Out with Social Security, in with the Church

Last month I blogged on how abolishing Social Security represented the cornerstone of Bush's domestic political ambitions. I argued that right-wing hatred for the Social Democratic state is deeply related to the view that the rise of the welfare state is tied to the decline of religion. Social Security "reformers" (i.e. abolitionists) believe that making social services the domain of churches will force the masses to become church-goers.

Evidence that this is the true agenda of welfare-state-rollback is everywhere, but today appears in an article on how an article on the politico-cultural landscape around Bakersfield. (I expect this posting represents the first in what will be an occasional series on how "Flyover country begins at the Altamont Pass.") Money quote:

The conservative vision of ideal government, which few locals question and which the Republicans have made part of their low-tax mantra, sees government as a kind of infrastructure guarantor only, even when the conversation turns to America's admittedly troubled health care system.

"I don't think the government owes people health care," says youth pastor and newly elected public high school board member Chad Vegas. "If we were doing things ideally in this country, it would be churches' responsibility to provide health care, using Christian doctors."

Let's be clear on two things: the goal of Social Security "reform" is to abolish it -- as a first step in rolling back the entire social safety net; and the goal of abolishing the safety net is to drive people back into the arms of church. Social security reform is thus deeply intwined with the anti-secularist, fundamentalist agenda.

More credence for the astrotrolling hypothesis

Last weekend I wrote about about how one needs to beware of getting one's "news" from blogs, because it's very possible that some of the "baghdad bloggers" we're seeing may in fact be plants by the U.S. proaganda machine. A couple people wrote me telling me this was another example of paranoia.

Turns out that the day after I wrote that blog entry, the New York Times published an article entitled, "Pentagon Weighs Use of Deception in a Broad Arena":

The Pentagon is engaged in bitter, high-level debate over how far it can and should go in managing or manipulating information to influence opinion abroad, senior Defense Department civilians and military officers say.

Such missions, if approved, could take the deceptive techniques endorsed for use on the battlefield to confuse an adversary and adopt them for covert propaganda campaigns aimed at neutral and even allied nations....

The efforts under consideration risk blurring the traditional lines between public affairs programs in the Pentagon and military branches - whose charters call for giving truthful information to the media and the public - and the world of combat information campaigns or psychological operations....

Pentagon and military officials directly involved in the debate say that such a secret propaganda program, for example, could include planting news stories in the foreign press or creating false documents and Web sites translated into Arabic as an effort to discredit and undermine the influence of mosques and religious schools that preach anti-American principles....

Administration officials say they are increasingly troubled that a nation that can so successfully market its cars and colas around the world, even to foreigners hostile to American policies, is failing to sell its democratic ideals, even as the insurgents they are battling are spreading falsehoods over mass media outlets like the Arab news satellite channel Al Jazeera.

"In the battle of perception management, where the enemy is clearly using the media to help manage perceptions of the general public, our job is not perception management but to counter the enemy's perception management," said the chief Pentagon spokesman, Lawrence Di Rita....

Mr. Di Rita said the scope of the issue had changed in recent years. "We have a unique challenge in this department," he said, "because four-star military officers are the face of the United States abroad in ways that are almost unprecedented since the end of World War II."

He added, "Communication is becoming a capability that combatant commanders have to factor in to the kinds of operations they are doing."

Much of the Pentagon's work in this new area falls under a relatively unknown field called Defense Support for Public Diplomacy. This new phrase is used to describe the Pentagon's work in governmentwide efforts to communicate with foreign audiences but that is separate from support for generals in the field.

At the Pentagon, that effort is managed by Ryan Henry, Mr. Feith's principal deputy for policy.

"With the pace of technology and such, and with the nature of the global war on terrorism, information has become much more a part of strategic victory, and to a certain extent tactical victory, than it ever was in the past," Mr. Henry said.

However, a senior military officer said that without clear guidance from the Pentagon, the military's psychological operations, information operations and public affairs programs are "coming together on the battlefield like never before, and as such, the lines are blurred." This has led to a situation where "proponents of these elements jockey for position to lead the overall communication effort," the officer said....

Mr. Di Rita, the Pentagon spokesman, says that even though the government is wrestling with these issues, the standard is still to tell to the truth.

The standard is still to tell the truth. Wow.

Hat tip: The Short Cut.

"They cannot represent themselves, they must be represented"

This site depicting the results of "US Air Strike on Iraqi Civilians" is undoubtedly anti-U.S. propaganda, not in the sense that the photos are doctored, but rather in the sense that they show nothing of the U.S. but its brutality and nothing of the other side but its nobility.

The truth is that war barbarizes all involved. Many right-wingers assume that nobility of purpose, like military strategy, can survive contact with the enemy unaltered. It's just not true. That's why to fight a war your purposes need to be clear and unvarnishedly noble from the outset, and your means of achieving those purposes equally so. This is why Afghanistan was a reasonable war, and Iraq not.

The main reason to look at the site, however, is not to realize that war is hell, which we all know. The main reason to look at this site is that this propaganda makes you realize what the United States is up against: this propaganda represents the dominant image of the war for many in the Arab world, just as surely as the equally biased Fox-News-sanitized version of the war represents the dominant view of the war for American wingjobs.

And that's a huge problem for the Bushist ambitions in the Middle East. U.S. doesn't control the media representation of the war, at least outside the United States. Edward Said was right to suggest that a cornerstone of colonialism's efficacy was, as he quoted Marx from The Eighteenth Brumaire with regard to the French peasantry, "they cannot represent themselves; they must be represented." The inability of the lumpenproletariat, or colonial subjects, to represent themselves -- an inability partly technological, partly ideological -- was crucial for allowing classical 19th century European imperial powers to be able to rule without constant application of force, in short with the grudging consent of the governed.

But that world is gone, by force of technology and ideological evolution. Now (really for the last fifty years) the unwashed postcolonial masses can represent themselves, and by God they do and will. They no longer put up with being represented the way we (that is, the Bushists) want to represent them. And if we cannot control that representation, is it possible for us to win their hearts and minds? To repeat, has any Western power won a guerilla war in the global South since 1965?

For reference purposes, here's the whole quote from Marx:

The small-holding peasants form a vast mass, the members of which live in similar conditions but without entering into manifold relations with one another. Their mode of production isolates them from one another instead of bringing them into manifold relations with one another. Their mode of production isolates them from one another instead of bringing them into mutual intercourse. The isolation is increased by France's bad means of communication and by the poverty of the peasants.... They [have] no national bound and no political organization among them. They do not form a class. They cannot represent themselves, they must be represented. Their representative must at the same time appear as their master, as an authority over them, as an unlimited governmental power that protects them against the other classes and sends them rain and sunshine from above. The political influence of the small-holding peasants, therefore, finds its final expression in the executive power subordinating society to itself.

Italics added.

The rightwing backlash against Rummy begins

With the election (and thus the need for dissembling and disingenuousness) in the rear view mirror, the Republican party intellectual establishment has begun a campaign for Rumsfeld's head, especially after Rummy's comments about how the lack of adequate armor was a result of having to "go to war with the army you have" -- as if the Army we have is not the Secretary of Defense's responsibility.

Now even elected Republicans, like Trent Lott, are piling on. Bush shouldn't be surprised that Lott's the first public critic: Bush had Lott thrown under a bus (well out of the majority leader's chair) for racist comments last year. Bush is probably wishing he'd sent the guy packing back to Mississippi, but then let him linger on in the Senate because Bush needed the vote in the tight Senate. There's surely some appropriate line from The Godfather for this kind of mistake: if you're going to kneecap someone, you may as well whack them altogether so they can't come back and getcha.

Even more shocking, in a story which hasn't gotten nearly enough play, the Army's own (much more honest and accurate) response to the "lack of armor" problem was to explain that, actually, the real problem is that the insurgents are becoming "more effective":

The assessment from Lt. Gen. Lance Smith, second in command at U.S. Central Command, was a stark reminder that the capture of Fallujah has not stopped a well-organized and resourceful insurgency from continuing to kill coalition members and disrupt crucial supplies of food, fuel and bullets.

The enemy is getting better at manufacturing and placing its weapon of choice, improvised explosive devices (IEDs), he said.

"They have gotten more effective in using IEDs," Gen. Smith told reporters at the Pentagon. "The enemy is very smart and thinking. It is a thinking enemy. So he changes his tactics and he becomes more effective."

The IED is a variety of roadside bombs hidden amid debris and detonated by remote control when Americans come near. The terrorists also put IEDs in vehicles driven by suicide bombers recruited by a terror organization led by Jordanian-born Abu Musab Zarqawi.

In a briefing before Gen. Smith spoke, an Army officer said the insurgents have found ways to pack more explosives into each bomb, increasing lethality. It was the appearance of IEDs in the late summer of 2003 that signaled to commanders that a deadly insurgency was under way and that lightly fortified vehicles were particularly susceptible.

As the U.S. death toll mounted, the Army launched an unprecedented effort to put armor on all Humvee multipurpose vehicles and supply trucks.

The Defense Department also set up an IED task force at the Pentagon to design countermeasures. To date, the tactics have resulted in foiling about 40 percent of planted bombs, according to U.S. officials.

"We have been hoping that our technology would be more effective than it has been," Gen. Smith acknowledged. Countermeasures have included driving fast past areas suspected of being booby-trapped and using electronic signals to blow up the remotely controlled bombs at a safe distance. Iraqis use a variety of electronics, such as parts of cell phones and radios, to send a signal for detonation as convoys pass.

"They may use doorbells today to blow these things up," Gen. Smith said. "They may use remote controls from toys tomorrow. And as we adapt, they adapt." Gen. Smith also said Central Command now believes that Zarqawi, who has organized cells of suicide bombers and personally beheaded captives, is moving around Baghdad rather than operating out of Fallujah.

"Baghdad would be the most likely area, but these guys are getting very, very good at concealing ... making it difficult for us to track them," Gen. Smith said. "He can operate pretty safely, we think. In some areas of Baghdad there are those that would hide him and those that would passively allow him to operate."

Sure sounds like things are moving in the right direction, doesn't it?

It's not Rumsfeld's fault that we will are losing the war in Iraq, any more than it was McNamara's fault we lost in Vietnam, or Goering's fault that Germany lost the Second World War. Each was a unwinnable war, launched for ignoble reasons by megalomaniacs, and supported by the benighted majorities of their countries. Like McNamara and Goering, however, Rumsfeld must bear responsibility for the particularly horrid nature of the way we are going about losing -- the incredible damage we are inflicting on our national reputation in the course of losing the war.

How the Bible helps

Marx observed that religion is the opium of the masses, but the bible-belt version appears to be somewhat more akin to the PCP of the masses.

Dena Schlosser, who cut off her baby's arms last month, cited Matthew 5:30 as the reason for her action:

And if thy right hand offend thee, cut it off, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell....

I guess that's what you get when you take a literalist approach to the Bible.

What's really disturbing, however, is that there have recently been several other similar cases of highly religious families whose mothers have slaughtered their children. Remember Andrea Yates, who drowned her five children saying she wanted to "give them to God"? More recently, there was Deanna Laney, who said the Lord told her to bash her child's brains in with rocks -- giving a whole new sense to the term "bible-thumping."

The (religious?) authorities have gone to pains to claim that in each case these women were suffering from post-partum depression. But as the Dallas Star Telegram puts it drily, PPD is "difficult to prove in court." Why not take the simpler explanation, namely the one that the women offer themselves?

Funny, us left coast pinkos don't seem to do this sort of thing to our children. Maybe it's because we say "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas."

Flood of Troubled Soldiers

I don't even know how to react to this story. A preview for an unfolding disaster:

An Army study shows that about one in six soldiers in Iraq report symptoms of major depression, serious anxiety or post-traumatic stress disorder, a proportion that some experts believe could eventually climb to one in three, the rate ultimately found in Vietnam veterans. Because about one million American troops have served so far in the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to Pentagon figures, some experts predict that the number eventually requiring mental health treatment could exceed 100,000....

What was planned as a short and decisive intervention in Iraq has become a grueling counterinsurgency that has put American troops into sustained close-quarters combat on a scale not seen since the Vietnam War. Psychiatrists say the kind of fighting seen in the recent retaking of Falluja - spooky urban settings with unlimited hiding places; the impossibility of telling Iraqi friend from Iraqi foe; the knowledge that every stretch of road may conceal an explosive device - is tailored to produce the adrenaline-gone-haywire reactions that leave lasting emotional scars.

One has to honor the troops for this sacrifice, which as this article makes clear goes far, far beyond the immediate field of duty in which they served.

But has it been worth it? Any war that is only worth it if you win, is a war that wasn't worth it for the soldiers who fight in it. And we're not winning.

This is why Rumsfeld and Perle and Wolfowitz and the rest will, if there is a God, burn in a special place in Hell for all of eternity.

"Logistical issues" with Iraqi election

Leave aside the continued security catastrophe in Iraq, or the on-again, off-again commitment to participate in the vote by Sunni and some religious Shi'ite parties. Even more insuperable challenge (related to the security issue) facing the Iraqi vote is logistical. The lede:

With less than eight weeks remaining before Iraq's national elections, preparations are so far behind it will be virtually impossible to carry off a proper vote, according to several consultants involved in the planning.

Although public attention has been focused on how to make the country safe for the Jan. 30 parliamentary election, logistical problems could undermine the vote just as seriously as the lack of security. Preparations are stalled on many levels, ranging from delays in hiring and training thousands of election workers to deciding what kind of ballots and ink to use.

Then again, "logistical issues" with voting didn't seem to bother the Bush regime much in Ohio or Florida either.

Anti-Europeanism

Right-wingers talk (and talk and talk) about the anti-Americanism of anyone who opposes George Bush’s foreign policies. But in fact, many of these wingjobs feel at least as much antipathy toward Europe and Europeans, and have just as malformed understandings of the objects of their hate, as any European leftist has toward the United States or Americans. This much-linked blog entry is case and point:

I’m sure I’m not the only one who is totally sick of reading these polls:

"President Bush’s re-election was viewed negatively by a majority of people in several European countries — including those in Britain, America’s strongest ally in the war in Iraq, Associated Press polling found. The president was not the only one viewed unfavorably. Americans generally were seen in an unfavorable light by many in France, Germany and Spain, countries not supportive of U.S. Iraq policies."

When the fuck are there going to be opinion polls done asking Americans their opinion of France? Why are we never given the opportunity to express our displeasure with these gutless European twats? Why can’t we talk about how much we hate the French as a people? Yes, Europe hates us, fine. When do we get the chance to speak?

It’s a self-parody of what Timothy Garton Ash refers to as the "anti-Europeanism" of the American right. Bummer that it's not just the French.

In fact, the only non-haters are those who reside in the intersecting part of the European and American ideological Venn diagram.

The political ironies of the Civil Rights movement

This LA Times article documents at a fine degree of granularity the lock that the GOP has developed on the South over the last generation, but especially with the ascendency of George Bush. In the election last month, Bush "carried nearly 85% of all the counties across the region — and more than 90% of counties where whites are a majority of the population." The tendency of the South the vote as a bloc has of course made it very effective at getting its way despite representing views out of the step with the a majority of the country. It's worth pondering why the South, of all regions, has once again emerged as a place of such polar and solid political loyalties, just as it was for the century after the Civil War for the Democrats.

The effect of "the Solid South" on the Presidency is also an interesting subject. Since the Civil Rights era began in the 1960s, the only non-Southerners who have won a presidential race have been candidates from California: Nixon and Reagan. That's interesting because between the Civil war and the 1960s, the White House was occupied exclusively by Northerners (with the possible exception of Woodrow Wilson, a Virginian by birth who made his career in the North) -- largely because Southerners were out of step with the mores of rest of the country, and therefore incapable of winning national office. Before the Civil War, of course, the Presidency had largely been occupied by slaveholders and other Southerners.

What the Civil Rights movement did was to pull the South's race laws, if not its social attitudes, into line with those of the rest of the country. At the same, however, the South (somehow, for some reason) managed to retain its unity and "exceptionalism," permitting it to re-assume its historic hegemony over the White House and the country. By hiding from view the most visible aspect of the South's core "values," the Civil Rights laws allowed Northerners to feel comfortable with Southerners as Presidents for the first time in a century. Thus the ironic result of the Civil Rights movement was to allow Southern whites, with their only partially reformed social attitudes (think: Trent Lott), to once again assume disproportionate national influence.

Judge Suspended for Wearing Blackface

This is a nice one: a judge in Louisiana showed up at a Halloween party in blackface. The party's host, the judge's brother-in-law, dressed as Buckwheat.

Do we even need to ask which political party these people belong to?

Man bites dog

CNN: Man bites dog, police say.

U.S. military deaths during Iraq war

Calendar of US Military Dead during Iraq War.

Google to revolutionize academic research

One can only cheer at the news of Google's decision to index the contents of the world's biggest libraries. It will undoubtedly revolutionize academic research in the humanities, rescuing obscure texts, and making it far easier to assess the scope of certain themes and topics. In my own research on modernization theory, one of the main tools I used was JSTOR, an ever-expanding index of key American academic journals, dating back in many cases to the nineteenth century, which allowed me to track quite precisely the radical transformation of the idea of "modernization" from the first to the second third of the twentieth century.

However, a small precaution: Google's efforts may enable lazy researchers to rely monolithically on keywording as a research methodology. If this takes place -- that is, if academics allow their undergraduates to do this -- it will represent a withering of important research skills and a truncation of historical sensibility. One invaluable research habit, as I discovered in my own work, is to walk through the aisles of a library and look at the other books filed next to the book you originally sought. Likewise, when doing historical research, one helpful way to contextualize an old article in an newspaper or magazine is to read other articles that appear in the same issue or week -- to help get a sense for the overall structure of sentiment in which a given topic was being discussed.

In other words, if relied on exclusively, keywording risks divorcing words from the wider contexts in which they initially appeared. And dematerializing and decontextualizing texts in this way cuts readers off from a key source of textual meaning. The point is not that Google's indexing is a bad thing: it's absolutely not. But it does give lazy researchers the rope with which to hang themselves.

An Iraqi Hitler?

The London Times reports that Iraq's interim President worries that "an Iraqi Hitler" may emerge if things continue in the current vein in Iraq:

Mr Yawar said that the continuing instability and violence presented a long-term threat to the prospects for democracy in Iraq, where nationwide elections are scheduled for January 30. "This could in the long term create an environment in which an Iraqi Hitler could emerge like the one created by the defeat of Germany and the humiliation of Germans in World War I," he told the London-based Asharq al-Awsat newspaper in remarks published today.

In other words, it's not Germany 1945 that the U.S. is recreating, but rather Germany 1918. Mission Accomplished!

I'm going to the store now to buy some popcorn to eat while I watch my favorite rightwing contortionists try to spin this one to indicate that things are actually going in the right direction over there.

Spurious attempt at "fair and balanced"

Last week the Washington Post ran a piece reporting that "Humans May Double the Risk of Heat Waves". Overall, it's good to see the papers reporting on the issue of human-induced climate change.

However, I'm linking to this article for a different reason, namely that it seems to me to exemplify a certain liberal pathology regarding what "fair and balanced" means. Now, right-wingers (Fox News) have a perfectly clear understanding of what "fair and balanced" means to them -- it means promoting their views. For liberals, however, "fair and balanced" means presenting "both sides of an issue" -- even when one side is rooted in fact and the scientific method, and the other is rooted in ideological claptrap. This article typifies this self-destructive liberal reportorial bias.

After summarizing the findings in the Nature piece (for those readers who don't know, Nature is one of the two most prestigious general science journals, along with Science), the article goes on to quote a fellow named Myron Ebell, who disputes the substance of the Nature article, poo-pooing it as "a small potatoes paper" and claiming that "modeling is not science."

This clown has no standing to comment on this issue as an equal to the scientists quoted. As even a simple Web search can tell you, Ebell runs a Republican-funded think tank and is the author of such wonderful observations as, "the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets are probably thickening rather than melting" and "higher fuel efficiency standards costs lives." He's a partisan hack whose life is dedicated to providing quotes that dispute indisputable scientific findings. What he's saying is something about as rooted in science as the claim that the earth is flat.

On the issue of climate change, if the WaPo wanted to achieve "balance," it ought to quote from Bjorn Lomborg or one of his proteges. Lomborg argues that human-induced climate change is real, but that the mainstream policy proposals for containing greenhouse gasses (i.e. Kyoto) are unjustifiably expensive. Now, that's a legitimate scientific opinion, and it deserves a hearing and debate. A partisan arse like Ebell deserves no hearing.

So why does the WaPo give a wingjob like Ebell the time of day? Mainly, because they've given him the time of day before. He can be reliably wheeled out to make a bold bullshit claim designed to confuse uninformed readers or viewers, thereby providing cover for the right-wing clear-cutting, strip-mining, gas-guzzling, ANWR-drilling agenda. Hacks like Ebell exploit the media's desperation to avoid seeming "biased" by reporting that the Bush regime's environmental policy is based, pure and simple, on bad science -- or actually, on anti-science. Giving people like this a hearing is a form of self-destruction -- in this case, not just liberal self-destruction, but self-destruction on a planetary scale.

The Bushist position on climate change is yet another example of its habit of lying about the future.

Astrotrolling in Iraq

Since at least the Nixon days, the Republican Party has had serious comparative advantage in the various darks political arts. I must admit that I say this not without some grudging admiration -- even though such behavior is obviously lamentable from an ethical perspective.

What kind of skullduggery are we talking about? Perhaps the best known are so-called push polls, in which you hire a telemarketing firm to call voters, ostensibly to gather their opinion on a subject, but in fact to spread some rumor. The most famous use of a push poll was by George Bush's primary campaign in South Carolina in 2000 against against John McCain. Karl Rove had telemarketers call SC voters and ask, "Would you be more likely or less likely to vote for John McCain for president if you knew he had fathered an illegitimate black child?" (Sometimes the pollsters made reference to McCain's appearances on the campagin trail with a dark-skinned little girl: his adopted Bangladeshi daughter. Nice.)

Another classic dark art is phone jamming -- using mass phone-bank spamming to block the telephone-based get-out-the-vote operations of your opposition. Bush's 2004 New England campaign manager, James Tobin, was just indicted for allegedly sponsoring such an operation in New Hampshire in the 2002 campaign.

Yet another good one -- originally pioneered by the tobacco lobby -- is the creation of what Josh Marshall calls astroturf organizations -- i.e. fake "grassroots" (hence: astroturf) campaigns operated by professional services organization that set up fake activist groups, media campaigns, phone banks to call congressmen imitating irate citizens, and so on.

So far, the Internet in general, and blogging in particular, has simply been one more vehicle for helping to create an astroturf organization. But as Martini Republic explains, something more sinister may be now beginning to take place, which we may refer to as blog trolling. In Internetspeak, "trolling" refers to people who lurk on discussion boards and make deliberately false or inflamatory remarks in order to throw the community into a tizzy. Made possible by the inherent anonomity of the Internet medium, effective trolls can get a whole community up in arms, distracted from its main goals. Blog trolling, as the name suggests, is an analogous idea to trolling, but in the blogosphere. It involves setting up blogs that pretend to express the voices of real people, but are in fact are potemkin villages designed to create an intentionally misleading impression of the scene they are commenting on. Blog trolling exploits two facts: the blogosphere's penumbra of personal authenticity, and the fact that the blogosphere is, in fact, just as anonymous as any Internet chat room.

That combination of apparent personal authenticity with what is in fact total anonymity makes blogs an almost perfect operational environment for agents provocateurs. For people working in psy-ops, blogs provide a perfect medium for spreading false information -- which can then be fed to more legitimate and widely-consumed media channels. All of this is especially important in the case of the war in Iraq, where blogs have become a truly important medium, widely cited both for facts and interpretations of the chaotic situation in Iraq.

The problem with blogs is they are completely unverified and unprofessionalized sources of news. For example, who knows who the "Baghdad Bloggers" who write for observes of the two brothers who write this blog:

the brothers are celebrated in the right-leaning weblogging world of the US, even though opinion polling shows that their views are far out of the mainstream of Iraqi opinion.... Their choice of internet service provider, in Abilene, Texas, is rather suspicious, and wonders whether they are getting some extra support from certain quarters.

People have started turning to blogs as a source of news because of the information void created a lack of quality professional reporting coming out of Iraq. (This informational vacuum is the joint creation of the insurgency's uniquely murderous attitude toward reporters, and the Bush regime's "other GWOT" -- global war on transparency.) In the hunger to figure out what's really happening in Iraq, people are now turning to bloggers as an alternative news source.

Unfortunately, as the problem of blog trolling illustrates, the cognitive legitimacy of bloggers in no way matches that of the professional, real media. The right-wing media have made a concerted case that no difference exists between "opinion" and fact-based reporting, but the truth is that, despite everything, the New York Times and the Washington Post are far more reliable sources of news, and give more reliable perspectives on the news, than any blogger out there.

The reason why this is so is pretty obvious, if you give it a moment's thought. It's not just that news organizations employ professional reporters, who are extraordinarily talented at finding and contextualizing interesting sources. It's not just that news organizations have a large number of these reporters, who can share sources and scoops, and follow-up on stories in a much more far-reaching and panoptic way than any individual blogger ever could. And it's not just that these reporters have editors, who vet and fact-check to keep the reporters honest.

What's most important is that these news organizations have a reputation to maintain. The Jayson Blair story at the New York Times was indeed a disgrace, as was the failure of news organizations to sufficiently question the Bush regime's rationale for war. But at the end of the day, when you take the longer view, professional news organizations are far more trustworthy than any other news source, for the simple reason that they have something very big to lose if they are exposed as being intentionally and consistently deceptive.

A lot of bloggers, in hyper-self-satisified mode, and some of the mainstream right-wing media, seem to believe or hope that the blogosphere will eventually displace the mainstream media -- providing a populist grassroots replacement for "elitist" news sources. This is nonsense. We need the validation of information by professional reporters. Blogs are useful for framing issues, and for helping to keep certain stories alive which might otherwise die in today's compressed news cycle. But anyone relying on blogs for the substance of their news is inviting themselves to be duped by professional dupers.

This is why the Bush regime's effort to exclude professional reporters from the news cycle is so sinister: it aims to exclude from the creation of the news the people whose expertise and reputation is based on their ability to sift and parse information. Without organizations dedicated to distinguishing what is real from what is false, or what is important from what is trivial, individual citizens cannot help but become overwhelmed by the overflow of information, or to adopt cynical attitudes about all news.

Even leaving aside the deliberate efforts to create false impressions about what is happening, this destruction of the fourth estate's function as a quality filter for information is a disaster for a democratic polity. It's also the intended result of the Bush regime's efforts to contain and control the news cycle.

Hypocrisy alert: presidential pardons

Remember the outrage when Clinton pardoned the fugitive financier Marc Rich in the waning hours of his Presidency? Well imagine how the media and the right-wing establishment would feel if a new Democratic administration were to give Rich the post of, say, an SEC commissioner?

Well something very much like that is going on in the current Bush regime, with regards to Iran-Contra felons. A number of these felons, you may dimly recall, received lame-duck pardons by George Bush senior, who noted that these men had paid a "disproportionate price" in terms of, inter alia, lost careers.

Turns out that their careers weren't compromised all that much at all. In fact, several of these confessed felons and liars are now back in senior policy positions in the current Bush regime. In particular, Elliott Abrams, who pleaded guilty October 7, 1991, to two misdemeanor charges of lying to Congress, and was pardoned by the current President's dad in the waning hours of his presidency, was appointed in 2002 to be special assistant to the president and senior director on the National Security Council for Near East and North African Affairs -- a role for which he has no qualifications other than ideological congeniality, a publication record of strong support for the Likud, and (obviously) a personal loyalty to Republican Presidents so fierce he is willing to perjure himself before Congress.

To reiterate: the first step in cutting off the possibility of political rationality is to suppress information. When politicians refuse to release information, they are undermining the cognitive foundation of effective democracy.

It's a sign of how little respect the Republican Congress has for its own institutional integrity that they would confirm someone who confessed to lying under oath to them about a matter of high policy. Let's not forget that these are the largely the same people who voted to impeach President Clinton for lying under oath not to them, but to a grand jury, and not about matters of state, but about personal pecadillos.

P.S. Here's a prediction: Bush's last acts will include, inter alia, pardoning Enron criminals like his buddy "Kenny Boy" Lay, noting that these people paid a "disproportionate price" as the result of a liberal witch-hunt.

The wingjobs go on the offensive

In relation to my recent post about how the steadily unfolding failure of Bush's strategy in Iraq has led to a PRC-style attack on transparency, my friend Robby Mockler comments that, "The fact that reporters have to use subterfuge to ask real questions of government officials (e.g., asking Rummy about those armored cars) demonstrates the sorry state of affairs."

Good point.

It's also worth noting how the right-wing punditocracy has been frothing at the mouth over the "planted" question from reporter Lee Pitts about the lack of adequate armor for American troops in theatre. Here, for example, is Rush Limbaugh:

Was [Pitts] on television last night? Anybody see him on TV? This guy has not yet stepped forward to answer questions as Rumsfeld did? Haven't seen him on TV, huh? I asked this question yesterday: Will Lee Pitts show up on television to answer questions about his actions just as Rumsfeld did? ... He knew what he had done was over the line, over the edge, and across the line. It was not journalism. It had become activism.

The first thing to note is the way Rush apparently feels as if reporters need to be scrutinized the same way that Secretaries of Defense during wartime do.

But what's really interesting about this transcript is what happens next. A caller named Karen calls up and takes umbrage with Rush, accusing him of "attacking the messenger."

When Rush launches into his usual bullying act, Karen stays on point, finally managing to get in, "What the soldier asked was a legitimate question. I personally don't care who said it to" -- at which point Rush cuts her off again, almost hysterical. He screams, bizarrely, that he is on the side of a "revolution" and that the caller fits "the full-fledged mold of a liberal caller," before finally, in a magnificent piece of pot-calling-a-kettlism, accusing her of turning her critique of his statement into a personal criticism of him.

When Karen denies any personal motive, noting simply that she knows parents of soldiers in Eugene, Oregon who "have been assembling pieces [of armor] to be sent over to Iraq," and that therefore the question, whoever posed it, is legitimate, Rush responds that since he hasn't personally met anyone in West Palm Beach, Florida, who is assembling armor, it can't be a serious issue.

What?

Read the whole transcript. It's the kind of thing that makes me wonder, really wonder. As Rush himself suggests, only a bunch of idiots can believe anything this guy says....

But let's leave the personal ridiculousness of Rush aside. The real issue, which thus far I've heard no one remark on explicitly, is that the reason why this reporter needed to "plant" a legitimate question with soldiers, is that reporters can't get straight answers when they themselves ask the Bush regime the questions. It's only when the Bush regime is caught on tape treating American soldiers with the same contempt that they treat reporters to on a daily basis that it becomes a major international news story.

The truth is that the Bush regime, and Rumsfeld in particular, doesn't feel as if it needs to answer to anyone in the public -- certainly not the media. It's precsiely the contempt for the media's role as a conduit in the free flow of information that leads to the sorry state of affairs that Robby describes.

Even now, I bet Rumsfeld, like Rush, views what's going on as essentially a PR problem, rather than as a symptom of the pathology of his approach to transparency -- not to mention of the substantive problems with his strategy and tactics in the war itself.

The fact that Bush is keeping Rumsfeld clearly indicates that he concurs with Rumsfeld in these essentials.

Photos from Iraq

Here are some pictures of what it's like in Mosul and Fallujah this week.

I'm pretty sure that must be what it looks like when you're winning the hearts and minds.

Beyond Mars and Venus

Ian Buruma is one of my favorite writers, and this article on what divides Europe from America illustrates why. As a writer, he has a delightfully light touch, erudite yet personal, with a keen eye for personal anecdote and telling detail.

The main point of this article is to describe the much commented-upon differences between the United States and Europe. Like Timothy Garton Ash, Buruma believes that Robert Kagan's oversimplifed EuroVenus/AmericoMars diptych overplays the distinction. Here's how Francis Fukuyama summarizes Ash's argument:

It simplifies and falsifies reality by suggesting that a uniform point of view holds sway on each side of the Atlantic. In actuality, he writes, Europeans are themselves divided into Euro-Atlanticists and Euro-Gaullists; the former want political ties with the U.S. and worry about the statist tendencies of the European Union, while the latter see the EU as a competitive counterweight to the U.S. and champion the Brussels version of the welfare state. ("Janus Britain" is schizophrenically suspended somewhere between the two.)

Americans, for their part, are divided between what have come to be called red and blue voters. The Left (or blue) side of the American political spectrum corresponds to the Right, or Atlanticist, side in Europe, while such quintessentially American characteristics as anti-statism, gun ownership, and pugnacious hostility to international institutions are typically to be found only on the red side, the side that tends to vote Republican.

The resulting political Venn diagram thus half-overlaps. Although Europe is largely devoid of anyone resembling a Republican, and America has no socialists, both Europe and America have the equivalent of American Democrats. It is in that intersecting space that Ash sees the “surprising future” he proclaims in the subtitle of this book—the space where John Kerry’s America makes common cause with Euro-Atlanticists. These two forces can, he believes, nudge the U.S. toward greater multilateralism and Europe toward closer trans-Atlantic cooperation. (Italics added.)

A small precaution to my readers: the intersection of the Venn diagram is certainly the place where I feel most at home myself -- as do Buruma and Garton Ash.

Buruma glosses the point a bit differently, however, explaining that the reason for the trans-Atlantic rift is that in America, populists have taken over and have made "European" into a codeword for anything that smacks of elitism or liberalism:

The main difference between Europe and the US is political: the former is still governed by elites, especially on the level of the EU, while populism has swept the US. Senators often used to be courtly figures with old-world contacts and tastes. Now many have the manners and opinions of backwoodsmen, and have difficulty telling one European country from another. And even when heartland Republicans are not really yokels, they often pretend to be, for they know which side their bread is buttered. This shift is illustrated by the differences between Bush father and son.

The elder Bush was still of the courtly school, an old-fashioned Atlanticist who travelled widely and liked to manage the world in the manner of a gentleman’s club - discreetly, politely, cautiously. I believe he spoke French and his religion was a private matter. Bush the younger, private boarding school and Yale notwithstanding, swaggers like a Texan loudmouth, has barely travelled and wears God on his sleeve. He regards internationalism and consensus-building as something strictly for sissies. And he picked up a little Spanish from his youthful high jinks across the Mexican border.

Buruma then goes on to explain that it would be a mistake to believe that this American neo-Know-Nothingism is merely a matter of personal style. Indeed, contemporary American populism's loathing of "Europe" bespeaks a radical hostility to the political and cognitive world occupied by those in the middle of Fukuyama's Venn diagram.

Many Bush supporters are as contemptuous of "the Europeans," whom they regard as a bunch of effete, godless, homo snobs, as the newly assertive Europeans are of Bush’s people, whom they dismiss as ignorant, philistine cowboys. But "Europeans," as Garton Ash has pointed out, is often code in Washington for something else: for the old liberal, Atlanticist elite, represented by Democrats such as Kerry, but also country club Republicans such as Bush the elder. To be "European" means to be on the side of secular liberalism at home, and cautious diplomacy and alliance-building abroad. To be "European" is to be sceptical about revolutionary schemes, about global missions to free mankind from evil, about ideological wars. And to be "European" is to speak French, hence Kerry has to hide this facility.

Understanding how a certain brand of right-wing populism has hijacked the United States's culture and politics is thus a crucial matter for international politics. As German historians used to argue to explain their own history of aggressive militarism, understanding American foreign policy requires understanding the Primat der Innenpolitik, i.e. the primacy of domestic politics.

This is what I think Tony Blair fundamentally didn't appreciate when he chose to support Bush. By supporting Bush, he was supporting not just Bush's international agenda -- an agenda which Blair for better or worse seems to have truly believed was the right thing to do, even as he must have secretly grimaced over Bush's lack of diplomatic skill in promoting the agenda. Rather, by supporting Bush internationally, Blair also backed a particular brand of American populism and nationalism which is anathema to every European, including Blair himself.

To this point in his argument, I am with Buruma. I part company, however, with his concluding point. Buruma tries to double back, arguing that "the Bushist project," as represented by the likes of apparent secularists like Paul Wolfowitz or Richard Perle, in fact is not simply a form of reactionary populism, but in fact presents an opening to the Enlightenment, in that these are men of reason who believe in, to paraphrase Rousseau, forcing men to be free.

I agree that the neocons are Jacobins of a sort, and as such represent a wing of the Enlightenment project -- the least savory part of the Enlightenment, to be sure, but enlightened nonetheless. However enlightened these men may be, however, they are not the representative, majoritarian element of the right-wing movement in the United States today.

The numerically significant part of the Republican party is the populist wing (the neocons, mostly, distrust populism), which hates the main values of the Enlightenment: scientism, secularism, social tolerance, cosmopolitanism, freedom from narrow prejudice, promotion of universal education, universal provision of health services, state guarantees for the poor, and so on.

That neocons believe in many of the things which the neopopulist voting masses find anathema -- reason, science, and secularism -- merely indicates their Faustian willingness to make any political deal to gain power.

GWOT over GWOT

The failure of the Bush regime's strategy in the "Global War on Terror" leads inexorably to an acceleration of its Global War on Transparency:

While American officials and the U.S.-backed Iraqi government are touting the retaking of Fallujah and upcoming national elections as blows to Iraq's insurgents, the guerrilla fighters look as deadly as ever, carrying out ambushes and bombings seemingly at will.

Since last Friday, dozens of Iraqis, many of them police and national guardsmen, and 13 Americans have been killed in attacks throughout the country. Another 70 Iraqis have died in Mosul during the past two weeks in what appears to be a campaign to intimidate Iraqi security forces.

There is no comprehensive way to quantify how rebel activity has been affected nationwide by the Fallujah assault. American officials no longer make available to reporters a daily tally of the number of incidents reported around the country.

Italics added.

Reality-Based view of climate change

The "reality-based community" has started a group blog on climate change. Today they note, rather plaintively:

Climate science is one of those fields where anyone, regardless of their lack of expertise or understanding, feels qualified to comment on new papers and ongoing controversies. This can be frustrating for scientists like ourselves who see agenda-driven 'commentary' on the Internet and in the opinion columns of newspapers crowding out careful analysis.

Those pinko cultural elitists...

How the troops see the progress in Iraq

A sobering article in the London Times about the many reasons for and symptoms of American troops disgruntlement: over 5000 desertions, including American soldiers fleeing to Canada and taking their story to the media; ire bubbling up against Rumsfeld in a public Q&A session; accusations that forced extensions of duty amount to a bait-and-switch from the one-year tours soldiers believed they were signing up for; and declining re-enlistment rates despite significantly increased re-enlistment bonuses. And then there's this:

At 10 per cent, the death rate among war casualties is the lowest in history. But maimed men and women are flocking home with horror stories about the war, which is claiming more and more casualties. Between June, when the Iraqi interim Government took over, and September, the average monthly casualty rate among US forces was 747 a month, compared with 482 during the invasion and 415 before the coalition government was disbanded. With elections looming next month, the toll is expected to mount.

Progress, optimism, will, faith...

Modernization theory's influence on the present

For those of you interested in the last post, I just added a couple more postings from my book on my other blog.

I'm posting sections from my conclusion in reverse order, so that eventually you'll be able to read the whole chapter from top to bottom on the blog.

Nation-building from the 1890s to the 1960s

Recently someone wrote to ask me, "Is there any link between the open door expansion of the 1890s, as discussed in Williams's Tragedy of American Diplomacy, and modernization [theory in the 1950s and 1960s]?"

Michael Latham discusses this subject at some length in the opening chapter of his Modernization as Ideology. I basically agree with Latham's take that postwar modernization theory was but an updating of a pretty old tune. One might say that the score always remains a variant of cosmopolitan Victorian progressivism, with each era applying a different libretto.

In each era -- including our own -- American internationalism has been predicated on the notion that U.S. interests and international interests were not in conflict, and that the salutary benefit the U.S. provided the world was to make them become more "like us." But this idea of being "like us" immediately raised the issue of national identity: who and what was the "us" that we were trying to help foreigners achieve for themselves? As such, this strand of foreign policy reflected national identity politics, always suggesting a complex and unstable interplay of domestic and foreign policies. As Latham explains, in both the 1890s and the 1960s (and he might have added the 2000s), ideologues of progressive foreign policy believed that, "America's domestic vitality would depend on continued expansion through either commercial or colonial means."

Three big things changed from the 1890s-1900s to the 1950s-1960s:

• the mechanism by which this transformation would take place: The 1890s expected that religious and moral suasion along with commerce would drive the transformation, whereas by the postwar period the state was seen as the primary driver of modernization.
• the formal language used to articulate this process: in the 1890s the process of transformation was described primarily through journalism, travelogues, and private economic association literature, whereas in the postwar period it was the language of social science -- economics, political science, and sociology -- that provided main linguistic vehicles.
• the vision of what "like us" meant: here we enter into a discussion of the national identity that I go into at length in my own book and that Latham also discusses, from a somewhat different (though agreeable) vantage point.

One thing I hoped to add to Latham's account was the idea that while Victorian progressivism has been present at every stage of American foreign diplomacy, at certain times -- notably the 1890s-1900s, the 1950s-60s, and the 1990s-2000s -- this presence has been particularly forceful and effective. The reason why this style of foreign policy came into force and effectiveness at these particular times, I believe, is that in each of these eras the country was undergoing a national identity crisis -- very different sorts of crises, to be sure, but all crises that called for a foreign policy capable of speaking to the national identity crisis by emphasizing the essential moral goodness of the United States. Conversely, politicians who failed to use foreign policy debate to express a clear position on the domestic national identity crisis were in each era marginalized. In short, one domestic faction used moralizing foreign policy as a club with which to beat domestic ideological enemies: ambitious foreign policy was linked via moralizing rhetoric to the promotion of sweeping domestic reforms.

More on lying about the future

Someone commented that my phrase "lying about the future" had a certain "Philip-K-Dick-paranoid quality" to it. That's pretty fair. Think Man in the High Castle.

Except of course, the Bush regime isn't science fiction. It's anti-science reality.

Buy Blue

A useful site for those of you looking for non-denominational but not non-partisan gift-giving-holiday gifts.

The other GWOT

Another front in the global war on transparency.

After a month of blogging

This marks the beginning of my second month of blogging. I'm still getting used to the medium, as you've no doubt been able to tell. Thanks to everyone who has sent me stuff they thought I should blog on. Keep it coming!

It's been a slow-news week, which is part of the reason I haven't blogged quite as frenetically. Another reason I'll be blogging a little less frequently is that I'm working on a few longer posts, one on the challenge of nation-building (just finished Francis Fukuyama's excellent book on the subject), another on the transformation of American populism, and a third on the alleged problem of "excessive liberalism" on American campuses.

Also, in what I hope will be an ongoing series on "why knowing history matters," I'll be posting on specific examples of how misreadings of the past often provide spurious "lessons" that end up justiying poor policy decisions in the present. Specifically, we'll show how two crucial geopolitical episodes, namely the Marshall Plan and Ronald Reagan's role in the end of the Cold War, have been consistently misremembered and mischaracterized. These mischaracterizations provide the essential background for understanding why the Bush regime and its intellectual sycophants have backed such a disastrous policy in Iraq and the GWOT: they're trying to replay scenarios that never happened in the first place.

The larger point will be to amend Santayana's overquoted and much-misunderstood insight: it's not just that those who do not remember the past are doomed to repeat it, but even worse, those who do not understand the past will be unable to repeat the parts of it they want to repeat.

A live-action shot of the credibility gap opening

The New York Review of Books: "The bad news always arrives in the same way: as a deepening contradiction between official briefings and what senators and congressmen read over their morning coffee in the pages of The New York Times and The Washington Post."

Authorizing torture

How much more evidence do we need before it becomes undeniable that torture is officially sanctioned by the Bush regime? Clearly, it was a policy decision to encourage torture of prisoners -- nothing else can explain why the Pentagon repeatedly ignored notifications from a wide variety of sources: the Red Cross, the F.B.I., even its own internal auditors. Alberto Gonzalez's musings on how torture could be legally justified were not just abstract exercises, but were (as we would expect from the White House Counsel) justifications for existing policy.

Torture is what the Pentagon wanted, and it's what the Pentagon got. And it's still going on.

People have said, rightly enough, that future one paragraph encyclopedia entries on Bill Clinton will highlight his impeachment and its sordid underpinnings. Historians will no doubt make much of the fact that many Americans seemingly didn't mind Clinton's behavior, with some pointing to how it signified the diminished moralizing fiber of the country.

Likewise, it now seems virtually inevitable that, decades hence, the first lines in potted histories of the Bush regime will mention its sanctioning of torture as a scandal to the core values the country. Likewise, historians will make much of the fact that many Americans seemingly didn't mind the regime's behavior, with some pointing to how it signified the diminished moral fiber of the country.

Remind me, which is the party of "values"? The one that gives torturers a free pass, or the one that gives philanderers a free pass?

Lying about the future

Last week I quoted Hitler with respect to the power of "the great lie". A friend commented that it was quite something for me to compare Bush to Hitler, but that it was probably okay, since Wonkette had just the day before compared him to Stalin. Another friend objected that Bush doesn't exactly lie so much as just make absurd claims. A couple of responses.

As to the Hitler comparison, I didn't actually compare Bush to Hitler, but rather said that the Bush regime practices an approach to deception that Hitler had described very well -- that is, rather than deceive about small things, deceive about very large things. In the passage from Mein Kampf that I quoted, Hitler explains that in many respects it's easier for politicians to get away with big lies than small ones, since really big deceptions have an awing quality to them. One thing I should have noted, however, is that if you read the entire passage in which Hitler makes this comment, it is quite clear that he is criticizing the practice and ascribing it to his political opponents. (That Hitler himself adopted the practice later is a different story.) The main point, however, is that Hitler achieved a fundamental insight into the political epistomology of mass society. Which should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with his political career.

As to the details of Bush's art of deception, Josh Marshall's take in the September 2003 Washington Monthly is unequalled. Marshall explains how Bush's scorn for expertise, in practice, amounts to a new form of lying. The Bush regime habitually makes statements about probable futures that so completely fly in the face of what the vast majority of experts on the subject claim (e.g., human activity is not causing global warming; mass tax cuts can be sustained without causing permanent mass deficits; touching genitals can get you pregnant; etc.) that its insistance on these positions amounts to a form of lying. Although ignoring massive amounts of contrary evidence thus functions as the logical equivalent of lying, because his statements typically refer to some as-yet-unrealized future state, Bush shields himself from the most obvious charges about lying.

To get a better sense of what I'm referring to, recall the classical Humean point about empiricism: just because the sun has risen on every morning we've ever known is no proof that it will do so tomorrow; it is, however, damn good evidence that it will. On many subjects, Bush is asking us to accept that by the application of enough will, perseverance, and faith, we can achieve results not much less fantastical than the failure of the sun to rise tomorrow. What would we make of Bush if he claimed that nay-saying physicists were just pessimistic liberal elitists? In claiming that things are getting better in Iraq, that the application of mass force to an entire city will quell the insurgency, and that democracy is on the march, Bush is making a claim that, in light of the historical evidence, is only marginally less preposterous than the one about the sun not rising.

High stakes poker in the Gulf

The New York Review of Books lays out the essential nature of the decision-making process that led us to wage a war of choice in Iraq:

Put simply, President Bush has laid an immense wager that the American military invasion and occupation of Iraq will result in a stable government friendly to the West and thereby make America safer. Some members of the administration have argued further that a genuine democracy in Iraq will help to change the political landscape in the Middle East, and Paul Wolfowitz, one of the Pentagon architects of the plan to invade Iraq, was even quoted as saying before the war that the road to Jerusalem -- by which he meant peace between Israel and the Palestinians -- lay through Baghdad. These hopes seem to have dimmed now, but the wager is on the table and cannot be withdrawn. Social and political realities in the region of conflict will determine whether the answer is win, lose, or draw....

Leave aside whether the wager was a wise one from the outset. Leave aside also whether geopolitical wagering is an appropriate approach to diplomacy. What's clear nonetheless is that for the U.S. to consider attacking Iran at this juncture is the wagering equivalent of splitting on a pair of fives when the dealer's showing an ace.

But just such a wager is quite clearly what the Bush regime and its neocon fantasists are contemplating:

We should all take careful note of official American remarks about Iran and Syria, but Iran especially; to my ear they closely echo what the administration was saying about Iraq beginning early in 2002— the regime is unelected, it is dominated by extremists, it is embarked on a program to build nuclear weapons, it supports terrorist groups and might give them weapons of mass destruction, the regime is a threat to America.

As the saying goes, haven't we seen this movie before?

The need for procedural reform in budgeting

I can't believe I find myself writing this, but I agree 100% with that the WSJ op-ed page says -- in this case about the need to reform the budgeting process. The lede:

Republicans in Congress have been patting themselves on the back since Election Day, but maybe they should pay more attention to the pummeling they've been taking in the past few weeks. Democrats have been scoring by attacking the majority GOP as the party of big, intrusive government.

Never mind the irony, Republicans have only themselves to blame.

This discussion of the budgeting process exemplifies (for both sides) what it means for the Democrats to be the party of opposition: it means finding symbolic issues that demonstrate the lack of respect for the national interest (and abuse of power) of the ruling party.

Why can't we find bin Laden

The WaPo informs us that not only haven't we found Osama bin Laden, but that his trail has gone completely cold, at least for the Pakistanis, on whose territory he's widely presumed to be hanging out.

The key graf in this article, however, is Musharraf's account for why the Pakistanis have been unable to find bin Laden:

The United States shares major responsibility, Musharraf suggested, because the U.S.-led coalition does not have enough troops in Afghanistan, which has left "voids." The United States and its allies need to expedite the training and expansion of the new Afghan army as the only viable alternative, he said.

Anyone care to venture a guess as to why we don't have enough troops in Afghanistan, hunting down the man who actually attacked us on 9-11?

Mission Accomplished....

After our great victory in Fallujah, it looks like we have the insurgents on their heels all over Iraq: they've only managed to kill 90 people in the last 3 days.

Would anyone describe this as "bringing it on"?

Update: You know Belgravia Dispatch is getting desperate when he has to resort to claiming, a month after the election, "Well, Kerry woulda been worse!"

Not that I doubt him about Kerry, but the situation in Iraq shows the bankruptcy of the overall American position in Iraq. I'd be interested in hearing Greg's en avance description of the scene that would describe the failure of the American agenda; in short, what hypothetical sitation would it take for Greg to say, "Yes, now, despite everything, we should leave." Like his dad, he'll probably take the standard diplomatic response, and say, "We don't engage in hypotheticals." That's diplomatically legitimate, but intellectually vacant. Can Greg do better?

Why the U.S. can't win in Iraq

Or rather, why the U.S. can't achieve the political objectives set out by the neocon fantasists and still promoted by the Bush regime, namely to achieve pro-American democracy in Iraq....

This Boston Globle article makes it clear why the U.S. needs to redefine its criteria for victory, as I started to enunciate last week: the tactical requirements to beat the Iraqi insurgency make it all but impossible for the U.S. to achieve its stated political objective of turning Iraq into a viable, pro-American (or at least non-anti-American) democracy. The money graf is the first one:

The US military is drawing up plans to keep insurgents from regaining control of this battle-scarred city, but returning residents may find that the measures make Fallujah look more like a police state than the democracy they have been promised.

The U.S. faces the same clear choice that every imperialist has who faced a well-armed, popular guerilla insurgency: you either have to subject the population itself to total repression (or, in the "classical" Roman model, kill them all); or you need to abandon the fray (the "modern" de Gaulle model). Contra Max Boot, you can't maintain both an imperial stance and an image of national benevolence. When it comes to resentful foreign populations, if you wish to order their world, you must be a ruthless dictator.

The article goes on to quote a soldier who seems to be reluctantly inching toward this realization, in reference to what the future holds for the civilian population of Fallujah:

One idea that has stirred debate among Marine officers would require all men to work, for pay, in military-style battalions. Depending on their skills, they would be assigned jobs in construction, waterworks, or rubble-clearing platoons.

"You have to say, 'Here are the rules,' and you are firm and fair. That radiates stability," said Lieutenant Colonel Dave Bellon, intelligence officer for the First Regimental Combat Team, the Marine regiment that took the western half of Fallujah during the US assault and expects to be based downtown for some time.

Bellon asserted that previous attempts to win trust from Iraqis suspicious of US intentions had telegraphed weakness by asking, " 'What are your needs? What are your emotional needs?' All this Oprah [stuff]," he said. "They want to figure out who the dominant tribe is and say, 'I'm with you.' We need to be the benevolent, dominant tribe.

"They're never going to like us," he added, echoing other Marine commanders who cautioned against raising hopes that Fallujans would warmly welcome troops when they return to ruined houses and rubble-strewn streets. The goal, Bellon said, is "mutual respect."

Bellon's line of reasoning about the need for the U.S. to act as the "benevolent, dominant tribe" in Iraq represents a sort of halfway point in the slow realization of what it really means to run an empire: Bellon realizes they hate us, but stills believes that the U.S. can be both "benevolent" and "firm" (euphemism alert!).

Such a combination works when raising children. But it doesn't work with foreign populations in the age of the modern media. Basically, if you're not willing to deal ruthlessly with civilian populations, then don't pretend to have the stones to run an empire. To be an imperialist, one must have the courage to carry out the necessary crimes. But the modern media makes it inevitable that these crimes will be fully displayed, and thus makes it impossible to maintain the fiction (or rather, the propaganda) of benevolence.

So that's it: either imperialism or benevolence, but not both.

The Virgin Spanking the Christ Child

Max Ernst's The Virgin Spanking the Christ Child... (1926) provides a suggestive visual metaphor for what cosmopolitans should do to the evangelical Right.

Elis slam their man

Check out this excellent column in the Yale Daily. It argues along the same lines I do that there is indeed a battle on for the soul of America, with superstition and and anti-empiricism on one side, and Enlightenment values of reason, inclusion, and cosmopolitanism on the other:

The belief in individual autonomy, natural rights and the inherent worth of the scientific method -- i.e. the Enlightenment values at the core of our nation's founding documents -- have always coexisted uneasily with a subcultural stratum of religious fundamentalism....

Though all Republicans are by no means fellow-travelers of the Christian Coalition, the number of prominent Republicans who will stand up to the religious right is small and shrinking. The majority of elected Republicans either believe in the Family Research Council's vision of social transformation, or else are both too ambitious and cowardly to resist taking the party line. More importantly, perhaps, the Republican president is a member of his own religious base. His rejection of empiricism has both served as a tool for crafting policy and as a badge of honor, a signifier that he has "values," whereas things like evidence and rational justification are only for those who never had any morals in the first place.

Exactly.

Andrew Sullivan makes a related observation, pointing out that public Christian moralism appeals mainly to people who live in communities where morality has failed.

Those of us who already live decent, inclusive, tolerant lives have no need for sanctimonious politicians.

Our new homeland security chief

Here's some good buzz about Bernard Kerik, our newly nominated Secretary of Homeland Security, from last April:

Former New York Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik and former New York Fire Commissioner Thomas Van Essen have formed the Bush-Cheney 2004 National First Responders Team supporting the president's re-election.

In announcing the group, Kerik took a swipe at Sen. John Kerry, pointing to Kerry's votes to cut intelligence budgets and against the $87 billion Iraq appropriation and saying his biggest fear is another 9/11 attack: "If you put Senator Kerry in the White House, I think you are going to see that happen ... and I don't want to see another September 11."

If the Germans had an agency like this one, they'd call it the Heimatsicherheitsministerium.

Iraq: responsibility and credibility

In recent months, the debate about why we are in Iraq has increasingly narrowed in scope to two essential arguments. The first, most usually uttered by right-wingers, is that no matter how bad things get, we can't pull out, because it'll ruin our "credibility" with the terrorists, thus emboldening them in their assault on our society. The second argument, most usually put forth by progressives, is that we owe it to the Iraqis not to leave the place a bigger mess than we found it.

To both of these arguments, my basic response is: it's important to be able to admit mistakes and move on. To the liberals I would simply say that sometimes you have to admit that, as much as it's the responsible thing to do to clean up your own mess, in certain situations by sticking around you're only going to make a situation worse. Most of us can probably think of any number of personal examples.

For the right-wingers, I'd start by noting that while I appreciate the moral importance of following through on the things you say you're going to do, the functional argument about credibility is, well, not credible. Leaving leave aside the issue of whether the resistance currently operating in Iraq have anything to do with the terrorists that have attacked Western cities repeatedly in the last few years, let me make two points.

First of all, pasty-faced white men talking about "cred" always seem to me to have an undeniable "wanksta" quality (a point brilliantly satirized in this video, produced right before the Republican convention in New York this summer). Second, as a simple matter of historical causality, the argument about credibility is just not sound. The people making this argument always like to wheel out "Munich 1938" to support their point, but the more recent and relevant examples are things like the U.S. retreat from Vietnam, after which none of those predicted dominoes fell; or Reagan's retreat from Beirut in 1983, when again, nothing happened (although some people, subscribing to a conspiratorial Hegelianism, attribute 9-11 in part to Reagan's fecklessness eighteen years earlier). In short, I just don't buy that leaving Iraq would harm our ability to credibly go after true terrorists like Osama bin Laden.

What's terrible in the case of our Iraq policy is that, pace Rumsfeld, anyone who had open eyes knew in advance that Iraq was going to be a disaster that would likely result in a situation in which we would be humiliatingly forced to leave. And just because we're in a hole now is no reason either to exculpate the initial decision to dig the hole, or to continue digging. Right-wingers characterize the situation in Iraq as a "battle of wills" and believe that merely by dint of perseverance we can "win." But as Juan Cole asks, can anyone think of a single instance since 1970 that a Western power has succeeded against a well-armed insurgency in the global South?

In terms of the definition of victory that we went into the war with, "winning" is no longer a meaningful option for us in Iraq -- if it ever was. The question now is only how humiliating our loss will be. In fact, if you subscribe to the credibility argument, just consider this: the longer we stay, the worse our credibility loss will be when we leave.

To use the sort of metaphor that ought to be comprehensible to our "MBA President", us staying the course in Iraq is like a company continuing with a strategy that has already failed: think of IBM continuing to invest in OS/2, or Motorola continuing to invest in Iridium, or Ford continuing to refuse to offer cars in any color except black... you get the idea. Sometimes you just have to admit you've lost and move on. That's part of what being a good leader is all about.

Let me be clear: I'm not saying we should pull all the troops out of Iraq tomorrow. What I'm saying is that a clearly-articulated exit strategy is (and should always have been) a top priority, and that that strategy should not be dependent on some secular or liberal pro-American regime emerging in Iraq. At this point, a stable and legitimate regime in Iraq is simply not compatible with a pro-American or liberal regime. It probably never was possible, but after the way the U.S. has behaved in Iraq this year, it's simply out of the question.

American casualty rates increasing in Iraq

In response to one of my recent posts, a friend commented that my post was misleading about the casualty situation in Iraq. But if you look at the statistics, it's pretty clear that the American casualty rate in Iraq is only increasing over time.

Even as the U.S. casualty rate continues to rise, the casualty rate for Iraqi civil defense forces is apparently increasing even faster. According to Rummy, "The Iraqis have lost more people than we have in their Iraqi security forces already. And they've only been organized in the last year or so."

What's bizarre is that Rummy mentions this factoid as part of his effort to convince us that the war is headed in the right direction.

Fallujah in Pictures

The proverbial thousand words.

"Dropping a thumbline"

Rummy's finally admitting, sort of, that what's happening in Iraq is a slow-motion disaster. But even as he's admitting this, he's still insisting that no one could have foreseen the disaster: "If you're asking, 'Was there any kind of understanding or agreement that there would likely be a long insurgency afterwards,' I don't believe that anyone would say -- if you dropped a thumbline through all that intelligence -- that anyone would say that."

Maybe Rumsfeld means that no one predicted that Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi would turn televised beheadings into a terrorist industry standard. Maybe he means that no one predicted that four mercenaries would be strung up on a bridge in Fallujah. Maybe he means that no one knew that a young cleric named Muqtada Al-Sadr would lead a Shi'ite uprising again the U.S. occupation. In short, if Rumsfeld means that no one predicted the tactical particulars of the insurgency, then he's probably being honest.

However, if this is the nature of Rumsfeld's claim, then it's also an almost entirely meaningless statement, since the first rule of military planning is that no plan survives contact with the enemy entirely intact.

If you look at the whole transcript of the interview with Bill O'Reilly where he made these claims, it's clear that Rumsfeld is making a much more general claim, namely that no one predicted there would be an insurgency. Rhetorically, it puts into place an assumption that everyone agreed with Dick Cheney's now-infamous "we'll be greeted as liberators" line and Ken Adelman's downright embarrassing "cakewalk" line.

The main problem with Rumsfeld's claim, to put it politely, is that it is total bullshit. Many, many people said in advance that we might well face very serious long-term military challenges. For example, here's an article from the first week of the war cataloging the doubters. Indeed, the Adelman piece itself was intended as a refutation of these all-too-prescient cassandras.

In fact, what Rumsfeld is engaged in here is a classic example of what Hitler famously referred to as "the big lie," namely a lie so grand in scale that the very audacity of its bullshit awes and stupefies the masses. As in, "he couldn't possibly tell a lie that big, could he?" Here's how Hitler put it:

the magnitude of a lie always contains a certain factor of credibility, since the great masses of the people in the very bottom of their hearts tend to be corrupted rather than consciously and purposely evil, and that, therefore, in view of the primitive simplicity of their minds they more easily fall a victim to a big lie than to a little one, since they themselves lie in little things, but would be ashamed of lies that were too big. Such a falsehood will never enter their heads and they will not be able to believe in the possibility of such monstrous effrontery and infamous misrepresentation in others; yes, even when enlightened on the subject, they will long doubt and waver, and continue to accept at least one of these causes as true. Therefore, something of even the most insolent lie will always remain and stick - a fact which all the great lie-virtuosi and lying-clubs in this world know only too well and also make the most treacherous use of.

Hitler's analysis makes it clear why, on the one hand, lying about getting a blowjob reduces the stature of the liar to that of an everyday schmuck, thus shaming the great office of the Presidency and making the great masses hate the liar, whereas Rumsfeld's and Bush's massive, world-historical lies serve, ironically, to "restore dignity" to the office.

Snug fit

Check out Ambassador John Negroponte's spiffy new vest! I'm guessing that that must be the official "Mission Accomplished" outfit. (Hat tip: Eric Umansky.)

If someone caps that guy, it'll be twenty years too late to make up for what he did in Central America in the 1980s.

Incidentally, Negroponte is one of the few Exeter boys among the Andover men (Bush, Libby, Bremer) taking it strong to the hole in the Middle East. He's also the brother of Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the M.I.T. Media Lab and Wired Magazine.

Bush's "communications problem" in the GWOT

In what will likely serve to augment the Bush regime's hatred for anything labelled "scientific", a Pentagon group called the Defense Science Board has issued a report that labels the Bush regime's Middle East "communications strategy" as an unmitigated disaster in terms of its effort to win over the hearts and minds of the peoples of the Middle East.

I must say that I find the reference to Bush's "communications problem" almost as amusing as references to his "intelligence failures."

But leave that to one side. What's really striking is that the Pentagon would have posted a paper that in so many ways repudiates everything that Bush has been saying about the GWOT. Let me pick out a few passages.

America is losing the war for hearts and minds:

We face a war on terrorism, intensified conflict within Islam, and insurgency in Iraq. Worldwide anger and discontent are directed at America’s tarnished credibility and ways the U.S. pursues its goals. There is consensus that America’s power to persuade is in a state of crisis....

Opinion surveys conducted by Zogby International, the Pew Research Center, Gallup (CNN/USA Today), and the Department of State (INR) reveal widespread animosity toward the United States and its policies. A year and a half after going to war in Iraq, Arab/Muslim anger has intensified. Data from Zogby International in July 2004, for example, show that the U.S. is viewed unfavorably by overwhelming majorities in Egypt (98 percent), Saudi Arabia (94 percent), Morocco (88 percent), and Jordan (78 percent). The war has increased mistrust of America in Europe, weakened support for the war on terrorism, and undermined U.S. credibility worldwide. Media commentary is consistent with polling data. In a State Department (INR) survey of editorials and op-eds in 72 countries, 82.5 % of commentaries were negative, 17.5% positive.

As a framing device, the "global war on terrorism" meme confuses more than it clarifies and that leads to misplaced policy objectives:

The events of September 11, 2001 were a catalyst in creating a new way to think about national security. The Global War on Terrorism replaced the Cold War as a national security metanarrative.... Like the Cold War frame, the terrorism frame marginalizes other significant issues and problems: failing states, non-proliferation, HIV/AIDS pandemic, economic globalization, transnational threats other than terrorism, and global warming. Often the terrorism frame directs attention to tactics not strategy. The focus is more on capturing and killing terrorists than attitudinal, political, and economic forces that are the underlying source of threats and opportunities in national security....

We call it a war on terrorism ― but Muslims in contrast see a history-shaking movement of Islamic restoration. This is not simply a religious revival, however, but also a renewal of the Muslim World itself. And it has taken form through many variant movements, both moderate and militant, with many millions of adherents ― of which radical fighters are only a small part.... U.S. policies and actions are increasingly seen by the overwhelming majority of Muslims as a threat to the survival of Islam itself....

Equating the GWOT with the Cold War is likewise misleading:

The Cold War emphasized dissemination of information to "huddled masses yearning to be free." Today we reflexively compare Muslim "masses" to those oppressed under Soviet rule. This is a strategic mistake. There is no yearning-to-be-liberated-by-the-U.S. groundswell among Muslim societies — except to be liberated perhaps from what they see as apostate tyrannies that the U.S. so determinedly promotes and defends....

American direct intervention in the Muslim World has paradoxically elevated the stature of and support for radical Islamists, while diminishing support for the United States to single-digits in some Arab societies. Muslims do not "hate our freedom," but rather, they hate our policies....

When American public diplomacy talks about bringing democracy to Islamic societies, this is seen as no more than self-serving hypocrisy. Moreover, saying that "freedom is the future of the Middle East" is seen as patronizing, suggesting that Arabs are like the enslaved peoples of the old Communist World — but Muslims do not feel this way: they feel oppressed, but not enslaved.

Bush's foreign policy is strengthening, not weakening, our true enemies:

The dramatic narrative since 9/11 has essentially borne out the entire radical Islamist bill of particulars. American actions and the flow of events have elevated the authority of the Jihadi insurgents and tended to ratify their legitimacy among Muslims. Fighting groups portray themselves as the true defenders of an Ummah (the entire Muslim community) invaded and under attack — to broad public support. What was a marginal network is now an Ummah-wide movement of fighting groups. Not only has there been a proliferation of "terrorist" groups: the unifying context of a shared cause creates a sense of affiliation across the many cultural and sectarian boundaries that divide Islam....

The critical problem in American public diplomacy directed toward the Muslim World is not one of "dissemination of information," or even one of crafting and delivering the "right" message. Rather, it is a fundamental problem of credibility. Simply, there is none....

That the American belief that we can be both good and pursue our interests is a crock:

Americans believe that while the U.S. necessarily shapes foreign policies to support our national interests, those same interests are not necessarily in opposition to the interests of other nations and cultures. To the contrary, Americans are convinced that the U.S. is a benevolent "superpower" that elevates values emphasizing freedom and prosperity as at the core of its own national interest. Thus, for Americans, "U.S. values" are in reality "world values"... so deep down we assume that everyone should naturally support our policies. Yet the world of Islam — by overwhelming majorities at this time — sees things differently. Muslims see American policies as inimical to their values, American rhetoric about freedom and democracy as hypocritical, and American actions as deeply threatening.

Finally, the Bush regime is itself the core of the problem:

There is consensus... that U.S. public diplomacy is in crisis. Missing are strong leadership, strategic direction, adequate coordination, sufficient resources, and a culture of measurement and evaluation. America’s image problem, many suggest, is linked to perceptions of the United States as arrogant, hypocritical, and self-indulgent.... So far these concerns have produced no real change. The White House has paid little attention.

Taken as a whole, this report underscores how completely Bush's foreign policy (and related communications approach) has been subordinated to winning the hearts and minds 51% of Americans in November 2004. And although doing and saying things that please evangelical American farmers proved an effective reelection strategy for Bush, from a policy perspective it's been a disaster for all Americans -- and for the world.

Finally, the last thing that struck me as I read this report was that it helps to illuminate another underpinning of what readers of this blog will know I refer to as Bush's "other GWOT," namely his global war on transparency. This report makes clear why Bush is waging the other GWOT: the more information flows freely, the less Bush can spin. (As the report concludes, "Fifty years ago political struggles were about the ability to control and transmit scarce information. Today, political struggles are about the creation and destruction of credibility." It's not even necessary to specify whose credibility has been destroyed. Let's just say that it's not Osama's.)

As the Cold War taught us, the free flow of information is the enemy of projects of domination, and the desire to contain the flow of information is the hallmark of a politically bankrupt regime. Reports like this will surely only strengthen the hand of those in the Bush regime who wish to further restrain the free flow of information.