Category Archives: War on Terror

Another Mission Accomplished

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The Pentagon said yesterday that the U.S. had attacked suspected al Qaeda targets in southern Somalia. CNN reports:

The operation was launched based on intelligence that al Qaeda operatives were at the location, but there was no immediate indication of how successful the strike had been.

The official said the al Qaeda operatives had fled south late last month from Somalia’s capital, Mogadishu, after Ethiopian-backed Somali troops forced out Islamist militants who had taken over much of southern Somalia. (Watch CNN’s Barbara Starr report on al Qaeda in Somalia.)

He did not identify the operatives, but U.S. officials accused the Islamic Courts Union of harboring suspects in the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya.

As this BBC timeline explains, the Ethiopian-backed Somalian government, which has been battling to take Somalia back from Islamists for awhile, captured Mogadishu right after Christmas and seized the port of Kismayo — “the last remaining stronghold” of the Islamists — on January 1. The BBC explains that now the United States is attacking Islamist fighters to keep them from regrouping and fomenting guerrilla war, which might make Somalia start to look a whole lot like Iraq.

As Andrew Cawthorne of Reuters reported after the fall of Kismayo on January 1,

“Washington encouraged Addis Ababa [Ethiopia] to go ahead. They provided the same sort of diplomatic cover they did for Israel going into Lebanon last summer, and for similar reasons — to keep a foothold in the region,” said analyst Michael Weinstein.

“Ordinary Americans are fed up with foreign interventions. So what’s happened in Somalia is now going to be a preferred strategy — using allies in the region as their catapult,” said Weinstein, a politics professor at Indiana’s Purdue University.

Western military sources say the United States gave Ethiopia intelligence and surveillance help to accelerate its victory.

Both Washington and Addis Ababa had portrayed the Islamists as linked to and even run by al Qaeda, putting Somalia firmly on the map of the U.S.-led global “war on terror”.

Yet President George W. Bush, haunted by such moments as his premature declaration of victory in Iraq in 2003, and his Africa policy-makers are unlikely to be crowing victory quickly.

Some analysts predict the Islamists, who fled rather than take heavy casualties, could regroup and fight an Iraq-style insurgency from remote corners of Somalia, or carry out bomb attacks elsewhere in east Africa.

“The parallels with Iraq are unsettling,” said Nairobi-based Somalia expert Matt Bryden.

There is no guarantee of peace and harmony in Somalia now that six months of Islamist sharia rule are over.

Indeed, the rapid return of warlords to Mogadishu shows how easily it could slide back into the anarchy and chaos it has suffered since dictator Mohamed Siad Barre was ousted in 1991.

“The Americans have learned enough in Somalia not to run up a ‘mission accomplished’ banner,” Bryden said.

Au contraire. Vance Serchuk The Weekly Standard seems to be waving a “mission accomplished” banner rather proudly in the current issue (January 15):

After holding Mogadishu for six months, Somalia’s Islamists have been swept from power, ousted in a blitzkrieg attack by the Ethiopian military. The nature of the emerging political order in Somalia remains profoundly uncertain, with the retreating Islamists threatening to wage an Iraq-style insurgency, and the internationally recognized Somali government facing doubts about its popular legitimacy, internal cohesion, and ability to ensure even basic security. Still, the battlefield gains of the past two weeks have created a rare window of opportunity in this long-suffering corner of the Horn of Africa, as well as in the broader war on terror.

The rout of the Islamists also represents a surprising success for the Bush administration, whose Somalia policy seemed hopelessly mired in interagency acrimony just a few months ago. Following the defeat of a coalition of CIA-backed “secular” warlords by the Islamists earlier this year, angry accusations flew from the State Department about Langley’s botched efforts, which seemed to have helped consolidate the very threat they were intended to preempt.

Yet ultimately, it was the behavior of the Islamists themselves, once established in power, that spurred key officials at Foggy Bottom to embrace a new, more aggressive set of policies. Prisoners to their ideology, the hardliners in Mogadishu failed to take the pragmatic steps that could have led to a rapprochement with the United States and allowed them to outflank the hapless “official” Somali government. Instead, the Islamists continued to shelter several known al Qaeda operatives, while welcoming other foreign jihadists into their ranks.

If only those awful hardliners had taken those pragmatic steps … but at The Agonist, Ian Welsh puts a different spin on pragmatism:

See, here’s the thing. The US, again, refused to talk directly to the ICU [Islamic Courts Union]. The ICU, like Hezbollah, wanted, needed, recognition (even more than Hezbollah). A deal could have been made. But it wasn’t. Instead what the US has done is back a foreign invasion in support of a puppet government with no popular support. …

…To summarize: the US has backed letting the warlords get back to their business of murder, extortion and rape. I’m sure the Somali people appreciate that.

Perhaps you see the problem.

Anyway, Jonathan Clayton of the Times (UK) writes that Somalia could start looking a whole lot like Iraq anyway.

The United States’ decision to bomb Islamists holed up in a corner of Somalia near the border with Kenya is a high-risk tactic which could ignite an Iraqi-style insurgency across a swathe of East Africa, analysts and regional experts say.

Buoyed by the success that its allies — Ethiopia and the UN-backed transitional Government — have had in driving the Islamists out of the capital in recent weeks, Washington clearly feels that it has an opportunity to wipe out what it sees as a persistent threat to Western interests in the region. The Americans have gone for the jugular.

The danger is that the high loss of life reported and the likelihood that many non-al Qaeda sympathisers have been killed, including more moderate leaders of the defeated Union of Islamic Courts, could see the operation backfire spectacularly and unite Somalis against its new US-supported government.

“The US has sided with one Somali faction against another, this could be the beginning of a new civil war … I fear once again they have gone for a quick fix based on false information. If they pull it off, however, it could be a turning point. The stakes are very high indeed, now,” said one highly respected regional analyst, recalling the futile US role in the hunt in the early 1990s for one Somali warlord which resulted in the Black Hawk Down incident when 18 US special forces troops were killed.

It may take some time to sort out the facts, but today’s news stories contain a number of claims of many civilian casualties as a result of the U.S. attacks, plus indications that Somalians are pissed off. Ethiopia and Somalia have a history, as they say, plus Ethiopia has a large Christian population, and Somali Muslims were not thrilled by the presence of Ethiopian troops in their country. Add civilian casualties from a U.S. raid, and insurrection easily could follow. Voilà — the mission is un-accomplished.

Today’s Assignment

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Or, the blog post I’d write if I didn’t have to leave in a few minutes for jury duty — take this quote about Senator Joe McCarthy:

    “The McCarthyist fellow travelers who announced that they approved of the senator’s goals even thought they disapproved of his methods missed the point: to McCarthy’s true believers what was really appealing about him were his methods, since his goals were always utterly nebulous.” –Richard Hofstatder, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1962)

Update by substituting “Bush” for “McCarthy”; think “global war on terror.” Or make other substitutions that occur to you. Discuss.

Update: Let’s refocus this, because people are tripping a big too much on the words goals and nebulous. Let’s consider something specific, like Bush’s desire to trash the Geneva Conventions and conduct what many of us consider torture. Bush’s claims to the contrary, it is extremely doubtful that what little useful intelligence obtained from detainees was squeezed out by the “tough” means Bush favors. According to Ron Suskind, the “tough” methods mostly gave the CIA information on plots that did not exist.

Yet if you suggest to a rightie that maybe we should stick to interrogation methods that are less harsh but which have a better track record of obtaining accurate information, they get hysterical and accuse you of siding with jihadists.

Look also at this Washington Post editorial from a few weeks ago, discussed here.

THE BUSH administration has pushed aggressively for expanded surveillance powers, military commissions and rough interrogation techniques. When it comes to fighting the war on terrorism, just about anything goes. Except, that is, those routine steps with no civil liberties implications at all that might significantly interrupt terrorism — such as, say, reading the mail of convicted terrorists housed in American prisons. The federal Bureau of Prisons, Justice Department Inspector General Glenn Fine wrote, “does not read all the mail for terrorist and other high-risk inmates on its mail monitoring lists.” It is also “unable to effectively monitor high-risk inmates’ verbal communications,” including phone calls. So while the administration won’t reveal the circumstances under which it spies on innocent Americans, the communications of imprisoned terrorists, at least, appear sadly secure.

Seems to me that Bush’s goals vis a vis the “global war on terrorism” are pretty damn nebulous —

    1. Cloudy, misty, or hazy.
    2. Lacking definite form or limits; vague: nebulous assurances of future cooperation.
    3. Of, relating to, or characteristic of a nebula.

This is not to say that he doesn’t have goals, or at least intentions, and that those goals are not well served by “tough interrogation.” The point is that Bush’s real (or inner) goals have to be inferred, or guessed at. That makes them nebulous to us observers. For all I know they are nebulous to Bush as well.

However, for now I do not care about what’s going on in Bush’s head. I am asking about what’s going on in his supporters‘ heads — note that Hofstatder’s observation was less about McCarthy than about McCarthy admirers.

The fact that his stated or official goal of saving the world from terrorism is not at all well served by his methods ought to be obvious to most vertebrate species by now. But the consideration at hand is not Bush himself, but his supporters, or what’s left of ’em. These are the people who think it’s just grand that Bush suspends habeas corpus for detainees, including citizens, at Bush’s discretion. They continue to argue that our lives and our nation will be forfeit if the CIA has to give up waterboarding. And they still have some hazy notion that we can “win” in Iraq.

I’m saying that these people stick with Bush because of his methods and practices, including violations of the Constitution. They really don’t much care about the results. The goals are nothing but empty rhetoric, and that’s OK with the true believers.

Facts and Fictions, Part II

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Following up the last post — what got me started on righties and reality was this TAP article by Brad Reed.

As the midterm elections approach, many conservatives are feeling betrayed by one of their most important allies in the war on terror: Battlestar Galactica.

To which I thought, WTF?

I just recently got into Galactica. I’ve been following season 3 while catching up with seasons 1 and 2 through Netflix. It’s entertaining. However, it has never occurred to me to incorporate Galactica into some inner political fantasy life. I keep real current events and television fiction in separate boxes, thanks.

I guess I just don’t think like a rightie.

In the series, a fleet of space ships carrying about 50,000 humans is fleeing evil killer robots, called Cylons, after the Cylons massacred most of the human species. Apparently righties came to identify with the fleeing humans and to associate Cylons with the dreaded Islamofascists.

National Review’s Jonah Goldberg, who writes regularly about Galactica’s politics on NRO’s group blog, The Corner, also picked up on parallels between the show and the war on terror. Goldberg took particular glee in attacking Galactica’s anti-war movement, which he said consisted of “radical peaceniks” and “peace-terrorists” who “are clearly a collection of whack jobs, fifth columnists and idiots.” Goldberg also praised several characters for trying to rig a presidential election. “I liked that the good guys wanted to steal the election and, it turns out, they were right to want to,” wrote Goldberg. Stolen elections, evil robots, crazed hippies … what more could a socially inept right-winger want from a show?

I must not have gotten to the part about the anti-war movement. Season 2 did have a storyline about a couple of Cylon prisoners who were subjected to Abu Ghraib-type abuse, but otherwise in the first two seasons I didn’t see much resemblance to the Global War on Terror. At the very beginning of the series the Cylons, with huge technological and military advantages over the humans, won a total war over humans. The few humans who escaped are trying to haul their butts out of harm’s way, but the Cylons keep catching up to them. An intriguing twist is that the humans lived in a distant star system, and they are trying to get back to Earth, which they know about only from religion and myths. And that’s the series. That doesn’t seem to me much like our current asymmetrical war against Muslim extremists, particularly if you assume humans = Americans and Cylons = terrorists. (But what does it tell us that righties associated America with characters who are already defeated and helpless to do much but flee their more powerful enemies? Hmmmm?)

Brad Reed continues,

But alas, this love affair between Galactica and the right was not to last: in its third season, the show has morphed into a stinging allegorical critique of America’s three-year occupation of Iraq. The trouble started at the end of the second season, when humanity briefly escaped the Cylons and settled down on the tiny planet of New Caprica. The Cylons soon returned and quickly conquered the defenseless humans. But instead of slaughtering everyone, the Cylons decided to take a more enlightened path by “benevolently occupying” the planet and imposing their preferred way of life by gunpoint. The humans were predictably not enthused about their allegedly altruistic rulers, and they immediately launched an insurgency against them using improvised explosive devices and suicide bombers.

I could be wrong, but I don’t think the screenwriters set out to make Galactica an allegory of the war on terror, one way or another. I think they set out to tell a good story. (Of course, I’m also one of those purists who insists The Lord of the Rings is not an allegory of World War II.) It is worth noting that the series is based on an earlier (and dreadfully boring, as I remember) series produced in 1978. Certainly the screenwriters have added elements from current events — torture of prisoners, suicide bombings — and some storylines do seem allegorical. But interpreting the overall series as pure allegory just doesn’t work, whether you are rooting for the humans or the Cylons.

Anyway, “Galacticons” like Goldberg and John Podheretz are mourning the program’s betrayal of their fantasies. And a rightie fan named Michael who has dedicated a blog to Galactica wrote:

Has this show jumped the shark? The writers are using current events in the Middle East as the source for their material, but putting the humans in the position of being the terrorists. The humans even resort to suicide bombings.

Terrorist tactics only work against the United States and Israel because we’re too good to wipe all of them out. The Cylons, on the other hand, had no problems with destroying twenty billion humans, why wouldn’t they destroy the remaining fifty thousand?

Terrorism also requires that the side being terrorized cares about dying. But the Cylons don’t care if they die. They just get reincarnated into a new body.

Why are people so pissed if the Cylons “massacre” two hundred humans? Hello McFly! The Cylons already massacred twenty billion.

I don’t think this storyline works at all.

I think somebody needs a more active social life. I also think the season 3 storyline works fine, if you aren’t married to the idea that the program is an allegory of the war on terror and can just enjoy it as science fiction. But that’s me. (BTW, if you’re familiar with the series, this post will amaze you. Not in a good way, however.)

Brad Reed documents a number of other recent connections between rightie politics and popular fiction, and concludes,

The most notable thing about the Galacticons is that even when they aren’t directly referencing science fiction, they still sound like total space cadets when discussing American military power. As they understand it, America is an omnipotent level-20 Warmage with 19 Strength and 20 Charisma who can wipe out entire armies of mariliths, gold dragons, and goblinoids with the flick of a wrist.

During a recent debate on Meet the Press, Tim Russert asked former GOP House Majority Leader Newt Gingrich if having 130,000 of our troops stuck in Iraq had reduced our ability to deal effectively with Iran and North Korea. “Only in our minds,” Gingrich replied. Glenn Reynolds, the prominent transhumanist conservative blogger, once wrote that the problem with Bush’s approach to the war on terror wasn’t that he got our military stuck in an Iraqi civil war, but rather that he “hasn’t been vigorous enough in toppling governments and invading countries in that region.” And William Kristol, one of America’s preeminent sci-fi foreign policy thinkers, said in the aftermath of Israel’s failed bombing campaign against Hezbollah that American should take the opportunity to launch a preemptive strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities. “Why wait?” asked the dweeby Galacticon sage. Such fantasies of military conquest are particularly galling since the Galacticons really don’t seem to think that waging multiple preemptive wars would have any adverse consequences. The world, it seems, is their Risk board.

Of course, it’s easy to talk tough about invading multiple nations if you’re not the one doing any of the work. The thrill the Galacticons get from watching the Iraq war on their TVs is the same thrill the typical Mountain Dew-swilling reject feels watching Battlestar Galactica; it’s only fun for them because they’re not going through it themselves. But this is sadly what characterizes much of Bush’s approach to the war on terror, which has been less about real sacrifice than cheap voyeuristic thrills and empty feel-good platitudes — combined with foolhardy notions of American omnipotence in the world. While the outright buffoonery of the Galacticon jingonauts is certainly amusing, the overall Galacticazation of American war policy is anything but.

Many have remarked on the rich fantasy lives of chickenhawks. See, for example, this Think Progress post and my comments on a Mark Steyn column. Digby wrote awhile back that many righties seem to be living a vicarious fantasy life of war-movie glory through the troops:

We are dealing with a group of right wing glory seekers who chose long ago to eschew putting themselves on the line in favor of tough talk and empty posturing — the Vietnam chickenhawks and their recently hatched offspring of the new Global War On Terrorism. These are men (mostly) driven by the desire to prove their manhood but who refuse to actually test their physical courage. Neither are they able to prove their virility as they are held hostage by prudish theocrats and their own shortcomings. So they adopt the pose of warrior but never actually place themselves under fire. This is a psychologically difficult position to uphold. Bullshitting yourself is never without a cost. …

… Playing laptop Pattons at full volume, supporting the president and the entire power structure of the government is their only way of proving to themselves that they are warriors. They are damaged by their own contradictory past and as a result they cannot see their way through the haze of emotional turmoil to seek out and find real solutions to the problem of terrorism. They lash out with trash talk and threats and constant references to their own resolve because they are afraid. They’ve always been afraid.

I’ve read that children like to pretend they are superheroes because it calms their fears. They can pretend they are not small and helpless. Some psychologists say that a retreat into superhero fantasies feels good to adults, too:

Legendary sociologist Norbert Elias suggested that in an increasingly structured society, fantasy books, games and movies create arenas for the “controlled decontrolling” of emotions. It’s not socially acceptable to duel that surly human resources director with a stapler gun at 20 paces, and destroying a castle with a trebuchet isn’t an option for the average white-collar worker. Instead, against a backdrop of magic and myth, heroic fantasy allows us to prove our mettle by saving some parallel world from easily identifiable bad guys.

But which bad guys? Let’s go back to Brad Reed for a moment:

Last year, a Star Trek rerun inspired Minnesota Star-Tribune columnist and warblogger James Lileks to concoct a plan that would eliminate any liberals who opposed abusing prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. “It’s time to institute Disintegration Chambers in our major American cities,” wrote Lileks, referring to a Star Trek episode that featured two tribes who preferred to fight wars by disintegrating their own people rather than sending them into live combat. Even though the episode was actually an allegory about the perverse methods governments use to shield their people from the brutal costs of war, Lileks took quite a fancy to the idea of forced disintegration, especially for his ideological foes.

“Here’s the deal,” he wrote. “We decide what constitutes torture, and identify it as the following: insufficient air conditioning, excess air conditioning, sleep deprivation, being chained to the floor, and other forms of psychological stress … Those who disagree with these techniques must sign a record that registers their complaints. When a terrorist finally spills the details on a forthcoming attack on, say, Chicago, the people who signed the register and live in Chicago are required to report to the disintegration chamber.”

Lileks probably believes this column was humorous. But it isn’t. As David Neiwert has documented in this and many other posts, eliminationism has become “a dominating feature of right-wing rhetoric.” I infer righties spend a lot of time fantasizing about suppressing, ejecting, or terminating us. In truth, righties have little faith in the processes of democracy; they want control.

And why do they want control? Is it because, deep down, they are fearful little weenies who feel helpless and weak, and who want a superhero to save them from the scary Cylons and Muslims and liberals?

* * *

Sorta kinda related: At Slate, William Saletan (who, truth be told, has had his own problems separating fact from fiction) discusses the fantasy world of Rush Limbaugh.

I once had a friend who listened to Rush Limbaugh three hours a day. He was a Republican operative. He sat in my apartment, wearing headphones, while I worked. He swore that if I put on the headphones for 10 minutes, I’d be hooked. So I put them on.

Inside the headphones was another world. Everyone in this world thought the same way, except liberals, and they were only cartoon characters, to be defeated as though in a video game. In the real world, my friend was unemployed and had been staying with me, rent-free, for two months. But inside the headphones, he could laugh about welfare bums instead of pounding the pavement.

Somebody said recently that the whole point of Rush Limbaugh is to help righties avoid reality. You can say that about the entire VRWC echo chamber, of course. But Saletan documents that Limbaugh has a hard time separating real life from stuff he’s seen on TV. Seems to be a common affliction.

Cowards

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The fundamental question is this: Why would any American citizen support the “2006 Military Commission Act” that President Bush signed into law today?

Let’s review:

The Act empowers President Bush to declare not just aliens, but also U.S. citizens, “unlawful enemy combatants.” An American citizen who speaks out against Bush’s policies could be designated an “unlawful enemy combatant” by Bush. The Act empowers the President to round up and incarcerate anyone, citizen or non-citizen, who he determines has given “material support” to terrorists. The Act strips habeas corpus rights from detained aliens who have been declared enemy combatants. The U.S. will continue to round up innocent and guilty alike and hold them indefinitely without giving them a way to prove their innocence. For more on how the Act strips American citizens and others of basic rights, see Marjorie Cohn, “American Prison Camps Are on the Way.”

Regarding torture: Reasonable people might disagree over the distinction between “cruelty” and “torture.” For example, Stephen Rickard argues in today’s WaPo that the Act authorizes cruelty but not torture. I assume he refers to definitions of torture and cruelty in international law; personally, I don’t see a difference. But he also says,

[The CIA] reportedly was using waterboarding (a terrifying mock execution in which a prisoner is strapped to a board and convinced he is being drowned), dousing naked prisoners with water in 50-degree cold and forcing shackled prisoners to stand for 40 straight hours. …

…The United States has prosecuted every one of these techniques as a war crime. So when Congress passed the McCain amendment last fall banning cruel treatment, CIA interrogators reportedly stopped working. Vice President Cheney had sought an exemption for the CIA — but didn’t get one. The administration apparently pushed the interrogators hard to resume their tactics, saying these techniques were still legal, but the CIA refused.

It seems the agency had learned an important lesson from the infamous Justice Department “torture memo,” which claimed that to be deemed “torture” a procedure had to be capable of causing major organ failure or death. The administration repudiated the memo when it became public. The lesson? Secret, contorted legal opinions don’t provide any real protection to CIA officers.

So the CIA demanded “clarity” — from Congress. No wonder President Bush practically sprinted to the cameras to begin spinning his “compromise” with Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) on the Military Commissions Act. He needs to convince CIA interrogators that they now have congressional carte blanche.

So did the Act signed today do the trick? Rickard says it doesn’t, and that if the interrogators give in to White House pressure and resume brutal interrogations, they’ll be at greater legal risk than before.

The administration is trying to convince CIA officers that they won’t be indicted — or at least convicted. But the CIA demanded clarity, not more ambiguity and “plausible deniability.”

At the end of the day all the president can honestly tell CIA interrogators is this: “The law has some loose language. We’ll give you another memo. Don’t worry.”

Sure.

And torture doesn’t work, anyway. Bush wants us to believe that the “tough” techniques that may or may not be torture has yielded vital information that has saved American lives, but there is plenty of indication that’s not so.

Dan Froonkin writes,

The new law vaguely bans torture — but makes the administration the arbiter of what is torture and what isn’t. It allows the president to imprison indefinitely anyone he decides falls under a wide-ranging new definition of unlawful combatant. It suspends the Great Writ of habeas corpus for detainees. It allows coerced testimony at trial. It immunizes retroactively interrogators who may have engaged in torture.

Here’s what Bush had to say at his signing ceremony in the East Room: “The bill I sign today helps secure this country, and it sends a clear message: This nation is patient and decent and fair, and we will never back down from the threats to our freedom.”

But that may not be the “clear message” the new law sends most people.

Here’s the clear message the law sends to the world: America makes its own rules. The law would apparently subject terror suspects to some of the same sorts of brutal interrogation tactics that have historically been prosecuted as war crimes when committed against Americans.

Here’s the clear message to the voters: This Congress is willing to rubberstamp pretty much any White House initiative it sees as being in its short-term political interests. (And I don’t just mean the Republicans; 12 Senate Democrats and 32 House Democrats voted for the bill as well.)

Here’s the clear message to the Supreme Court: Review me.

I ask again: why would anyone support Bush’s position? Today righties are snarling and snapping like cornered animals at anyone who criticizes the torture bill. We nay-sayers are “whiny hippies” throwing a “moonbat hissy fit.”

A more temperate rightie declared “This is undeniably a victory for those of us that believe we need to aggressively wage the war against jihadism.” This and other rightie commenters continue to follow the White House in blind faith that the Bush Administration knows what it is doing and will use the unprecedented power it has gained wisely. Given the Bush Administration’s record — that’s insane.

Righties like to talk tough, but peel enough layers off ’em and you’ll find a sniveling little coward crouching and whimpering at their core. Deep down, they want Dear Leader to have dictatorial power so that he can protect them. Like any mob in the grip of hysteria, they have lost reason and inhibition, and they attack anyone who gets in their way.

They’re cowards, they’re out of control, and they must be stopped.

Numbers That Go Crunch

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Daniel Davies, better known to bloggers as Daniel of Crooked Timber, explains the Johns Hopkins/Lancet study on deaths in Iraq.

First, don’t concentrate on the number 600,000 (or 655,000, depending on where you read). This is a point estimate of the number of excess Iraqi deaths – it’s basically equal to the change in the death rate since the invasion, multiplied by the population of Iraq, multiplied by three-and-a-quarter years. Point estimates are almost never the important results of statistical studies and I wish the statistics profession would stop printing them as headlines.

The question that this study was set up to answer was: as a result of the invasion, have things got better or worse in Iraq? And if they have got worse, have they got a little bit worse or a lot worse. Point estimates are only interesting in so far as they demonstrate or dramatise the answer to this question.

The results speak for themselves. There was a sample of 12,801 individuals in 1,849 households, in 47 geographical locations. That is a big sample, not a small one. The opinion polls from Mori and such which measure political support use a sample size of about 2,000 individuals, and they have a margin of error of +/- 3%. If Margaret Beckett looks at the Labour party’s rating in the polls, she presumably considers this to be reasonably reliable, so she should not contribute to public ignorance by allowing her department to disparage “small samples extrapolated to the whole country”. The Iraq Body Count website and the Iraqi government statistics are not better measures than the survey results, because one of the things we know about war zones is that casualties are under-reported, usually by a factor of more than five.

And the results were shocking. In the 18 months before the invasion, the sample reported 82 deaths, two of them from violence. In the 39 months since the invasion, the sample households had seen 547 deaths, 300 of them from violence. The death rate expressed as deaths per 1,000 per year had gone up from 5.5 to 13.3.

Just as a number on a chart, a mortality rate of 13.3 is not self-evidently absurd. A great many third-world nations have mortality rates at least that high, if not higher. (You can find a handy-dandy table of world demographics in this PDF file. I believe Mozambique wins the mortality prize at 20 deaths per 1,000.)

Talk of confidence intervals becomes frankly irrelevant at this point. If you want to pick a figure for the precise number of excess deaths, then (1.33% – 0.55%) x 26,000,000 x 3.25 = 659,000 is as good as any, multiplying out the difference between the death rates by the population of Iraq and the time since the invasion. But we’re interested in the qualitative conclusion here.

That qualitative conclusion is this: things have got worse, and they have got a lot worse, not a little bit worse. Whatever detailed criticisms one might make of the methodology of the study (and I have searched assiduously for the last two years, with the assistance of a lot of partisans of the Iraq war who have tried to pick holes in the study, and not found any), the numbers are too big. If you go out and ask 12,000 people whether a family member has died and get reports of 300 deaths from violence, then that is not consistent with there being only 60,000 deaths from violence in a country of 26 million. It is not even nearly consistent.

Most of the criticism coming from the Right Blogosphere amounts to “I don’t believe it,” albeit expressed in more colorful language and accompanied by ad hominem attacks on the researchers. And all of the criticisms of the study that I’ve seen pick apart the point estimate number but do not seriously address the methodology or the increase in mortality rate.

Some of the comparisons are downright weird. For example, some guy quoted on Instapundit said “It is a larger number than were killed in Germany during five years (and 955,044 tons) of WWII bombing.” I assume that’s true, but that’s not an honest comparison. An honest comparison would compare pre-war mortality rates to mortality rates of German citizens during World War II — deaths from everything, including mumps, traffic accidents, and the Holocaust — and extrapolate from that the number of people who would not have died had the mortality rate not risen.

The “WWII bombing” comparison just tells me that whoever came up with it does not grasp what the Johns Hopkins/Lancet study even is about, never mind understand the methodology. Yet he declares himself an expert and says it’s wrong.

Daniel Davies continues,

A particularly disgusting theme of some right-wing American critics of the study as been to impugn it by talking about it being “conveniently” released before the November congressional elections. As if a war that doubled the death rate in Iraq was not the sort of thing that ought to be a political issue. Nobody is doing anything about this disaster, and nobody will do until people start suffering some kind of consequences for their actions (for example, no British politician, soldier or spy has lost his job over the handling of the Iraq war and no senior member of the Bush administration either).

There has to be some accountability here. It is not good enough for the pro-intervention community to shrug their shoulders and say that the fatalities caused by the insurgents are not our fault and not part of the moral calculus. I would surely like to see the insurgents in the ICC on war crimes charges, but the Nuremberg convention was also correct to say that aggression was “the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole”. The people who started this war of aggression need to face up to the fact, and that is a political issue.


Richard Horton writes in The Guardian:

Not only do we have a better understanding of the toll our invasion has had on the country; we also understand better just how those deaths have come about. Before the invasion only a tiny proportion of deaths were due to violence. But since the invasion over half of all deaths have been due to violent causes. It is our occupation and our continued presence in Iraq that is fuelling this violence. Claims that the terrorist threat was always there are simply disproved by these findings.

The nature of these causes has changed too. Early on in the post-invasion period deaths were made worse by aerial bombing. But now gunshot wounds and car bombs are having a far greater effect. Far from our presence in Iraq stabilising the chaos or alleviating the rate at which casualties are mounting, we seem to be making the situation worse. In each year since the invasion, the mortality rates due to violence have increased.


In each year since the invasion, the mortality rates due to violence have increased. That’s the important point, and that’s what the Bush Administration and its rightie supporters need to explain. And answer for.

Hate Speech and Its Consequences

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Michelle Malkin is on the warpath, literally, because YouTube is pulling what she calls “anti-jihad” videos from its servers.

She presents one such video, of which she is clearly proud, on her site. I say it’s not so much “anti-jihad” as “anti-Muslim.” The point of the video is to present Muslims as murderous, violent people who must be “stopped.” As I watched I noticed a photo in which a protester held up a sign calling for the beheading of anyone who insults the Prophet. At least the jihadists are upfront about their intentions. Malkin fervently stirs up hate and fear and says jihadists must be “stopped,” but doesn’t follow through with explicit proposals for how to do the “stopping.” The clear implication of the video is “kill them before they kill us,” but Malkin lacks the intellectual honesty to say that and will, I assume, deny that’s what she meant.

That’s why I say the video is not “anti-jihad.” More accurately, it is “counter-jihad,” albeit with the punches (or beheadings, if you will) pulled. An “anti-jihad” video would be one that proposes peaceful and rational solutions.

As the Buddha said, hate is never appeased by hate, but by metta (loving kindness; Dhammapada 1:3). Jesus had an opinion on this matter also:

Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy. But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you; That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust. For if ye love them which love you, what reward have ye? do not even the publicans the same? And if ye salute your brethren only, what do ye more than others? do not even the publicans so? Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect. [Matthew 5:43-48, King James Version]

Is that not clear? Is there some other passage in the Gospels where Jesus threw in qualifiers (e.g., Thou mayest make hateful videos and post them on YouTube) that I’ve missed?

Awhile back Malkin threw a fit over alleged insults to Christianity. At least she’s speaking out for a religion other than her own, since she clearly isn’t a Christian herself. But let’s go on …

[Update: Right-wing columnist Jeff Jacoby says Jesus was wrong.]

Malkin also alleges that YouTube is being inconsistent with its standards, because videos posted by Islamic jihadists are allowed to remain. I’m going to take her word on that, as I’m not terribly interested in spending the next several hours checking out the content of YouTube. I’m all in favor of consistency in applying standards. However, “they get to do it, so why can’t we do it too?” is not a compelling moral argument.

Sharing of web content — text, music, photographs, or videos — brings up a number of issues touching on intellectual property, fair use, copyrights, and free access to information. I don’t want to get into most of those now, except to say that lots of people have some fuzzy notions about “rights” and “fairness.” As of this morning YouTube is, still, a privately owned company, I believe. It may be aquired by Google soon, which would make it part of a publicly owned company. What it isn’t is a public utility. That means nobody has a right to post whatever they want on YouTube. The owners are perfectly within their rights to restrict content to that which works well with their business model and doesn’t get them into legal trouble.

I feel the same way about blog comments. This blog is my property, I pay for the bandwidth, and I get to decide what stays and what goes. To anyone who gets pissed because I delete their comment, I say: Get your own blog. I am under no obligation to disseminate “information” that I believe is false or opinions with which I do not agree.

Which is pretty much what Tbogg says to Michelle:

Now Michelle could post her videos at her own site or at Hot Air but doing so indicates a lack lack of revolutionary zeal, not to mention that the cost of bandwidth would come out of her own mom pants pocket…. so I won’t mention it. This might cause the Great Leap Forward to become a mere Stumble on the Sidewalk-Crack Forward and those revolutions take way too long and then the proletariat masses get bored and they wander back inside to watch Extreme Makeover: Home Edition and wonder if they could afford one of those refrigerators that has the TV in the door because that would be really cool and besides, if you want money for people with minds that hate, all I can tell is brother you have to wait.

Shooby-do-wah.

Offensive speech was one of the issues discussed at the Clinton Global Initiatives conference, such as in this panel discussion. The discussion was interesting but not entirely satisfactory. For example, at one point Farheed Zakaria asked why protests in the Muslim world about speech — for example, over the Danish cartoons and recent comments by the Pope — so often turn violent, even murderous. Queen Rania of Jordan responded by calling for “more interreligious and intercultural dialogue between all of us,” which is nice, but it doesn’t answer the question. However, in another part of the same discussion she described how violence begets violence —

I would like to say for example, like two months ago, before the war in Lebanon began. Here’s Lebanon, which is made up of a group of people that are peace-loving. They are very moderate and open and modern by nature. They are the natural allies to the global community. Then this war took place. And innocent civilians were seeing, on a daily basis, bodies of babies being put into plastic bags. The vital infrastructure was destroyed. A quarter of the population was displaced. And I can say that over the course of two months, the Arab public became much more radicalized. Because they saw this injustice. They saw this grief. And even the moderates, what we thought was a moderate majority started to shrink, and you can see this shrinking taking place. And the extreme voices came out as the victorious ones. And you could see that the voice of moderation, the voices that called for peace and diplomacy and engagement, they are losing currency. They are being marginalized.

So, if you want to strengthen the moderates, we have to see ― people have to see the dividends of moderation. They have to see the dividends of peace. And now, they are not seeing them. So again, I just want to say that if we want to gain the moderates, if we want to increase ― it’s almost percentages, you know. The percentage of extremists to moderates. If you want to increase and strengthen your moderate block, then people have to really feel an important difference in their lives. They have to see justice. They have to see ― and as I said, an honest engagement and an interest in their cause.

As I explained in this post, at the CGI conference several speakers said we shouldn’t be talking about a war on terrorism, but about a war on extremism. And fighting extremism with military aggression is a bit like using heavy machinery to re-arrange a china shop. The china may indeed be re-arranged, but the end results may still be unsatisfactory.

Further, you can’t reduce extremism with counter-extremism, but with moderation. That’s why we as a society need to discourage extremism in our own midst, just as we wish moderate Muslims would speak out more forcefully about extremism in their backyards. I’m not calling for censorship. I’m just saying, one private citizen to another: The counter-jihadist videos are not helping any of us.

I mean, what is the point? As I say, Malkin doesn’t provide strategies for dealing with Muslim hate and anger; she’s just interested in stirring up hate and anger against Muslims. Does she think people need to be warned about Islamic terrorism? Are we not, in fact, perpetually and robustly being warned about Islamic terrorism?

As an eyewitness to the collapse of the WTC towers, and as someone who spends time in New York City and its public transportation and other infrastructures (likewise my children and friends), believe me, I don’t need to be warned about the dangers of terrorism. I am genuinely worried about train and subway bombings, à la Madrid and London. I worry that eventually we’ll be plagued by suicide bombers in our major cities.

There’s free speech, and there’s irresponsible speech — yelling fire in a crowded theater, and all that.

It seems to me that the video Ms. Malkin is so proud of serves no other function than to fan the flames of hate. If she presented information that is not already very public, or provided some kind of strategy for dealing with Islamic jihadism, that would be different. But she doesn’t. The video is nothing but hate speech, IMO.

Back during the Danish cartoon flap I mused over whether American news outlets were right not to republish the cartoons. Malkin was heading up a crusade to get those cartoons re-published all over America, saying that not publishing the cartoons was giving in to terrorists. I said in the earlier post that solidarity with the free speech of Danish newspapers was certainly a compelling stand.

But then I looked at the cartoons, and for the most part they were crude and hateful and conveyed no other message than Muslims are bad. They were not cartoons most American news editors would choose to publish without the controversy. And it’s not like the cartoons were hidden, as they were all over the web. So what do you call it if newspapers allowed themselves to be bullied by righties into publishing something they didn’t want to publish? Is coercion ever acceptable?

One of the commenters wrote, “Sorry, but I can’t see how cultural sensitivity and respect (which are good) should EVER trump a fundamental value in our own culture.” I respect that. On the other hand, the fact is that news media self-censor themselves all the time for the sake of cultural sensitivity. Racist, sexist, anti-semitic, and other bigoted expression once common in the American press are pretty scarce now. This self-censorship is inspired mostly by marketing — publishers don’t want to drive away readers by offending them. Ah, the magic of free markets …

Freedom of speech is a fundamental value in the West. Yet it has never been absolute, even here in the Land of the Free. The German Opera of Berlin was slammed recently for canceling a production of Mozart’s Idomeneo in which Jesus, Mohammed, and the Buddha are decapitated, a scene not in the original opera. Police had warned the opera company management that the production might incite violence. As a matter of principle I think the production should have been performed, even though (as an opera buff) most artistic revisionism of standard repertoire annoys me. Just get the best singers you can get and put them in pretty costumes and perform the damnfool opera, I say.

But it’s also realistic to assume that few if any opera companies in the U.S. would have scheduled that production at all. That’s because grand opera is so expensive to produce that opera companies cannot support themselves with ticket sales. This is true even of Big Shot companies like New York’s Metropolitan Opera, which consistently sells out performances even though the tickets ain’t cheap. The Met draws more than 800,000 attendees every season, their web site says. Yet the Met seems to be in perpetual telethon mode; I get solicited for donations at least once a month. In fact, this report says the Met gets more of its funds from “contributions and bequests” than from the box office.

I don’t know about the Met, but most opera companies in the U.S. depend in part on government grants to stay afloat. If you care to study it, here’s a financial statement from the Los Angeles Opera Company, for example.

That’s why I doubt any opera company in America would even consider mounting the Idomeneo production that was bounced in Berlin. Beheading Jesus might piss off too many contributors, corporate and private. Forget about selling ads in the program. And as for government grants — the wingnuts still get worked up about the photograph “Piss Christ” that was exhibited in bleeping 1987. They’ve been on a rampage to reduce or eliminate public funding of the arts since, in spite of the fact that public funding underwrites preservation and exhibition of traditional sacred art and objects (including Bibles) and uncounted performances of Handel’s Messiah.

Take also reactions to the Terrence McNally play, “Corpus Christi,” which depicts Christ and the Apostles as gay men living in Texas. These include death threats against actors and arson threats against theaters. What’s not documented are the number of theater companies that might like to produce the play but wouldn’t dare touch it with a ten-foot pool.

I’m rambling on longer than I intended to. My general point is that we’re real good at pointing out the logs in others’ eyes when we’re not so quick to notice the logs in our own (Matthew 7:1-5, sorta). And, really, nobody needs counter-jihadist videos on YouTube.

Update: Reuters reports:

Danish state TV on Friday aired amateur video footage showing young members of the anti-immigrant Danish Peoples’ party engaged in a competition to draw humiliating cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad.

The video images have surfaced little more than a year after a Danish paper published cartoons of the Prophet that sparked violent protests worldwide.

The images, filmed by artist Martin Rosengaard Knudsen who posed as a member of the party for several months to document attitudes among young members, show a number of young people drinking, singing and drawing cartoons ridiculing the Prophet Mohammad.

The faces of the young people were blurred in most of the footage. One cartoon appeared to depict the Prophet Mohammad as a camel, urinating and drinking beer. The competition took place in early August, according to Danish media.

Another cartoon strip aired in the partly masked footage on state TV seemed to show the prophet Mohammad surrounded by beer bottles and included an image of an explosion.

The news story is titled “Danish TV shows cartoons mocking Prophet Mohammad,” but it appears Danish TV was not mocking the Prophet but presenting a news story about young people mocking the Prophet, which is somewhat different.

Some of the children on the blosophere — by which I mean some rightie bloggers — have embraced the cartoons as their newest cause célèbre and are posting as many bits and pieces of the broadcast as they can get their virtual hands on. This is done in the same spirit of concerned interest that you find in any gang of eight-year-olds with a purloined Hustler magazine.

Somebody, please call their parents …

Finally

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Earlier this week I cited an article by Michael Hirsh and Michael Isikoff, “What Went Wrong,” from Newsweek, May 27, 2002. The Hirsh-Isikoff and other news stories that appeared in late spring of 2002 revealed that the Bush Administration had received copious warnings about the September 11 attacks and had failed to act on them.

Much of what would later be found by the September 11 commission was in these articles. We saw Sandy Berger and Richard Clarke explicitly warn the incoming Bush Administration that they must give the threat of al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden the highest priority. We learned that the Bush State Department and National Security Council decided to put al Qaeda low on their priority list, in spite of the warnings. We learned that the Bushies didn’t bother to use unarmed drones, as had the Clinton security team, to gather intelligence in the critical summer of 2001. We learned that President Bush had been given an explicit warning of a terrorist attack involving hijacked airplanes on August 6, 2001 (although it would take the 9/11 commission to pry the title of the warning, “Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States,” out of Condi Rice). We learned that the Bush team had not followed up on this warning.

Righties quickly stepped in and declared that there wasn’t anything the Bush Administration could have done, because the Bush team had not been given the day, the hour, the airports, the targets, the exact plan. We’ve since been treated to a blow-by-blow description of what went on at NORAD and the FAA on September 11. It was not pretty. Every ball that could have been dropped, was dropped. Although there is no excuse for the inability of NORAD and the FAA to work together in this time of crisis — that’s part of their jobs — it is obvious neither agency had been given so much as a hint to be alert to anything extraordinary. By the time the managers at the FAA and NORAD realized the nature of the crisis, it was pretty much over.

Had they been better prepared, had they been on a higher alert, had even one hijacker crew been stopped, had even one tower been spared, hundreds of lives might have been saved. And that failure is the fault of the federal executive branch that existed in 2001 — the Bush Administration. Yes, many of the slip-ups originated in the intelligence agencies. But had Bush rattled cages to make al Qaeda a priority, it might have made a difference. We’ll never know.

Michael Hirsch wrote in the May 17, 2002, Newsweek, in an article titled “What Did He Know?”:

George W. Bush has been all but untouchable in the war on terror, and he has the poll ratings to prove it. Now, for the first time, doubts are surfacing publicly in Washington-and knives are being sharpened-over what Bush knew about the threat from Osama bin Laden and when he knew it.

Most of the questions center on a recently disclosed intelligence briefing on Aug. 6, 2001, at which the president was warned that, among other threats, Al Qaeda-linked terrorists might try to hijack an airliner. Considering that, at about the same time, FBI agents in Phoenix and Minneapolis were raising suspicions about Middle Easterners taking flight lessons in the United States and the intentions of Zacarias Moussaoui, the alleged “20th hijacker” who had been arrested, the revelations have opened up a credibility gap for a White House that prides itself on giving things straight to the American people. The reason is simple: Bush and his top officials insisted in no uncertain terms after September 11 that they had no inkling of the attacks beforehand.

The Bush administration, which faces a series of hearings on Capitol Hill, is mounting a stout defense. National-security advisor Condoleezza Rice, at a White House briefing on Thursday, said the hijacking threat that Bush heard about a little over a month before the attacks was not linked to any specific threat. It came during an “analytic” briefing and only “mentioned hijacking in the traditional sense,” she said-in other words, the use of passenger planes as hostages, not missiles. “This government,” she said, “did everything it could in a period when the information was very generalized.”

In truth, the question of whether the Bush administration was paying enough attention in general to the terror threat is what is really at issue-far more than what the president specifically learned on Aug. 6 or at other briefings. The new disclosures could open a Pandora’s box of questions about just how focused the Bush administration was on deterring and disrupting bin Laden before September 11.

Newly emboldened Democrats on the Hill, for instance, and even some Republicans, might think to ask why an administration that blamed its predecessor for failing to deter bin Laden ignored, for nearly eight months, hard evidence linking the Oct. 12, 2000, attack on the USS Cole in Yemen to Al Qaeda. Bush and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld both suggested publicly that the Clinton administration had left America with a weak image abroad. As Bush told The Washington Post in January, “It was clear that bin Laden felt emboldened and didn’t feel threatened by the United States.” But the new administration mounted no retaliation of its own, despite what seemed to be a clear casus belli.

I want to emphasize that these words were published in a major national news magazine in May 2002. Yet more than four years later, we are still struggling to bring these facts to the nation’s attention.

Instead of being held accountable, President Bush was wrapped in a cult of personality that protected him from criticism. The nation was persuaded that President Bush was uniquely, almost supernaturally, qualified to protect the nation from terrorist attacks. What should have been the Bush Administration’s shame was spun and exploited into an unbeatable political asset.

What happened to “the series of hearings” Hirsch spoke of? In fact, the Senate and House Intelligence Committees had announced a joint inquiry in February 2002. This was after President Bush and Vice President Cheney had personally asked Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle to limit the investigation. The hearings began in June, 2002.

From The Memory Hole:

From June to October 2002, the Intelligence Committees from the US Senate and House teamed up to probe, more or less, 9/11. Of course, the Joint Investigation ran into all kinds of roadblocks. It took Congress five months to even announce the inquiry and another four months before it got started. Bush and Cheney each personally asked then-Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle to keep the scope of the probe narrow. Republican Senator Richard Shelby openly complained of the lack of cooperation from the FBI, intelligence agencies, and others. [Read more]

Throughout June, July, and the first half of September, 2002, the Joint Inquiry held closed sessions. The second half of September saw all open hearings, while those in October alternated between open and closed. In December, the Joint Inquiry issued its report, but only 24 pages were publicly released out of a total of over 800.

In May 2003, Newsweek, Knight Ridder, and other media outlets reported that the Bush Administration was working to block the release of the Joint Inquiry’s full report. In fact, officials were quoted as saying that they’d like to retroactively classify parts of the material that came out during the open hearings. They’re upset about some of the information divulged by senior intelligence officials and by the Inquiry staff’s leader, Eleanor Hill. (They now regret giving Hill and her team access to so many classified intelligence briefings.) [Read more]

The Memory Hole has archived all publicly released statements from the hearings. The two links provided in the quote above both document the many ways the Bush Administration tried to stonewall the hearings — first by opposing any investigation at all, then by withholding critical documents and witnesses, finally by suppressing much of the final report.

The Administration also fought tooth and nail to prevent an independent, public investigation of the attacks. It was only because of pressure from September 11 families — notably the Family Steering Committee — that the 9/11 Commission was created at all.

During the 16 months of investigation by the 9/11 Commission, the Bush Administration continued to play games over access to documents and witnesses. The commission was forced to issue subpoenas to the Federal Aviation Administration and NORAD to get information about the FAA-NORAD problems I mentioned above, and it was only weeks ago that we learned the testimony from the FAA and NORAD was, um, wrong.

Even after the 9/11 Commission finished its work, many questions remain unanswered. And as September 11 faded from public consciousness, it seemed likely they would remain unanswered.

Yet now, finally, the questions Michael Hirsch and others asked in the spring of 2002 — What did President Bush know? And what did he do about it? — are being asked again. Hallelujah.

David Horowitz’s propaganda miniseries, “The Path to 9/11,” and President Clinton’s robust response, have hauled all the old questions into the light of day once again. Glenn Greenwald writes at Salon:

Republicans appear to have gravely miscalculated in provoking Bill Clinton into the debate over the Bush administration’s terrorism policies. Ever since the 9/11 attacks, most Democrats have refrained from aggressively blaming the administration for the attacks, blame that could easily be assigned by exploiting two simple facts — 1) the 9/11 attacks happened while Bush, not Clinton, was president and 2) Bush received the Aug. 6 presidential daily briefing embarrassingly titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US” and apparently did nothing in response. With some scattered exceptions, both parties seemed content more or less to maintain a truce with regard to casting blame for the 9/11 attacks by agreeing that few people in either party recognized the magnitude of this threat until those attacks happened.

But ABC’s broadcast of the right-wing propaganda film “Path to 9/11” forced into the public discourse a comparison of Bush vs. Clinton on the question of terrorism. And the subsequent attempts by right-wing pundits and “journalists” to heap the blame for terrorism on the Clinton administration left Clinton with no choice but defending himself aggressively. Following the Wallace interview, Condoleezza Rice accused Clinton of making statements about the Bush administration’s pre-9/11 anti-terrorism efforts (or lack thereof), which Rice said were “flatly false,” comments that in turn prompted an aggressive response from Hillary Clinton.

My explanation of the many ways Condi Rice lied her ass off is here.

Last night, Keith Olbermann’s Countdown presented a segment on Bush’s failure to address terrorism before September 11. You can see the video here, and Crooks & Liars has the video and a rough transcript. It was well done. Attacking George Bush’s image as Our Glorious Protector From Scary Swarthy People With Bombs still takes guts, although not as much as before Katrina. (Indeed, I’m surprised there’s not more reaction from rightie bloggers today; the Word must have been handed down to shut up about the pre-9/11 thing so that maybe it’ll go away.)

Olbermann put together one part of the pre-9/11 puzzle I had not considered before, even though I’d had the pieces. This is from the Crooks & Liars transcript:

Mr. Bush was personally briefed about al Qaeda even before the election in November, 2000.

During the transition, President Clinton and his National Security Advisor, Sandy Berger, say they told Bush and his team of the urgency in getting al Qaeda.

Three days before Mr. Bush took office, Berger spoke at a “passing the baton” event that Rice attended.

Berger (1/17/01): “Sitting at the Norfolk Base with survivors from the USS Cole only reinforced the reality that America is in a deadly struggle with a new breed of anti-western jihadists. Nothing less than a war, I think, is a fair way to describe this.”

Eight days later, Clarke sent Rice the strategy Clinton developed for retaliating, in the event al Qaeda was found to be behind October’s attack on the USS Cole.

The next day, the FBI conclusively pinned the Cole attack on al Qaeda.

Mr. Bush ordered no military strike, no escalation of existing Clinton measures. Instead, he repeated Clinton’s previous diplomatic efforts, writing a letter to Pakistani leader Pervez Musharraf in February, and another on August 4th.

Until September 11th, even when Mr. Bush was asked about the Cole, an attack carried out on water, by men in a boat, he offered a consistent prescription for keeping America safe, one he reiterated upon taking office.

    Bush (2/27/01): “To protect our own people, our allies and friends, we must develop and we must deploy effective missile defenses.”

… According to the 9/11 report, even bin Laden expected Bush to respond militarily to the Cole bombing. Quote, “In February, 2001…according to [a] source, Bin Laden wanted the United States to attack, and if it did not he would launch something bigger.”

Obviously, W is a Weenie who encouraged that “something bigger” by his failure to act. Not Clinton’s failure, Bush’s failure.

I have never said that President Clinton was blameless, or that there wasn’t more he could have done. But the elevation of the hapless and clueless George W. Bush into some kind of Demigod of National Strength has got to be one of the most pathological events in American history. For generations historians will be looking back on our little era and asking, “How could so many people have been so blind?”

I think the time is ripe for Democrats to pull a Karl Rove and mount an attack directly on Bush’s alleged “strength.” It’s past time to dismantle the Big Lie that George W. Bush is an effective leader against terrorism.

Whatever else happens, please help keep this issue out in the light. Don’t let the VRWC cover it up again. Don’t let the lies continue.

Update: See also Brilliant at Breakfast.

Our Baby Boy

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The Adolescent-in-Chief is whining that the recent leak of the April NIE was “political.” But he’s going to release “key judgments” of the report so Americans can decide for themselves what it says.

Translation: We’ll let you see it after we’ve scrubbed out the parts that make us look bad.

He’s played fast and loose with NIEs before, remember. He had Scooter Libby release a highly, um, edited version of an NIE as part of their Joe Wilson smear campaign. As explained in Media Matters, the leaked version presented the famous African yellowcake story as a “key judgment.” In fact, the story was not a key judgment, and the unedited NIE revealed the yellowcake story was strongly disputed.

Josh Marshall has found there is another NIE exclusively about Iraq, and he’s leading a charge to have them both released.

We talked to various Hill sources who confirmed its existence. And then Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA), ranking member of the House intel committee discussed the report and called for its release at an event at the National Press Club.

Only there was another wrinkle to the sources. Hill sources tell TPMmuckraker that the administration has been sitting on the report, trying to prevent its dissemination before the election, presumably. And it turns out, from what we’ve heard, that this NIE actually hasn’t been given the official “NIE” label because doing that would have required sharing it with various members of Congress.

The President has already said he’s releasing “parts” of the April NIE — which likely means it’ll cleansed of all the important details. But both should be released. The April NIE and this NIE that dare not speak its name too.

Call your Senators and your Representative.

Dan Froomkin provides more juicy bits:

Indeed, the 9/11 Commission Report very diplomatically concluded that both Bush and Clinton could have done more to prevent the terrorist threat.

But up until now, it’s remained a mystery what exactly Bush said to the commissioners when he grudgingly consented to an interview with them in the Oval Office, back in April of 2004.

Pretty much all we knew about that interview was that Bush insisted that it be held in private, unrecorded — and with Vice President Cheney at his side. (See, for instance, my April 8, 2004, column , and this Tom Toles cartoon .)

But yesterday afternoon, Democratic former commission member Richard Ben-Veniste dramatically broke his silence about that meeting in an interview with CNN’s Blitzer. Here’s the transcript . Forgive me for quoting so extensively, but it’s fascinating stuff.

    “BLITZER: All right. You, in your questioning in your investigation, when you were a member of this commission, specifically asked President Bush about efforts after he was inaugurated on January 20, 2001, until 9/11, eight months later, what he and his administration were doing to kill bin Laden, because by then it was certified, it was authorized. It was, in fact, confirmed that al Qaeda was responsible for the attack on the USS Cole in December of 2000.

    “BEN-VENISTE: It’s true, Wolf, we had the opportunity to interview President Bush, along with the vice president, and we spent a few hours doing that in the Oval Office. And one of the questions we had and I specifically had was why President Bush did not respond to the Cole attack. And what he told me was that he did not want to launch a cruise missile attack against bin Laden for fear of missing him and bombing the rubble.

    “And then I asked him, ‘Well, what about the Taliban?’ The United States had warned the Taliban, indeed threatened the Taliban on at least three occasions, all of which is set out in our 9/11 Commission final report, that if bin Laden, who had refuge in Afghanistan, were to strike against U.S. interests then we would respond against the Taliban.

    “”BLITZER: Now, that was warnings during the Clinton administration. . . .

    “BEN-VENISTE: That’s correct.

    “BLITZER: . . . the final years of the Clinton administration.

    “BEN-VENISTE: That’s correct.

    “BLITZER: So you the asked the president in the Oval Office — and the vice president — why didn’t you go after the Taliban in those eight months before 9/11 after he was president. What did he say?

    “BEN-VENISTE: Well, now that it was established that al Qaeda was responsible for the Cole bombing and the president was briefed in January of 2001, soon after he took office, by George Tenet, head of the CIA, telling him of the finding that al Qaeda was responsible, and I said, ‘Well, why wouldn’t you go after the Taliban in order to get them to kick bin Laden out of Afghanistan?’

    “Maybe, just maybe, who knows — we don’t know the answer to that question — but maybe that could have affected the 9/11 plot.

    “BLITZER: What did he say?

    “BEN-VENISTE: He said that no one had told him that we had made that threat. And I found that very discouraging and surprising.

    “BLITZER: Now, I read this report, the 9/11 Commission report. This is a big, thick book. I don’t see anything and I don’t remember seeing anything about this exchange that you had with the president in this report.

    “BEN-VENISTE: Well, I had hoped that we had — we would have made both the Clinton interview and the Bush interview a part of our report, but that was not to be. I was outvoted on that question. . . .

    “BLITZER: Now, you haven’t spoken publicly about this, your interview in the Oval Office, together with the other commissioners, the president and the vice president. Why are you doing that right now?

    “BEN-VENISTE: Well, I think it’s an important subject. The issue of the Cole is an important subject, and there has been a lot of politicization over this issue, why didn’t President Clinton respond?

    “Well, we set forth in the report the reasons, and that is because the CIA had not given the president the conclusion that al Qaeda was responsible. That did not occur until some point in December. It was reiterated in a briefing to the — to the new president in January….

    “BLITZER: Well, let me stop you for a second. If former President Clinton knew in December. . . .

    “BEN-VENISTE: Right.

    “BLITZER: . . . that the CIA and the FBI had, in his words, certified that al Qaeda was responsible, he was still president until January 20, 2001. He had a month, let’s say, or at least a few weeks to respond.

    “Why didn’t he?

    “BEN-VENISTE: Well, I think that was a question of whether a president who would be soon leaving office would initiate an attack against a foreign country, Afghanistan. And I think that was left up to the new administration. But strangely, in the transition there did not seem to be any great interest by the Bush administration, at least none that we found, in pursuing the question of plans which were being drawn up to attack in Afghanistan as a response to the Cole.

    “BLITZER: Now, as best of my recollection, when you went to the Oval Office with your other commissioners, the president and the vice president did that together. That was a joint interview.

    “BEN-VENISTE: At the request of the president.

    “BLITZER: Did the vice president say anything to you? Did he know that this warning had been given to the Taliban, who were then ruling Afghanistan, if there’s another attack on the United States, we’re going to go after you because you harbor al Qaeda? And there was this attack on the USS Cole.

    “BEN-VENISTE: The vice president did not at that point volunteer any information about the Cole.

    “BLITZER: So what’s your — did the president say to you — did the president say, you know, ‘I made a mistake, I wish we would have done something’? What did he say when you continually — when you pressed him? And I know you’re a former prosecutor, you know how to drill, try to press a point.

    “BEN-VENISTE: Well, the president made a humorous remark about the fact that — asking me whether I had ever lost an argument, and I reminded him that — or I informed him that I, too, had two daughters. And so we passed that.”

If it weren’t for the fact that he looks older, I’d swear George W. Bush was some random 17-year-old somebody hauled to Washington and installed in the Oval Office as President.

News That Isn’t News

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Karen DeYoung writes in the Washington Post:

The war in Iraq has become a primary recruitment vehicle for violent Islamic extremists, motivating a new generation of potential terrorists around the world whose numbers may be increasing faster than the United States and its allies can reduce the threat, U.S. intelligence analysts have concluded.

A 30-page National Intelligence Estimate completed in April cites the “centrality” of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and the insurgency that has followed, as the leading inspiration for new Islamic extremist networks and cells that are united by little more than an anti-Western agenda. It concludes that, rather than contributing to eventual victory in the global counterterrorism struggle, the situation in Iraq has worsened the U.S. position, according to officials familiar with the classified document.

Mark Mazzetti writes for the New York Times:

A stark assessment of terrorism trends by American intelligence agencies has found that the American invasion and occupation of Iraq has helped spawn a new generation of Islamic radicalism and that the overall terrorist threat has grown since the Sept. 11 attacks.

The classified National Intelligence Estimate attributes a more direct role to the Iraq war in fueling radicalism than that presented either in recent White House documents or in a report released Wednesday by the House Intelligence Committee, according to several officials in Washington involved in preparing the assessment or who have read the final document.

Like they needed an NIE to figure that out. The White House is still in denial mode, of course.

From DeYoung’s and Mazzetti’s articles, it seems the NIE came to the same general conclusions as the experts consulted in James Fallows’s recent Atlantic Monthly article on national security. I blogged about this article here, here, and here, and probably elsewhere.

In a nutshell: Since September 11, al Qaeda has been scattered around the globe and has become more diffuse, less organized. That’s good and bad; Fallows’s article argues that at the moment the old al Qaeda organization has lost the operational capability to pull off Big Deal attacks such as those of September 11. On the other hand, the myriad independent cells springing up around the globe are harder to track and perfectly capable of nasty little operations such as the London subway bombings.

Still, in some ways we could be making real progress against Islamic terrorism were it not for the war in Iraq. The Fallows, Marzzetti, and DeYoung articles all state plainly that Iraq is growing the threat of terrorism against the United States, not reducing it. DeYoung writes,

According to officials familiar with the document, it describes the situation in Iraq as promoting the spread of radical Islam by providing a focal point, with constant reinforcement of an anti-American message for disaffected Muslims. The Web sites provide a narrative of a war with frequent victories for the insurgents, and describe an occupation that they say regularly targets Islam and its adherents. They also distribute increasingly frequent and sophisticated messages from al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, urging Muslims wherever they are to take up arms against the “Crusaders” on behalf of Iraq.

Both Bush and bin Laden now consistently describe the Iraq war as the “central front” of the global war, and both are depending on victory there to set the direction of future struggles far afield. Although intelligence officials believe bin Laden’s ability to direct major terrorist operations has been greatly diminished, his status as the ideological leader of a global movement that appeals to disaffected Muslims has vastly increased. …

…The latest terrorism assessment paints a portrait of a global war in which Iraq is less the central front of actual combat than a unifying battle cry for disparate extremist groups and even individuals. “It is just those kinetic actions that lead to the radicalization of others,” a senior counterterrorism official said earlier this summer. “Surgical strikes? Nothing is surgical about military operations. They tend to have impacts, affects.”

Another problem that Fallows’s experts discussed was the misallocation of resources caused by our focus on Iraq. For example, Fallows writes,

When Americans think of satellite surveillance and the National Security Agency, they are likely to imagine something out of the TV show 24: a limitless set of eyes in the sky that can watch everything, all the time. In fact, even today’s amply funded NSA can watch only a limited number of sites. “Our overhead imagery is dedicated to force protection in Iraq and Afghanistan,” I was told by a former intelligence official who would not let me use his name. He meant that the satellites are tied up following U.S. troops on patrol and in firefights to let them know who might be waiting in ambush. “There are still ammo dumps in Iraq that are open to insurgents,” he said, “but we lack the imagery to cover them—let alone what people might be dreaming up in Thailand or Bangladesh.” Because so many spy satellites are trained on the countries we have invaded, they tell us less than they used to about the rest of the world.

Last I heard, we’re dumping $1.5 billion in Iraq every week. I suspect that money could be put to better use than pissing people off.

Rightie bloggers are in full-bore pooh-pooh mode. Captain Ed writes,

It makes the classic logical fallacy of confusing correlation with causation, and the basic premise can easily be dismissed with a reminder of some basic facts.

Ed then crashes ahead with his “basic facts” without noticing that they support the NIE conclusions.

First and foremost, Islamist radicalism didn’t just start expanding in 2003. The most massive expansion of Islamist radicalism came after the end of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, when the Islamists defeated one of the world’s superpowers. Shortly afterwards, the staging of American forces in Saudi Arabia to drive Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait created the most significant impulse for the expansion of organized Islamist radicalism and led directly to the formation of al-Qaeda. It put the US in Wahhabi jihadist crosshairs for the first time.

Righties have a weird inability to grasp large concepts. Islamic radicalism was inflamed when the non-Muslim Soviets invaded Afghanistan. The deployment of non-Muslim Americans in the Middle East in 1990 brought about the formation of al Qaeda. More non-Muslims invading Iraq in 2003 got ’em all whipped up even more. One might conclude that Muslim in the Middle East get really, really pissed off when non-Muslim soldiers mess with their territory.

James Fallows’s experts explain that the American invasion of Iraq and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan run together in some Middle Eastern heads:

So far the war in Iraq has advanced the jihadist cause because it generates a steady supply of Islamic victims, or martyrs; because it seems to prove Osama bin Laden’s contention that America lusts to occupy Islam’s sacred sites, abuse Muslim people, and steal Muslim resources; and because it raises the tantalizing possibility that humble Muslim insurgents, with cheap, primitive weapons, can once more hobble and ultimately destroy a superpower, as they believe they did to the Soviet Union in Afghanistan twenty years ago. The United States also played a large role in thwarting the Soviets, but that doesn’t matter. For mythic purposes, mujahideen brought down one anti-Islamic army and can bring down another.

America’s military action in Afghanistan after 9/11 was different, because that action really was tied to 9/11 and because we allied ourselves to other Muslims — the Northern Alliance — against the Taliban. Unfortunately our loss of focus in Afghanistan allowed bin Laden to escape, and now the Taliban is making a comeback.

BTW, the Captain’s blog post title is “NIE: Ending 12-Year Iraqi Quagmire Made Terrorism Worse,” revealing some confusion on the Captain’s part between a “quagmire” and “containment.” Among other things, American troops didn’t die during the 12-year containment of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, and the containment sure as hell didn’t cost $1.5 billion every bleeping week. Was the containment perfect? No. Is the Iraq War perfect? Cough.

Another rightie, Rick Moran, falls back on straw-man arguments to criticize the NIE:

I am not disputing the conclusions in this leaked report. I am resisting the implications that some would draw from it; that if only we had not confronted the jihadists or worked to solve the root causes of terrorism, none of this would be true today.

Did anyone actually advise that we should not confront terrorists? Not that I’ve seen. The difference is that some of us think we should have focused on those terrorists who perpetrated acts against America and Americans, and are likely to do so again, rather than squander our attention and resources on every terrorist cell on the planet whether it is likely to strike the U.S. or not.

And as for “if only we had not … worked to solve the root causes of terrorism” — that’s a joke, right?

DeYoung:

But “a really big hole” in the U.S. strategy, a second counterterrorism official said, “is that we focus on the terrorists and very little on how they are created. If you looked at all the resources of the U.S. government, we spent 85, 90 percent on current terrorists, not on how people are radicalized.”

In fact, the Bush Administration hasn’t done a bleeping thing about root causes. All it has done is package Islamic terrorism as a political wedge issue here in the U.S. They don’t even honestly articulate what the root causes are. Instead, they crank out propagandistic sludge like We are at war with enemies who hate our freedoms. We must fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them here. Victory. Resolve. We can’t cut and run.

Oh, sure, the Bushies have gone through the motions of helping Muslim civilians, but even the famous Iraqi “restructuring” program was more about allowing Bush campaign contributors to exploit Iraq and make a profit from the invasion than it was about helping Iraqis.

Their other big “root cause” initiative was to name bleeping Karen dumb as an eggplant Hughes Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy.

I rest my case.

The War on Bad Metaphors

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I’m blogging at you from the second day of the Clinton Global Initiative conference. The 8 a.m. (8 a.m.? In New York City? This may be the city that never sleeps, but at 8 a.m. it’s damn groggy) session featured Queen Rania Al-Abdullah of Jordan, President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan, and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, moderated by Fareed Zakaria.

A point made by speakers yesterday, and repeated this morning, is that the metaphorical war we are fighting is the wrong metaphorical war. Instead of the War on Terrorism, speakers say, we should be fighting the War on Extremism.

I agree. And, one would think, President Bush ought to agree as well. Yesterday at the UN he said,

At the start of the 21st century, it is clear that the world is engaged in a great ideological struggle between extremists who use terror as a weapon to create fear and moderate people who work for peace.

Note: The enemy is not “terrorism.” The enemy are ideological extremists who use terrorism as one of their tactics. But it is extremism, and the spread of extremism, that we should be fighting. Talking about a war on terrorism makes as much sense as calling World War II the War on Great Big Stuff That Blows Up.

The name is critical, I think, because by misdirecting our attention from the enemy to violence perpetrated by the enemy, it might seem that the struggle is primarily a violent one. But if the conflict is primarily ideological, we need to put more emphasis on countering ideology than perpetrating more violence. Although some military action probably is required, military action must be subservient to and supportive of political and diplomatic efforts. Instead, we put our military strategy first, and misdirect politics to support the military strategy.

Queen Rania, poised and articulate, spoke to the problem of extremism directly. Extremist ideologies that once existed only on the fringes of the Muslim world now resonate with more and more Middle Easterners, she said, and it’s important to understand why.

Our lack of knowledge of one another helps extremism spread. Westerners tend to lump all Muslims into one group. Even those who appreciate that there is a difference between Shi’ia and Sunni may not understand that there are further divisions within Shi’ia and Sunni. A nuanced approach to the people of the Middle East is critical.

It is a huge mistake, she said, to rule out a political approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in favor of a military approach. (This line brought robust applause from the audience.) Before the recent war in Lebanon, she continued, most Lebanese were moderate, peace loving people. But over the course of two months, once moderate people were radicalized. The war pushed the entire Arabic public toward extremism; it caused the voices of peace and moderation to lose currency and become marginalized. The way to win the war on extremism is to support and strengthen the voices of moderation in the Middle East, not discredit them.

President Karzai said that he had tried to warn the West to pay attention to the spread of extremism since the Taliban came into power in 1966. Long before September 11, the Taliban was killing Muslims. They were destroying families; they ruined livelihoods by, for example, burning vineyards full of grapes. And most of all, the Taliban preached hatred. Karzai said he tried to tell the West the hate would reach them eventually. But no attention was paid, he said, because you in the West did not hurt. We didn’t pay attention until we did hurt.

Karzai also said that we in the West mistake the voices of terrorists, of the most brutal elements of the Middle East, as the voice of the people of the Middle East. This has to stop, he said.

The Archbishop Desmond Tutu radiates more sweet, selfless joy than his little body could possibly contain. No religion in the world promotes death and murder, he said. Instead, all of the world’s religions promote compassion, justice, love, caring. It is unfortunate that people misuse religion for bad purposes, like a knife intended to cut bread might be used to hurt someone.

It’s a mistake to associate the terrorism of the Middle East with Islam, the Archbishop said. If a Muslim commits an act of terrorism, it’s called Muslims terrorism; but when a Christian man blew up a building in Oklahoma, no one called it Christian terrorism. Likewise, terrorism in Northern Ireland, or the Holocaust, was not called Christian terrorism.

We humans can survive only if we survive together, the Archbishop said. We need one another. No one is totally self-sufficient without being subhuman.

To be continued.