Set the Iraq Record Straight

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As we settle into collective amnesia over Iraq, the Brits actually are holding a public inquiry into how they got themselves into that misbegotten adventure. In today’s news we learn from Sir Christopher Meyer, former ambassador to Washington, that at least some people in the British government had realized before the invasion they had no solid proof of weapons of mass destruction hidden in Iraq.

The UN weapons inspectors were not given time to finish their jobs, Sir Christopher said. This was no secret. Blix’s briefing to the UN Security Council in February 2003 basically said, Ladies and gentlemen, we’re inspecting up a storm, but we haven’t found WMDs. We need more time to know what’s going on. The Bush Administration’s response, even before that report, was to undermine Blix.

The problem, Sir Christopher said, essentially is that the Bush and Blair administrations had gotten themselves so solidly committed to war that when evidence for a cause didn’t turn up, they had to fabricate one.

Sir Christopher Meyer said the “unforgiving nature” of the build-up after American forces had been told to prepare for war meant that “we found ourselves scrabbling for the smoking gun”. … Asked about Tony Blair’s meeting with Bush at Crawford, Texas, in April 2002, where, some observers believe, the decision to go to war was made, Meyer said: “To this day I’m not entirely clear what degree of convergence was signed in blood at the Texas range.”

Again, this is not news to most of us who followed events closely at the time. However, it’s important to rub the nation’s nose in the truth about how we got into Iraq. If you young folks will indulge me, let me draw your attention to the aftermath of Vietnam.

With Vietnam, once the Paris peace accords were signed in 1973 the American public didn’t want to hear about Vietnam. Attention was paid to the fall of Saigon in 1975, of course, but that was an exception. Once the U.S. was out of Vietnam, few people wanted to talk about it or think about it. We were tired of it.

This was understandable, but the problem with not talking about it is that there was no processing of what had happened. Everyone’s opinions, impressions, and knowledge of the war remained frozen in place as they were in 1973. And the problem with that came to light during the Bush II Administration. People talked about the “lessons of Vietnam,” and it became apparent that entirely different sets of lessons had been learned.

For some of us, the lesson of Vietnam was that you don’t commit to a foreign war on trumped-up reasons, and without clear (and essential!) goals and an exit strategy.

For others, the lesson of Vietnam was that it’s wrong to dissent against war because it will lead to defeat. Therefore, war dissenters have to be shut up and the military effort supported without question.

The latter position, of course, is held by the same people who whine incessantly that liberals want to take away their “freedoms.” But I digress.

I realize the Obama Administration probably figures it can’t afford to stir up more hard feelings on the Right by making them admit they screwed up while he’s trying to push through health care reform and other vital issues. But I don’t see what difference it would make. The people who would be worked up into a snit over facing facts about Iraq are the same ones fighting the Administration already. How crazier can they get? What trouble could they possibly stir up that they aren’t stirring up?

In a just world, Bush, Cheney, Rove et al. would be too ashamed to be seen in public, if not serving time. We cannot sweep this under the memory rug, or else in a few years the Next Generation of evildoers will be staging a comeback. And that comeback will be built on the uncorrected lies of the Bush Administration.

Today’s Headlines

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Stuff in teh nooz:

President Obama actually thinks before making decisions. The Right calls this a sign of weakness, of course.

Rumors say Lou Dobbs is planning to run for President. That’s funny enough, but here’s the punch line: He’s reaching out to Latino voters.

Mandated insurance probably is not unconstitutional.

Michelle Obama wears great dress to state dinner.

Why the Senate sucks.

Update: Sarah Palin supporters — dumb as socks.

Thanks to joan16 for this one — Dana Perino says there were no terrorist attacks in America while George W. Bush was president.

Obama’s China Trip Failed Everywhere But China

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A follow up to “How the Liberal Media Behaves With Abject Obsequiousness to Barack Obama” — now some fellow at Spiegel is jumping into the “Obama’s China trip a failure” pool. Apparently Chris Matthews (and we know how sterling his judgment is) is calling Obama “Carteresque,” meaning weak. Conventional wisdom is saying that Obama is a sock who doesn’t now how to behave around those tough Chinese.

However, people who actually know something about China, especially those living there or who have lived there, are saying just the opposite.

Richard at Peking Duck writes, “The townhall was a triumph, and it is beyond comprehension why the media is determined to brand it – and all other aspects of the trip – a failure.” Well, it’s because that’s what our media does — somebody feeds them a narrative, and they write their news stories around the narrative. And the narrative they settled into is “the China trip failed.” What actually happened is irrelevant.

The townhall event was a live broadcast that went to 100 million Chinese. This is remarkable, because the Chinese government really doesn’t like live broadcasts. But they caved in. Obama spoke to an audience of young people — Communist Party youth, yes. James Fallows quotes a Mandarin speaking businessman who was in China at the time:

But the comment from President Obama that I think will have the most impact inside the firewall was not the one about US principles that you quoted in your followups. It was this one:

‘Now, I should tell you, I should be honest, as President of the United States, there are times where I wish information didn’t flow so freely because then I wouldn’t have to listen to people criticizing me all the time. I think people naturally are — when they’re in positions of power sometimes thinks, oh, how could that person say that about me, or that’s irresponsible, or — but the truth is that because in the United States information is free, and I have a lot of critics in the United States who can say all kinds of things about me, I actually think that that makes our democracy stronger and it makes me a better leader because it forces me to hear opinions that I don’t want to hear. It forces me to examine what I’m doing on a day-to-day basis to see, am I really doing the very best that I could be doing for the people of the United States.’

“Wow! As a resident of China for two decades and a Mandarin-speaking China-watcher for three decades, I can say without any doubt that those words will resonate far more deeply — and potentially more “subversively” or “destabilizingly” — than any overt thumb-in-the-eye hectoring that any foreigner or foreign leader might muster, in public or private. Those words are ***precisely*** the kind that Zhongnanhai [Chinese term equivalent to “the Kremlin”] fears the most, and rightly so.”

This was reported in the U.S. as a failure. The Communist government outmaneuvered the Obama advance team by allowing him only a local broadcast (that went to 100 million Chinese), and Obama backed off from saying anything about human rights.

You see the disconnect. Obama’s words are not remarkable to an American, but apparently they had an entirely different effect in China.

Fallows quotes some other people who had a closer look at the China trip than most of us did, and they were far more positive toward the trip than anyone watching from here.

Some Things Are Certain

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After any Democratic Party legislative accomplishment, even an accomplishment that’s not really an accomplishment yet, such as last night’s Senate vote, there are some reactions you can count on.

Someone on the Right will explain why the accomplishment was not, in fact, an accomplishment, but a failure. Or a sign of weakness. Or a portent of failures to come.

Someone on the Left will explain that Harry Reid (or Rahm Emanuel, or Chuck Schumer, or Barack Obama, etc.) isn’t really one of us and has been planning to sell us out all along.

I’m still waiting for the third reaction, although it will no doubt be all over the Sunday talk shows — A majority of “pundits” will solemnly declare that whatever the Dems want to do will have no chance of success unless progressives adopt the wiser, more temperate positions of “moderates.”

How the Liberal Media Behaves With Abject Obsequiousness to Barack Obama

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By James Fallows, who lived and worked in China and Japan for many years: “Barack Obama’s recent swing through Asia was a relative success, and certainly nothing like the disaster that most U.S. coverage implied.” And in a more recent post, Fallows says the press corps is guilty of distorting reality by “compressing every complex issue into the narrative of the DC-based ‘horse race.'”

Fallows quoted Alexandra Fenwick in the Columbia Journalism Review:

In almost every analysis of the trip, Chinese officials were portrayed as optimistic and newly emboldened to stand up to American interests and Obama was cast in the role of the meek debtor, standing with hat in hand. The line is that little was achieved and Obama was stifled, literally by state television and figuratively by the Chinese upper hand in the power dynamic.

… that negative narrative failed to take several things into account: the strict Chinese image control that doesn’t allow the sort of media celebrity that Obama enjoys elsewhere in the world; progress made in backroom diplomatic discussions; Obama’s stated objectives; and his quiet diplomatic style that doesn’t produce the kind of sound bytes that a scorekeeping-focused press Washington press corps feeds on.

Fenwick interviewed former New York Times Shanghai bureau chief Howard French, who basically said the reporting on the Asian trip sucked out loud. “Everything is shot through this prism of short-term political calculation as opposed to thinking seriously about stuff,” he said.

See also Trish Durkin at The Week. In brief, she says the idea that Obama somehow failed to obtain anything was based on the erroneous idea that there was anything that could have been obtained on one trip.

Last but not least, there is the bupkuss factor: the consenus that Obama, poor jerk, has come away with nothing. No breakthroughs. No deals. Not even an Oprah “a-ha” moment. It’s as if everybody thinks that some concrete public concession on at least one of the biggies — carbon emissions or political reform or North Korea — is something a U.S. president just can’t leave China without, like a silk robe or a ceramic tea set.

But in reality, it’s not like that. Every key element of the Sino-American relationship is too big and too convoluted for the thumbs-up/thumbs-down approach to apply.

So, relax, everybody. Obama came, he charmed, he left. And for now, that’s perfectly fine.

Just Griping

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True story: On Monday I sent a payment for something in a regular-size envelope from a post office in southern Westchester County, New York — about three miles north of the Bronx — to an address on Long Island. And I wanted to be sure it arrived in a timely manner. So I sent it priority mail with delivery confirmation so I could track its progress on the USPS website.

According to the USPS website, the envelope was sent to a processing facility in Puerto Rico. I am informed it left Puerto Rico on Wednesday and is on route to the destination in Long Island. Timely sort of went out the window already. Sigh.

Update: The envelope was delivered this morning.

Health Care Vote Tomorrow Night

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Tomorrow night the Senate is supposed to vote on whether it will take up the health care bill released this week. They need 60 votes, and it’s a big question mark whether they will get 60 votes.

The Senate bill is somewhere between “not what we wanted” and “better than nothing.” It pulls back a bit on the House bill’s draconian abortion restrictions, but it adds a “national plans” provision that would allow insurance companies to sell policies without regard for state consumer protections.

Conservatives and the insurance companies love the national insurance idea. The insurance companies could all set up shop in Texas and sell cheap junk policies to healthy young people in any state. Most of the young folks likely would pay premiums for quite some time before they make a claim and realize their policies are a ripoff and their insurance doesn’t cover whatever it is they have. Big profits to be made. But if enough healthy young people drop out of the state insurance pools, the not-so-young and not-so-healthy will be paying higher premiums.

The public option will be available only to people who can’t get insurance any other way, and because it will attract a less-than-young and healthy (hereafter abbreviated Y & H) risk pool it is expected to actually be more expensive than private insurance. Robert Reich explains.

The Senate bill has a state “opt out” provision that many leftie bloggers don’t like. I think that if there have to be compromises (and why is that true?) this is one of the less onerous ones. If the public option were to be more robust, and go into effect sooner, I think it would actually hurt conservative state-level politicians in the long run to opt out. As it is, I’m not sure it will make a whole lot of difference to many people.

Many of the provisions of the bill won’t go into effect until 2014. I think this is a colossally stupid move on the part of the Democrats. I know Reid put that in to make the bill cheaper. But it will give the Right plenty of time to spread more “death panel” stories to scare the public with. If they manage to take back the House or Senate in 2010 or 2012, expect them to try to kill the legislation before it goes into effect.

Jon Walker at FireDogLake explains these and other issues with the bill. At the Washington Post, Ezra Klein explains the actuarial values thing. He also explains what parts of the bill go into effect before 2014. The New York Times presents the major provisions of the Senate and House bills side by side.

Between now and then, expect to hear all kinds of rumors and speculation about how senators Baucus, Landrieu and Lincoln will vote. Michael Tomasky argues that obstructing the health care bill would be bad for their political careers in the long run, even if they might take a hit from their conservative constituents in the short run.

As I’ve written many times over the recent months, the political paradox is this, at least for Nelson, Landrieu and Lincoln. As individual senators from red states where Obama has lower approval ratings, they would be rewarded in the short-term by blocking reform. But as members of the larger group of Democrats who represent states where Republicans tend to win statewide elections, a collective party failure is far more likely to hurt them in the long run than it is to hurt safe, blue-state Democrats.

If they’re really thinking long term, they should want reform to succeed. And oh yes, there’s this, too: the fact that they represent poor-ish states (especially Lincoln and Landrieu), where many families are uninsured and would benefit from being able to purchase insurance with a decent federal subsidy. This should make them want a bill.

Emphasis on should. We’ll know more soon.

Yes, I guess we will.

Terminal Whining

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From yesterday’s Watertown Daily Times:

With his prospect of winning the 23rd Congressional District race now almost zero, Conservative Party candidate Douglas L. Hoffman suggested Wednesday in a letter that “ACORN, the unions and the Democratic Party” “tampered” with results to deny him victory.

A few days ago Hoffman “unconceded” after he was told counting of absentee ballots showed him trailing by only 3,000 or so votes instead of 5,000. Hoffman provided no evidence for his claims, and the Republican county chairman says Hoffman is all wet. He observed the election closely, the chairman said, and saw no evidence of tampering.

Update: George J. Williams, Oswego County Republican chairman, said Mr. Hoffman’s assertion “is not accurate.” The chairman said he roamed the county on Election Day and saw no evidence of tampering.

Update: Alex Koppelman reports that a majority of Republicans think ACORN stole the election for Obama. Steve Benen is skeptical about the poll numbers Koppelman sites, but adds,

One in four Americans — and a majority of self-identified Republicans — believes this was made possible due to the secret, carefully-executed, coordinated national efforts of a community group that can’t recognize fake pimps?

In the Republican brain, ACORN is morphing into a cross between the Illuminati and the bogyman.