable to operate across borders, unable to communicate and less able to kill. Al Qaeda would still exist but be rendered "Unorganized. Localized. Non-sponsored." Terrorism would be "returned to the criminal domain."
The caption on this grand endpoint was not "Victory Over Terror." Instead, it was labeled with a term more often seen in hard-drive installation manuals: "Desired Endstate."
As in that great British battleship, Desired Endstate. Or the battle cry, "Desired endstate or death!" As in D-E Day. The diagram was interesting, but I needed to know if this Desired Endstate was official policy and just how "unorganized, localized and non-sponsored" terrorism would have to be for us to celebrate D-E Day. Whoever drew the diagram, I thought, would have the answers.
As many commentators have observed, although the GWOT being represented and to some extent fought as a conventional war, in fact it is a "war" only in the same metaphoric sense that Reagan's "War on Drugs," or Johnson's "War on Poverty" were wars -- in other words, all of these are wars not against an an enemy that can be defeated, but rather against a condition that can never be completely palliated.I found a collection of them at an organization called Americans for Victory Over Terrorism.
Its Web site includes an article by novelist Mark Helprin called "A Strategy for Victory in the War on Terror." Perfect. Except that nowhere in the piece does he provide readers with a vision of our world after the war. Instead, he focuses on process. Steps, then more steps, but no end in sight.
Michael Ledeen, co-founder of Americans for Victory Over Terrorism, is also a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington think tank. In his 2002 book "The War Against the Terror Masters," he called for war with Iraq, Iran or any other country that supports terrorism. He often appears on talk shows defending administration policies. If anyone could describe victory, I thought, he could.
I called and explained my quest. He responded with a scoff, "Pfft. The goal? You wouldn't be saying that if you had a daughter in Baghdad." I wasn't quite sure what to make of that, but assured him I wanted terrorists gone as much as anyone. My question was: What would the world look like then?
"There won't be people blowing us up," he said. "They won't have a nation- state supporting them. That's very important."
"How will we know when we're getting close to victory?"
"We'll start seeing defectors," he replied. "It will be all the usual signs when someone's getting ready to lose a war. A drop in morale, recruiting getting more difficult. You'll see their followers throwing down their weapons, giving up."
Have we really burned through our treasury, devastated civil liberties and killed thousands of people to diminish the morale of suicide bombers?
Ledeen told me to look at the president's second inaugural speech. Bush said, "It is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world." So GWOT is valiant and vague. Does Russia count? How about Venezuela?
Bush's inaugural imprecision epitomizes the armchair-warrior class. Sept. 11 inspired brave rhetoric, but the armchair warriors' idea of resolution is as vaporous as their destructive fantasies are cold steel. If they won't tell us what the desired endstate is, there's no way for us to gauge our trajectory to victory.
One major difference between terror and say, poverty or drug use, however, is that terror is something that can happen to nice rich white folks in the suburbs, even though they do nothing to bring it on themselves. In this sense, the personal fear factor associated with terrorism is for the typical American voter much higher than that associated with poverty or drug use. At the same time, it's precisely this inability to personally ward against terrorism that makes its specter so perfectly designed to create a pemanent siege mentality -- a mentality exploitable by the political powers that be to provide justification for continued rule even as they massively mismanage the economy and the budget, disfigure the environment, and attempt to impose nauseating social mores on the country.
With all that said, I think Bodzin overstates his case. One might reasonably answer "Yes" to his rhetorical question, "Have we really burned through our treasury, devastated civil liberties and killed thousands of people to diminish the morale of suicide bombers?" As Susan Sontag rightly if impoliticly pointed out in the New Yorker just a few days after 9-11, "whatever may be said of the perpetrators of Tuesday's slaughter, they were not cowards." With that in mind, attempting to break the morale of America's enemies to the point where they are incapable of actions like 9-11 is an undeniably worthwhile goal for our foreign policy. A better point to make, therefore, is that the tactics that the Bush regime has adopted to achieve this goal have been abysmal failures, if not downright counterproductive.
Then again, Bodzin is right to point out the vagueness (not to say vacuousness, or downright bullshit) of the "goals" set forth in Bush's second inaugural. And this, in turn, brings us back to all these accused terrorists that were are holding indefinitely. If victory is defined as the time at which tyranny has been extinguished from this earth, and if these "detainees formerly known as POWs" are to be held until that time... then does anyone think they will ever be let out? The failure to define unambiguous terms for victory (or defeat) in the GWOT exacerbates the dire civil liberties implications of the Bush regime's prisoner detentions.
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