Kicking the Can

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Michael Abramowitz writes at WaPo:

The long-awaited testimony this afternoon of Gen. David H. Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker, once seen as a potential turning point in war policy, seemed more like an exercise of kicking the can down the road.

Wow. How … expected.

Appearing before two House committees, Petraeus confirmed that 30,000 U.S. troops could be withdrawn from Iraq by the middle of next summer, but that was hardly unexpected: Officials have been forecasting for months that the so-called surge would have to end no later than April 2008 or there would be unacceptable strains on the American military.

But Petraeus left the larger questions — what will be the future size and mission of the American “footprint” in Iraq — unanswered. He offered hints that the reductions might continue beyond next summer but said he would not be able to offer a definitive judgment until March.

“Our experience in Iraq has repeatedly shown that projecting too far into the future is not just difficult, it can be misleading and even hazardous,” Petraeus testified.

Well, so much for that. Sen. Harry Reid has released this statement:

“Today, we heard that the Bush Administration likely intends to keep at least 130,000 troops in Iraq through next summer. Our enemies around the globe gain great advantage by having the United States mired in an Iraqi civil war. Clearly, continuing to pursue the President’s flawed escalation policy until at least July 2008 is not in the national interest of the United States.

“U.S. national security requires that we truly and immediately change course in Iraq, so that America can more effectively dedicate our resources to other, more pressing challenges we face across the globe. The longer we keep over 130,000 troops in Iraq, the less incentive Iraqis have to engage in the needed political reconciliation and the longer we avoid dealing with several pressing threats to our national security: Bin Laden remains at large and his terrorist organization has rebuilt its strength to pre-9/11 levels, Afghanistan’s stability is being undermined as the Taliban and narco-traffickers grow in strength, and Iran and other countries and groups pursue the acquisition of nuclear weapons technology.”

The Senate Dems also released a fact check that’s worth a look. See also Think Progress, “FACT CHECK: Petraeus To Withdraw Troops Next Summer Because Of Broken Military, Not ‘Progress.’”

Meanwhile, the Right Blogosphere is still hyperventilating over the Moveon.org ad. Howard Fineman is on Countdown right now saying that the GOP is whipping up outrage over the ad as a way to go on offense against Democrats. They can’t go on offense against the Dems on the war, you see, so they have to grab whatever phony issue they can. All day long rightie bloggers have dutifully jacked up the pitiful victimized whining act, sometimes to genuinely hallucinatory degrees.

And, of course, not one has actually addressed the facts Moveon presents in the ad.

Macranger predicts “this is most likely the day that puplic opinion for Democrats begins a nose dive from which they will not recover before 2008.”

Every Democrat candidate for President who has taken money from Moveon.org which now have to answer to the American people. They’re not going to denounce Moveon.org or any affliliation [sic] with any other leftwing nut group. They’re bought and paid for and they know it.

Of course, this is the same guy who wrote in April 2006 that “the pure and simple fact is as I told you this is going to be a vindicating summer for supporters of the Bush Administration.”

If anything, I’d think association — they aren’t affiliated — with Moveon helps the Dems, because it might remind people that some Dems really are against the war and the Bush Administration. If Dem popularity sinks after today it won’t be because of Moveon. It’ll be because the Dems didn’t push back against the Bushies and the war hard enough.

Pooh-poohing Petraeus

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The White House report on Iraq “progress” being fronted by General Petraeus likely will be the top news story over the next couple of days. The general’s testimony to Congress will begin this afternoon.

This morning the Right Blogosphere had the vapors over a Moveon.org ad that, the righties said, called General Petraeus a traitor. They harrumphed that Moveon had crossed a line and that the ad is “despicable.”

Righties, of course, never cross lines. When they called former President Jimmy Carter a traitor, or when they called Senator John Kerry a traitor, or when they called Rep. Jack Murtha a traitor, that was entirely different. I don’t know why, but it was.

For the record, here’s the text of the Moveon ad:

GENERAL PETRAEUS OR GENERAL BETRAY US?

General Petraeus is a military man constantly at war with the facts. In 2004, just before the election, he said there was “tangible progress” in Iraq and that “Iraqi leaders are stepping forward.” And last week Petraeus, the architect of the escalation of troops in Iraq, said, “We say we have achieved progress, and we are obviously going to do everything we can to build on that progress.”

Every independent report on the ground situation in Iraq shows that the surge strategy has failed. Yet the General claims a reduction in violence. That’s because, according to the New York Times, the Pentagon has adopted a bizarre formula for keeping tabs on violence. For example, deaths by car bombs don’t count. The Washington Post reported that assassinations only count if you’re shot in the back of the head — not the front. According to the Associated Press, there have been more civilian deaths and more American soldier deaths in the past three months than in any other summer we’ve been there. We’ll hear of neighborhoods where violence has decreased. But we won’t hear that those neighborhoods have been ethnically cleansed.

Most importantly, General Petraeus will not admit what everyone knows: Iraq is mired in an unwinnable religious civil war. We may hear of a plan to withdraw a few thousand American troops. But we won’t hear what Americans are desperate to hear: a timetable for withdrawing all our troops. General Petraeus has actually said American troops will need to stay in Iraq for as long as ten years.

Today, before Congress and before the American people, General Petraeus is likely to become General Betray Us.

Cooking the Books for the White House

There are no end of outraged rightie blog posts about this ad, but not one that I’ve seen refutes the facts presented in the ad. They get hung up on the headline — GENERAL PETRAEUS OR GENERAL BETRAY US? — and that’s as far as their “analysis” gets. (See previous post on scientific evidence that righties are stupid.) Instead of, you know, thinking, they commence their usual hysterical wailing and play the victim.

Pete Hegseth of National Review Online is calling for Democrats to “denounce” Moveon. Yes, just as the GOP denounced the Swift Boat Liars. Oh, wait …

Also for the record, had Moveon asked me I would have advised them not to focus so much on Gen. Petraeus. He’s just a pawn, really, although as near as I can tell he’s playing the pawn role of his own free will. I think Robert Stein makes a valid point —

In his farewell address, Eisenhower famously warned against “the disastrous rise of misplaced power” by the military-industrial complex, “Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of…defense with our peaceful methods and goals.”

Now Bush is breaking down the barriers between military and civilian by attempting to use Petraeus and “the generals” who agree with him, after replacing those who don’t, as a battering ram against Congress to keep them from challenging and changing his disastrous policies.

The invective of the ad against Petraeus is misplaced. He is doing his job in the way that the Commander-in-Chief has defined it. It’s that definition that is now not only causing ruin in Iraq but subverting the Constitution.

Of course, unless the Bushies are holding Gen. Petraeus’s mother hostage in the White House basement, he’s complicit in allowing his uniform to be used as political butt cover.

See also: “Bush in Space.”

Cognitively Challenged

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Y’all will enjoy this one — some researchers have found differences in brain activity between liberals and conservatives. Simply put, we think differently because we think differently.

Exploring the neurobiology of politics, scientists have found that liberals tolerate ambiguity and conflict better than conservatives because of how their brains work.

In a simple experiment reported today in the journal Nature Neuroscience, scientists at New York University and UCLA show that political orientation is related to differences in how the brain processes information.

Previous psychological studies have found that conservatives tend to be more structured and persistent in their judgments whereas liberals are more open to new experiences. The latest study found those traits are not confined to political situations but also influence everyday decisions.

The results show “there are two cognitive styles — a liberal style and a conservative style,” said UCLA neurologist Dr. Marco Iacoboni, who was not connected to the latest research. …

… Frank J. Sulloway, a researcher at UC Berkeley’s Institute of Personality and Social Research who was not connected to the study, said the results “provided an elegant demonstration that individual differences on a conservative-liberal dimension are strongly related to brain activity.”

Analyzing the data, Sulloway said liberals were 4.9 times as likely as conservatives to show activity in the brain circuits that deal with conflicts, and 2.2 times as likely to score in the top half of the distribution for accuracy.

Attempting to be diplomatic, the lead author cautioned that it would be a mistake to assume one style of thinking is better than the other. The tendency of conservatives to block distracting information (e.g., “facts”) could be useful in some circumstances, he said. And I’m sure that’s true. If your survival depends on, say, catching flies with your tongue, single-minded focus on where the flies are must be a big plus.

On the other hand, if your survival depends on making intelligent decisions about, say, Middle East policy — not so much.

Update: Some more blog reaction to this story has come in. Don Boudreaux of Cafe Hayek (I postulate this is a “free market” blogger) points out that the definitions of “liberal” and “conservative” are hard to pin down, which puts the results in question. But I think this experiment sheds light on the phenomenon of left-right division on the blogosphere and elsewhere. In spite of the fact that it’s damn near impossible to come up with definitions of “liberal” or “conservative” that everyone agrees to, the political blogosphere has very neatly sorted itself into a Right and a Left, with relatively few blogs occupying a consistently ambiguous middle. We somehow know what side we belong to, even if we can’t articulate why. This suggests there is something other than pure linear logic going on here.

This rightie blogger is confused.

What the results showed was more emotional activity in the brains of Leftists when presented with a difficult task so I would see the results as yet another example of Leftists being more emotional — as being emotionally-driven rather than reason-driven. I suspect that most readers of this blog would see Leftists that way.

I went back and re-read the original article, and the word emotion doesn’t appear in it anywhere. The study did not show there was more “emotional activity” in the brains of Leftists when presented with a difficult task. Here’s how the article described the experiment:

Participants were college students whose politics ranged from “very liberal” to “very conservative.” They were instructed to tap a keyboard when an M appeared on a computer monitor and to refrain from tapping when they saw a W.

M appeared four times more frequently than W, conditioning participants to press a key in knee-jerk fashion whenever they saw a letter.

Each participant was wired to an electroencephalograph that recorded activity in the anterior cingulate cortex, the part of the brain that detects conflicts between a habitual tendency (pressing a key) and a more appropriate response (not pressing the key). Liberals had more brain activity and made fewer mistakes than conservatives when they saw a W, researchers said. Liberals and conservatives were equally accurate in recognizing M.

According to Wikipedia,

The anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) is the frontal part of the cingulate cortex, which resembles a “collar” form around the corpus callosum, the fibrous bundle that relays neural signals between the right and left cerebral hemispheres of the brain.

It includes both the ventral and dorsal areas of the cingulate cortex, and appears to play a role in a wide variety of autonomic functions, such as regulating blood pressure and heart rate, as well as rational cognitive functions, such as reward anticipation, decision-making, empathy and emotion.

Neuroscientists indicate the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex is primarily related to rational cognition while the ventral is more related to emotional cognition.

The anterior cingulate cortex is active in both cognitive and emotional tasks, it says here, and also plays a role in motor tasks. Scientists think the anterior cingulate cortex may play a role in integrating mental processes with bodily systems. It has also been observed that people with lesions on their anterior cingulate cortex tend to be apathetic and unconcerned when significant events occur.

See also tristero.

Uncompromising

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An article in Newsweek about the struggle between evolution and creationism got me thinking about the recent post on religion and liberalism.

Day before yesterday I wrote about how liberalism seeks to promote domestic tranquility and individual freedom by drawing lines between the personal and the public. To quote John McGowan:

Here I just want to end by noting how “unnatural” liberalism seems. It involves self-abnegation, accepting the frustration of my will. It involves, as I will detail in my next post, compromise in almost every instance, and thus can seem akin to having no strong convictions, no principles. Yet its benefits are enormous; it provides, I am convinced, the only possible way humans can live in peace together in a pluralistic world. …

…Because liberalism aims to insure peace and prevent tyranny in pluralistic societies, it often works to establish zones of mutual indifference. Liberalism strives to place lots of individual actions outside the pale of politics, beyond interference from the state or other powers. And, culturally, it strives to promote tolerance, where tolerance is, at a minimum, indifference to the choices and actions of others and, at best, a recognition that diversity yields some social benefits….

… Except for what are generally weak claims for the benefits of diversity (weak not in the sense of being unconvincing, but weak in the sense that no very major social benefit is claimed and some costs are acknowledged), the liberal argument for non-political interference, for privacy and individual autonomy, is primarily negative. Conflict is the result of trying to tell people what to believe and what to do, so we are better off cultivating a talent for resisting our inclinations to insist that others see the world and run their lives the way I do.

Ironically, anti-liberal forces in America use the values of liberalism against liberalism. For example, creationism is argued to be an alternative view to evolution that is owed respect. Peter Slevin wrote in the Washington Post (March 14, 2005) (emphasis added):

Alabama and Georgia legislators recently introduced bills to allow teachers to challenge evolutionary theory in the classroom. Ohio, Minnesota, New Mexico and Ohio have approved new rules allowing that. And a school board member in a Tennessee county wants stickers pasted on textbooks that say evolution remains unproven. …

… Polls show that a large majority of Americans believe God alone created man or had a guiding hand. Advocates invoke the First Amendment and say the current campaigns are partly about respect for those beliefs.

“It’s an academic freedom proposal. What we would like to foment is a civil discussion about science. That falls right down the middle of the fairway of American pluralism,” said the Discovery Institute’s Stephen C. Meyer, who believes evolution alone cannot explain life’s unfurling. “We are interested in seeing that spread state by state across the country.” …

…That approach appeals to Cindy Duckett, a Wichita mother who believes public school leaves many religious children feeling shut out. Teaching doubts about evolution, she said, is “more inclusive. I think the more options, the better.”

“If students only have one thing to consider, one option, that’s really more brainwashing,” said Duckett, who sent her children to Christian schools because of her frustration. Students should be exposed to the Big Bang, evolution, intelligent design “and, beyond that, any other belief that a kid in class has. It should all be okay.”

Fox — pastor of the largest Southern Baptist church in the Midwest, drawing 6,000 worshipers a week to his Wichita church — said the compromise is an important tactic. “The strategy this time is not to go for the whole enchilada. We’re trying to be a little more subtle,” he said. …

…”If you believe God created that baby, it makes it a whole lot harder to get rid of that baby,” [Southern Baptist minister Terry] Fox said. “If you can cause enough doubt on evolution, liberalism will die.”

See, science is supposed to “compromise” with religion, because to deny religion equal say with science violates the liberal values of “inclusiveness” and “freedom.” And the goal is to destroy liberalism. Of course, if the creationists had the authority they’d see to it that only their version of creation is taught in public schools, because they aren’t liberals.

Here’s the latest round in the evolution wars, by Sharon Begley in the current issue of Newsweek:

There may be some battlefields where the gospel’s “blessed are the peacemakers” holds true. But despite the work of a growing number of scholars and millions of dollars in foundation funding to find harmony between science and faith, evolution still isn’t one of them. Just ask biologist Richard Colling. A professor at Olivet Nazarene University in Illinois and a lifelong member of the evangelical Church of the Nazarene, Colling wrote a 2004 book called “Random Designer” because—as he said in a letter to students and colleagues this year—”I want you to know the truth that God is bigger, far more profound and vastly more creative than you may have known.” Moreover, he said, God “cares enough about creation to harness even the forces of [Darwinian] randomness.”

For all the good it’s done him, Colling might as well have thrown a book party for Christopher Hitchens (“God Is Not Great”) and Richard Dawkins (“The God Delusion”). Anger over his work had been building for two years. When classes resumed in late August, things finally came to a head. Colling is prohibited from teaching the general biology class, a version of which he had taught since 1991, and college president John Bowling has banned professors from assigning his book. At least one local Nazarene church called for Colling to be fired and threatened to withhold financial support from the college. In a letter to Bowling, ministers in Caro, Mo., expressed “deep concern regarding the teaching of evolutionary theory as a scientifically proven fact,” calling it “a philosophy that is godless, contrary to scripture and scientifically unverifiable.” Irate parents, pastors and others complained to Bowling, while a meeting between church leaders and Colling “led to some tension and misunderstanding,” Bowling said in a letter to trustees. (Well, “misunderstanding” in the sense that the Noachian flood was a little puddle.) It’s a rude awakening to scientists who thought the Galilean gulf was closing.

So much for compromise.

Colling’s troubles come as more and more researchers are fighting the “godless” rap, emphasizing that evolution does not preclude a deity (though neither does it require one).

Science doesn’t have anything to apologize for. It’s the creationists and their “intelligent design” allies who dissemble and lie and misrepresent evolution and science in their war against liberalism.

I think it’s a mistake for science to attempt “compromise” with the religionists (and I doubt many scientists are thinking about doing so), because it wouldn’t be an honest compromise. Creationism/ID “theory” is not only based on lies; it has the intention of undermining science. Same thing for liberalism, which does not require giving in anti-liberal factions in the name of “inclusiveness.”

As John Holbo wrote, (h/t Dan S):

I would also like to request a moratorium on critiques of liberalism that consist entirely of a flourish for effect – with accompanying air of discovery – of the familiar consideration that liberalism is inconsistent with blanket, categorical tolerance of absolutely every possible act and attitude. That is, liberalism is incompatible, in practice, with any form of illiberalism that destroys liberalism. If something is inconsistent with liberalism, it is inconsistent with liberalism. Yes. Quite. We noticed.

Also, it might not be a half-bad idea to notice that liberalism is not incompatible with religion, merely with illiberal forms of religion. Just as liberalism is incompatible with illiberal forms of secularism.

Exactly. We should all print that on our T-shirts.

It is not “inclusive” to allow propagandists to hijack science classes. It is not “academic freedom” to lie to children to confuse them. Don’t forget that this controversy is not between religion and science. It’s between a faction of religious totalitarians and modern civilization. We do not have to tolerate them, compromise with them, or humor them. They must be utterly resisted in the public sphere. And this resistance is not a betrayal of liberal values, but a defense of liberal values.

Here is the line drawn between the personal and the public: That minority among the religious who find evolution incompatible with their beliefs are perfectly free to make up their own minds who and what to believe. They can disregard science, if they wish. They can do what Professor Richard Colling did and find their own middle ground. They can even build creationist “museums” with their own money. But they have no right to demand their views be respected as science, nor may they impose their views on children through public schools.

Science doesn’t owe anything to religion, or anyone else, except to be honest, ethical and diligent about the practice of science. However, neither does religion have to justify itself to science. But that’ll have to be the topic of another post.

Bush In Space — Hiding Behind Stars

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NY Times editorial:

The military commander in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus, is to deliver a report to Congress on Monday that could be the most consequential testimony by a wartime commander in more than a generation. What the country desperately needs is an honest assessment of the war and a clear strategy for extricating American forces from the hopeless spiral of violence in Iraq.

President Bush, however, seems to be aiming for maximum political advantage — not maximum clarity on Iraq’s military and political crises, which cannot be separated from each other. Mr. Bush, we fear, isn’t looking for the truth, only for ways to confound the public, scare Democrats into dropping their demands for a sound exit strategy, and prolong the war until he leaves office. At times, General Petraeus gives the disturbing impression that he, too, is more focused on the political game in Washington than the unfolding disaster in Iraq. That serves neither American nor Iraqi interests.

Mr. Bush, deeply unpopular with the American people, is counting on the general to restore credibility to his discredited Iraq policy. He frequently refers to the escalation of American forces last January as General Petraeus’s strategy — as if it were not his own creation. The situation echoes the way Mr. Bush made Colin Powell — another military man with an overly honed sense of a soldier’s duty — play frontman at the United Nations in 2003 to make the case that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Mr. Bush cannot once again subcontract his responsibility. This is his war.

President Bush often acts as if the “generals on the ground” are responsible for determining the mission. The generals on the ground will determine troop strength, he says. The generals on the ground will decide when the troops can leave. Whatever. This is disingenuous on several levels, but on the most fundamental level Bush is taking advantage of the professionalism of the officers.

The generals don’t decide what the objective is, or what the mission is, or whether the mission is winnable or worth the cost in blood and treasure. That’s the job of civilian politicians — the President and Congress. The job of the generals is to use the resources available to accomplish the mission they are given. They don’t ask, Why are we doing this? What’s the point? That’s not their role.

Frank Rich writes (behind the firewall):

Today the spirit of WHIG [White House Iraq Group] lives. In the stay-the-surge propaganda offensive that crests with this week’s Congressional testimony of Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker, history is repeating itself in almost every particular. Even the specter of imminent “nuclear holocaust” has been rebooted in President Bush’s arsenal of rhetorical scare tactics.

The new WHIG is a 24/7 Pentagon information “war room” conceived in the last throes of the Rumsfeld regime and run by a former ABC News producer. White House “facts” about the surge’s triumph are turning up unsubstantiated in newspapers and on TV. Instead of being bombarded with dire cherry-picked intelligence about W.M.D., this time we’re being serenaded with feel-good cherry-picked statistics offering hope. Once again the fix is in. Mr. Bush’s pretense that he has been waiting for the Petraeus-Crocker report before setting his policy is as bogus as his U.N. charade before the war. And once again a narrowly Democratic Senate lacks the votes to stop him.

As always with this White House, telegenic artificial realities are paramount. Exhibit A, of course, was last weekend’s precisely timed “surprise” presidential junket: Mr. Bush took the measure of success “on the ground here in Anbar” (as he put it) without ever leaving a heavily fortified American base….

… Last week the administration and its ideological surrogates were tireless in trashing the nonpartisan G.A.O. report card that found the Iraqi government flunking most of its benchmarks.

Those benchmarks, the war’s dead- enders now say, are obsolete anyway. But what about the president’s own benchmarks? Remember “as the Iraqis stand up, we’ll stand down”? General Petraeus was once in charge of the Iraqi Army’s training and proclaimed it “on track and increasing in capacity” three years ago. On Thursday, an independent commission convened by the Republican John Warner and populated by retired military officers and police chiefs reported that Iraqi forces can take charge no sooner than 12 to 18 months from now, and that the corrupt Iraqi police force has to be rebuilt from scratch. Let us not forget, either, Mr. Bush’s former top-down benchmarks for measuring success: “an Iraq that can govern itself, sustain itself and defend itself.” On that scorecard, he’s batting 0 for 3.

What’s surprising is not that this White House makes stuff up, but that even after all the journalistic embarrassments in the run-up to the war its fictions can still infiltrate the real news.

Through its many surrogates and apologists in media, the Bushies are still able to get enough disinformation and happy talk into the news to keep everyone confused. They can’t govern their way out of a wet paper bag, but they’re world champs at catapulting the propaganda.

Gaffed

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President Bush’s performance at the APEC summit in Australia was really bad. He said OPEC for APEC, confused Australia with Austria, and was clearly disoriented when he tried to get off the stage. Here’s just the latter part of the speech, if you can stand watching:

This kind of sloppiness could be caused by many things, including Bush’s usual disdain for actually doing his job. He might be fatigued. Maybe the near beer is getting nearer.

Or maybe his bubble wrap is getting a little tight. Rosa Brooks writes in the Los Angeles Times:

The president is a lonely man. Once, he was surrounded by admirers and acolytes. There was Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld and Colin Powell and Alberto Gonzales and Condi Rice and Karl Rove — many of them better known inside the White House by the affectionate but often unprintable nicknames assigned by their playful president. (Rove, you’ll recall, was “Turd Blossom.”) Yale University forgave Bush’s mediocre student record and gave him an honorary degree in 2001, and bright young Yale law graduates at the Justice Department struggled to acquire Texas drawls and develop legal rationales for White House criminality.

Those were the days.

It’s all so different now. Cheney is still there, but most of the rest of the rats are off the sinking ship. Rumsfeld and Gonzales walked the plank, but Powell marched off in disgust, as did a host of others. Rove left last week on a mission to find and destroy some other planet, and even the still-steadfast Rice hasn’t referred to Bush as her “husband” in several years.

Condi and George are back to just dating now, it seems.

Thomas DeFrank writes for the New York Daily News:

Bush’s latest bumbles came a couple of days after a Sydney newspaper quoted him as telling the Australian deputy prime minister “we’re kicking ass” in Iraq.

“It’s what happens when he gets tired,” an old friend observed.

Six hours later, in a routine photo session, South Korea President Roh Moo-hyun complained that Bush hadn’t made an explicit “declaration to end the Korean War just now. Did you say so, President Bush?” The 1950-53 Korean conflict ended in a truce, not a peace treaty, and South Korea wants a formal peace.

A visibly annoyed Bush replied: “I said it’s up to [North Korean President] Kim Jong Il…. He’s got to get rid of his weapons in a verifiable fashion.”

“If you could be a little bit clearer in your message,” Roh said.

“I can’t make it any more clear, Mr. President,” Bush said.

U.S. officials played down the exchange. “There was clearly something lost in translation,” National Security Council spokesman Gordon Johndroe told reporters.

Let’s face it; Bush doesn’t do the diplomacy thing well. Or the President thing. Or even the human being thing.

And he’s never been the sharpest tack in the box, but a few more performances like this might indicate some kind of psychological breakdown. The sheer weight of the bullshit Bush must carry around in his head would crush anybody.

Religion and Liberalism

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I’ve been struggling with an essay by Stanley Fish in the behind-the-firewall New York Times. Fish seems to be arguing that liberalism and religion are incompatible and that liberal society requires the diminution of religion.

Liberalism is in no way incompatible with my religion. However, I’m not going to dismiss Fish’s argument out of hand, even though I think he has several blind spots.

First, I want to repeat the point made by Mark Lilla in his recent New York Times essay, “The Politics of God,” that I blogged about here: Separating political authority from religious revelation made modern liberal society possible.

I cannot emphasize this enough: Separating political authority from religious revelation made modern liberal society possible. Lilla provides a long and thoughtful analysis of western civilization going back to the Reformation, and he makes a solid argument that joining religious and political authority, even when done in a reasonably progressive and benevolent way, leads either to totalitarianism or ongoing violent conflict, or both. As Lilla puts it, “Messianic theology eventually breeds messianic politics.” Lilla continues,

So we are heirs to the Great Separation only if we wish to be, if we make a conscious effort to separate basic principles of political legitimacy from divine revelation. Yet more is required still. Since the challenge of political theology is enduring, we need to remain aware of its logic and the threat it poses. This means vigilance, but even more it means self-awareness. We must never forget that there was nothing historically inevitable about our Great Separation, that it was and remains an experiment. In Europe, the political ambiguities of one religion, Christianity, happened to set off a political crisis that might have been avoided but wasn’t, triggering the Wars of Religion; the resulting carnage made European thinkers more receptive to Hobbes’s heretical ideas about religious psychology and the political implications he drew from them; and over time those political ideas were liberalized. Even then, it was only after the Second World War that the principles of modern liberal democracy became fully rooted in continental Europe.

As for the American experience, it is utterly exceptional: there is no other fully developed industrial society with a population so committed to its faiths (and such exotic ones), while being equally committed to the Great Separation. Our political rhetoric, which owes much to the Protestant sectarians of the 17th century, vibrates with messianic energy, and it is only thanks to a strong constitutional structure and various lucky breaks that political theology has never seriously challenged the basic legitimacy of our institutions. Americans have potentially explosive religious differences over abortion, prayer in schools, censorship, euthanasia, biological research and countless other issues, yet they generally settle them within the bounds of the Constitution. It’s a miracle.

It’s a miracle we’re maintaining by the skin of our teeth, of course, and several items Lilla lists above are far from settled. But I want to digress one more time, to a wonderful blog series written by John McGowan and posted on Michael Bérubé’s blog in June 2005. It’s called “The Republican Assault on Democracy,” and it’s in three parts — Part I, Part II, Part III. The following extract is taken from all three parts.

My point is that liberalism, first and foremost, is a set of expedients (mostly institutional and legal) for minimizing tyranny by setting limits to government power. It also tries to prevent the consolidation of power by fostering the multiplication of power. Democracy, in my view, is not worth a damn if it is not partnered with liberalism. Democracy and liberalism are a squabbling pair; they each locate power in a different place–democracy in the people, liberalism in the law–and they aim for different goods: democracy (in its most ideal form) for something like the “general will,” liberalism for a modus vivendi in a world characterized by intractable conflicts among people with different beliefs, goals, ambitions, and values. Neither one trumps the other; both, in my view, are essential ingredients of a legitimate polity. …

… Not only the Republicans, but the American nation as a whole, seem to have lost any sense whatsoever of what liberalism means and what it strives to insure. Even at the best of times, the liberal check upon power is a tenuous bulwark that fights against the odds. There is nothing that underwrites the rule of law except the continued practice of upholding it. The law must be reaffirmed anew each and every time it is enunciated and enforced. And the temptation to circumvent the law, to rewrite it to accommodate one’s current beliefs and practices, is also ever present. To pay the law heed is to accept that one’s own virtue is doubtful–or that one’s own beliefs are, in every sense of that word, “partial.” It is their assurance in their own virtue that renders the Republicans most dangerous, most prone to set the law aside when it gets in the way of doing when they know in their hearts is right. Impatience with the law is endemic–and it is the harbinger of extreme politics of either the right or the left. (It is here, of course, that the leftist will leap. But why should we think leftist self-righteousness any more attractive or less dangerous than the rightist variety?)

I will continue on this line of thought in my next post. Here I just want to end by noting how “unnatural” liberalism seems. It involves self-abnegation, accepting the frustration of my will. It involves, as I will detail in my next post, compromise in almost every instance, and thus can seem akin to having no strong convictions, no principles. Yet its benefits are enormous; it provides, I am convinced, the only possible way humans can live in peace together in a pluralistic world. Given how distasteful liberal expedients are in experience, it is a miracle that they ever get established and maintained. But the benefits of that miracle are multiple–and we, as a nation, will sorely regret it if we trash our liberal edifice out of impatience, frustration, or, even worse, sheer forgetfulness of why that edifice was put in place, how it works, and what it accomplishes. …

… Because liberalism aims to insure peace and prevent tyranny in pluralistic societies, it often works to establish zones of mutual indifference. Liberalism strives to place lots of individual actions outside the pale of politics, beyond interference from the state or other powers. And, culturally, it strives to promote tolerance, where tolerance is, at a minimum, indifference to the choices and actions of others and, at best, a recognition that diversity yields some social benefits. (A social benefit, as opposed to an individual benefit, is a good that can only be produced as the result of the aggregate of many individual actions, not by any individual acting on his or her own. And, ideally, social benefits would accrue to all of the individuals who contribute to its creation, although that is hardly always the case.)

Except for what are generally weak claims for the benefits of diversity (weak not in the sense of being unconvincing, but weak in the sense that no very major social benefit is claimed and some costs are acknowledged), the liberal argument for non-political interference, for privacy and individual autonomy, is primarily negative. Conflict is the result of trying to tell people what to believe and what to do, so we are better off cultivating a talent for resisting our inclinations to insist that others see the world and run their lives the way I do.

But liberalism also provides a positive response to pluralism. It guarantees–through freedoms of speech, the press, and association, and through the institutional mechanisms of election, jury trials, and legislative deliberations–the active engagement of citizens with one another. Liberals should, I believe, promote in every way possible the existence of a vibrant, accessible, and uncensored public sphere (or, to use another term for it, civil society). In short, liberalism proliferates the occasions where citizens of different opinions, backgrounds, creeds etc. mingle with one another, express their views, and argue about specific issues. And, in some but not all cases, these settings have to move to a decision that is then accepted, even when not very satisfying, by all the parties involved. …

… I think we have lost any sense of how our democracy functions–or that it may be much more fragile than we assume. … We are assuming an immunity from civil strife that is hardly guaranteed.

It’s interesting to me that Lilla and McGowan both call liberal democracy a “miracle.” Particularly in a country as large and diverse as ours, we ought to be a roiling mass of warring factions. Ironically, I believe one of the reasons we’ve managed to keep the great experiment going this long is our almost religious devotion to the Constitution.

McGowan wasn’t writing about religion specifically, but I wanted to get his points about liberalism in front of you before wading into the Stanley Fish essay. Fish begins by citing the crusading atheists, i.e. Richard Dawkins.

The authors of these tracts are characterized by professor Jacques Berlinerblau of Georgetown University as “the soccer hooligans of reasoned discourse.” He asks (rhetorically), “Can an atheist or agnostic commentator discuss any aspect of religion for more than thirty seconds without referring to religious peoples as imbeciles, extremists, mental deficients, fascists, enemies of the public good, crypto-Nazis, conjure men, irrationalists … authoritarian despots and so forth?”

In a similar vein, Tom Krattenmaker, who studies religion in public life, wonders why, given their celebration of open-mindedness and critical thinking, secularists “so frequently leave their critical thinking at the door” when it “comes to matters of religion?” Why are they closed-minded on this one subject?

An answer to these questions can be found, I think, in another publishing phenomenon: the growing number of books and articles dedicated to the rehabilitation of liberalism both as a political vision and as a self-identification of which one needn’t be ashamed.

I object to the equation of liberalism with atheism, intolerant or otherwise. A liberal may be religious, or not, but so may be a conservative. But let’s go on —

An answer to these questions can be found, I think, in another publishing phenomenon: the growing number of books and articles dedicated to the rehabilitation of liberalism both as a political vision and as a self-identification of which one needn’t be ashamed.

A recent example is Paul Starr’s “Freedom’s Power: The True Force of Liberalism” (2007). Starr, a professor of sociology at Princeton, claims that what unites liberals are political principles rather than agreement “on the ultimate grounds on which these principles rest.” This is the familiar (and suspect) claim that liberalism is not a substantive ideology but a political device that allows many ideologies to flourish and compete in the marketplace of ideas. Liberalism, says Starr, “is only a framework – that is, it provides a space for free development.” Where there are deep “divisions over the meaning of the good life,” he continues, the “neutrality” of the liberal state “furthers mutual forbearance.”

But right there, in the invocation of “free development” and “mutual forbearance,” Starr gives the lie to liberal neutrality. Free development (the right of individuals to frame and follow their own life plans) and mutual forbearance (a live-and-let-live attitude toward the beliefs of others as long as they do you no harm) are not values everyone endorses.

Remember what McGowan said — “Because liberalism aims to insure peace and prevent tyranny in pluralistic societies, it often works to establish zones of mutual indifference. Liberalism strives to place lots of individual actions outside the pale of politics, beyond interference from the state or other powers. And, culturally, it strives to promote tolerance, where tolerance is, at a minimum, indifference to the choices and actions of others and, at best, a recognition that diversity yields some social benefits.”

Fish is, in effect, arguing that democratic society must honor anti-democratic views, even if those views threaten civil peace and promote tyranny, because to do otherwise violates the principles of tolerance that liberalism claims to value. However, I argue that it is perfectly consistent for a liberal to be intolerant of intolerance and to stand against anything that threatens civil liberty.

And I’ve also argued in the past that being liberal doesn’t mean being a patsy.

Anyway, finally we get to the meat of Fish’s essay:

And neither are the other values Starr identifies as distinctively liberal — individualism, egalitarianism, self-realization, free expression, modernity, innovation. These values, as many have pointed out, are part and parcel of an ideology, one that rejects a form of government organized around a single compelling principle or faith and insists instead on a form of government that is, in legal philosopher Ronald Dworkin’s words, “independent of any particular conception of the good life.” Individual citizens are free to have their own conception of what the good life is, but the state, liberal orthodoxy insists, should neither endorse nor condemn any one of them (unless of course its adherents would seek to impose their vision on others).

It follows then that the liberal state can not espouse a particular religion or require its citizens to profess it. Instead, the liberal state is committed to tolerating all religions while allying itself with none. Indeed, Starr declares, “the logic of liberalism” is “exemplified” by religious toleration. For if the idea is to facilitate the flourishing of many points of view while forestalling “internecine… conflicts”  between them, religion, the most volatile and divisive of issues, must be removed from the give and take of political debate and confined to the private realm of the spirit, where it can be tolerated because it has been quarantined.

Thus the toleration of religion goes hand in hand with – is the same thing as – the diminishing of its role in the society. It is a quid pro quo. What the state gets by “excluding religion from any binding social consensus” (Starr) is a religion made safe for democracy. What religion gets is the state’s protection. The result, Starr concludes approvingly, is “a political order that does not threaten to extinguish any of the various theological doctrines” it contains.

That’s right. The liberal order does not extinguish religions; it just eviscerates them, unless they are the religions that display the same respect for the public-private distinction that liberalism depends on and enforces. A religion that accepts the partitioning of the secular and the sacred and puts at its center the private transaction between the individual and his God fits the liberal bill perfectly. John Locke and his followers, of whom Starr is one, would bar civic authorities from imposing religious beliefs and would also bar religious establishments from meddling in the civic sphere. Everyone stays in place; no one gets out of line.

What Fish doesn’t address is Lilla’s contention that the kind of democratic republic we have enjoyed since the Constitution took effect in 1789 is not possible without separation of church and state. Without strict limits on the power of sectarian religion, liberal democracy cannot survive. Either religious strife will pull it apart, or else a dominant religious faction will take over and render government more authoritarian and intolerant of diversity. And that includes religious diversity.

Fish continues,

But what of religions that will not stay in place, but claim the right, and indeed the duty, to order and control the affairs of the world so that the tenets of the true faith are reflected in every aspect of civic life? Liberalism’s answer is unequivocal. Such religions are the home of “extremists … fascists … enemies of the public good … authoritarian despots and so forth.”

Lilla’s essay makes a good argument that the name-callers are correct. And I would like to point out to Stanley Fish that, were the U.S. given over to “religions that will not stay in place, but claim the right, and indeed the duty, to order and control the affairs of the world so that the tenets of the true faith are reflected in every aspect of civic life,” those people inevitably will turn around and oppress religious minorities. Liberalism may be “intolerant” of some religion, but so is theocracy.

Closed-mindedness with respect to religions that do not honor the line between the secular and the sacred is not a defect of liberalism; it is its very definition. …

… At first glance, this makes perfect sense. After all, why should we tolerate the unreasonable? But the sense it makes depends on “reasonable” having been defined as congruent with the liberal values of pluralism and moderation, and “unreasonable” having been defined as any viewpoint that refuses to respect and tolerate its competitors, but seeks to defeat them. In liberal thought, “reasonable” is a partisan, not a normative notion. It means “reasonable” from our perspective.

I’d say “reasonable” means “reasonably unlikely to destroy the fabric of society.” For a democratic republic, toleration of religious totalitarianism amounts to a suicide pact.

In saying this, I am not criticizing liberalism, just explaining what it is. It is a form of political organization that is militantly secular and incapable, by definition, of seeing the strong claim of religion — the claim to be in possession of a truth all should acknowledge — as anything but an expression of unreasonableness and irrationality.

Yet many liberals are deeply religious. Fish lazily equates “liberal” and “secular” with “non-religious” and “atheist,” but these are not synonymous. “Religious” and “secular” are not necessarily opposites. I call myself a “religious secularist,” for example, because I believe a religion-neutral society is one that allows a free and healthy personal exploration of religion, without coercion, intimidation, or forced indoctrination. On the other hand, when religionists are given governmental power, generally the first thing they do is squelch other religion.

Berlinerblau and Krattenmaker hold out the hope that secularists and strong religionists might come to an accommodation if they would listen to each other rather than just condemn each other. That hope is illusory, for each is defined by what it sees as the other’s errors.

I’m glad Fish used the word religionist here. The plain truth is that religionism is incompatible with democracy and with civil society that does not permit religious majorities to oppress and discriminate against religious minorities. Complain all you want, but if you want to live in a true democracy, religious neutrality is a necessary condition. Allowing any religious faction to use government “to order and control the affairs of the world so that the tenets of the true faith are reflected in every aspect of civic life” would mean the end of religious freedom for the rest of us.

However, I’m troubled by Fish’s claim that “The liberal order does not extinguish religions; it just eviscerates them, unless they are the religions that display the same respect for the public-private distinction that liberalism depends on and enforces.” What do we do about religions that simply don’t respect the liberal social compact? That consider it their duty to take over government and rule all of us according to their religious beliefs? What should be the liberal response?

For reasons I’ve ranted about in the past I am as offended as Stanley Fish by the Dawkin-Hitchens school of broad-gauge shotgun, “demonize ’em all” criticism of religion. A big part of my argument with Stanley Fish is that he equates this school of criticism with “liberalism,” and I say it is just the opposite. Remember what John McGowan wrote —

I just want to end by noting how “unnatural” liberalism seems. It involves self-abnegation, accepting the frustration of my will. It involves, as I will detail in my next post, compromise in almost every instance, and thus can seem akin to having no strong convictions, no principles.

Can we say, liberalism appreciates the wisdom of doubt?

Right now great vistas of argument are opening up in front of me, so I’m going to stop here and save much of what’s rattling around in my head for future posts.

He Knew

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Sidney Blumenthal writes that President Bush knew Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction before the invasion of Iraq. Or, at least, he was briefed on this but chose to disregard the briefing.

On Sept. 18, 2002, CIA director George Tenet briefed President Bush in the Oval Office on top-secret intelligence that Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction, according to two former senior CIA officers. Bush dismissed as worthless this information from the Iraqi foreign minister, a member of Saddam’s inner circle, although it turned out to be accurate in every detail. Tenet never brought it up again.

Note in particular (emphasis added):

Nor was the intelligence included in the National Intelligence Estimate of October 2002, which stated categorically that Iraq possessed WMD. No one in Congress was aware of the secret intelligence that Saddam had no WMD as the House of Representatives and the Senate voted, a week after the submission of the NIE, on the Authorization for Use of Military Force in Iraq. The information, moreover, was not circulated within the CIA among those agents involved in operations to prove whether Saddam had WMD. …

… In the congressional debate over the Authorization for the Use of Military Force, even those voting against it gave credence to the notion that Saddam possessed WMD. Even a leading opponent such as Sen. Bob Graham, then the Democratic chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, who had instigated the production of the NIE, declared in his floor speech on Oct. 12, 2002, “Saddam Hussein’s regime has chemical and biological weapons and is trying to get nuclear capacity.” Not a single senator contested otherwise. None of them had an inkling of the Sabri intelligence.

Apologists for the Administration still insist that Bush’s judgments on WMD were no different from everyone else’s. Just two days ago Republican mouthpiece Ron Christie said on MSNBC’s “Hardball”:

Let me tell you something. This is a man who takes his responsibility his—again, as I said, his responsibility as commander in chief far more seriously than you can imagine when you‘ve never had the opportunity to talk to him and see exactly the deliberation that he goes through.

Let me take that a step further. For you to suggest without knowing what the commander in chief looks at, by way of intelligence—let‘s go back to the Clinton administration, let‘s go back to the previous administrations, people who were convinced that there were weapons of mass destruction, and, in fact, Senator Clinton, many others in the Democrat side of the aisle, believed that Iraq posed an imminent threat to the United States.

This stirring usage of the “Clinton did it too” dodge leaves out the part about Bush withholding intelligence from Congress, doesn’t it? And regarding the Clinton Administration — it’s true that President Clinton suspected Saddam Hussein of having WMDs, which is one reason why he ordered an air strike of WMD targets in Iraq in 1998. In 2004, weapons inspector David Kay (reluctantly) admitted that the Clinton bombing had effectively destroyed much of Iraq’s remaining chemical weapons program. (See also Fred Kaplan.)

Back to Blumenthal:

On April 23, 2006, CBS’s “60 Minutes” interviewed Tyler Drumheller, the former CIA chief of clandestine operations for Europe, who disclosed that the agency had received documentary intelligence from Naji Sabri, Saddam’s foreign minister, that Saddam did not have WMD. “We continued to validate him the whole way through,” said Drumheller. “The policy was set. The war in Iraq was coming, and they were looking for intelligence to fit into the policy, to justify the policy.”

Now two former senior CIA officers have confirmed Drumheller’s account to me and provided the background to the story of how the information that might have stopped the invasion of Iraq was twisted in order to justify it. They described what Tenet said to Bush about the lack of WMD, and how Bush responded, and noted that Tenet never shared Sabri’s intelligence with then Secretary of State Colin Powell. According to the former officers, the intelligence was also never shared with the senior military planning the invasion, which required U.S. soldiers to receive medical shots against the ill effects of WMD and to wear protective uniforms in the desert.

Instead, said the former officials, the information was distorted in a report written to fit the preconception that Saddam did have WMD programs. That false and restructured report was passed to Richard Dearlove, chief of the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), who briefed Prime Minister Tony Blair on it as validation of the cause for war.

You’ll remember Richard Dearlove, of Downing Street Memo fame. It was Dearlove who said “Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.”

Both the French intelligence service and the CIA paid Sabri hundreds of thousands of dollars (at least $200,000 in the case of the CIA) to give them documents on Saddam’s WMD programs. “The information detailed that Saddam may have wished to have a program, that his engineers had told him they could build a nuclear weapon within two years if they had fissile material, which they didn’t, and that they had no chemical or biological weapons,” one of the former CIA officers told me.

On the eve of Sabri’s appearance at the United Nations in September 2002 to present Saddam’s case, the officer in charge of this operation met in New York with a “cutout” who had debriefed Sabri for the CIA. Then the officer flew to Washington, where he met with CIA deputy director John McLaughlin, who was “excited” about the report. Nonetheless, McLaughlin expressed his reservations. He said that Sabri’s information was at odds with “our best source.” That source was code-named “Curveball,” later exposed as a fabricator, con man and former Iraqi taxi driver posing as a chemical engineer.

I bet you remember Curveball, too. German intelligence tried to tell the Bushies that Curveball was nuts, but the Bushies weren’t listening.

The next day, Sept. 18, Tenet briefed Bush on Sabri. “Tenet told me he briefed the president personally,” said one of the former CIA officers. According to Tenet, Bush’s response was to call the information “the same old thing.” Bush insisted it was simply what Saddam wanted him to think. “The president had no interest in the intelligence,” said the CIA officer. The other officer said, “Bush didn’t give a fuck about the intelligence. He had his mind made up.”

But the CIA officers working on the Sabri case kept collecting information. “We checked on everything he told us.” French intelligence eavesdropped on his telephone conversations and shared them with the CIA. These taps “validated” Sabri’s claims, according to one of the CIA officers. The officers brought this material to the attention of the newly formed Iraqi Operations Group within the CIA. But those in charge of the IOG were on a mission to prove that Saddam did have WMD and would not give credit to anything that came from the French. “They kept saying the French were trying to undermine the war,” said one of the CIA officers.

Those French. Can’t trust ’em.

The CIA officers on the case awaited the report they had submitted on Sabri to be circulated back to them, but they never received it. They learned later that a new report had been written. “It was written by someone in the agency, but unclear who or where, it was so tightly controlled. They knew what would please the White House. They knew what the king wanted,” one of the officers told me.

That report contained a false preamble stating that Saddam was “aggressively and covertly developing” nuclear weapons and that he already possessed chemical and biological weapons. “Totally out of whack,” said one of the CIA officers. “The first [para]graph of an intelligence report is the most important and most read and colors the rest of the report.” He pointed out that the case officer who wrote the initial report had not written the preamble and the new memo. “That’s not what the original memo said.”

And all this time, Secretary of State Colin Powell and his staff were being kept completely out of the loop by everybody.

How much of this was deliberate and conscious lying, and how much stemmed from the fanatic’s absolutist faith in his own version of Truth, is anyone’s guess. And maybe one is not really different from the other, as Digby says —

Is it the final straw? Probably not. But it is impossible for anyone anymore to pretend that Bush wasn’t lying about the infamous 16 words. As for Bush lying to himself…it won’t wash. He knew. By the time Tenet briefed Bush about Sabri, two things prevented Bush from behaving like a sane human being. First, he was in too deep. By September ’02, Bush had geared up the country for war – the vote in Congress to come, the UN and the inspections, they were just meaningless diversions. The die was cast and nothing would stop Bush from going to war, let alone something as trivial as contradictory and credible intelligence that there wasn’t even the shadow of a casus belli.

Second, by 2002, Bush’s psychopathic personality was at its most floridly deranged. Riding incredibly high opinion polls, convinced God was speaking to him, having gotten away with stupendous lies and irresponsible behavior throughout his entire career, Bush was incapable of anything but lying when he dismissed the report from Tenet. But simply because he was at the height of mania, don’t make the mistake of thinking he didn’t know where the truth lay. Oh, he knew, all right.

But some people don’t learn. Today righties are complaining because Dems are already dismissing the Petraeus report.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi is pointedly referring to the Petraeus testimony as “the Bush report presented by General Petraeus,” as opposed to an independent assessment by the top military man in Iraq that has been billed for months now. “Progress is not being made,” Pelosi insisted in a Capitol presser this afternoon, no matter how some people might want to “cherry pick” stories of success. “The plural of anecdotes is not data,” she added.

It’s no secret the White House plans to “tweak” the report, in the same way they “tweaked” the pre-invasion intelligence. (Update: See also “Experts Doubt Drop In Violence in Iraq.”) However, this is a point lost on closet Maha admirer the Confederate Yankee:

Harry Reid, Dick Durbin, Chuck Shumer and Democratic Senators/Presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama were among those Senators who voted to confirm General Petraeus to his position as commander of American forces in Iraq without a single objecting vote, 81-0, on January 26, 2007.

They did not question the capability of the 1974 West Point graduate and Princeton PhD when they had their chance to reject him. Nor did they denounce or even raise serious doubts about allegiences or partisanship then, when they easily could have stated their disgreement with a simple “no” vote.

What a difference 223 days and the fear of success makes.

General Petraeus did have a sterling reputation within the military — which, unfortunately, is going the way of Colin Powell’s reputation. If Petraeus were allowed to make his assessments and report independent of the White House, I’d be inclined to listen to him. However, he isn’t, and I’m not. Fool me once, shame on … well, you know how that goes.