It’s Easy Being Right

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Whenever I see Dean Barnett’s byline, I know whatever verbiage is dribbled under it will be raging, five-alarm, neon-lit stupid. And I have to look; it’s so ghastly it’s compelling. Sorta like three-day-old road kill.

Here; you can look for yourself, if you dare. You might want to keep some Pepto-Bismol handy.

The basic premise of this monstrosity is that the “9/11 generation” is more patriotic than their dirty bleeping hippie parents.

In the 1960s, history called the Baby Boomers. They didn’t answer the phone.

Confronted with a generation-defining conflict, the cold war, the Boomers–those, at any rate, who came to be emblematic of their generation–took the opposite path from their parents during World War II. Sadly, the excesses of Woodstock became the face of the Boomers’ response to their moment of challenge. War protests where agitated youths derided American soldiers as baby-killers added no luster to their image.

Few of the leading lights of that generation joined the military. Most calculated how they could avoid military service, and their attitude rippled through the rest of the century. In the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s, military service didn’t occur to most young people as an option, let alone a duty.

But now, once again, history is calling. Fortunately, the present generation appears more reminiscent of their grandparents than their parents.

Then he goes on for a bit about how he’s been talking to young folks who have enlisted, and then he says,

One of the excesses of the 1960s that present-day liberals have disowned and disavowed since 9/11 is the demonization of the American military. While every now and then an unrepentant liberal like Charlie Rangel will appear on cable news and casually accuse U.S. troops of engaging in baby-killing in Iraq,

There’s no documentation of Charlie Rangel or anyone else on cable news saying any such thing, but let’s go on …

the liberal establishment generally knows better. They “support” the American military–at least in the abstract, until it does anything resembling fighting a war.

In search of a new narrative, 21st-century liberals have settled on the “soldiers are victims” meme. Democratic senators (and the occasional Republican senator who’s facing a tough reelection campaign) routinely pronounce their concern for our “children” in Iraq. One of the reasons John Kerry’s “botched joke” resonated so strongly was that it fit the liberals’ narrative. The Democratic party would have you believe that our soldiers are children or, at best, adults with few options: In short, a callous and mendacious administration has victimized the young, the gullible, and the hopeless, and stuck them in Iraq.

Barnett really hates it when somebody reminds us that the soldiers are sons, daughters, husbands, wives, parents, or have any other identity outside of “soldier.” Awhile back he threw a snit when Nancy Pelosi referred to a 22-year-old Marine as a “young man.”

Then he speaks to some young enlistees who have served in Iraq. I don’t doubt these are fine young people. Oops, excuse me, I’m not supposed to call them “young.” Or “people.” At my age everyone under 40 is “young,” but to acknowledge a soldier is actually human does vex Dean Barnett so. I guess that makes supporting a stupid war that is wasting their lives so much easier. Then he concludes:

It is surely a measure of how far we’ve come as a society from the dark days of the 1960s that things like military service and duty and sacrifice are now celebrated. Just because Washington and Hollywood haven’t noticed this generational shift doesn’t mean it hasn’t occurred. It has, and it’s seismic.

At no point in this mess does Barnett acknowledge that a lot more young Boomer men actually served in Vietnam than are likely to ever serve in Iraq. At no point does he mention there was a draft then and there isn’t now. At no point does he offer actual data to show that fewer Boomer men enlisted for Vietnam than are enlisting today. Lots of young men enlisted back then, actually, and recruitment quotas are not being met now. Why is Barnett so sure Boomer men didn’t enlist at least as often as young folks do today? Did he check? And has anyone ever explained to him that 58,209 Boomers were killed in Vietnam, 305,000 were wounded, and approximately 2,000 remain missing?

Did I mention this is published by the Weekly Standard? Barnett probably got paid for it.

That’s why it’s so easy being Right. Righties doesn’t have to provide documentation. They don’t have to provide data. They don’t have to check facts. They can drool out whatever hate and prejudice and stupidity is clanking about in their squishy little brains, and be rewarded for it.

Update: See also D at Lawyers, Guns and Money and Tbogg.

The Wisdom of Doubt, Part VIII

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It’s time to look at evangelicalism and fundamentalism, and to do that we need to put these religious movements into the context of the rest of Christianity. Those of you who are religious and/or history nerds may know most of this. However, after reading and listening to criticism of religion from the non-religious, I’ve realized many non-religious people assume that all religion is some kind of fundamentalism, and the only difference between religious extremists and religious moderates is that the moderates are more wishy-washy about it.

The truth is that in the 18th and 19th centuries a strong current of liberalism and modern thinking flowed through religion in America. Beginning with Deism — a religious philosophy embraced by a number of the Founding Fathers — and continuing through Transcendentalism and Liberal Christianity, prominent philosophers and theologians developed a way to follow a spiritual path that rejected rigid dogmas and harmonized with science and rational thought. This diverse religious movement enjoyed considerable popularity and influence until after World War I, when it was swamped by a newer movement, an anti-liberal backlash that came to be called “fundamentalism.”

To explain what happened, here’s a quickie, super-streamlined romp through Western Civ 102:

For long centuries a European Christian related to God through the Catholic Church. Then in 1517, Martin Luther nailed the Ninety-Five Theses to the door of a church, and the Reformation began. Soon Catholicism had competition.

During this same period the Church was challenged from another side by scientific geniuses like Copernicus (1473-1543) and Galileo (1564-1642). These guys ushered in the scientific revolution , which changed the way people understood the world they lived in. Most important to our discussion is that knowledge came to be based on empiricism. Scientists stopped attributing causes and effects to angels and demons and instead spoke of natural, physical laws that could be observed and measured.

The Age of Enlightenment paralleled the scientific revolution. The “intellectual upheaval overturned the accepted belief that mysticism and revelation are the primary sources of knowledge and wisdom” says Wikipedia. Through the 18th century great thinkers applied reason to all aspects of human life and civilization, challenging centuries-old assumptions. The ideal of “human rights” as natural entitlements of all human beings took hold. Governments were also challenged, leading to some little political tweaks like the American and French revolutions.

The First Great Awakening swept through the American colonies in the middle of the Enlightenment. Historians tie the Awakening and the origins of evangelicalism in America to George Whitefield, an Anglican itinerant preacher who toured the American colonies in the 1730s and 1740s. Whitefield was a charismatic Anglican priest whose ministry was taken away after his sermons grew increasingly un-Anglican. So he traveled, and spoke in churchyards and fields, and was wildly popular with the masses.

Whitefield did not propose any radical new doctrine. Instead, he talked about his own conversion experience and stressed reform of the heart and personal salvation. One might say this was the logical conclusion of the Reformation; a Christian could now relate to God directly instead of through the Church. Sacraments and rituals — once thought to be essential to receiving grace — lost much of their importance in the new religious movement. Instead of priests to intercede with God on their behalf, many American Christians turned to preachers to give them spiritual resolve and guidance. But they had to walk that lonesome valley by themselves.

There’s more about the First Great Awakening at Answers.com.

The First Great Awakening was a religious revitalization movement that swept the American colonies in the 1730s and 1740s, leaving a permanent impact on American religion. It resulted from powerful preaching that aimed to convince listeners of their personal guilt and of their need of salvation through decisive action that included public repentance. The Great Awakening led people to “experience God in their own way” and that they were responsible for their own actions. Pulling away from ritual and ceremony, the Great Awakening made religion intensely personal to the average person by creating a deep sense of spiritual guilt and redemption, along with introspection and a commitment to a new standard of personal morality. … It brought Christianity to the slaves and was an apocalyptic event in New England that challenged established authority. It incited rancor and division between the old traditionalists who insisted on ritual and doctrine, and the new revivalists.

The evangelical movement in America grew out of the First Great Awakening. On the whole, evangelicals supported the American Revolution and also the disestablishment of churches. You might remember the story of the Danbury Baptists who wrote to President Thomas Jefferson in 1801, complaining about the establishment of Congregationalism as the official state religion of Connecticut. Jefferson famously wrote back in 1802:

Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should “make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” thus building a wall of separation between Church & State. Adhering to this expression of the supreme will of the nation in behalf of the rights of conscience, I shall see with sincere satisfaction the progress of those sentiments which tend to restore to man all his natural rights, convinced he has no natural right in opposition to his social duties.

Through the early 19th century evangelicalism became common among more rural and less educated people, while the educated and urban tended to remain loyal to older denominations more based on doctrine than enthusiasm. Certainly there were intelligent and educated evangelicals and stupid, ignorant Congregationalists, but a loose rural-urban, populist-elite dichotomy did emerge.

The 19th century also witnessed the growth of a liberal Christian theology. Enlightenment movements such as Deism and German rationalism took a humanistic and anti-supernatural approach to religion. Then came Unitarians and William Ellery Channing (1780-1842), followed by the Transcendentalists, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) and Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862). Transcendentalists embraced the evangelical zeal for individualism. As Emerson wrote,

We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds…. A nation of men will for the first time exist, because each believes himself inspired by the Divine Soul which also inspires all men.

Also like the evangelicals, Transcendentalists were not tied to ritual and rigid doctrine. Unlike the evangelicals, the Transcendentalists felt free to push beyond Christianity to find spiritual truth. They encouraged higher biblical criticism, which questioned the origins and authorship of the Bible. They understood that large parts of the Bible were allegorical, not historical. Some even studied translations of Hindu and Buddhist sutras. The name “transcendental” came from their desire to transcend the limitations of concepts and dogmas to reach an intuitive, perceptual understanding of religion that would not conflict with science and reason.

Now I want to go back to the last Wisdom of Doubt post and repeat a quote from Richard Hofstadter’s Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (Vintage Books, 1962).

As evangelicals made increasingly impressive gains from 1795 to 1835, and as Deism lapsed into relative quiescence, the battle between pietism and rationalism fell into the background. There was much more concern among evangelicals with rescuing the vast American interior from the twin evils of Romanism and religious apathy than there was with dispelling the rather faint afterglow of the Enlightenment.

After the Civil War, all this changed and rationalism once more took an important place among the foes of the evangelical mind. The coming of Darwinism, with its widespread and pervasive influence upon every area of thinking, put orthodox Christianity on the defensive, and the impact of Darwinism was heightened by modern scholarly Biblical criticism among the learned ministry and among educated laymen. Finally, toward the end of the century, the problems of industrialism and the urban churches gave rise to a widespread movement for a social gospel, another modernist tendency. Ministers and laymen alike now had to choose between fundamentalism and modernism; between conservative Christianity and the social gospel. [pp. 120-121]

The last post discussed the Social Gospel. Basically, toward the end of the 19th century modernist Christians took up progressive causes, working to help the poor and fight injustice. This paralleled the Progressive Era in U.S. politics and was an outgrowth of the Transcendental movement.

Now we’re in the latter part of the 19th century, and it’s time to return to the evangelicals. In the 150 or so years since George Whitefield came to America to light the candle of evangelical zeal, evangelicals had gone from being the cutting edge of spiritual revolution to the keepers and defenders of Dat Ol’ Time Religion. The Darwinists and the Bible-critizing scholars and the snotty elitist incomprehensible Transcendentalists and the Social Gospel do-gooders set off alarm bells among the generally more rural and less well-educated evangelicals. And from the more conservative ranks of the evangelicals, fundamentalism was born.

In 1910 the Presbyterians drew up a list of five points of faith that they said distinguished true believers from the wannabees. The original five points were: (1) the inerrancy of Scripture, (2) the virgin birth of Jesus, (3) the substantionary atonement, (4) the bodily ressurrection of Jesus, and (5) the authenticity of miracles. In time, point #5 would be replaced by (5) Christ’s Second Coming. From 1910 to 1915 evangelicals published a series of books based on these five points called The Fundamentals. The term fundamentalist was coined about 1920.

As someone with more of an old-church background it’s interesting to me that these “fundamentals” seem disconnected from the Nicene Creed, which used to be the “fundamentals.” I admit I’m not entirely certain what “substantionary atonement” means. It may refer to a doctrine that Christ is substantially present in the Eucharist, but I’m not going to swear to that. I have an essay by Gary Wills in hand that says it just means “Jesus died for our sins.” If anyone can enlighten me on this point, I’d be grateful.

In any event, I doubt very many of today’s “fundamentalists” know what “substantionary atonement” means, either, or can even recite the five points. Today’s Christian fundamentalists have created a fanciful alternative history for themselves, which says that they are the heirs of Christ’s true followers, who were driven underground by the Catholic Church in the 4th century. Twelves centuries later, during the Reformation, they resurfaced. After being knocked around a bit they finally established an enclave of True Faith in America. Their mission now is to convert everyone else on the planet to whatever it is they believe — currently a weird stew of apocalyptic eschatology and American exceptionalism, sometimes with free market dogmatism tossed in.

One of the ironies of fundamentalism is that while it is a backlash against modernity, it is also a creature of modernity. The insistence that the Bible must be read as literal truth comes from the post-Enlightenment, rational understanding that truth is factual. Fundies figure if the Bible is myth and allegory it is not true, and if it is not true it loses its authority as the arbiter of truth. This is, academic theologians say, a peculiarly “modern” way to understand the Bible.

If you cruise around the web you can find no end of definitions of fundamentalism. and as Grahame Thompson points out in this essay, there are a lot of “fundamentalisms,” secular and religious, in the world today. I’d define fundamentalism as “zealous adherence to any rigid, inflexible doctrine.” There’s general agreement among scholars that fundamentalism in all its forms is a backlash to modernity. Religious fundamentalism is not so much religion as it is a social pathology that expresses itself as religion.

Here’s a dialogue with Karen Armstrong, Susannah Heschel, Jim Wallis, and Feisal Abdul Rauf called “Fundamentalism and the Modern World.” Karen Armstrong says,

Typically, fundamentalists have proceeded on a fairly common program. Very often they begin by retreating from mainstream society and creating, as it were, enclaves of pure faith where they try to keep the godless world at bay and where they try to live a pure religious life. Examples would include the ultra-orthodox Jewish communities in New York City or [Christians at] Bob Jones University or Osama bin Laden’s camps.

In these enclaves, fundamentalist communities often plan, as it were, a counteroffensive, where they seek to convert the mainstream society back to a more godly way of life. Some of them may resort to violence. Why? Because every fundamentalist movement that I’ve studied–in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam–is rooted in a profound fear. They are convinced, even here in the United States, that modern liberal secular society wants to wipe out religion in some way or is destructive to faith.

In the next post I want to take a closer look at fundamentalism in America, from the post-World War I period to the present. I also want to explain why scriptural literalism is a bugaboo of fundies and not a requirement for Christians or members of any other religion.

Saturday Cartoons

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For the regular cartoons, see Bob Geiger.

For an irregular cartoon, take a look at Fred Hiatt, editorial page editor of the Washington Post. WaPo is running an editorial today that’s so absurd I had to read it three times to be sure my eyes weren’t playing tricks.

As Tbogg says, the shorter version of this rhetorical specimen is “The glaring lack of an exit strategy from Iraq is entirely Harry Reid’s fault.” The less short version is that, in HiattWorld, there is already a bipartisan consensus on what to do about Iraq that is also supported by the White House. The reason this consensus is not being carried out is that Harry Reid is standing in the way.

I’m serious. Get this first paragraph:

THE SENATE Democratic leadership spent the past week trying to prove that Congress is deeply divided over Iraq, with Democrats pressing and Republicans resisting a change of course. In fact that’s far from the truth. A large majority of senators from both parties favor a shift in the U.S. mission that would involve substantially reducing the number of American forces over the next year or so and rededicating those remaining to training the Iraqi army, protecting Iraq’s borders and fighting al-Qaeda. President Bush and his senior aides and generals also support this broad strategy, which was formulated by the bipartisan Baker-Hamilton commission. Mr. Bush recently said that “it’s a position I’d like to see us in.”

I’m no military expert, but I take it Fred Hiatt isn’t, either, so I say my opinion is at least as informed as his. I question whether a “residual” force could be kept in Iraq for very long. In March 1973, when the last combat troops were withdrawn from Vietnam, the U.S. planned to keep a “residual” force there, also. Two years and one month later, as North Vietnam took control of Saigon, the last Americans were airlifted out. My fear for the “residual” troops is that they would be targeted by insurgents — some of whom are part of the Iraqi military they’d be training — and there’d be not enough protection for them.

The other glaring problem that Hiatt doesn’t see is that, no matter what Bush may say he wants to do, he’s not going to remove combat troops from Iraq until Congress forces him to do so. He’s been making noises about “drawing down” troops numbers since 2004, at least. It ain’t happenin’. He’s been making noises about training Iraqi soldiers to take over “the mission” since 2004. The Iraqi military is never ready to take over.

And the big, fat reality Hiatt isn’t seeing is that while more Republicans talk about changing Iraq policy, so far only four Senators have actually had the guts to vote on changing policy. The rest of the GOP senators “wavering” on Iraq policy are WINOs — “wavering in name only.”

The editorial continues,

The decision of Democrats led by Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (Nev.) to deny rather than nourish a bipartisan agreement is, of course, irresponsible.

Let’s see — Republicans were using procedural weaseling to avoid debate and block an up-or-down vote on a proposal to begin troop withdrawal. Hiatt says this is Reid’s fault. Weird.

But so was Mr. Reid’s answer when he was asked by the Los Angeles Times how the United States should manage the explosion of violence that the U.S. intelligence community agrees would follow a rapid pullout. “That’s a hypothetical. I’m not going to get into it,” the paper quoted the Democratic leader as saying.

Nobody’s talking about a “rapid” pullout. The bill the Republicans blocked voting on provided that a withdrawal would begin within 120 days and end by April 2008. And it provided for Hiatt’s deeply beloved “residual” force.

Fred, dear, that’s why Reid called talk of a “rapid” withdrawal “hypothetical.” It’s not because he’s avoiding the issue; it’s because no one is talking about a rapid withdrawal. Do pay attention.

For now Mr. Reid’s cynical politicking and willful blindness to the stakes in Iraq don’t matter so much. The result of his maneuvering was to postpone congressional debate until September, when Gen. David H. Petraeus, commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, will report on results of the surge — in other words, just the outcome the White House was hoping for.

In paragraph one, the editorial implied that the White House was on board with the Baker-Hamilton commission recommendations. In this paragraph, the White House is just kidding. But let’s go on …

Harry Reid voted against Reed-Levin to give himself the option of re-introducing it at any time. After the recent vote on Reed-Levin, Reid explained,

Because Republicans continue to block votes on important amendments to the Defense Authorization bill, we can make no further progress on Iraq and this bill at this time.

For these reasons, I have temporarily laid aside the Defense Authorization bill and have entered a motion to reconsider.

But let me be clear to my Republican colleagues — I emphasize the word “temporarily”. We will do everything in our power to change course in Iraq. We will do everything in our power to complete consideration of a Defense Authorization bill. We must do both.

And just to remind my Republican colleagues — even if this bill had passed yesterday, its provisions would not take effect until October.

So we will come back to this bill as soon as it is clear we can make real progress. To that end, I have asked the Democratic Whip and Democratic Manager of the bill to sit down with their counterparts to work on a process to address all outstanding issues related to this bill so the Senate can return to it as soon as possible.

The editorial accuses Reid of avoiding issues and the Dems of “trying to use Iraq as a polarizing campaign issue and as a club against moderate Republicans who are up for reelection.”

The game the Republicans seem to be playing — with Fred’s help — is “let’s obstruct everything the Dems try to do so we can campaign against do-nothing Dems.” But that’s a game that can be played both ways. The point of Reid’s little pajama party was to demonstrate what weasels the Senate Republicans really are. Outside the Senate chamber they talk about changing course; inside the Senate chamber they refuse to allow a change of course. The biggest leverage the Dems have to force the Republicans to get serious about changing course is the 2008 elections. If Republicans don’t want to be “clubbed” with Iraq in the 2008 campaigns, all they have to do is put their votes where their mouths are.

Update: More WaPo propaganda — Paul Kane and Shailagh Murray wrote yesterday that

Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid offered no apologies yesterday for his decision to reject compromise efforts to alter President Bush’s Iraq strategy that had the support of a growing number of Republicans.

What Kane and Murray don’t explain is that the so-called “compromise efforts” were a sham. Greg Sargent explains,

Meanwhile, Collins has her own measure calling for withdrawal from Iraq that would force a transition away from the current combat mission but wouldn’t force withdrawal of the troops. The measure — whose exact language hasn’t yet been released, according to the office of its co-sponsor, Senator Ben Nelson — is murky at best. And as best as we can tell, it appears to be riddled with loopholes.

Maybe Collins’ idea is to become a member emeritus of the WINO caucus now, or something.

Kane and Murray wrote that Dem Senator Chuck Schumer said the Nelson-Collins bill would have allowed the war to continue while giving Republicans a safe haven from tough choices. “It would delay them coming on board, because they would say [to their voters], ‘See, I’m trying to do something,’ ” Schumer said.

I guess with WaPo, actually bringing home the troops is less important that saying the troops will be brought home. Someday. Depending on conditions on the ground. As soon as the White House says it’s OK. Whenever.

Update2: Susie writes,

How much does Fred Hiatt get paid under the table to put crap like this on the WashPo editorial page?

I had the same thought. Truly, if Hiatt isn’t already getting paid, he should send the RNC an invoice.

Yeah, You And What Army?

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From the Washington Post:

Bush administration officials unveiled a bold new assertion of executive authority yesterday in the dispute over the firing of nine U.S. attorneys, saying that the Justice Department will never be allowed to pursue contempt charges initiated by Congress against White House officials once the president has invoked executive privilege.

The position presents serious legal and political obstacles for congressional Democrats, who have begun laying the groundwork for contempt proceedings against current and former White House officials in order to pry loose information about the dismissals.

Under federal law, a statutory contempt citation by the House or Senate must be submitted to the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, “whose duty it shall be to bring the matter before the grand jury for its action.”

But administration officials argued yesterday that Congress has no power to force a U.S. attorney to pursue contempt charges in cases, such as the prosecutor firings, in which the president has declared that testimony or documents are protected from release by executive privilege. Officials pointed to a Justice Department legal opinion during the Reagan administration, which made the same argument in a case that was never resolved by the courts.

It’s not like we couldn’t see this coming. Still, there was a vanishing hope that, given their problems with Iraq, historically low approval ratings, and a long list of scandals, the administration might choose not to provoke a Constitutional crisis.

That hope, of course, forgets the role that Dick Cheney has in running the White House agenda. Dick Cheney, as you may recall, ranks among the world’s historical sore losers. Having been on the wrong side in Watergate, he has made it his life’s mission to “restore” to the Presidency powers it never was meant to have. As if bitten by a radioactive spider emerging from Dick Nixon’s drunken dream of power, Cheney has gained powers unknown to any previous Vice President, spinning a theory of Executive power that would have been extreme at Runnymede.

As long ago as 1215, the notion that there ought to be and were limits, that others could over-rule the King, was established. No wonder Dick Cheney seems so cranky all the time; it must be hard to feel personally responsible to correct a mistake made eight centuries ago.

Still, he’s been doing his part for years. Cheney, then a Congressman, leapt to the barricades in defense of Oliver North and the Iran-Contra conspiracy, writing an infamous minority report denying the ability of Congress to limit Presidential power.

In the Cheney view of Presidential power, Congress’ role is to write the checks that pay for whatever the President chooses to do, and to smile about it. And if, for some ridiculous reason, Congress gets the idea that the Executive owes it anything, they should get over it. It’s a Congressman’s job to protect Executive authority, not to assert any independent power of his own.

And the suggestion that someone in the Department of Justice might work for the United States Government (having taken an oath to uphold the Constitution) and not just for the President? That’s a notion that really needed to be smacked down, and hard. Cheney can’t have people getting confused, like former White House aide Sara Taylor.

Mugged by Reality

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Today’s Paul Krugman column:

In a coordinated public relations offensive, the White House is using reliably friendly pundits — amazingly, they still exist — to put out the word that President Bush is as upbeat and confident as ever. It might even be true.

What I don’t understand is why we’re supposed to consider Mr. Bush’s continuing confidence a good thing.

Remember, Mr. Bush was confident six years ago when he promised to bring in Osama, dead or alive. He was confident four years ago, when he told the insurgents to bring it on. He was confident two years ago, when he told Brownie that he was doing a heckuva job.

Now Iraq is a bloody quagmire, Afghanistan is deteriorating and the Bush administration’s own National Intelligence Estimate admits, in effect, that thanks to Mr. Bush’s poor leadership America is losing the struggle with Al Qaeda. Yet Mr. Bush remains confident.

What I don’t understand is why we’re supposed to consider Mr. Bush’s continuing confidence a good thing. Well, let’s think about that. I don’t think most Americans are all that confident in Mr. Bush’s “confidence.” But he’s still got his base. And that would be the pseudo conservatives who have mired the nation in the bog of their many social pathologies. The game he’s playing is to contrast himself with the “defeatists” targeted to be scapegoats.

If you missed Keith Olbermann’s special comment last night, you can see the video and read the transcript at Crooks and Liars. In brief, the White House blames the Iraq War’s opponents for the failures of the war.

The fault, brought down — as if a sermon from this mount of hypocrisy and slaughter, by a nearly anonymous Under-Secretary of Defense — the fault has tonight been laid on the doorstep of Senator Hillary Clinton and, by extension, at the doorstep of every American — the now vast majority of us — who have dared to criticize this war, or protest it, or merely ask questions about it, or simply, plaintively, innocently, honestly, plead, “don’t take my son; don’t take my daughter.”

Senator Clinton has been sent — and someone has leaked to the Associated Press — a letter, sent in reply to hers, asking if there exists, an actual plan for evacuating U.S. troops from Iraq.

This extraordinary document was written by an Under-Secretary of Defense named Eric Edelman.

“Premature and public discussion of the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq,” Edelman writes, “reinforces enemy propaganda that the United States will abandon its allies in Iraq, much as we are perceived to have done in Vietnam, Lebanon and Somalia.” Edelman adds: “such talk understandably unnerves the very same Iraqi allies we are asking to assume enormous personal risks.”

After that Keith gets a tad miffed. Don’t miss it.

In today’s Washington Post, Eugene Robinson also takes note of Bush’s boundless optimism. Robinson points to the Oval Office pep talk given to nine conservative pundits last week. The pundits described Bush’s demeanor as “sunny,” “upbeat,” “energized,” and “good-humored.” Robinson comments,

Excuse me? I guess he must be in an even better mood since the feckless Iraqi government announced its decision to take the whole month of August off while U.S. troops continue fighting and dying in Baghdad’s 130-degree summer heat.

It’s almost as if Bush were trying to apply the principles of cognitive therapy, the system psychiatrist Aaron T. Beck developed in the 1960s. Beck found that getting patients to banish negative thoughts and develop patterns of positive thinking was helpful in pulling them out of depression. However, Beck was trying to get the patients to see themselves and the world realistically, whereas Bush has left realism far behind.

Beside scapegoating lefties, the other explanation for Bush’s confidence goes back to the subject of the first Wisdom of Doubt post. Our culture has developed a pathological aversion to doubt. Being without doubt is celebrated as a virtue, a strength, a source of moral character. Our President, for example, is a man without doubt, and he seems to think this is what makes him a great president.

Recently Peter Birkenhead wrote a piece for Salon called “Better to Be Hamlet Than King George.” We have created a culture, he said, that confuses leadership with “an almost psychotic form of false optimism.” I’d leave out the “almost.” The Bush Administration, Birkenhead continued, is riddled with people who lack the wisdom of doubt, the grace of humility, and the simple ability to learn from mistakes.

Let’s face it, George Bush doesn’t have to doubt himself, any more than Donald Trump or Tom Cruise or Mitt Romney do. We live in a culture where they will never be forced to examine their prejudices or flaws. Of course, they have been denied the true confidence of people who are brave enough to face their doubts and who know there are worse things than feeling insecure. Like, say, feeling too secure. Pumped up by steroidic pseudo-confidence and anesthetized by doubt-free sentimentality, they are incapable of feeling anything authentic and experiencing the world. But that hasn’t stopped them, and won’t stop others, from succeeding in a society that is more enamored of a non-reality-based conception of leadership than previous generations were.

So here we have Mr. Bush, at the nadir (so far) of his presidency, putting on a demonstration of absolute doubtlessness in front of the faithful scribes. This makes perfect sense, if you understand how they think. To most of us, of course, it’s insanity.

Robinson continues,

“Bush gives the impression that he is more steadfast on the war than many in his own administration and that, if need be, he’ll be the last hawk standing,” wrote Lowry. The president says the results of his recent troop escalation will be evaluated by Gen. David Petraeus, wrote Barone, and not by “the polls.”

Translation: Everybody’s out of step but me.

One of the more unnerving reports out of the president’s seminar with the pundits came from Brooks, who quoted Bush as saying: “It’s more of a theological perspective. I do believe there is an Almighty, and I believe a gift of that Almighty to all is freedom. And I will tell you that is a principle that no one can convince me that doesn’t exist.”

Those last couple of sentences are doozies, huh? Although the American invasion brought many things to Iraq, so far “freedom” seems in short supply. But (as I’ve argued elsewhere) what Bush is talking about is more an idea of freedom than freedom itself.

It’s also a long-established cornerstone of Wingnutism that liberty comes from God, not government, and for years wingnuts predictably would throw a fit if one argued for the government’s role in the protection of civil liberty. (Of course, if they really believed that they wouldn’t have seen a need for sending armies here and there to effect “regime change” and install “freedom,” or at least an idea of it.) The notion that liberty is a moral entitlement for being human is mostly a legacy of the Enlightenment, which was not a happy era for religious conservatives of the time. But today’s religious conservatives are not above using government to impose their notions of “liberty” — namely, the liberty to oppress the rest of us. They just don’t like government’s protection of civil liberty when government protects other people from them.

Eugene Robinson continues,

It’s bad enough that Osama bin Laden is still out there plotting bloody acts of terrorism, convinced that God wants him to slay the infidels. Now we know that the president of the United States believes God has chosen him to bring freedom to the world, that he refuses to acknowledge setbacks in his crusade and that he flat-out doesn’t care what “the polls” — meaning the American people — might think. I’m having trouble seeing the bright side. I think I need cognitive therapy.

You and me both, Eugene. But in today’s Los Angeles Times, Rosa Brooks argues that Bush has imposed his idea of reality on the world, in spite of his blunders.

In a much-quoted 2004 New York Times Magazine article, journalist Ron Suskind described a 2002 conversation with a senior Bush advisor — widely assumed to be Karl Rove — who added an extra gloss to Kristol’s aphorism, making it clear that “reality” can mean different things to different people.

As Suskind relates the story: “The aide said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community,’ which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.’ I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore. We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.’ ” …

… If empires can choose to create their own realities, why hasn’t Bush’s American Empire created a stable, more peaceful world? Why aren’t we safer than we were before 9/11? The neocons deluded themselves into imagining they could control reality, but in the end, aren’t they the ones who’ve just been mugged? But it’s not that simple.

In a very real sense, Suskind’s “senior Bush advisor” has been proved more right than wrong. The administration did create realities to match its darkest visions, reshaping the world with remarkable speed and thoroughness.

In 2001, administration stalwarts suggested that Osama bin Laden rivaled Hitler in the danger he posed to U.S. security and insisted that Al Qaeda’s power was so great that nothing short of a “global war on terror” was required.

At that time, most experts say, this description of Al Qaeda simply wasn’t true. It was little more than an obscure group of extremist thugs, well financed and intermittently lethal but relatively limited in their global and regional political pull. On 9/11, they got lucky — but despite the unexpected success of their attack on the U.S., they did not pose an imminent mortal threat to the nation.

Today, things are different. Thanks to U.S. policies, Al Qaeda has become the vast global threat the administration imagined it to be in 2001. Our ham-handed detention and interrogation tactics and our ill-advised invasion of Iraq have alienated vast swathes of the Islamic world, fueling extremism and anti-Americanism. Today, Al Qaeda is no longer a single organization. Now it’s a franchise, with new gangs of terrorists around the world proudly seizing the “Al Qaeda” affiliation.

Other neocon fantasies have also come true. In 2003, there was no alliance between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda, and no Al Qaeda-linked terrorist groups in Iraq. Today, thanks to the administration’s actions, Iraq has become a prime training and recruiting ground for Al Qaeda, and the NIE has declared Al Qaeda in Iraq one of the greatest threats to U.S. peace and security.

Welcome to the neocons’ reality.

Suskind’s senior Bush aide was right all along. When an empire acts, it creates new realities — for better or for worse — and all the rest us are left to study those new realities. And, unfortunately, to live with them.

Be sure to read Michael Hirsch’s most recent Newsweek.com column, “Let’s Not Kid Ourselves.” I don’t think most of us are, actually. Unfortunately, those in charge of government are still living in La La Land.

Update: See also Glenn Greenwald —

Speaking of which, in a post almost immediately preceding Kudlow’s, Jonah Goldberg laid down his Lofty Principles of American Warfare: namely, we must favor democracy in the world because it “is morally preferable to tyranny”; our wars must keep in mind “America’s sense of decency”; “Americans want to feel good about their wars, particularly their wars of choice”; to beat terrorism, we need “something,” and “Our something must be freedom”; and when waging war, Americans “need to be reassured they are the good guys.”

And with these inspiring principals in mind, what does Jonah think we should now in Iraq?

    As a matter of analysis and prescription, I’m all in favor of the war in Iraq becoming less “liberal” — as you folks are using the term around here — and more realistic, i.e. ruthless. No fan of “liberalizing” Iraq can be against winning there first.

Absolutely. The problem we have in the Muslim world is that we have not been sufficiently “ruthless” in our wars. We need to make sure that we are the good guys and on the side of freedom and maintain our sense of decency. And to do this, we must — after four straight years of decimating that country — increase our ruthlessness.

Frogs in a Pickle

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Bush recently issued an executive order, Blocking Property of Certain Persons Who Threaten Stabilization Efforts in Iraq, which has raised some alarms in the blogosphere.

Sara Robinson at Orcinus explains why this is alarming:

It’s that B clause that concerns me — and should concern all of us who blog, comment, organize, write letters, and otherwise exercise our rights to agitate against this unholy war. "Undermining the efforts" is a term that can be defined very, very broadly. And since those of us opposing this war have been told repeatedly, from the beginning, that our efforts to change our fellow citizens’ minds were in fact treasonous acts that undermined the war effort, emboldened America’s enemies, and harmed our troops, it’s not unreasonable to believe that those warnings are now being backed up by official action. "At risk of committing significant acts of violence" is more overbroad weasel-speak: How many of us have said things that could be construed (at least by the certifiable paranoids in the White House) as a threat of violence against the Bush Administration?

This government has now asserted — without so much as a by-your-leave from Congress — its right to take away our houses, cars, savings accounts, the stuff of our lives, on the say-so of the President and his Treasury Secretary. They are not kidding. What we do here, what I am doing right now (unless I choose my words very carefully) is being done in defiance of the Law According to George Bush.

When the President can take away your life’s savings without due process, under authority of a law no people’s legislature ever approved, for simply disagreeing with his policies and publicly stating your intentions to do something about them, we are treading so close to that line [between proto-fascism and the real thing] that it’s hard to tell whether we’re actually over it.

And, worse, we’ve reached the point where these outrages seem to occur weekly — bigger and more blatant every time, but by now we’ve seen so many so often that we’re inured. We don’t even know where to start fighting. In any other administration we’ve ever had, this one act on its own would be an impeachable offense. In this one, it’s just another drop in an overflowing bucket.

Commenters to Sara’s article have been taking issue with whether this order really is as bad as she thinks, and there certainly is room for disagreement. I want to put this type of debate into context, by highlighting an excerpt Sara also posted in the same article, from Milton Mayer’s They Thought They Were Free. Mayer was an American Jew who traveled to Germany after World War 2, to document the mindset of ordinary Germans, who revealed how their country slid into fascism:

"Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You don’t want to act, or even talk, alone; you don’t want to ‘go out of your way to make trouble.’ Why not?—Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty."

"Uncertainty is a very important factor, and, instead of decreasing as time goes on, it grows. Outside, in the streets, in the general community, ‘everyone’ is happy. One hears no protest, and certainly sees none. You know, in France or Italy there would be slogans against the government painted on walls and fences; in Germany, outside the great cities, perhaps, there is not even this. In the university community, in your own community, you speak privately to your colleagues, some of whom certainly feel as you do; but what do they say? They say, ‘It’s not so bad’ or ‘You’re seeing things’ or ‘You’re an alarmist.’

"And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can’t prove it. These are the beginnings, yes; but how do you know for sure when you don’t know the end, and how do you know, or even surmise, the end? On the one hand, your enemies, the law, the regime, the Party, intimidate you. On the other, your colleagues pooh-pooh you as pessimistic or even neurotic. You are left with your close friends, who are, naturally, people who have always thought as you have….

"But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the ‘German Firm’ stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.

"And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jewish swine,’ collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way."

The debate about whether this executive order is serious or not, is part of the uncertainty Mayer talks about. The cabal commits some outrage, which knocks some of us off balance, creating rage and uncertainty, we try to sort it out, and then we adjust and life goes on. We regain our balance. The net effect, to use a parable, is the familiar story of the frogs who were slowly boiled to death by ever so slowly increasing the temperature.

The ease at which this happens is captured in the title of a DailyKos diary on the same topic, Bush Declares Martial Law. Country Yawns, Changes Channel. This diary refers to yet another diary that talks about why the founders of this country really revolted against England. It’s not what you think:

Contrary to the beliefs of many, American colonists did not go to war against the British because of taxes.  Colonists went to war against the King because the British government had become so corrupt, so despicable that the colonists feared if they didn’t take drastic action, this corruption would flow across the pond to America.  Benjamin Franklin wrote in 1775 (quoted from The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution by Bernard Bailyn):

. . . when I consider the extreme corruption prevalent among all orders of men in this old rotten state, and the glorious public virtue so predominant in our rising country  . . . I fear they will drag us after them in their plundering wars which their desperate circumstances, injustice, and rapacity [greed] may prompt them to undertake; and their wide wasting prodigality [living the high life] and profusion is a gulf that will swallow up every aid we may distress ourselves to afford them.  Here [Franklin was writing from England] enormous salaries, pensions, perquisites, bribes, groundless quarrels, foolish expeditions, false accounts or no accounts, contracts and jobs, devour all revenue [which will serve] to corrupt and poison us.

Why is this important now?  Because when you read Bailyn, you will clearly see that we are facing a crisis equal to that faced by the colonists.  Corruption, waste, war, and greed is swallowing up the America that other countries admired before and rallied around after 9/11.  We are facing the same constitutional crisis the colonists faced in the late 1700s.  They had been governed by the British constitution, which the colonists felt the King and his "minions" were plotting to weaken and dissolve.  Here is another passage from Bailyn:

For their power and interest is so great that they can and do procure whatever laws they please, having (by power, interest, and the application of the people’s money to placement and pensioners) the whole legislative authority at their command.  So that it is plain . . . that the rights of the people are ruined and destroyed by ministerial tyrannical authority and thereby  . . . become a kind of slaves to the ministers of the state.

Sound familiar?  Pass whatever laws they please, apply the people’s money however they choose and for whatever purpose they deem fit, whole legislative authority at their command.  This could have been written in the early 21st century and rather than saying it of King George III in 1775, it fits perfectly with King George II of America.

I can add nothing to this, other than to urge you to read the whole illuminating piece. I’ll close with Sara’s conclusion:

The America that would accept this kind of edict in silence is not the America that we grew up in. Something has changed. We are poised to accept this like we’ve accepted every other insult. It’s hard to imagine that, even when bloggers and other dissenters start losing their property, that there will be tens of thousands in the streets to protect us. As long as the forms are still there, and the system continues to do what it must to sustain itself, we will simply be collateral damage.

If we accept the forcible removal of our property without due process, forcible removal of our lives will not be far behind. And there are people eager to accomplish this: according to Barna Research, there are about 50 million hardcore fundamentalists who have been eagerly awaiting the day, training and planning and praying for the chance to do just that — to take out their frustrations on the liberal traitors whom they have been taught to believe are responsible for everything that’s wrong with their lives. They believe, in their bones, we have stabbed God’s America in the back; and they are out for vengeance. This is the edict that will provide "legal" support and justification for their first tentative steps toward mob rule.

Announcements

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Our own moonbat has graciously agreed to be a partner blogger here at The Mahablog. Although his blogging time might be a bit erratic and irregular, he says — day job, and all that — I am sure what he posts will add a little freshness and variety to the place.

Recent guest bloggers Donna and biggerbox also still have blogging privileges here (I assume you guys got the email) and I hope they will feel moved to post something now and then. (Don’t be shy!)

Resistance

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The Guardian reports that Sunni insurgents in Iraq are forming a coalition to better resist the American occupation of their country. Seumas Milne writes,

Seven of the most important Sunni-led insurgent organisations fighting the US occupation in Iraq have agreed to form a public political alliance with the aim of preparing for negotiations in advance of an American withdrawal, their leaders have told the Guardian.

In their first interview with the western media since the US-British invasion of 2003, leaders of three of the insurgent groups – responsible for thousands of attacks against US and Iraqi armed forces and police – said they would continue their armed resistance until all foreign troops were withdrawn from Iraq, and denounced al-Qaida for sectarian killings and suicide bombings against civilians. …

… Leaders of the three groups, who did not use their real names in the interview, said the new front, which brings together the main Sunni-based armed organisations except al-Qaida and the Ba’athists, had agreed the main planks of a joint political programme, including a commitment to free Iraq from foreign troops, rejection of cooperation with parties involved in political institutions set up under the occupation and a declaration that decisions and agreements made by the US occupation and Iraqi government are null and void.

The aim of the alliance – which includes a range of Islamist and nationalist-leaning groups and is planned to be called the Political Office for the Iraqi Resistance – is to link up with other anti-occupation groups in Iraq to negotiate with the Americans in anticipation of an early US withdrawal. The programme envisages a temporary technocratic government to run the country during a transition period until free elections can be held.

I’d like to rub some rightie noses in this section:

Abd al-Rahman al-Zubeidy, political spokesman of Ansar al-Sunna, a salafist (purist Islamic) group with a particularly violent reputation in Iraq, said his organisation had split over relations with al-Qaida, whose members were mostly Iraqi, but its leaders largely foreigners.

“Resistance isn’t just about killing Americans without aims or goals. Our people have come to hate al-Qaida, which gives the impression to the outside world that the resistance in Iraq are terrorists. We are against indiscriminate killing, fighting should be concentrated only on the enemy,” he said. He added: “A great gap has opened up between Sunni and Shia under the occupation and al-Qaida has contributed to that.”

Every time there’s a news story about Sunni or Shia militants badmouthing al Qaeda, righties celebrate that Iraqis support “our” struggle. No, they support “their” struggle, and “their” struggle is as much against us as it is against any other foreigners messing around in their country and killing their people.

One of the Sunnis said “Peaceful resistance will not end the occupation. The US made clear it intended to stay for many decades.” However, “Now it is a common view in the resistance that they will start to withdraw within a year. ” The perception that we really are fixin’ to leave (which would, alas, be a big surprise to President Bush) seems to have spurred the insurgents toward political organization.

Wayne White, of Washington’s Middle East Institute and a former expert adviser to the Iraq Study Group, said it was unclear, given the diversity within the Sunni Arab insurgency, what influence the new grouping would have on the ground.

He added: “This does reveal that despite the widening cooperation on the part of some Sunni Arab insurgent groups with US forces against al-Qaida in recent months, such cooperation could prove very shortlived if the US does not make clear that it has a credible exit strategy.

Now, if we had smart leadership who wanted to do the right thing by Iraq — and note that if we really did have such leadership we wouldn’t have gotten into this mess — that leadership might seize upon this development as part of an exit strategy. We might say here’s our proposed timetable for withdrawal; all we need from you is cooperation in reducing violence, and we’re outta here.

Juan Cole writes that Sunnis want constitutional changes before they will cooperate in a parliamentary re-alignment that would free Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki from dependence on the Sadr block.

The Iraqi Accord Front, however, has not only not rushed to embrace the new alliance, but has threatened to call a vote of no confidence on al-Maliki itself. The Sunni Arab members of parliament generally feel betrayed that they entered the political process in December 2005 on promises that they would have the opportunity to revise the constitution (which they largely rejected). But no such opportunity seems forthcoming. Among their major objections is to the provision of the constitution allowing for the formation of new regional confederacies (i.e. a Shiite one in addition to the present Kurdish one.) The main proponent of this plan is the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council of Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, so that getting a stable alliance between it and the Sunni Arabs strikes me as a stretch.

Alissa Rubin of the New York Times reports that al Sadr is busy, too.

After months of lying low, the anti-American Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr has re-emerged with a shrewd strategy that reaches out to Iraqis on the street while distancing himself from the increasingly unpopular government.

Mr. Sadr and his political allies have largely disengaged from government, contributing to the political paralysis noted in a White House report last week. That outsider status has enhanced Mr. Sadr’s appeal to Iraqis, who consider politics less and less relevant to their daily lives.

This is giving me a headache.

Timothy Garton Ash writes at The Guardian blog page that Americans are waking up to the scale of the disaster in Iraq, and we want out.

So Iraq is over. But Iraq has not yet begun. Not yet begun in terms of the consequences for Iraq itself, the Middle East, the US’s own foreign policy and its reputation in the world. The most probable consequence of rapid US withdrawal from Iraq in its present condition is a further bloodbath, with even larger refugee flows and the effective dismemberment of the country. Already some 2 million Iraqis have fled across the borders and more than 2 million are internally displaced. Now a pained and painstaking study from the Brookings Institution argues that what its authors call “soft partition”, involving the peaceful, voluntary transfer of an estimated 2 to 5 million Iraqis into distinct Kurdish, Sunni and Shia regions, under close US military supervision, would be the lesser evil. The lesser evil, that is, assuming that all goes according to plan and that the American public is prepared to allow the troops to stay in sufficient numbers to accomplish that thankless job – two implausible assumptions. A greater evil is more likely.

In an article for the web magazine Open Democracy, the Middle East specialist Fred Halliday spells out some regional consequences. Beside the effective destruction of the Iraqi state, these include the revitalising of militant Islamism and enhancement of the international appeal of the al-Qaida brand; the eruption for the first time in modern history of internecine war between Sunni and Shia – “a trend that reverberates in other states of mixed confessional composition”; the alienation of most sectors of Turkish politics from the west, and the stimulation of authoritarian nationalism there; the strengthening of a nuclear-hungry Iran; and a new regional rivalry, pitting the Islamic Republic of Iran and its allies, including Syria, Hizbullah and Hamas, against Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan.

For the US itself, the world is now, as a result of the Iraq war, a more dangerous and hostile place. At the end of 2002, what is sometimes tagged al-Qaida Central in Afghanistan had been virtually destroyed and there was no al-Qaida in Iraq. In 2007, there is an al-Qaida in Iraq; parts of the old al-Qaida are creeping back into Afghanistan; and there are al-Qaida emulator groupuscules spawning elsewhere, notably in Europe. Osama bin Laden’s plan was to get the US to overreact and over-reach itself. With the invasion of Iraq, President Bush fell slap-bang into that trap. The US government’s own latest national intelligence estimate, released earlier this week, suggests that al-Qaida in Iraq is now among the most significant threats to the security of the American homeland.

About that National Intelligence Estimate — Sidney Blumenthal writes,

At his July 12 press conference, Bush elevated al-Qaida to enemy No. 1 in Iraq and mentioned it 31 times, asserting that not supporting his policy would lead to “surrendering the future of Iraq to al-Qaida.” Asked about the soon to be released National Intelligence Estimate on al-Qaida, Bush claimed it would state, “There is a perception in the coverage that al Qaeda may be as strong today as they were prior to September the 11th. That’s just simply not the case.”

One day later, on July 13, Bush held a meeting at the White House for a small group of conservative pundits, giving them a glimpse into his state of mind. David Brooks of the New York Times described his “self-confidence.” Fred Barnes of the Weekly Standard quoted him saying, “I’m optimistic,” even though he also said, “I understand the polls. This is an unpopular war!” At his press conference, Bush had said, “There is a war fatigue in America.” And he pointed to his head. “It’s affecting our psychology.” During his meeting with the conservative writers, he mocked his critics. Kate O’Beirne and Rich Lowry of the National Review quoted him as saying: “How can he possibly do this? Can’t he see? Can’t he hear?” The son of a president explained that no one could really understand what it meant to be president. “You don’t know what it’s like to be commander in chief until you’re commander in chief,” he said, according to participants. His critics could not possibly understand him. But he was obviously peeved. Washington, he complained, was filled with “a lot of talkers.” Yet Bush pledged, unbidden, that he would not listen to these critics. “I’m not on the phone chatting up with these people writing these articles, ascribing motives to me.” Such are the reflections of the so-called self-confident president.

On Tuesday, the executive summary of the new NIE on al-Qaida was made public. But it did not fit the administration’s marketing campaign. Al-Qaida, the report stated, has “protected or regenerated” itself in the northern provinces of Pakistan. It also said that the terrorist group would “probably leverage” its contacts with the group known as al-Qaida in Iraq, an “affiliate,” and “the only one known to have expressed a desire to attack the Homeland.”

The next day, Wednesday, the U.S. military made a timely announcement of the capture of Khaled Abdul-Fattah Dawoud Mahmoud al-Mashhadani, a courier for al-Qaida in Iraq. After two weeks in detention, he confessed to hand delivering messages from al-Qaida leaders Ayman al-Zawahiri and Osama bin Laden, suggesting that the so-called enhanced interrogation techniques vociferously defended by the administration indeed work.

The latest NIE, however, is a strange product. According to highly reliable sources in the intelligence community, no new intelligence at all is reflected in the NIE. Its conclusions, on one level, are a rehash of obvious facts that anyone who reads a daily newspaper could glean, such as the protected status of al-Qaida in frontier regions of Pakistan. Other conclusions lack contextual analysis, partly because of the continuing pressure from the administration to politicize information and cherry-pick intelligence. The NIE, for example, does not explain that al-Qaida in Iraq, while lethal, is a very small part of the Sunni insurgency, and that a number of Sunni insurgent groups are its sworn enemies. Nor did the NIE note how few foreign fighters are in Iraq and what a small percentage of insurgents they constitute. (A Los Angeles Times story published on July 15 reported that of the 19,000 Iraqi prisoners held by the U.S. military there, only 135 are foreign fighters, and nearly half are Saudis.) The NIE is utterly devoid of political analysis.

According to intelligence sources, CIA director Michael Hayden has been under attack within the administration from Dick Cheney and the neoconservatives since testifying frankly to the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group that urged a strategic redeployment of U.S. forces and new diplomatic efforts in the region, which were rejected by President Bush. A virtual paralysis is setting in within the intelligence community. Analysts are even anxious about putting their names on their reports. While they are homogenizing information, the administration is still unhappy with the result, as it was with the new NIE.

For the embattled president, filled with “self-confidence,” the “motives” he doesn’t wish critics to examine turn out to be far more utopian than the military success of the surge, as he explained to his conservative interlocutors. “There is such a thing as the universality of freedom. I strongly believe that Muslims desire to be free just like Methodists desire to be free.” Beneath the seething chaotic violence, beyond the tribal and religious strife, past the civil war, the Iraqis, according to the president, under their robes are no different from American Methodists. There’s nothing more to understand. If only we can prevail, they can be just like us. The rest is marketing.

And speaking of Rich Lowry — he actually wrote something sensible about this. No, really. I was stunned. He wrote,

Bush believes the spread of liberty is “inevitable.” If that is the case, why not spare ourselves all the effort and let the inevitable flowering of liberty take hold?

I am no Middle East expert. Maybe the Iraqis could work things out, somehow, if we just got out of the way. Or maybe there will be a bloodbath when we leave, as Timothy Garton Ash. The only certainty is that President Bush is utterly out of control and utterly incapable of managing the situation in Iraq.

From an editorial in today’s New York Times:

The nation’s anguish over the Iraq war was kept on hold in the Senate yesterday as the Republican minority maintained serial threats of filibuster to buy time for President Bush’s aimless policies. Last week, the House debated and voted along party lines for a timetable for an American troop withdrawal by next spring. But a similar measure was allowed no such decisive expression in the Senate. Instead, the G.O.P. insisted on the approval of a “supermajority” of 60 of 100 senators before putting to a vote a measure that would apply real pressure on the president to shift his disastrous course in Iraq.

Republicans have the right to filibuster under centuries-old rules that this page has long defended. It is the height of hypocrisy for this band of Republicans to use that power since only about two years ago they were ready to unilaterally ban filibusters to push through some of Mr. Bush’s most ideologically blinkered judicial nominees.

But beyond that, the Republicans are doing the public a real disservice and playing an increasingly risky hand by delaying sober consideration of the war. The filibuster threat on Iraq also is part of a broader Republican tactic of demanding supermajorities on a raft of major issues in the hopes of paralyzing the Senate and then painting the Democrats as a do-nothing, marginal majority.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid tested the opposition’s stated appetite for unhampered debate by staging an all-nighter Tuesday replete with cots and pizzas. A measure containing a withdrawal timetable failed to get the 60 votes it needed, but it did draw a 52-vote majority, including four Republicans, that amounted to more handwriting on the wall for Bush loyalists. A year ago, a nonbinding withdrawal measure drew 39 votes. The tide is shifting, even if the White House and its Republican backers won’t recognize it. …

… In postponing real action to September and beyond, Republicans laughed off the all-night debate as a “slumber party” of “twilight zone” theatrics by the Democrats. In fact, Bush loyalists seem trapped in the twilight zone, ducking their responsibility to represent constituents by applying credible pressure on the president to come up with an end to his sorry war.