Monthly Archives: August 2006

Can This Marriage Be Saved?

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I got up this morning looking forward to wallowing in the Lamont victory (I know there’s a big challenge ahead, but we get so little to wallow in; enjoy, I say). I had also planned to float the speculation that the Lieberman team deliberately sabotaged their own web site because they knew they were losing, and Joe wanted an excuse. An unfair primary gives him a moral basis on which to challenge the election results.

But then I read this from the Washington Times supplement Insight:

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has become increasingly dismayed over President Bush’s support for Israel to continue its war with Hezbollah.

State Department sources said Ms. Rice has been repeatedly stymied in her attempts to pressure Israel to end strikes against Hezbollah strongholds in Lebanon. The sources said the secretary’s trip to the Middle East last week was torpedoed by the Israeli air strike of a Lebanese village in which 25 people were killed.

“I’ve never seen her so angry,” an aide said.

The U.S. response to the Israeli-Hezbollah war was said to have divided both the administration as well as the family of President George W. Bush. At the same time, it marked the first time since Ms. Rice became secretary of state that the president has overruled her.

Yesterday I speculated that the President had tuned out the Middle East because he doesn’t give a shit. But maybe he does give a shit. Or else the cluster bombing of civilians reminds him of his wholesome Texas childhood and the exploding frogs.

“We were terrible to animals,” recalled [Bush pal Terry] Throckmorton, laughing. A dip behind the Bush borne turned into a small lake after a good rain, and thousands of frogs would come out. “Everybody would get BB guns and shoot them,” Throckmorton said. “Or we’d put firecrackers in the frogs and throw them and blow them up.”

Kristof made plain that “we” explicitly included George W. Bush, and that George W., the Safari Club International Governor of the Year in 1999 for his support of trophy hunting, was the leader among the boys who did it.

I think I read somewhere that children get their first lessons in conflict resolution from playing with other children. But now let’s go back to Insight:

“For the last 18 months, Condi was given nearly carte blanche in setting foreign policy guidelines,” a senior government source familiar with the issue said. “All of a sudden, the president has a different opinion and he wants the last word.”

The disagreement between Mr. Bush and Ms. Rice is over the ramifications of U.S. support for Israel’s continued offensive against Lebanon. The sources said Mr. Bush believes that Israel’s failure to defeat Hezbollah would encourage Iranian adventurism in neighboring Iraq. Ms. Rice has argued that the United States would be isolated both in the Middle East and Europe at a time when the administration seeks to build a consensus against Iran’s nuclear weapons program.

Instead, Ms. Rice believes the United States should engage Iran and Syria to pressure Hezbollah to end the war with Israel. Ms. Rice has argued that such an effort would result in a U.S. dialogue with Damascus and Tehran on Middle East stability.

It occurs to me that this article may be part of the neocon’s scheme to scapegoat and marginalize Condi for being a stick-in-the-mud. Sidney Blumenthal wrote last week that the Bush Administration’s neoconservative insiders are eager to “widen the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah and Israel and Hamas into a four-front war,” and Condi isn’t helping:

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is said to have been “briefed” and to be “on board,” but she is not a central actor in pushing the covert neoconservative scenario. Her “briefing” appears to be an aspect of an internal struggle to intimidate and marginalize her. Recently she has come under fire from prominent neoconservatives who oppose her support for diplomatic negotiations with Iran to prevent its development of nuclear weaponry.

Rice’s diplomacy in the Middle East has erratically veered from initially calling on Israel for “restraint,” to categorically opposing a cease-fire, to proposing terms for a cease-fire guaranteed to conflict with the European proposal, and thus to thwarting diplomacy, prolonging the time available for the Israeli offensive to achieve its stated aim of driving Hezbollah out of southern Lebanon. But the neocon scenario extends far beyond that objective to pushing Israel into a “cleansing war” with Syria and Iran, says the national security official, which somehow will redeem Bush’s beleaguered policy in the entire region.

Last month Insight published an article titled “Dump Condi” that is riddled with dire warnings about accommodation and appeasement. Real Men don’t accommodate; they dictate. The neocons complain that Rice’s “ignorance of the Middle East” is hindering U.S. foreign policy. They expect Rice to be “transferred” after the November midterms, because by that time by that time “even Mr. Bush will recognize the failure of relying solely on diplomacy in the face of Iran’s nuclear weapons program.”

Right now it’s hard to know exactly what Mr. Bush’s recognizes. Fred Kaplan writes in Slate that Bush doesn’t seem to understand his own foreign policy. Writing of Monday’s “presser” (in which Condi expressed her solicitous concern for the emotional problems of the Lebanese), Kaplan writes,

The transcript contains so many mind-boggling statements that it’s hard to know where to begin, so let’s take them in chronological order.

“Everybody wants the violence to stop,” Bush said in answer to the session’s first question. But of course this isn’t true. If it were, he could have imposed a cease-fire in the first few days. He and Rice explicitly wanted the violence to continue, wanted Israel to pummel Hezbollah, so that when the time was ripe for a settlement, Israel could come to the table with a huge advantage.

Then Bush made a statement that curiously veered off script: “People understand that there needs to be a cessation of hostilities in order for us to address the root causes of the problem.” This contradicted Rice’s mantra of the last two weeks—that there should be no cessation until these root causes are addressed. Did he understand what he was saying? Everybody skipped over it in any case.

And on and on. I urge you to read the entire Kaplan column. I may come back to it in another post. But there’s some more juicy stuff in the new Insight article about the spat between Condi and George. You’ll like this:

Mr. Bush’s position has been supported by Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and to a lesser extent National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley. They have urged the president to hold off international pressure and give Israel more time to cause strategic damage to Hezbollah as well as Iranian and Syrian interests in Lebanon.

“I think if you think of what’s happening in Lebanon and Israel right now, you see the face of the beginning of the 21st century,” Mr. Rumsfeld said in a radio interview on Aug. 2.

Wait, it gets better.

Aides for Mr. Cheney have argued that the United States should have targeted Hezbollah and Syria during the war against Iraq in 2003. They said despite U.S. intelligence warnings Hezbollah was allowed to dominate Lebanon and build a formidable force along the Israeli border.

“There was talk of taking care of Hezbollah and Syria, but Condi and [then-Secretary of State Colin] Powell said ‘no way. We don’t need another front,'” an official said.

Oblivious doesn’t even get close to describing these people. They are lost in their own shit. John Williams writes about the neocon worldview on The Guardian web site:

One of the most interesting things I did as Jack Straw’s press secretary was to arrange the meeting between some of his Muslim constituents and Condoleezza Rice. That day in Blackburn last March came to mind when I saw the extraordinary suggestion that Straw might have been removed from the Foreign Office because the US administration thought he was too influenced by Muslim opinion in the town.

I say “extraordinary” not because I think it’s inaccurate but because it takes extreme mental gymnastics to conceive how anyone could believe it to be a bad thing to listen to and understand Muslim points of view. I’ve no idea whether the story is true. Under our unwritten constitution, nobody tells you why your competent, creative, diligent, honest, thoughtful boss of five years has suddenly been defenestrated.

The point about this story is that it is taken seriously. And it should be, because of its original source – Irwin Stelzer. An adviser to Rupert Murdoch, Stelzer is part of the commentating class in the US that glorifies itself with the title neoconservative. I’ve never quite understood the neoconservative worldview, except that its evidential base is their own prejudice, and its prescriptions are built on the world as they would like it to be, rather than as it is.

Some of them – for example, William Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard – actually believe that Iranians would welcome a military attack on their country by America, taking their cue to rise up against their leaders. Again, it takes advanced mental gymnastics.

Nah, “mental gymnastics” doesn’t get there. It’s more like the neocons are so full of themselves they displace the rest of the universe. Reality is put through so many filters of ego-centrism and bigotry in a neocon’s head that it dissipates before it can reach consciousness. A neocon literally cannot see anything else in the world but himself. Wherever he looks, he sees only the shining reflection of his own bigotries and ideologies and pathologies scowling back at him.

[UPDATE: See also Robert Scheer, “Why We Don’t Know Our Enemy.” Outstanding.]

But I keep wandering away from the Insight article. We’re almost done. In fact, here’s the punch line:

Mr. Bush has been dismayed by the Israeli failure to defeat Hezbollah. They said several high-ranking Republicans have expressed amazement at the plodding Israeli advance into Lebanon.

“One Jewish friend of Bush actually called up a senior Israeli official and began yelling, ‘What the hell’s going on here,'” a source said. “‘Are you going to fight or what?'”

I love it that a friend of Bush who is, it seems, neither an elected or appointed government official takes it on himself to dictate policy to another nation. Grand.

Warren Strobel and Carol Rosenberg of McClatchy Newspapers (formerly known as Knight Ridder) write that Israel is preparing to expand the ground war in Lebanon. Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora begs Washington Post readers to “End This Tragedy Now.” And in Salon, Mitchell Prothero writes in “Bombs Over Beirut” that once pro-Western Lebanese are rapidly becoming Hezbollah supporters. Juan Cole has news of the fighting over the past few hours.

I’m going to wallow for awhile now. Catch ya later.

Update: See also Scott Ritter, “The Grave Consequences of Supporting War in Lebanon“; Thomas Friedman, “Warren Buffet and Hezbollah”

Nail Biting

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UPDATE: LIEBERMAN CONCEDES!

He’s announcing his third-party run as well, the creep.

More update: It’s official; Ned wins. Right now about 98% of votes are counted, and Lamont is up by about 3.6 points. Lieberman is still going for a general election win. Pathetic.

Kos writes about next steps.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I’m watching Connecticut returns on four different web sites. The spread between Lamont and Lieberman gets tighter as the votes come in. Grrr.

In other news — Tom DeLay wants his name off the ballot.

More—

71.79% of precincts reporting —

Lamont, Ned — 100,425 — 51.61%

Lieberman, Joe — 94,148 — 48.39%

Update:

76.87% of precincts reporting —

Lamont — 109,239 — 51.76%

Lieberman — 101,818 — 48.24%

Update: 80% of precincts reporting, percentage remains the same.

Update: 83.56% of precincts —

Lamont — 120,616 — 51.88%

Lieberman — 111,887 — 48.12%

Update: 89.17% of precincts reporting —

Lamont — 127,786 — 51.60%

Lieberman — 119,867 — 48.40%

Update: 93.85% of precincts reporting —

Lamont — 134,942 — 51.65%

Lieberman — 126,330 — 48.35%

Update: 95.32% of precincts reporting —

Lamont — 138,836 — 51.92%

Lieberman — 128,566 — 48.08%

Only in the Blogosphere

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The Talking Dog interviews Erik Saar, who was an Arabic linguist at Guantanamo Bay. You want to read this.

Dave Neiwert comments on those nasty liberal bloggers. Steve G. reminds us to remember Vince Foster.

More: Via Ezra, the Rude Pundit on those nasty liberal bloggers:

Why is it that whenever right-wingers wanna criticize the “viciousness” of the left, more often than not, they use e-mails and blog comments instead of, say, the words of writers (bloggy and non-bloggy) and leaders? Like Lanny Davis in the Wall Street Journal‘s OpinionJournal, making some big and brave statement about “McCarthyism” on the left towards Shoeless Joe Lieberman as indicated by the well-considered and crafted comments on blogs and e-mail responses. The Lieberman-lovin’ Davis writes, “The far right does not have a monopoly on bigotry and hatred and sanctimony. Here are just a few examples (there are many, many more anyone with a search engine can find) of the type of thing the liberal blog sites have been posting about Joe Lieberman” and then quotes the mean meanies of the left, like at Daily Kos. But not, you know, Kos, or Hunter, or McJoan, or DarkSyde, or any of the other posters. Nope, it’s commenter “tomjones.” …

… When the Rude Pundit wants to go trawling for right-wing hate, he doesn’t need to look to his hate e-mails, with their occasional threats of violence. He doesn’t need to point to the comments on right-wing blogs. He can just point to the blogs themselves, or turn on the goddamn radio or the fuckin’ Fox “News,” or open the newspaper to read the vomitous rantings of every other conservative columnist talking about liberals despising and destroying America. They can only pick nits; we have to swat hissing cockroaches.

Exactly.

More more:

Billmon’s Da Man:

This is really quite revealing of the neocon mind set — and the increasingly large gulf between that mind set and what American power and influence can support:

    “The position that we’re taking in the UN is just nuts,” a former White House official close to the US decision-making process said during the negotiations. “The US wants to put international forces on the ground in the middle of the conflict, before there’s a ceasefire. The reasoning at the White House is that the international force could weigh on the side of the Israelis — could enforce Hezbollah’s disarmament” . . .

    A former US Central Intelligence Agency officer confirmed this view: “I am under the impression that George Bush and Condoleezza Rice were surprised when the Europeans disagreed with the US position — they were running around saying, ‘But how can you disagree, don’t you understand? Hezbollah is a terrorist organization.'” (emphasis added)

And a tough and dangerous one to boot. This is supposed to encourage the French to plunk their people down in the middle of a hot LZ?

Ever since 9/11, there’s been this attitude among the Bushies that the most important thing is to convince the world that America’s enemies (who are now identical with Israel’s enemies) represent the ultimate in evil — the Wal-Mart of evil, the Pittsburgh Steelers of evil, the Dr. Evil of evil. Once that goal has been accomplished, why then of course the “free world” will line up and enlist in Uncle Sam’s army. Or so the thinking seems to be.

In other words, the PR strategy is also the diplomatic strategy — and, as we’ve seen in Iraq, the military strategy as well. Mike Gerson (Bush’s chief speechwriter, crafter of all those fine phrases about freedom and democracy) really is running the war. And when you let your speechwriters run your war, you have no right to complain when you lose.

Chamberlain’s Ghost

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On last night’s Countdown, Keith Olbermann compared President Bush to the eternally maligned Neville Chamberlain:

On August 4, 1939, the prime minister of Great Britain, Neville Chamberlain, adjourned the British parliament and ordered it reconvened on October 1st. He went on vacation. Eighteen days later, the Russians and Germans signed a non-aggression pact removing the last obstacle to the Nazis rolling through Europe. When Chamberlain was located by his secretary, he was knee-deep in a river fishing. When the secretary told him that Hitler and Stalin had just cut a deal, Chamberlain told him, ‘You must have gotten that wrong somehow.’ Chamberlain was on vacation. World War II started nine days later.

Our fifth story on the Countdown, depending on how you parse it, there barely is or barely isn’t a civil war in Iraq, and the intensity of the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah continues to spiral upwards. But President Bush, right on time, started his vacation today. His close ally, Tony Blair, avoided the direct Chamberlain comparison and cancelled his own time off because of the events in the Middle East. But the President went to Crawford, Texas today anyway. There he announced two new United Nations resolutions to end the conflict perhaps while making it clear he is not actually involved with a lot of the diplomatic legwork that is needed to make either resolution stick, like actually talking to the leaders of Lebanon and Israel about it.

Later in the program, Olbermann brought in Howard Fineman:

Olbermann: “Is it more than a cheap shot to say the President’s on vacation? Is it even possible to stop Israel and Hezbollah without the President at least giving the appearance of being involved in the process?”

Howard Fineman, Newsweek: “Well, I don’t think it’s a cheap shot, although the White House is trying to tell everybody that this is a much shorter vacation than ones he’s taken in the past, more like a campaign year. It’s that much of an emergency. But the key thing is not how many days he spends in Crawford, it’s what he does or doesn’t do when he’s there. Unfortunately for him, his Crawford record of vigilance is not that terrific politically or substantively. Don’t forget in 2001 he got that famous warning about the possible attack of al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden’s interest in attacking the United States just a month before 9/11. And then last year, during Katrina, there was evidence that he wasn’t really on his game and really vigilant the way he should have been, as early as he should have been, and he paid a lot politically for it. Now you got the combination of him being down in Crawford while at the same time saying that he’s not talking to the two most important leaders in the Middle East conflict right now, the leaders of Israel and Lebanon.”

Olbermann: “In the context of the PDB from 2001 and Katrina from 2005, we know that every few weeks the White House tries to change the delivery of the message or how the message is received or to blame reporters about the message. Does anybody there believe in history? Would somebody say to Mr. Bush, ‘Hey, you know, it would mean something, at least symbolically, if you delayed this trip even by a couple of days if there was some sense that it was not business as usual’?”

Fineman: “There may be some people who might say that to him. They’re not in his inner circle. Some measure of August vacation in Crawford is sacrosanct with George W. Bush. They think they’ve made a big sacrifice. He thinks he’s made a big sacrifice by having it only be about 10 to 11 days and not the nearly month that he sometimes takes and would prefer to take. They’re not going to say it to him. This is a guy who operates sometimes stubbornly by delegation, who operates on a rhythm, who cares very much about routine, and he’s not going to change, and I daresay most of the American people have already come to a conclusion about the character and public persona of George W. Bush. They either like him loathe him, and that’s really not going to be changed by the number of days he spends in Crawford.”

The MSNBC transcript of last night’s program isn’t available yet, so I want to thank Brad Wilmouth of NewsBusters for providing it. I take it Mr. Wilmouth disagrees with this analysis, but he doesn’t say why. It seems the comparison of Bush to Chamberlain was so intrinsically outrageous to Mr. Wilmouth that he believed no counterargument was necessary. Perhaps Mr. Olbermann violated the Right’s copyright on Chamberlain, whose corpse they wave incessantly to frighten spineless leftist appeasers. However, as Attaturk says,

Oh, and another thing if one more person uses poor old Neville Chamberlain one more time in justifying a war, let him or her have to enter the front ranks as a penance. The Right, most of whose intellectual ancestors were in “America First” at the time Chamberlain was earning the appeasement moniker, have more than used up their right to the approbation. Being for more war doesn’t make you tough, it doesn’t make you a man — it distracts you from the activity you never matured out of, taking a magnifying glass to ants.

So let’s put Mr. Chamberlain to rest and move on — Juan Cole writes,

Bush is on vacation, his favorite place to be during a major crisis. The August retreat is the only open admission he makes that Cheney and Rumsfeld are actually running the country, and he just doesn’t need to be in his office. The only difference between his stonewalling of Lebanon and the way he let New Orleans drown is that he has put away the banjo this summer, at least in public view. He had someone tie a necktie on him and stopped manically clearing brush for long enough to come out with Condi and hold a press conference. He lied, saying that no one wants to see the violence continue. He wants to see the violence continue. Otherwise he would insist on a ceasefire. You see, if you don’t have a ceasefire, the violence continues. If you oppose a ceasefire, you are saying you want the violence to continue. He does.

I suppose it’s possible he just plain doesn’t give a shit either way. But the man’s actions speak loudly and clearly that he isn’t particularly interested in stopping the violence, don’t they? Bush defends Israel by saying the war is against jihadists. But Professor Cole points out,

… the Israelis are not confining themselves to bombing Muslim radicals. They dropped 3000 bombs on Aitaroun in a single day. They are leveling the towns of the south altogether. They are hitting people who are not Muslim fascists.

In fact, they are hitting Christian areas such as Jounieh.

The Professor links to a Gulfnews article titled “Christian support to Israel dies under hail of bombs.” I really would like the righties to explain why Israel is bombing Christians, since Christians are way unlikely to be jihadists. The righties, however, are in their fourth day of a feeding frenzy over a couple of “doctored” photographs. Some other time, maybe.

Dan Froomkin writes,

As President Bush’s foreign policy oscillates between “cowboy diplomacy” and “post-cowboy diplomacy” and back again, it’s worth pointing out that it’s not really correct to call it diplomacy if he invariably refuses to talk to people who disagree with him.

The U.N. resolution Bush was pushing this morning from his vacation home in Texas bears the hallmarks of non-diplomacy: It’s a supposed cease-fire resolution that the parties most desperate for a cease fire are condemning as unworkable, unsatisfactory and doomed.

Perhaps that’s because the Bush administration is only engaging in direct talks with one party to the hostilities: Israel. The United States refuses to conduct negotiations with Hezbollah or its sponsors, Syria and Iran.

And the views of the democratically-elected government of Lebanon — where the continuing Israeli air strikes have killed more than 550 people, mostly civilians — are being dismissed by the White House as the overly emotional arguments of people who don’t know what’s best for them.

According to the quotations provided by Froomkin, it’s Condi who refuses to countenance “emotional arguments”:

Asked about Lebanese objections, Rice responded dismissively: “I understand how emotional this is for the Lebanese.”

But this is actually my favorite part:

Both Bush and Rice were dispassionate about the carnage in the region, savoring instead what they insist are important geopolitical gains. An unconditional cease-fire three weeks ago, Rice said, “would not have addressed any of these items that both sides know are going to have to be addressed if we’re going to have a sustainable cease-fire in the future.

“So this has been time that’s been well-spent over the last couple of weeks.”

I ‘spect there are a lot of Lebanese and also many Israelis who disagree, but they’re just being emotional. Then Condi goes on to talk about those “root causes” again, oblivious to the fact that, with every bomb dropped and every rocket launched, the roots are growing deeper. One could argue the wars in Lebanon and Iraq are jihadist fertilizer.

The Guardian reports it was a “bloody night” in Beirut last night,

Israel inflicted one of its deadliest attacks on Beirut last night when an air strike on a southern district killed at least 15 people, just hours after the departure of a delegation from the Arab League.

At least 30 were injured in the strike, which capped another day of violence in Lebanon in which more than 50 people died, including three Israeli soldiers.

The Guardian also reports that Israel refuses to cooperate with the UN or international aid groups trying to deliver humanitarian supplies to Lebanon.

Meanwhile, the justifications for the bombs and rockets continue to be debated on the nation’s op ed pages. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen presents Israel’s side in today’s Los Angeles Times:

Hezbollah — in choosing not to return the two soldiers it seized on July 12, and in its bombardment of Israel — has declared that it does not care if its war-making leads Israel to attack Lebanon’s cities, ruin that country’s economy and kill its people. What matters most is inflicting damage on Israel, weakening its morale and goading it to a level of destruction that will incite the world’s wrath. The Palestinians said as much with their second intifada and their suicide bombings. But this is different because Hezbollah’s daily rainfall of rockets in Israel portends an intolerable military assault without end.

What can Israel do — what could any country do? — with such an enemy?

After checking off some options and explaining why they wouldn’t work, Professor Goldhagen continues,

So Israel has adopted the fourth strategic possibility: to devastate its dangerous foe, which also would restore deterrence. Yet Israel has discovered that against combatants who look like civilians and whose rockets are hidden everywhere, it must fight longer and occupy and destroy much more of Lebanon than it may deem moral, wise or feasible. Even a future international force in southern Lebanon — the possibility of which is highly uncertain — may be incapable of thwarting Hezbollah and would still leave northern Israel in Hezbollah’s rocket range.

Professor Goldhagen concludes that Israel’s only viable option is to escalate the war and take it to Iran and Syria.

I’m not even going to comment on this. Make of it what you will (and I know you will).

George Monbiot also looks at the question asked by Professor Goldhagen, “What can Israel do?” But Monbiot’s answer differs.

Whatever we think of Israel’s assault on Lebanon, all of us seem to agree about one fact: that it was a response, however disproportionate, to an unprovoked attack by Hizbullah. I repeated this “fact” in my last column, when I wrote that “Hizbullah fired the first shots”. This being so, the Israeli government’s supporters ask peaceniks like me, what would you have done? It’s an important question. But its premise, I have now discovered, is flawed.

After listing some Hezbollah-Israeli aggressions over the past few years, Monbiot continues,

On July 12, in other words, Hizbullah fired the first shots. But that act of aggression was simply one instance in a long sequence of small incursions and attacks over the past six years by both sides. So why was the Israeli response so different from all that preceded it? The answer is that it was not a reaction to the events of that day. The assault had been planned for months.

The San Francisco Chronicle reports that “more than a year ago, a senior Israeli army officer began giving PowerPoint presentations, on an off-the-record basis, to US and other diplomats, journalists and thinktanks, setting out the plan for the current operation in revealing detail”. The attack, he said, would last for three weeks. It would begin with bombing and culminate in a ground invasion. Gerald Steinberg, professor of political science at Bar-Ilan University, told the paper that “of all of Israel’s wars since 1948, this was the one for which Israel was most prepared … By 2004, the military campaign scheduled to last about three weeks that we’re seeing now had already been blocked out and, in the last year or two, it’s been simulated and rehearsed across the board”.

A “senior Israeli official” told the Washington Post that the raid by Hizbullah provided Israel with a “unique moment” for wiping out the organisation. The New Statesman’s editor, John Kampfner, says he was told by more than one official source that the US government knew in advance of Israel’s intention to take military action in Lebanon. The Bush administration told the British government.

At the Boston Globe, H.D.S. Greenway points out the flaws in Israel’s position:

… Israel’s assault has not just been upon the Shi’ite militia group, but upon Lebanon itself.

For it is hard to reconcile bombing of Beirut’s international airport, petroleum supplies, power plants, fishing fleets, and even attacks upon the Lebanese military, with combating guerrillas. The attacks of Lebanon’s military are especially odd when Israel keeps calling upon Lebanon to take charge and disarm Hezbollah. …

… Israel seems to have two strategies at play in addition to reducing Hezbollah’s ability to rain down rockets upon terrified civilians. The first is that if Lebanon can be made to feel enough pain, then it will finally rein in Hezbollah of its own accord. The choice given Lebanon is: Either you disarm Hezbollah, as the UN has demanded, or we will make life impossible for you.

The fault in this approach is that the Lebanese military hasn’t the ability to disarm Hezbollah, and will be even less able to do so if Israel continues to attack it. More important, the attacks on Lebanon’s civilian infrastructure are convincing Lebanese of all confessions that Israel is a bigger enemy and threat than Hezbollah.

As for the question “What can Israel do?” Greenway says,

The key to disarming Hezbollah has always been, first, convincing Lebanon’s Shi’ites that they no longer need a militia and would be better off without one, and second, building up the institutions of the Lebanese state to the point where the Lebanese government can exert its authority. Unfortunately for Israel, bombing apartment buildings and whole Shi’ite sections of Beirut have strengthened Hezbollah’s prestige among Shi’ites. And the destruction of Lebanon’s economy, which was just getting back to normal, will give terrorists a stronger foothold in that unhappy land than they might otherwise have had.

I haven’t seen anyone arguing that Israel doesn’t have a right, even a duty, to defend itself and do whatever is necessary to provide security for Israeli citizens. Our argument all along has been that Israel’s actions are illogical and counterproductive. I have yet to see a rightie address this.

The second strategy, beyond the reduction of Hezbollah itself, seems to have been borrowed from the old Palestine Liberation Organization playbook: Behave in such a wild manner, causing so much trouble, that the world will have to take notice and do something about it. It also sends a warning to Damascus and Tehran not to count on Israeli restraint. That strategy seems to have been partly successful as the United Nations struggles to find an international force to secure Israel’s northern border.

President Jimmy Carter writes (emphasis added),

… even if the UN Security Council adopts and implements a resolution that would lead to such an eventual solution, it will provide just another band-aid and temporary relief. Tragically, the current conflict is part of the inevitably repetitive cycle of violence that results from the absence of a comprehensive settlement in the Middle East, exacerbated by the almost unprecedented six-year absence of any real effort to achieve such a goal.

Jeez, I wonder what six-year absence he is talking about.

Leaders on both sides ignore strong majorities that crave peace, allowing extremist-led violence to preempt all opportunities for building a political consensus. Traumatized Israelis cling to the false hope that their lives will be made safer by incremental unilateral withdrawals from occupied areas, while Palestinians see their remnant territories reduced to little more than human dumping grounds surrounded by a provocative “security barrier” that embarrasses Israel’s friends and fails to bring safety or stability.

And this is because political solutions are the same thing as “appeasement” to the hawks. They are so terrified of Neville Chamberlain’s ghost that all other lessons of history have been flushed down the toilet. War is the only solution they recognize.

Did I mention President Bush is on vacation?

See also:

Larry Johnson, “Israel’s Looming Defeat”

SusanUnPC, “Bush’s Middle East Strategery: For Toddlers”

Billmon, “Whose Line Is It Anyway?”

Glenn Greenwald, “Neoconservatives can’t dig their way out of this hole”

Update: More Billmon.

“Hey, Hey, LBJ …”

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Gary Younge writes in The Guardian,

The joke is not on Lamont or his followers, but on those who brand them insurrectionists. Opposing illegal wars and torture are not radical positions. These are ordinary people, indignant at the “premeditated” deception of their commander-in-chief.

“Pundits” like David Broder and even the usually sensible Jonathan Alter are certain that the Connecticut Insurgency is going to return the Democrats to the bad old days of Eugene McCarthy and George McGovern — a syndrome Digby calls “pathological fear of hippies.” And Cokie Roberts made an ass of herself this weekend by shrieking that a win for Lamont tomorrow would pull the Democrats to the Left “to the position from which it traditionally loses.”

Like Dems were doing so well in elections otherwise.

Whatever resemblance the Iraq War has to Vietnam, the home front seems to me to be very different from what it was in the Vietnam era. Back then, even though polls taken during the LBJ and Nixon Administration say most people thought Vietnam was a mistake (54 percent in 1968; 61 percent in 1971), to a 20-something those times felt like generational war; rebellious youth against the war versus the Establishment that supported it

But it wasn’t just about the war then. The antiwar movement, the Black Power movement, and second wave feminism all arose about the same time and got in the face of the status quo. Wrap all that up within the 1960s counterculture, and you get one hell of a blowback. And that blowback was political gold for Nixon, who played it masterfully to win re-election in a landslide in 1972.

Indeed, today’s Right still seems traumatized by the 1960s. Like someday we lefties are going to go on a collective acid flashback and revert to form. We will grow our hair out again and drench ourselves in patchouli oil; we will break into their homes and force them to wear love beads and tie-dye. BWAHAHAHAHAHAH!

But we’re in a very different place today, and it’s not just because of the osteoarthritis. The antiwar and various liberation movements of the 1960s were, in the context of the times, radical challenges to political and social norms across the board; the counterculture was bent on sweeping away the old establishment and creating something entirely new. But although we may have swept away much of the old establishment, what replaced it was not liberal utopia but Reaganism. As Fred Siegel wrote here (scroll down to the essay under the subhead “American History”),

But this new conservatism did not so much win the country over to its perspective as board the empty ship of state vacated by a 1960s liberalism that had self-destructed. Conservatism triumphed because New Deal liberalism was unable to accommodate the new cultural and political demands unleashed by the civil rights revolution, feminism, and the counterculture, all of which was exacerbated by the Kulturkampf over Vietnam.

The irony of this is that radicalism won, after all. The “conservatism” that holds power now has pulled the nation so far to the Right I hardly recognize it any more. The “insurgent” movement, on the other hand, is not revolutionary but counter-reactionary. Now it’s the “establishment” pushing radical cultural change; the “insurgents” are more interested in traditional kitchen-table issues like jobs, Social Security, and health care.

Gary Younge continues,

Some have described it as a struggle for the heart and soul of the Democratic party, but a more accurate portrayal would be a battle to establish whether the party should have a soul at all. It raises not only the question of what does the party stand for apart from office but also whether it is prepared to adopt an agenda that could actually win office. This race could set the tone for the 2008 presidential elections.

You’ve got to wonder what strange times we live in when it’s considered politically perilous to take a position favored by a whopping majority of the voters. Although the war in Iraq is an obvious disaster, and now the entire Middle East is tottering on the edge of catastrophe, somehow it’s centrist to enable this mess. But if one suggests that instead of using “creative chaos” to remake the Middle East we should refocus our attention and resources on more conventional counter-terrorism measures to protect the nation, that person is a radical.

Forty years ago Lyndon Johnson sent troops to Vietnam because he didn’t want to be called “soft on communism.” Today’s Dems are afraid to speak up for moderation and sanity because they’re afraid to be called “peaceniks” or “McCarthyites.” Today’s Dems recall the “lessons” of 1972, but it ain’t 1972 any more.

Update: Martin Peretz rejoices that the peace Democrats are back.

We have been here before. Left-wing Democrats are once again fielding single-issue “peace candidates,” and the one in Connecticut, like several in the 1970s, is a middle-aged patrician, seeking office de haut en bas, and almost entirely because he can.

Then, after recalling “peace Democrats” of earlier times and how they lost elections, Peretz continues,

If Mr. Lieberman goes down, the thought-enforcers of the left will target other centrists as if the center was the locus of a terrible heresy, an emphasis on national strength. Of course, they cannot touch Hillary Clinton, who lists rightward and then leftward so dexterously that she eludes positioning. Not so Mr. Lieberman. He does not camouflage his opinions. He does not play for safety, which is why he is now unsafe.

Hmm, maybe “peace Democrats” lose elections, but it seems being a “war Democrat” is risky, also. What’s a Democrat to do, Mr. Peretz?

Scott Lemieux, emptywheel, BooMan, the Heretik, and Steve M. say all that needs to be said about Peretz.

Peak Oil and the Middle East

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You want to read Juan Cole’s hypothesis on the role of oil in the bombing of Lebanon. Trust me on this.

In addition: Via Kevin Drum, Jeff Weintraub suggests that the Israeli bombing of Lebanon was not about getting rid of Hezbollah.

Instead, it looks increasingly apparent that a prime Israeli goal was to provoke a multilateral diplomatic and political intervention by the so-called “international community” (meaning in this case the US, the major European governments, Russia, and some Arab governments) to help broker, impose, and guarantee a political solution alone the lines of UN Security Council Resolutions 1559 and 1680. In the meantime, Israel’s military assault would also weaken Hezbollah’s military capacities and other bargaining cards in ways that could facilitate a diplomatic & political solution of this sort. It also seems clear that the Israeli & US governments have been roughly in accord on this strategy–and, more surprisingly, that the major European governments have signed on to its broad outlines (expressed, for example in the G-8 Summit statement on the Middle East crisis and the positions adopted at the later Rome conference), a fact that has been obscured by surface noise and posturing about the more specific issue of an immediate cease-fire. All the commentary that has misunderstood or ignored these connections between the military, diplomatic, and political dimensions of the situation–which is to say, most of the commentary in news reports, punditry, and the blogosphere–has largely missed the point of what is going on. (For one example, see here.)

Compare/contrast to the Michael Levy article at Haaretz.com, “Ending the Neoconservative Nightmare.”

Witnessing the near-perfect symmetry of Israeli and American policy has been one of the more noteworthy aspects of the latest Lebanon war. A true friend in the White House. No deescalate and stabilize, honest-broker, diplomatic jaw-jaw from this president. Great. Except that Israel was actually in need of an early exit strategy, had its diplomatic options narrowed by American weakness and marginalization in the region, and found itself ratcheting up aerial and ground operations in ways that largely worked to Hezbollah’s advantage, the Qana tragedy included. The American ladder had gone AWOL.

As Juan Cole says, much is not making sense.

The wholesale destruction of all of Lebanon by Israel and the US Pentagon does not make any sense. Why bomb roads, roads, bridges, ports, fuel depots in Sunni and Christian areas that have nothing to do with Shiite Hizbullah in the deep south? … Hizbullah had killed 6 Israeli civilians since 2000. For this you would destroy a whole country?

Insane.

Know Your Enemy

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Bill Kristol thinks the Republican Party has flaws, but “at least we have a president who knows we are at war with jihadist Islam.”

Says who?

This week at Time.com Lisa Beyer wrote,

Enunciating a new security doctrine nine days after the 9/11 attacks, President Bush declared that the war on terrorism would be fought not just against al-Qaeda but also against “every terrorist group of global reach.” Hizballah can certainly be said to fit in that category. However grand it may be to fight all global terrorists, though, the simple fact is that we can’t: we don’t have the troops, the money or the political will. That means it may make sense to limit our hit list to the groups that actually threaten us. Hizballah does not now do that. Nor does the other group currently in the spotlight, the Palestinian Islamist organization Hamas. The U.S. has sound reasons for wanting to constrain these groups, principally that they threaten our ally Israel. But those reasons have largely gone unarticulated as Bush falls back on maxims about the need to confront terrorism, as if Hizballah and Hamas are likely to be behind the next spectacular that will top 9/11. They are not, and pretending that they are costs the U.S. credibility, risks driving terrorist groups that aren’t allied into alliance and obscures the real issues at hand in the Middle East: How do you soften up militants who vehemently oppose Israel’s existence? What should the U.S. put on the line for Israel? And does it make sense for Washington to engage in boxing by surrogate with Tehran?

Yesterday I posted commentary on James Fallows’s new article in Atlantic, here and here. Here’s another bit:

How can the United States regain the initiative against terrorists, as opposed to living in a permanent crouch? By recognizing the point that I heard from so many military strategists: that terrorists, through their own efforts, can damage but not destroy us. Their real destructive power, again, lies in what they can provoke us to do. While the United States can never completely control what violent groups intend and sometimes achieve, it can determine its own response. That we have this power should come as good and important news, because it switches the strategic advantage to our side.

On the other hand …

So far, the United States has been as predictable in its responses as al-Qaeda could have dreamed. Early in 2004, a Saudi exile named Saad al-Faqih was interviewed by the online publication Terrorism Monitor. Al-Faqih, who leads an opposition group seeking political reform in Saudi Arabia, is a longtime observer of his fellow Saudi Osama bin Laden and of the evolution of bin Laden’s doctrine for al-Qaeda.

In the interview, al-Faqih said that for nearly a decade, bin Laden and al-Zawahiri had followed a powerful grand strategy for confronting the United States. Their approach boiled down to “superpower baiting” (as John Robb, of the Global Guerrillas blog, put it in an article about the interview). The most predictable thing about Americans, in this view, was that they would rise to the bait of a challenge or provocation. …

…The United States is immeasurably stronger than al-Qaeda, but against jujitsu forms of attack its strength has been its disadvantage. The predictability of the U.S. response has allowed opponents to turn our bulk and momentum against us. Al-Qaeda can do more harm to the United States than to, say, Italy because the self-damaging potential of an uncontrolled American reaction is so vast.

Bill Kristol rants that Democrats are “Anti-war, Anti-Israel, Anti-Joe [Lieberman].” I say neocons like Kristol are anti-American. They seem to have no connection whatsoever to this country, its future, and its historical values. They’re also anti-smart. Let’s face it; your standard neocon is to intelligence what a black hole is to matter. If, after all that’s gone wrong, these people still think they are qualified to dictate America’s foreign policy, they are pathologically dense.

At Haaretz.com, Michael Levy calls for the end of the neocon nightmare.

The key neocon protagonists, their think tanks and publications may be unfamiliar to many Israelis, but they are redefining the region we live in. This tight-knit group of “defense intellectuals” – centered around Bill Kristol, Michael Ledeen, Elliott Abrams, Perle, Feith and others – were considered somewhat off-beat until they teamed up with hawkish well-connected Republicans like Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Newt Gingrich, and with the emerging powerhouse of the Christian right. Their agenda was an aggressive unilateralist U.S. global supremacy, a radical vision of transformative regime-change democratization, with a fixation on the Middle East, an obsession with Iraq and an affinity to “old Likud” politics in Israel. Their extended moment in the sun arrived after 9/11.

Finding themselves somewhat bogged down in the Iraqi quagmire, the neoconservatives are reveling in the latest crisis, displaying their customary hubris in re-seizing the initiative. The U.S. press and blogosphere is awash with neocon-inspired calls for indefinite shooting, no talking and extension of hostilities to Syria and Iran, with Gingrich calling this a third world war to “defend civilization.”

Bottom line:

An America that seeks to reshape the region through an unsophisticated mixture of bombs and ballots, devoid of local contextual understanding, alliance-building or redressing of grievances, ultimately undermines both itself and Israel.

Levy provides the alternative:

A U.S. return to proactive diplomacy, realism and multilateralism, with sustained and hard engagement that delivers concrete progress, would best serve its own, Israeli and regional interests. …

…Beyond that, Israel and its friends in the United States should seriously reconsider their alliances not only with the neocons, but also with the Christian Right. The largest “pro-Israel” lobby day during this crisis was mobilized by Pastor John Hagee and his Christians United For Israel, a believer in Armageddon with all its implications for a rather particular end to the Jewish story. This is just asking to become the mother of all dumb, self-defeating and morally abhorrent alliances.

Well, yeah.

Be sure to read all of Levy’s article. See also commentary by Brent Budowsky. Billmon and Taylor Marsh discuss the UN Security Council Resolution proposed today by the United States and France.

About That Graphic, II

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There’s something obscene about arguing over a graphic as we totter on the edge of World War III, but as I’ve been accused of being insensitive by people I respect I’m going to (reluctantly) open another thread for discussion of the infamous Lieberman blackface graphic. (If you are new here, please read my first post on the subject before commenting, and note that any comments that deliberately misrepresent what I wrote, or what other commenters write, will be deleted.)

Some warmup: I have a habit left over from my Zen student days of stepping outside my emotions and analyzing them. This is a means to develop equanimity and purge oneself of ego attachment. I don’t claim to have succeeded, mind you, but I still make the effort. There’s more about the practice of examining one’s own anger here and an advanced dharma talk here, for the adventurous. This may be new to you, but please give it a try. Although certainly there is righteous anger that arises on behalf of others, most of the time anger is like a guard dog defending our egos. I request that everyone chain up the guard dog, at least temporarily.

There are a number of issues here, which I’ll present randomly–

As I said elsewhere, symbols have no intrinsic meaning or power; they have only the meaning and power we assign to them. And that’s a subjective, individual thing. The same symbol — let’s say, a Christian cross — might represent love and salvation to one person and hate and oppression to another. Racist symbols push a lot of buttons in our society, certainly, and evoke a lot of pain. Using racist symbols to make any point is perilous, for that reason. And, yes, one could argue it’s dumb and inconsiderate, as well. But not necessarily malicious.

Starting with the dumb part: There is a lot of material on the left side of the blogosphere that offends me. I am very squeamish about sexually explicit language and graphics, for example. I attribute this squeamishness to my advanced age and 1950s-era midwestern small-town upbringing, however, and usually don’t make an issue of it except when it carries over into public demonstrations. But if we bloggers are in fact going to become major players whose utterances become hot button issues that could sway elections, perhaps it’s time to tone down the raunch on the blogs as well. As Mary Mary said here, “If bloggers want to play with the big kids they’d better start acting like it.”

But then (she said, taking the other side) the strength of blogs is that bloggers can be gut-level honest in ways that writers for commercial media cannot be. Is there a line that can be drawn between “toning down the raunch” and self-censorship? I could argue that line might be found somewhere between clear and honest expression of opinion and pandering to one’s audience. I think the Lieberman blackface image falls into the “pandering” category. But then firedoglake gets about six times the traffic The Mahablog gets, so what do I know? Maybe I should do more pandering.

Although I defended it, I wouldn’t have published the Lieberman blackface image on The Mahablog, controversy or no controversy, because although it had a point it was not an illuminating point. In other words, if you have to read the text to clarify what the illustration means, then the illustration isn’t being illustrative. Further, blackface is ugly and disgusting, and I don’t generally publish ugly and disgusting graphics here. Snarky is as far as I go.

Dave Neiwert and I are on the same page, I believe —

Now, longtime readers of this blog know that cursing and profanity aren’t really my style, though I do use them when the occasion warrants. And I have argued that obscene hate mail and vicious sexism have no place in the left’s repertoire.

However,

But there is a place for profanity. Even if it’s not my style, I well understand that the outrageous behavior of the right inspires real and righteous outrage; people are being killed on behalf of their agenda, after all. After awhile, it’s only natural to respond to constant abuse — the threats, the charges of treason, the constant personal attacks, the outrageous abuse of power — with a straight shot to the face: “Aw, fuck you, asshole.”

I think bloggers like Atrios, Digby, Tbogg and Jane — and scores of others — do a good job of giving voice to that outrage, and it’s needed. Reason and facts often are next to worthless when confronting these jerks, and though I do my best to provide them, I also applaud those who fight back — especially when they do so with as much wit as you often find in left Blogtopia [yes, skippy invented that term].

And I’m relieved I’m not the only one who thinks intention matters —

As with all such cases, it all boils down to intent. If this had been posted to derogatorily suggest that Lieberman was secretly a “black man” at heart (the kind of thing that is known to occur at certain far-right sites) then it would be a clear-cut case of race-baiting. If the intent, on the other hand, is to portray Lieberman as a pretend black sympathizer in the mold of a minstrel showman (as the artist responsible later made clear in the post’s comments) then it’s fairly harmless. Dumb, and not particularly effective, but harmless.

I really hate it when people take offense where (it seems obvious) none was intended. A wise person once told me if you don’t take offense, no one can offend you. I admit that takes discipline, but it’s the truth. And as explained above I don’t expect the whole world to tiptoe around and cater to my personal sensibilities, but I’d like the same consideration.

I defended Jane Hamsher not because I thought the graphic was brilliant, but because it was obvious to me she was not making a racist statement. Instead, she was making a statement about racism — more specifically, about a white politician’s racial hypocrisies. Slams of Hamsher did not make this distinction. But if we assume that any use of a racist symbol is racist per se, then by the same logic the World War II poster at left is anti-Semitic because it incorporates a swastika.

This rightie dug up other stuff out of firedoglake so he could rant about how awful it is. The first thing you probably notice on the page is the raunchy boys-in-leather image, which firedoglake didn’t publish but only linked to. Like this. This image leaves me cold, but I guess other people find it amusing. The image is closely parallel to the blackface image, except that instead of pretending to be black Lieberman is pictured as pretending to be gay. I suppose one could argue that the image is homophobic, because it depicts gay men in a stereotypical way. I don’t know that anyone complained about it, though. The rightie bloggers calls it an example of “sexually perverted imagery” — isn’t that homophobic?

I believe I could argue that this image of John Kerry in drag, while a lot less explicit, is misogynistic because it depicts being female as demeaning.

The rightie goes on to catalog examples of sexually explicit language at firedoglake. As I say I don’t care for raunchy language myself, but on the Left I seem to be an anomaly in that regard. But then the rightie finds it equally shocking that Ned Lamont agrees with Jack Murtha on Iraq — like any deviation from Dear Leader is just wrong — and objects to calling the “Religious” Right the “American Taliban,” which seems to me spot on (hey, if the shoe fits …). Lots of us lefties have used the same phrase many times before. Strong opinions are always going to be offensive to somebody. That’s why freedom of speech has to be protected.

Let’s wade in a little deeper. Mahablog commenter Kevin objected strongly to my defense of Hamsher, here, here, and here. And although Kevin is very articulate it still isn’t clear to me where the offense lies if (as he says) he doesn’t believe Hamsher is a racist. I also agree with Ian that the Malcolm X quote e.g., “the white liberal is able to use the Negro as a pawn or tool in this political ‘football game'”) was uncalled for. It seems to me Kevin is assuming I am racist, and insincere about it. I admit I am frequently oblivious to many things, and I cannot speak to anyone’s inner motivations but my own, but I sincerely hate racism and do not want to use anyone as a pawn or tool. Being one of the more marginalized creatures on the planet myself, I’m hardly in a position to have pawns of my own, anyway.

Certainly you can argue that the Democrats have fallen short of keeping their promises to African Americans. But, hell, in the past several years the Democrats have fallen short of keeping their promises to all of us. Welcome to Progressive World. The whole point of the Lamont challenge is to send a message to the Dems they need to start listening to their base instead of the lobbyists and interest groups.

I was also stunned that Liza Sabater, who is a friend and a good-hearted person, slammed Jane Hamsher for being a “white woman of privilege” who presumed to speak for the black people of Connecticut. I never did see the text that went with the graphic, so maybe I’m missing something. And I sorta thought all us progressives were in the fight together. Certainly if, say, a black man presumes to speak for white-but-not-privileged me he’s welcome to go ahead and do so; I’ll take all the help I can get.

I learned a long time ago never to tell others they shouldn’t be angry. Through the years I’ve met people who have endured outrageous violations of their being, from many sources. Nobody gets through life without some wounds, but some people do seem to get wounded a lot more than others. However people deal with their anger is a personal matter. I’m not going to deliver any lectures on that today, except to remind readers that anger tends to be a defense mechanism (remember the guard dog?). It’s up to us as individuals to come to terms with whatever the dog is defending.

But although I regret whatever anger my position provoked, and although I acknowledge that anger may be understandable, at the moment I do not see cause to change my opinion in this matter. If there’s something I’m not seeing, please enlighten me.

Good New, Bad News, Part II

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Back to the new James Fallows article in Atlantic, which I discussed here —

Recap: Fallows interviewed a number of experts to determine where we are in the “war” on terrorism. In spite of the Bush Administration’s multiple blunders, at the moment our national security situation isn’t all that bad. As explained here, the chance of al Qaeda or another terrorist group pulling off another September 11 is fairly small.

The fly in the ointment is Iraq.

About half of the authorities I spoke with were from military or intelligence organizations; the others were academics or members of think tanks, plus a few businesspeople. Half were Americans; the rest were Europeans, Middle Easterners, Australians, and others. Four years ago, most of these people had supported the decision to invade Iraq. Although they now said that the war had been a mistake (followed by what nearly all viewed as a disastrously mismanaged occupation), relatively few said that the United States should withdraw anytime soon. The reasons most of them gave were the need for America to make good on commitments, the importance of keeping the Sunni parts of Iraq from turning into a new haven for global terrorists, and the chance that conditions in Iraq would eventually improve.

One, I worry about the expertise of anyone who supported the decision to invade Iraq. Two, this article was written before the recent Israeli-Hezbollah conflict. I strongly suspect that whatever slim chance there might have been of a not-too-terrible outcome in Iraq is now utterly gone. And there’s no doubt the neocons are hoping to use the conflict to take the war to Syria and Iran.

“If the United States stays in Iraq, it keeps making enemies,” Fallows writes. “If it leaves, it goes dragging its tail.” The war is hurting us so many ways, from the misallocation of resources, growing deficits, erosion of civil liberties, and loss of moral high ground. Maybe a little tail dragging is in order.

The final destructive response helping al-Qaeda has been America’s estrangement from its allies and diminution of its traditionally vast “soft power.” “America’s cause is doomed unless it regains the moral high ground,” Sir Richard Dearlove, the former director of Britain’s secret intelligence agency, MI-6, told me. He pointed out that by the end of the Cold War there was no dispute worldwide about which side held the moral high ground—and that this made his work as a spymaster far easier. “Potential recruits would come to us because they believed in the cause,” he said. A senior army officer from a country whose forces are fighting alongside America’s in Iraq similarly told me that America “simply has to recapture its moral authority.” His reasoning:

    The United States is so powerful militarily that by its very nature it represents a threat to every other nation on earth. The only country that could theoretically destroy every single other country is the United States. The only way we can say that the U.S. is not a threat is by looking at intent, and that depends on moral authority. If you’re not sure the United States is going to do the right thing, you can’t trust it with that power, so you begin thinking, How can I balance it off and find other alliances to protect myself?

America’s glory has been its openness and idealism, internally and externally. Each has been constrained from time to time, but not for as long or in as open-ended a way as now.

I combed through the Fallows article looking for a compelling argument to stay in Iraq, other than “the need for America to make good on commitments, the importance of keeping the Sunni parts of Iraq from turning into a new haven for global terrorists, and the chance that conditions in Iraq would eventually improve.” No luck. If improving the security situation in Iraq by force of American arms were still possible, then perhaps those would be arguments for staying in Iraq. I doubt it’s still possible, however.

Yet note this from Billmon:

If the United States were to begin pulling troops out of Iraq now, it would be interpreted correctly throughout the Middle East as an open admission of defeat — one that would likely lead fairly quickly to a complete American evacuation of the country. (Maybe not literally by landing helicopters on the roof of the embassy, but all in the region would understand the military reality that as the force grows smaller it will become progressively more dangerous to keep it in Iraq.)

Such an outcome could well force Iraq’s Shi’a political leaders to snuggle up even more tightly to Iran, if only as a matter of physical survival. If the full-scale civil war everyone seems to expect were to break out following an American withdrawal, Baghdad might even feel compelled to call in Iranian troops. At a minimum, Iran could be left with enormous influence over, if not outright control of, the Iraqi government and its security forces. Access to Iraqi air space would give Iran a direct resupply corridor to Syria, and, through Syria, to Hizbullah. A ground presence could provide Tehran with a direct ground link — call it the Ayatollah Khomeini Trail — assuming the Kurds could be bought off and/or intimidated, or the Sunni belt pacified (one shudders to think of what that might involve.)

Presto: one Shi’a crescent to go.

The Israel situation has, um, complicated it all:

Of course, it might not actually come to this — or if it did it might not come quickly. But the fact remains that the U.S. Army is the only significant force standing between Iran and it’s closest allies, and thus between Iran and Israel. If, as it now seems, Washington and Jerusalem both perceive Iran as the primary threat (and/or target for aggression) in the region, then there is no real distinction between America’s occupation of Iraq and Israel’s intended re-occupation of southern Lebanon. They are, in essence, both part of the next war.

It seems increasingly probable that that war will come soon — perhaps as early as November or December, although more likely next year. Israel’s failure to knock out Hizbullah with a rapid first strike has left the neocons even deeper in the hole, enormously ratcheting up the pressure to try to recoup all losses by taking the war to Damascus and Tehran.

In other words, it’s almost time for the ultimate “flight forward” — the one that finally pushes the Middle East into World War III.

You’ll like this — Sidney Blumenthal writes in Salon,

The National Security Agency is providing signal intelligence to Israel to monitor whether Syria and Iran are supplying new armaments to Hezbollah as it fires hundreds of missiles into northern Israel, according to a national security official with direct knowledge of the operation. President Bush has approved the secret program.

Inside the administration, neoconservatives on Vice President Dick Cheney’s national security staff and Elliott Abrams, the neoconservative senior director for the Near East on the National Security Council, are prime movers behind sharing NSA intelligence with Israel, and they have discussed Syrian and Iranian supply activities as a potential pretext for Israeli bombing of both countries, the source privy to conversations about the program says. (Intelligence, including that gathered by the NSA, has been provided to Israel in the past for various purposes.) The neoconservatives are described as enthusiastic about the possibility of using NSA intelligence as a lever to widen the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah and Israel and Hamas into a four-front war.

While the much-derided Condi Rice muddles ahead with something that might resemble a foreign policy if you squint and cross your eyes when you look at it, the neocons are actively trying to marginalize her. Condi mostly has been buying time for the Israelis to continue to bomb Lebanon,

But the neocon scenario extends far beyond that objective to pushing Israel into a “cleansing war” with Syria and Iran, says the national security official, which somehow will redeem Bush’s beleaguered policy in the entire region.

Of course, it’s desirable to get the American people on board with the program. Back to Billmon:

A number of wealthy pro-Israel donors, including Ronald Lauder, the perfume heir, have given millions to something called the Israel Project — a “public education” cum PR cum grassroots lobbying machine — to fund a program specifically aimed at building support for a military strike on Iran. You can’t turn on Fox News these days without finding James Woolsey or Newt Gingrich or Bill Kristol or some other pro-Israel mouthpiece demanding war with Syria and/or Iran, and painting it as the only way to stop the rockets falling on Haifa.

Billmon writes that even if the Dems finally speak out against Iraq, he predicts they will remain loyal spear carriers for Israel.

I don’t want rockets falling on Haifa, and I believe most Americans don’t want rockets falling on Haifa. But at some point the American people need to have a serious discussion about how far we’re willing to go, and how much of our own security we’re willing to risk, to keep rockets from falling on Haifa. And, especially after more than three years in Iraq, I think many Americans could be ready to establish some boundaries.

It’s true that the latest Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg Poll shows that Americans think recent Israeli actions in Lebanon are justified, 59 to 28 percent, with 13 percent unsure. 50 percent of Americans believe the U.S. should remain aligned with Israel, although a hefty minority, 44 percent, think the U.S. should be neutral. None of the poll questions mentioned risk or cost, however. None of them asked Would you still support Israel if you knew that Israel’s actions are making the security situation in Iraq even worse? If it means drawing the United States into war with Iran and Syria? If it means inspiring new and better armed groups of jihadists to attack the U.S.? Are you willing to risk your life, or the lives of your loved ones, to keep rockets from falling on Haifa?

Of course, we’re not going to have that conversation, except perhaps on the blogosphere.

The President of the United States is lost in space. The Vice President and Secretary of Defense are delusional. The Secretary of State is incompetent. Republicans in Congress are yes men. A few Dems are finally standing up against the last war — the one started three years ago — but it’s unlikely they’ll stand in the way of the next war.

James Fallows’s article — again, written before the Israel-Lebanon conflict began — ends on a hopeful note. He says this is an ideal time to declare victory in the “war on terror” and launch realistic and practical policies for long-term security and anti-terrorism efforts. Too bad that won’t happen.

Interlude

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A bit of an exchange among Todd Purdum, Kate O‘Beirne, and Mike Barnicle on Wednesday night’s Hardball:

BARNICLE: One of the themes in your “Vanity Fair” magazine piece this month, the presidents 41 and 43, both Bushes, is the streak of stubbornness that is akin to both of them. This stubbornness, apparently this is stay the course all the way in Iraq.

PURDUM: It does seem a little bit like stay the course. And of course in some ways, stubbornness is a very admirable quality and both Bushes got where they are because they are stubborn and they are willing to fight against the odds and prove the smart money wrong.

But this feels so much more in a way something like Lyndon Johnson or a slow, steady drip, drip, drip in which it‘s impossible to get any other good news and there are glimmers of good news here and there, to get any traction because of the ongoing drain of the war. It colors everything.

O‘BEIRNE: Of course, one man‘s stubbornness is another man‘s resolve frankly and one thing the people have admired about George Bush, and I think Republican rank and file continue to admire it, is his resolve when it comes to fighting this threat we face.

Oh, yes, resolve. President Bush is one resolved man. He is like a rock in a storm; nothing moves him.

So let’s see how the President is applying this resolve — Condi has been dispatched to do the diplomacy thing; this week the President decided to focus on his domestic agenda. No, seriously. Peter Baker of the Washington Post reported that last Sunday the President went on a bicycle ride and hosted a children’s T-ball game on the South Lawn. Then he flew to Florida to have dinner with “community leaders” who turned out to be “a bunch of former Miami Dolphins football players, an actor and the flamboyant host of a raunchy and ribald Spanish-language variety show,” according to Dan Froomkin. Tuesday he had his annual physical. Wednesday he was in Ohio meeting with “firefighters and other rescuers who helped flood victims in Lake County.” He also attended a fundraising dinner for gubernatorial candidate Ken Blackwell. Thursday he flew to Texas and delivered a speech on immigration reform. Today he’s at the ranch, beginning his August vacation.

But what’s this — he’s only going to be on vacation for ten days this year? Not the whole month? Does that mean he’s going to do some work this August?

White House press secretary Tony Snow says Bush is taking a shorter break not because of criticism but because he has other things to do, including campaigning for Republican candidates in the fall elections, pushing for immigration reform and attending a family wedding in Kennebunkport, Maine.

OK, never mind.

Meanwhile, back in Iraq —

American generals have laid bare the facts: Baghdad is on the brink of chaos, and the specter of all-out civil war looms. …

… The stakes could not be higher: The fate of the U.S. mission in Iraq is on the line as fighting in Lebanon to the west and the rise of a militant Iran to the east threaten American interests throughout the Middle East.

Without a firm grip on Baghdad, the U.S. and its Iraqi allies cannot control the country. But Baghdad’s diverse population of Sunnis, Shiites, Kurds, Turkomen and Christians makes for a volatile mix as the country’s religious and ethnic groups compete for power in the new Iraq. All the tensions that threaten to tear the country apart play themselves out in Baghdad.

As I mentioned this morning, Shiites in Baghdad held a huge anti-American and anti-Israel rally. Anger at Israel’s bombing of Lebanon is driving Iraq into further chaos, as many predicted. Violence in Lebanon increases. Shit is, um, happening.

President Bush delegated foreign policy to his Secretary of State and went on vacation. President Bush is totally dissociated with whatever is happening in the Middle East. This isn’t resolve; it’s pathology.