Facts and Fictions, Part II

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

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

To which I thought, WTF?

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

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

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

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

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

Brad Reed continues,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I don’t think this storyline works at all.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

Facts and Fictions, Part I

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About a month ago I wrote a post that started with this quote:

Win or lose, the GOP talks about three core principles: less government, lower taxes, and a strong military. It doesn’t matter that, when in charge, Republican politicians have been known to grow government, raise taxes, and stretch the military too thin. Party leaders have decided that less government, lower taxes, and a strong military is what they stand for and what they run on. That’s their story and they’re sticking with it for good reason — because more often that not, it has helped them win. [Bill Scher, Wait! Don’t Move to Canada! (Rodale, 2006), p. 13.]

I asked if we might come up with our own short list of “ideas” to run on. I see that LeonJohn Podesta asked a similar question:

“The question I’m asked most often is, When are we getting our eight words?” Podesta said. Conservatives, he went on, “have their eight words in a bumper sticker: Less government. Lower taxes. Less welfare. And so on. Where’s our eight-word bumper sticker?”

My post generated some rich discussion, but no “eight words in a bumper sticker.” I’ve been thinking about this since, and realized that everything I come up with is much less specific than what the Right runs on. For example, where the Right always runs on cutting taxes, I would run on responsible taxes. Whether taxes should be raised or lowered, IMO, depends on a whole lot of factors that are always changing. Factors to consider include what people need from their government and what’s good for the economic health of the nation, both short and long term. There is a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted. And there’s a time to lower taxes, and a time to raise them. But the phrase “responsible taxes” doesn’t mean anything unless I explain what I mean, so we’re already over the eight words.

Of course, I always want to pin conservatives down on what they mean by “less” government, since many of them seem OK with big, strong, intrusive government in matters of sex and death. If you think about it, they seem to want government to go away only where money is involved. And I’m all for a “strong” military, but by that I don’t mean keeping the military-industrial complex gorged on no-bid contracts and sweetheart deals. I mean a military strong enough to defend the nation.

Leon Podesta said that coming up with eight words in a bumper sticker is harder for liberals, “because we believe in a lot more things.” I don’t think that’s true; righties certainly seem to have beliefs up the wazoo. Liberals get slammed because we don’t have beliefs. For example, check out what what Sebastian Mallaby wrote in the Washington Post awhile back:

After years of single-party government, the prospect of a Democratic majority in the House ought to feel refreshing. But even with Republicans collapsing in a pile of sexual sleaze, I just can’t get excited. Most Democrats in Congress seem bereft of ideas or the courage to stand up for them. They clearly want power, but they have no principles to guide their use of it.

In fact, Dems are brimming over with ideas; just check out Podesta’s think tank if you want some examples. Do the Dems as a party have clearly articulated principles to guide their use of power? That’s a harder question to answer. But do Republicans? Not that I’ve seen. Republicans have rhetoric; they have talking points; they have campaign slogans. Principles, not so much. But Republicans get a pass on the principle thing. In the same way, the Democratic Party is perpetually being challenged to come up with a plan for Iraq; individual Dems have come up with a number of plans, but since the party hasn’t rallied around any one plan, this doesn’t count. But Republicans as a party have no discernible “plan,” either, other than “stay the course.” And now some of them are disowning even that.

But as I’ve been combing through commentary this morning I’m struck by the fact that many commenters (like Mallaby) use words like idea, principle, and belief loosely and interchangeably as if they were synonyms, and of course they are not. Fuzzy use of language usually connotes fuzzy thinking. Why is it that Republicans get credit for having ideas even though they haven’t had a genuinely new idea since the McKinley Administration? Why is it Republicans get credit for having principles even though their words and deeds rarely meet up in the same ball park?

Many liberals argue that righties have us beat in the language and framing departments, and I think that’s part of it, but I say there’s a more fundamental reason: righties have a strong ideology, and lefties don’t.

I just stumbled upon this very lovely quote —

    “The essence of the Liberal outlook lies not in what opinions are held, but in how they are held: instead of being held dogmatically, they are held tentatively, and with a consciousness that new evidence may at any moment lead to their abandonment.” -Bertrand Russell

Contrast this to our current crop of American conservatives, who remain steadfastly loyal to their ideas even after trial and empirical evidence reveal they don’t work. Supply side economics comes to mind.

I’m not saying ideologies are better than no-ideology; just the opposite. I am leery of ideology. The dictionary defines ideology thus —

1. The body of ideas reflecting the social needs and aspirations of an individual, group, class, or culture. 2. A set of doctrines or beliefs that form the basis of a political, economic, or other system.

— But I think ideology is better understood as an interface to reality. An ideology makes interacting with reality easier, because it eliminates much of the detail and limits one’s choices.

For example, if a non-ideological person wants to understand why there is so much poverty in New Orleans, he has to piece together myriad historical, cultural, political, and economic factors, some of which may be unique to New Orleans. But an ideologue can click on the drop-down menu for social problems, then choose poverty, and get a simple answer. Easy as pie.

Simple answers have the advantage of being easier to explain and to understand than complicated answers. This gives politicians with simple answers a strong advantage over those whose answers require some explaining. A person with simple answers also can seem more certain about what he says than someone who understands all the ambiguities and complications and mitigating factors.

And, my dears, there are always ambiguities and complications and mitigating factors. Pretending they aren’t there doesn’t make them go away.

Put another way, instead of learning more about a issue to understand it, ideologues eliminate factors until the issue becomes easily understandable. The fact that the “understanding” may have little to do with reality is of no consequence. You see this phenomenon in righties’ quest for “moral clarity.” The way one achieves “moral clarity” is not through deep thinking or thorough study; it is through reducing complex issues to a simple “good versus evil” equation. And this equation is created by eliminating any factors that don’t return the desired answer.

For example, “moral clarity” on the abortion issue usually means designating the embryo as “good” and the woman who wants to abort as “bad.” In order to be “clear” the ideologue sees the embryo as innocent and blameless, but the “bad” woman is narcissistic and immoral. Crushing personal circumstances or genetic anomalies are dismissed as “inconveniences” that virtuous women would accept without complaint. Factors that don’t fit into the equation are dismissed as unimportant, in other words.

To be fair, there are lefties who dismiss the embryo as a “growth” or a “parasite,” which is another easy way to achieve “clarity” on the issue. To my mind, these people are playing the same mental games righties are playing. It’s not an honest way to look at the issue.

Ideologies can be found all along the political spectrum. But neither conservatism nor liberalism are in themselves ideologies. In some people, conservatism or liberalism are no more than inclinations or attitudes that cause them to sympathize with one set of values more than another. If you look at political conservatism around the globe and over time, you find all manner of competing and contradictory ideas attached to it. And many Americans have called themselves conservative without having to believe that taxes must always be cut or that abortions must be stopped at all cost.

But right now, in the U.S., most of the Right is strongly ideological, but most of the Left isn’t. Most of us who call ourselves “liberals” or “progressives” or “Democrats” these days do not have simple doctrines and beliefs and dogmas that tell us whether taxes should go up or down, for example. Instead, we’ve got policy wonks studying trends and crunching numbers. Most of us in favor of reproduction rights are concerned about the impact of abortion and birth control bans on the lives and health of women, and our concerns are based on real-world experience. We think government ought to be responsive to the needs and desires of citizens, but we don’t assume what those needs and desires are always going to be.

Thus, we have “nuances.” We lack “clarity.” We aren’t always sure we are right. We can’t reduce our ideas into simple slogans and equations. The Right can do these things, however. While the Left consults maps and debates diverse routes, the Right knows exactly which way to march.

But then, so do lemmings.

See also: The Anonymous Liberal, “Straw Man Politics and The Great Rhetorical Divide“; Robert Parry, “Whose Moral Clarity?“

War and Numbers

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Steve Gilliard responds to the news that support for the Iraq war is slipping among evangelicals:

Uh, who’s sons and daughters face the choice of Wal Mart or Iraq? It ain’t the Dobsons of the world sending their kids to the sandbox. Who’s spending their nights looking at their broken children in Walter Reed? Not the rich, not the connected. When that phone call comes, god forbid, the knock on the door, the odds are good that a evangelical is behind it.

Their kids are the ones coming home broken and dead and Washington lies to them and they know it.

And this, combined with Foley, is dooming Bush and the GOP’s election chances. He may think he’s winning, but the people with the 21 year old who spends all day drinking or the 22 year old daughter learning to walk with a new leg, know Iraq is all fucked up and Bush won’t admit it.

A new poll by the PEW Research Center found that 58 percent of white evangelicals still believe the U.S. made the right decision to support the war, which is still a majority. But this is down from 71 percent in September.

That’s a pretty big drop for one month, I’d say. Perhaps the drop correlates to this month’s spike in U.S. deaths in Iraq.

I can’t help but think a lot of these evangelicals are the same folks who dissed the Dixie Chicks.

Behind the New York Times firewall, Paul Krugman writes:

Iraq is a lost cause. It’s just a matter of arithmetic: given the violence of the environment, with ethnic groups and rival militias at each other’s throats, American forces there are large enough to suffer terrible losses, but far too small to stabilize the country.

We’re so undermanned that we’re even losing our ability to influence events: earlier this week, Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki brusquely rejected American efforts to set a timetable for reining in the militias.

Well, yes. And it seems everyone in the country has figured that out, except Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld.

Professor Krugman thinks that we haven’t lost Afghanistan yet (N. Todd at Dohiyi Mir disagrees) and suggests that our resources in Iraq might be redeployed to Afghanistan before two wars are lost, assuming two wars aren’t already lost.

Here’s where Krugman gets his numbers:

The classic analysis of the arithmetic of insurgencies is a 1995 article by James T. Quinlivan, an analyst at the Rand Corporation. “Force Requirements in Stability Operations,” published in Parameters, the journal of the U.S. Army War College, looked at the number of troops that peacekeeping forces have historically needed to maintain order and cope with insurgencies. Mr. Quinlivan’s comparisons suggested that even small countries might need large occupying forces.

Specifically, in some cases it was possible to stabilize countries with between 4 and 10 troops per 1,000 inhabitants. But examples like the British campaign against communist guerrillas in Malaya and the fight against the Irish Republican Army in Northern Ireland indicated that establishing order and stability in a difficult environment could require about 20 troops per 1,000 inhabitants.

The implication was clear: “Many countries are simply too big to be plausible candidates for stabilization by external forces,” Mr. Quinlivan wrote.

Krugman is a numbers guy and I’m not, so I’m going to trust that he has this figured out.

Given the way the Bush administration relegated Afghanistan to sideshow status, it comes as something of a shock to realize that Afghanistan has a larger population than Iraq. If Afghanistan were in as bad shape as Iraq, stabilizing it would require at least 600,000 troops — an obvious impossibility.

However, things in Afghanistan aren’t yet as far gone as they are in Iraq, and it’s possible that a smaller force — one in that range of 4 to 10 per 1,000 that has been sufficient in some cases — might be enough to stabilize the situation. But right now, the forces trying to stabilize Afghanistan are absurdly small: we’re trying to provide security to 30 million people with a force of only 32,000 Western troops and 77,000 Afghan national forces.

If we stopped trying to do the impossible in Iraq, both we and the British would be able to put more troops in a place where they might still do some good. But we have to do something soon: the commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan says that most of the population will switch its allegiance to a resurgent Taliban unless things get better by this time next year.

It’s hard to believe that the world’s only superpower is on the verge of losing not just one but two wars. But the arithmetic of stability operations suggests that unless we give up our futile efforts in Iraq, we’re on track to do just that.

You can count on the Bushies to deny there’s any reason to change the course in Afghanistan, either, until it’s too late. And probably not then, either.

Today’s Dan Froomkin:

… in spite of a furious public-relations campaign by the White House aimed at muddying the issue, at week’s end there is simply no doubt that “stay the course” is a deadly accurate description of Bush’s strategy in Iraq.

The fundamental issue is whether American troops should continue what looks to many to be a hopeless fight — or whether they should start coming home. And on that central point, Bush has not wavered one bit.

Yes, as the White House has been at great pains to point out lately, the day-to-day military tactics sometimes change. But as Bush himself has long been at great pains to point out, the White House has no place in setting those military tactics.

Bush will make no substantive policy changes in either Iraq or Afghanistan as long as he has anything to say about policy changes. I doubt he will make even non-substantive policy changes. It doesn’t matter how many commissions are sent to study the situation or what they recommend. I doubt that Bush is much engaged in what is happening in Iraq at all; that’s what the help (i.e., generals) are for. He’s happy as long as he can claim we’re winning, and he can claim we’re winning as long as we don’t leave.

Tortured news update: Yesterday I wrote that The Dick had admitted the U.S. engaged in waterboarding. Dan Eggen writes in today’s Washington Post that “a Cheney spokeswoman” denied the Veep admitting to waterboarding. Today Tony Snow did his best to spin what The Dick said; see the video at Crooks and Liars.

The Big Giant Head

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Bill O’Reilly believes that Rush Limbaugh has a moral argument.

On the Fox side, you have Americans who believe it is morally right to create and then destroy in research life in pursuit of curing terrible afflictions. The Limbaugh side says it is morally wrong to interfere with nature and terminate a potential human being, even in its initial stages.

Now it all comes down to what you believe. Nobody can win the debate. You either believe life begins at conception or you don’t. And the polls say Americans are about equally divided on the issue.

Awhile back I wrote at length about why the question of when “life” begins is a stupid question, and that O’Reilly’s dichotomy — You either believe life begins at conception or you don’t — is a false dichotomy that misses the true nature of life and death, as I see it.

(If you are really adventurous, here’s an advanced Dharma talk on the subject of life and death by John Daido Loori, the roshi who took on the impossible task of imparting some wisdom into my thick head. Don’t let the talk bother you if it doesn’t make sense. More than that I won’t say.)

“I know Mr. Limbaugh believes he is doing the absolute right thing in objecting to the destruction of potential human beings,” says O’Reilly. I rather doubt Mr. Limbaugh cares about the destruction of anything except his own ego.

Further down the news story O’Reilly played a clip of his appearance on Oprah. I don’t have the clip, but if anyone finds it, let me know. Here’s the transcript:

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

OPRAH WINFREY, HOST, “THE OPRAH WINFREY SHOW”: Why do we have to be put in categories, Bill?

O’REILLY: Because you have to make a decision. I think you have to fight for what kind of a country you want. And if you want to be in the middle, and you vacillate back and forth, I don’t know what good that does.

Again, you don’t have to toe the line. You have to make a decision on what kind of a country you want to live at.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We can’t legislate what freedom of speech allows. Freedom means freedom. Say what you want to say and someone else can decide.

O’REILLY: This is important. That’s bull. I’ll tell you why.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Freedom is bull?

O’REILLY: No. It’s not freedom. You can hide behind freedom all day long. Responsibility goes along with freedom, sir, with all due respect.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

To which I say, WTF?

My earlier post on the Michael J. Fox ad is here.

Down and Dirty

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As I wrote a few days ago, the senatorial election campaign staff of George “Macaca” Allen has been combing through Jim Webb’s novels and screenplays looking for passages they can use against Webb. And, apparently, they believe they found what they were looking for. Today Drudge has published a selection of juicy bits (I don’t link to Drudge). Some rightie bloggers are claiming the bits of fiction reveal that Webb has a twisted mind and are posting gleefully that this will be the end of Webb’s political career.

I’d like to advise these bloggers to be mindful of the glass house they live in before they throw too many more stones. If we’re talking naughty bits, need I say more than … Scooter Libby? Or Lynn Cheney? (Unfortunately, neither Libby nor Cheney are running for office at the moment. Too bad.) And remember —

Webb novels: Fiction.

Foley emails: Not fiction.

Josh Marshall remarks,

If Allen really wants to play rough, maybe it’s time for some Democrats to start going on the shows and asking about that sealed divorce records of Allen’s. All those reporters have a pretty good idea of what’s in there. But Sen. Allen (R-VA) just won’t agree to let them see it.

It’s almost like he’s spitting in their face.

I web surfed a bit but found no substantive gossip on Allen’s divorce, granted about 20 years ago. Oh, well.

Michael Grunwald writes in today’s Washington Post that Republicans are outdoing themselves in the dirty campaign department this year.

Rep. Ron Kind pays for sex!

Well, that’s what the Republican challenger for his Wisconsin congressional seat, Paul R. Nelson, claims in new ads, the ones with “XXX” stamped across Kind’s face.

It turns out that Kind — along with more than 200 of his fellow hedonists in the House — opposed an unsuccessful effort to stop the National Institutes of Health from pursuing peer-reviewed sex studies. According to Nelson’s ads, the Democrat also wants to “let illegal aliens burn the American flag” and “allow convicted child molesters to enter this country.”

To Nelson, that doesn’t even qualify as negative campaigning.

“Negative campaigning is vicious personal attacks,” he said in an interview. “This isn’t personal at all.”

By 2006 standards, maybe it isn’t.

I assume (Kind’s web site doesn’t say) that Kind is opposed to deporting illegals and amending the Constitution to ban flag burning; hence, Kind wants to “let illegal aliens burn the American flag.” But I cannot figure out what the “convicted child molesters” claim relates to, if anything. (You can check out Kind’s record here.)

Granted, dirty campaigning long has been part of American political tradition — ever since Thomas Jefferson claimed John Adams planned to marry his son John Quincy to a daughter of King George III, then return America to the British. That was perhaps a slight exaggeration. Grunwald provides some more:

· In New York, the NRCC ran an ad accusing Democratic House candidate Michael A. Arcuri, a district attorney, of using taxpayer dollars for phone sex. “Hi, sexy,” a dancing woman purrs. “You’ve reached the live, one-on-one fantasy line.” It turns out that one of Arcuri’s aides had tried to call the state Division of Criminal Justice, which had a number that was almost identical to that of a porn line. The misdial cost taxpayers $1.25.

· In Ohio, GOP gubernatorial candidate J. Kenneth Blackwell, trailing by more than 20 points in polls, has accused front-running Democratic Rep. Ted Strickland of protecting a former aide who was convicted in 1994 on a misdemeanor indecency charge. Blackwell’s campaign is also warning voters through suggestive “push polls” that Strickland failed to support a resolution condemning sex between adults and children. Strickland, a psychiatrist, objected to a line suggesting that sexually abused children cannot have healthy relationships when they grow up.

· The Republican Party of Wisconsin distributed a mailing linking Democratic House candidate Steve Kagen to a convicted serial killer and child rapist. The supposed connection: The “bloodthirsty” attorney for the killer had also done legal work for Kagen.

· In two dozen congressional districts, a political action committee supported by a white Indianapolis businessman, J. Patrick Rooney, is running ads saying Democrats want to abort black babies. A voice says, “If you make a little mistake with one of your hos, you’ll want to dispose of that problem tout de suite, no questions asked.”

Grunwald also mentions the infamous “playboy” ad linking a white actress to African-American senatorial candidate Harold Ford. [Update: This ad is still on the air, according to the New York Times.] The RNC is running a new ad claiming that Ford “wants to give the abortion pill to schoolchildren.” Ford’s web site says this claim relates to a vote “banning funding that goes to Emergency Contraception, not RU-486 (The Abortion Pill).”

Grunwald’s article contains the obligatory “Dems do it too” section:

Some Democrats are playing rough, too. House candidate Chris Carney is running ads slamming the “family values” of Rep. Don Sherwood (R-Pa.), whose former mistress accused him of choking her. And House candidate Kirsten Gillibrand has an ad online ridiculing Rep. John E. Sweeney (R-N.Y.) for attending a late-night fraternity party. … But most harsh Democratic attacks have focused on the policies and performance of the GOP majority, trying to link Republicans to Bush, the unpopular war in Iraq and the scandals involving former representative Mark Foley and former lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

Dems don’t have to make stuff up, in other words. Reality does have a liberal bias … and the wingnuts never notice that spreading lies to smear an opponent’s character reveals, um, a lack of character.

Experts say that in the past, negative ads were usually more accurate, better documented and more informative than positive ads; there was a higher burden of proof.

I don’t know who those “experts” are. Back in 1828 the Andrew Jackson campaign accused John Quincy Adams of turning the White House into a gambling den. Turns out JQA had purchased a chess set and a pool table.

Meanwhile, some people are still whining about the Michael J. Fox ad. This creep, for example, comments on “the tremendous selfishness of Michael J Fox.” This is beyond disgusting, and I’m not the only one to think so.

I missed Fox being interviewed by Katie Couric on CBS, but here is Digby’s description:

The portion of the interview they broadcast was quite decent. But you can see the whole interview here — and listen to Katie Couric push him over and over again on the burning question of whether he manipulated his medication and ask him whether he should have re-scheduled the shoot when his symptoms were manifested as they were. And she does it while she’s sitting directly across from him watching him shake like crazy. Her questions imply that it was in poor taste or manipulative as if he can magically conjure a film crew to catch him in on of the fleeting moments where he doesn’t appear too symptomatic. The press seems to truly believe that it is reasonable to be suspicious of him showing symptoms of a disease that has him so severely in its clutches that if he doesn’t take his medication his face becomes a frozen mask and he cannot even talk.

I think Digby is pissed. So am I.

Update: See also —

Tony Norman, “What color is your hypocrisy?”

Eugene Robinson, “Does the Code Still Work?”

Update update: See also Billmon.

Update update update: The Agitator has more.

Adventures in BushWorld

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In yesterday’s press conference, President Bush trotted out one of his straw man friends —

I understand here in Washington, some people say we’re not at war. I know that. They’re just wrong in my opinion.

At least this straw man seems to have a backstory. Yesterday Bush told a group of (highly selected) journalists:

I ran into a kid the other day who used to work here and he goes to a famous law school, and he said, the problem, Mr. President, is people don’t believe we’re at war. I not only believe we’re at war, I know we’re at war.

Of course, at the moment much of the Republican party is pretending there is no war. And some people say the last thing campaigning Republican politicians needed yesterday was Bush dragging the Iraq debacle back into the limelight.

So why did he do it?

A headline in today’s Boston Globe says “Bush puts optimism aside in his assessment of war,” but the fact is he still says we’re winning. That’s not putting “optimism” aside. Yesterday’s press conference was nothing but an attempt to repackage Bush’s giddy delusions.

From the Boston Globe article, by Rick Klein:

Bush continued to back Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, defended the decision to keep fighting in Iraq, and rejected growing calls from Democrats and some Republicans to set a timetable for US withdrawal.

“My view is the only way we lose in Iraq is if we leave before the job is done,” the president said. “If I did not think our mission in Iraq was vital to America’s security, I’d bring our troops home tomorrow. I met too many wives and husbands who have lost their partners in life, too many children who won’t ever see their mom and dad again.”

Dan Froomkin picks up on this statement.

“Absolutely, we’re winning,” Bush said. “As a matter of fact, my view is the only way we lose in Iraq is if we leave before the job is done.”

With the body counts soaring, the country descending deeper into civil war and the central government consistently unable to assert itself, how can he call this winning?

The answer: It’s becoming increasingly clear that Bush sees the war in Iraq in very simple terms. As he himself said, he believes that the only way to lose is to leave. Therefore anything else is winning — anything else at all.

Even if no progress is being made — even if things are getting worse, rather than better — simply staying is winning.

So we’re winning.

Froomkin was the one who alerted me to Bush’s talk with the selected journalists. Here’s my favorite part — Bush’s explanation of why Iraq is not Vietnam.

What’s happening is I’m not — remember the pictures in the Oval Office, with them sitting over the maps, picking out the targets in Vietnam? That’s not happening in this war. The Commander-in-Chief, through the Secretary of Defense, must empower the military people on the ground, and the embassy, to work — and by the way, these guys are working very closely, which is important — to implement the strategy. And if tactics need to change, change them. Just keep us posted. And that’s what’s happening.

Abizaid, who I think is one of the really great thinkers, John Abizaid — I don’t know if you’ve ever had a chance to talk to him, he’s a smart guy — he came up with this construct: If we leave, they will follow us here. That’s really different from other wars we’ve been in. If we leave, okay, so they suffer in other parts of the world, used to be the old mantra. This one is different. This war is, if they leave, they’re coming after us. As a matter of fact, they’ll be more emboldened to come after us. They will be able to find more recruits to come after us.

Abizaid clearly sees this struggle — he sees the effects of victory in Iraq as having a major impact on other parts of the Middle East. He also sees the reciprocal of that, a defeat — just leaving — the only defeat is leaving, is letting things fall into chaos and letting al Qaeda have a safe haven. And he sees it as a — he sees that as an accelerating effect to creating incredible hostility toward people that are moderate in their view. They may not necessarily be as democrat as they want, but they’re moderate in their view about the future.

The only defeat is leaving. As long as we’re still there, we’re winning. Got that?

And I really like the part about “If we leave, they will follow us here.” I do remember jokes we told back in the day — If we pull out of Vietnam, the Vietnamese navy will attack Los Angeles. Nobody believed that, of course; it was just a way to underline how absurd the war was.

But does anyone really believe “if we leave, they will follow us here”? Why would that be true? We don’t exactly have al Qaeda pinned down over there.

I mean, we weren’t in Iraq on September 11, were we?

Sorry; I couldn’t resist.

Here’s another bit from Bush talking to the selected journalists:

My attitude about our — look, I’m into campaigning out there: People want to know, can you win? That’s what they want to know. I mean, there’s — look, there’s some 25 percent or so that want us to get out, shouldn’t have been out there in the first place — and that’s fine. They’re wrong. But you can understand why they feel that way. They just don’t believe in war, and — at any cost.

Now, if Bush really believes only “25 percent or so” thinks the Iraq invasion was a mistake and wants the U.S. out … well, as I’ve said elsewhere, Bubble Boy is in for a hard fall. The most recent Newsweek poll says 25 percent think we’re making progress; 65 percent say we’re not. The most recent CNN poll says 64 percent oppose the war and Bush’s handling of it. And 56 percent say the invasion was a mistake, according to the most recent USA Today/Gallup poll (all on Pollingreport.com).

As my Ma would say, the boy’s got no more notion of what’s going on than a hill of beans.

I believe when you get attacked and somebody declares war on you, you fight back. And that’s what we’re doing.

Iraq attacked us, when?

Anyway, that’s where my — that’s what I’m thinking about these days. Upbeat about things. Upbeat about the elections. As I said — I’m sharing with you what I said in the press conference — I’m not breaking a lot of news here, but I said, look, I understand the conventional wisdom, it’s over. You’ve got people who are dancing in the end zones and they’re measuring their drapes in their new offices. It’s not over. We’ve got the issues on our side.

I just hope they’re not dancing in the end zones and measuring the drapes at the same time.

And you talk to — admittedly, my focus groups are not broad, but people always say to me, thank you for protecting us.

As he says, the focus groups are not, um, broad.. I think the White House must keep a staff of people who will pretend to be a focus group and thank Bush for protecting them. From time to time, these same people also tell Bush stuff like “some people don’t believe there’s a war.” It’s what keeps him going. Otherwise he gets very moody and yells a lot.

Although many hopes are pinned on James Baker’s yet-to-be-released recommendations for policy changes in Iraq, Sidney Blumenthal writes that Bush is fixin’ to ignore them.

Baker, the ultimate cold-eyed realist and authority figure who field-marshaled the strategy in Florida that secured the presidency for Bush, has publicly suggested in the past three weeks that he will offer policy changes. Since then, Bush has plunged into rhetorical contortions to explain that he is “staying the course,” that he is altering his “tactics” and, finally, that he never said “stay the course.” He has adopted the Groucho Marx doctrine: Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes or, in this case, ears?

Bush is engaged in a shadow politics of fending off Baker that he can’t admit and that require new disingenuous explanations for rejection even before receiving Baker’s report. But will consummate political player Baker permit a dynamic in which he is humiliated and join the ranks of the dismissed and discarded, like “good soldier” Colin Powell? If Baker, taking his cue from Bush’s rebuke, simply closes ranks, what would have been his point, except to highlight his failure at an attempted rescue? By undermining Baker, especially beforehand, Bush sends a signal that he is determined to maintain his counterproductive strategies in Iraq and the Middle East. Yet his tightening coil will trigger further attempts among U.S. allies and Arab governments to disentangle themselves.

There is much speculation about what Baker will recommend, and even if Baker’s recommendations are really more than a pre-election feint to make people think Bush will change his policies. But, he won’t. I said it yesterday, and I’m saying it again now — Bush will not be changing his policies in Iraq.

Blumenthal continues,

On Wednesday, Bush held a press conference that can only be interpreted as a preemptive repudiation of Baker. Of course, other motives underlay the press conference as well. It was an effort to repackage Bush’s unpopular Iraq policy on the eve of the elections and to demonstrate that he is in charge of circumstances that have careened out of control.

In his remarks, Bush digressed at length to give rote explanations that were elementary, irrelevant or misleading. His supposed admissions of error were attempts at deflecting responsibility. Rather than stating the facts that his Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq had forced the disbanding of the Iraqi army and the civil service (by banning those with Baathist Party membership, which included nearly every bureaucrat), he passively said, “We overestimated the capability of the civil service in Iraq to continue to provide essential services to the Iraqi people.” And: “We did not expect the Iraqi army, including the Republican Guard, to melt away in the way that it did in the face of advancing coalition forces.”

In BushWorld, nothing that goes wrong is ever Bush’s fault.

* * *

One year ago today we were marking the two thousandth American in uniform lost in Iraq. James Dao wrote in the New York Times (October 26, 2005):

Sgt. Anthony G. Jones, fresh off the plane from Iraq and an impish grin on his face, sauntered unannounced into his wife’s hospital room in Georgia just hours after she had given birth to their second son.

For two joyous weeks in May, Sergeant Jones cooed over their baby and showered attention on his wife. But he also took care of unfinished business, selling his pickup truck to retire a loan, paying off bills, calling on family and friends.

”I want to live this week like it is my last,” he told his wife.

Three weeks later, on June 14, Sergeant Jones was killed by a roadside bomb in Baghdad on his third tour in a war that is not yet three years old. He was 25. …

… as the nation pays grim tribute today to the 2,000 service members killed in Iraq since the invasion of 2003, their collective stories describe the painful stresses and recurring strains that an extended conflict, with all its demands for multiple tours, is placing on families, towns and the military itself as they struggle to console the living while burying the dead.

In the year since, another 810 American soldiers have died; this includes 97 this month.

Update: A sober cartoon.

Tortured News

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Vice President Dick “the Dick” Cheney has confirmed the U.S. engaged in waterboarding. Jonathan S. Landay of McClatchy Newspapers reports:

Vice President Dick Cheney has confirmed that U.S. interrogators subjected captured senior al-Qaida suspects to a controversial interrogation technique called “water-boarding,” which creates a sensation of drowning.

Cheney indicated that the Bush administration doesn’t regard water-boarding as torture and allows the CIA to use it. “It’s a no-brainer for me,” Cheney said at one point in an interview.

Cheney’s comments, in a White House interview on Tuesday with a conservative radio talk show host, appeared to reflect the Bush administration’s view that the president has the constitutional power to do whatever he deems necessary to fight terrorism.

There’s a more shocking allegation against the U.S. in today’s Guardian. Richard Norton-Taylor writes,

The CIA tried to persuade Germany to silence EU protests about the human rights record of one of America’s key allies in its clandestine torture flights programme, the Guardian can reveal.

According to a secret intelligence report, the CIA offered to let Germany have access to one of its citizens, an al-Qaida suspect being held in a Moroccan cell. But the US secret agents demanded that in return, Berlin should cooperate and “avert pressure from EU” over human rights abuses in the north African country. The report describes Morocco as a “valuable partner in the fight against terrorism”. …

… After the CIA offered a deal to Germany, EU countries adopted an almost universal policy of downplaying criticism of human rights records in countries where terrorist suspects have been held. They have also sidestepped questions about secret CIA flights partly because of growing evidence of their complicity.

Democracy may be on the march, but it’s marching the wrong way.

Norton-Taylor doesn’t mention Big Dick, but I suspect he’s the instigator of the CIA deal with Germany. The Dickster is into torture and intrigue. A New York Times editorial from one year ago described how the Dick made a secret proposal to Sen. John McCain to allow the CIA to torture and abuse prisoners as long as the subjects weren’t U.S. citizens and the nasty stuff took place overseas.

Like Cheney cares whether such activities are legal or not. It’s what he wanted the CIA to do.

Myron Beckenstein writes in today’s Baltimore Sun:

The nightmare still isn’t finished for Maher Arar and, through him, for those who care about what is happening to what once were considered bedrock American values – such naive concepts as liberty, trial by jury and innocent until proved guilty. The latest spasm showed up this month, four years after something that never should have happened had long passed the stage where it should have been over. …

… Maher Arar is a Canadian citizen born in Syria. In 2002, he was returning to Canada from an overseas trip, and this required a brief stopover at John F. Kennedy Airport in New York. He was not planning to even leave the airport. But he was seized by U.S. agents as a threat to American security, held for several days and then sent to Syria, where he was jailed and tortured for a year before being allowed to return home to Canada. …

… The Canadians were not even consulted before this was done.

The picture became more complicated by the recent revelation that days before Mr. Arar was flown to Syria, Ottawa had notified the FBI that the information it had posted on him was wrong. It could find nothing linking him to terrorism.

So we have a man with no known terrorist ties being arbitrarily, nonjudicially convicted of having terrorist ties and sent off to a punishment that until recently was deemed unconscionable. [emphasis added]

It seems the Royal Canadian Mounted Police told the U.S. that Arar was an “Islamic extremist” — an error, it turns out. RCMP Commissioner Giuliano Zaccardelli told a Canadian House of Commons investigative committee that he had not been informed about this information. According to James Brown of CNews:

Justice Dennis O’Connor, who headed a public inquiry into the affair, found the Mounties had sent information to the U.S. wrongly identifying Arar as an Islamic extremist with suspected ties to Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida network.

It was “very likely” that information was the key to an American decision to deport Arar to Syria, where he was tortured into false confessions, said O’Connor.

In fact, Arar was never more than a “person of interest” to the Mounties, who wanted to question him because he’d been seen in the company of another man targeted in an anti-terrorist investigation.

Zaccardelli, in his committee testimony last month, said the force moved to correct the erroneous information while Arar was in custody in New York.

The commissioner said he didn’t personally learn of the mistake until after Arar was already in Syria. He offered no explanation of why he didn’t go public on the matter at that time.

Did the Dick make Zaccardelli an offer he couldn’t refuse? But whatever happened, Becksenstein of the Baltimore Sun writes, the U.S. is shrugging its shoulders and denying responsibility.

Washington’s reaction has been neither apology nor even concern. Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales said he had not read the report and didn’t know that Mr. Arar had been tortured, although this fact had been public for years. Mr. Gonzales added, “Well, we were not responsible for his removal to Syria.”

The United States had shipped an innocent man to torture in a foreign country, but “we were not responsible.” A day later, a clarification was issued: When Mr. Gonzales said “we,” he was not speaking of the U.S. but just of his own Justice Department.

The deportation was carried out by the Immigration and Naturalization Service, which in 2002 was part of the Justice Department. But now it is part of the Department of Homeland Security. Thus the Justice Department cannot be responsible for INS actions, even if they happened on its watch. And obviously DHS can’t be responsible for something that happened before it was created. Responsibility has fallen safely into the bureaucratic cracks.

But it turns out the Justice Department did know. The deportation order was signed by Deputy Attorney General Larry D. Thompson. Even John Ashcroft, the attorney general at the time, knew. When Canada learned of Mr. Arar’s deportation and protested, Mr. Ashcroft assured Ottawa that Syria had assured him that Mr. Arar would not be tortured.

Even weirder, Arar remains on U.S. terror watch lists. Last week the Associated Press reported:

Syrian torturers could find nothing to implicate Canadian Maher Arar in al-Qaida or any other terrorist ties. An official Canadian government report agreed with that finding and recommended that Arar be compensated for his 10 months in a Syrian prison.

Still, Arar remains on the U.S. government terror watch list. And the United States has not admitted fault for holding him incommunicado for a week, then, five days after his first telephone call, putting him on a private jet and flying him to the Syrian prison.

Because the watch list will not let Arar enter the United States, he had to stay in Canada and participate by telephone in a discussion of his case and of the U.S. law signed Tuesday by President Bush on treatment and prosecution of detainees.

I guess the Gubmint figures that even if Arar wasn’t an anti-American extremist before they sent him to Syria to be tortured, he may be one now.

Flies in the Soup

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Blog P.I. provides an in-depth analysis of the new “Hotsoup” political site. Verdict: It ain’t so hot.

I concur with the analysis, and add —

I’ve been messing around on Internet discussion forums for more than a dozen years. I go back to pre-Web forums like the original CompuServe and Prodigy, and the inglorious Usenet. And I’ve participated in all kinds of web forums. And I’ve run this blog for a while. I’m an old hand at Internet debate, in other words. But I’ll be damned if I can figure out how the Hotsoup “discussion loops” are supposed to work. I can’t find threads, just disjointed comments that don’t seem to attach to anything else. Very weird.

In any event, the site’s a crashing bore.

Our Plan for Glorious Victory in Iraq

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[Update: Here is the transcript of the press conference, and here is Skippy’s translation.]

President Bush answered some reporters’ questions about Iraq today. I checked the White House web site, and the transcript isn’t posted yet. But Susan Jones of CNS provides a glimpse:

President Bush says he fully understands that if the American people think he doesn’t have a plan for victory in Iraq (as Democrats have been saying), they won’t support the war effort.

So on Wednesday, Bush once again explained the stakes — stressing how victory in Iraq is vital to U.S. national security.

At a White House press conference, the president said America’s goals remain the same – to establish an Iraqi government that can sustain itself, govern itself, and defend itself. But he said the methods of achieving those goals are flexible and depend on “dynamic events.” …

… He said he will send more troops to Iraq if Gen. Casey says he needs them to achieve victory, adding that he has “great faith” in Casey to give the best advice.

So is there a plan? Or is “flexibility” a euphemism for “there is no plan”? So far all we’ve gotten from Bush is that there’s a plan for victory, which is to obtain victory. Exactly how we’re going to do that, however, depends on whatever General Casey says it depends on.

At Huffington Post, Marty Kaplan provides another glimpse:

At his press conference today, President Bush rallied his remaining base — those scattered cult members who can always be counted on to agree with whatever he says. To all other Americans, his message is: It’s my way, or the die-way.

If you missed the broadcast, here’s the gist of it:

I’m the decider.

Except for deciding how many troops we have in Iraq, in which case, General Casey is the decider.

Except for deciding what benchmarks the Iraqis have to meet, in which case, Prime Minister al-Maliki is the decider.

Except for deciding what “getting the job done” in Iraq means, in which case, Muqtada al-Sadr and Osama Bin Laden are the deciders.

Except for deciding if it’s “stay the course,” or “strategy for victory,” in which case Karl is the decider.

I’m looking forward to the Baker-Hamilton report. If it agrees with my strategy for victory and getting the job done, I will read it. I call this attitude “flexibility.”

Earlier today, Simon Jenkins of the UK wrote,

This country has been turned by two of the most powerful and civilised nations on Earth into the most hellish place on Earth. Armies claiming to bring democracy and prosperity have brought bloodshed and a misery worse than under the most ruthless modern dictator. This must be the stupidest paradox in modern history. Neither America nor Britain has the guts to rule Iraq properly, yet they lack the guts to leave.

Jenkins says the “coalition” is getting out, whether they admit it or not.

US and UK policy in Iraq is now entering its retreat phrase. Where there is no hope of victory, the necessity for victory must be asserted ever more strongly. This was the theme of yesterday’s unreal US press conference in Baghdad, identical in substance to one I attended there three years ago. There is talk of staying the course, of sticking by friends and of not cutting and running. Every day some general or diplomat hints at ultimatums, timelines and even failure – as did the British foreign secretary, Margaret Beckett, on Monday. But officially denial is all. For retreat to be tolerable it must be called victory.

The US and British are covering their retreat. Operation Together Forward II has been an attempt, now failed, to pacify Baghdad during Ramadan. In Basra, Britain is pursuing Operation Sinbad to win hearts and minds that it contrives constantly to lose. This may be an advance on Kissinger’s bombing of Laos to cover defeat in Vietnam and Reagan’s shelling of the Shouf mountains to cover his 1984 Beirut “redeployment” (two days after he had pledged not to cut and run). But retreat is retreat, even if it is called redeployment. Every exit strategy is unhappy in its own way.

The Bushies lied us into Iraq; now they’re going to try to lie us out of it. The problem is (as I wrote yesterday) I doubt very much the Commander in Chief will allow any significant movement out of Iraq as long as he is president. He will not allow it because he is weak. He is too weak to admit he is wrong; he is too weak to give up his beloved “war president” prop. You can argue — and I have argued, as well — that Iraq was invaded to get votes and aggrandize presidential power. Of course, that is true. But above all, I strongly suspect, Bush is desperately trying to hang on to the last shreds of his much undeserved post-9/11 glory. He’s like a cult leader who would rather kill his followers and himself, by fire or Kool-Aid, rather than give up that glory and return to being a mortal man.

And, of course, those making excuses for the debacle are blaming everybody but Dear and Glorious Leader Bush. For example, Jenkins says, Iraqis — “They are telling the world that the occupation will have failed only through the ingratitude and uselessness of the Iraqis themselves.” This is a theme picked up by war supporter Frederick W. Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute:

It’s been coming for a long time: the idea that fixing Iraq is the Iraqis’ problem, not ours — that we’ve done all we can and now it’s up to them. …

… The implication of these arguments is clear: The United States should prepare to leave Iraq, after which the Iraqis will work out their own troubles — or they won’t. In any event, we can no longer help them. This notion is wrong and morally contemptible, and it endangers American security around the world.

The current crisis in Iraq is no more just an Iraqi problem than it has ever been. The U.S. military destroyed Iraq’s government and all institutions able to keep civil order. It designated itself an “occupying force,” thereby accepting the responsibility to restore and maintain such order.

A strong statement. Then Kagan’s moral courage fails, and he blames the military for the policy:

And yet U.S. Central Command never actually made establishing order and security a priority.

And that is because, oh thou bleeping idiot Mr. Kagan, it is not up to “U.S. Central Command” to establish priorities. That’s the job of the damnfool civilians whose damnfool idea it was to invade Iraq to begin with. And chief among those is “The Decider,” George Bush.

It is the responsibility of the leaders of government, not the military, to understand why war is engaged and what outcome is desired. And most of the time, when nations go to war, military strategy is crafted with that outcome in mind. Leaders of government are supposed to think about what assets of the enemy they want destroyed, and what they want preserved. They’re supposed to decide if the enemy population should be killed, imprisoned, or befriended. There may be political considerations given to what cities or regions are attacked first. These priorities should be communicated clearly to the generals, who are charged with the job of giving the political leaders the outcome they want.

Instead, we had a Commander in Chief who wants more and more power with less and less responsibility. And lo these three years, nearly every complaint about Iraq is met with a speech about how the President “listens to the generals.”

So what our view is, we continue to support the generals in any we can, and in any way they find fitting. And we also understand that based on changing conditions in Baghdad and elsewhere, they may be asking for different things at different times and we’re going to supply them; we’re going to support them fully.

Have you ever noticed that when President Bush is talking about Iraq in the abstract — about victory and glory and all — he’s the proud and courageous and resolute leader. But ask him about specifics, and suddenly, he’s just playing a supporting role.

See also today’s Harold Meyerson column:

The president has fled the field from “stay the course,” signaling not just the unwinnability of his war but the bankruptcy of his political strategy. For as the president and his party grope for an alternative plan of action in Iraq, Karl Rove’s bright line between Republican resolve and Democratic defeatism has become irreversibly fuzzed.

“Stay the course,” after all, was never intended to have a free-standing existence. Republicans invoked it only in dialectical contrast to “cut and run,” their caricature of the Democrats’ preference for a phased withdrawal from Iraq, or for partitioning it into three separate quasi-nations, or for redeploying our troops to neighboring states — or, more simply, of the Democrats’ mounting conviction that our presence in Iraq was growing more pointless each day.

In a strenuous attempt to make lemonade from lemons, George Bush attacked the Democrats for failing to articulate a clear, compelling alternative to his war, though his war created so cosmic a debacle that there were no compelling alternatives.

Meyerson then names several Republicans, explains the many ways they are backing away from George Bush’s War, and concludes — “As Iraq descends into a Hobbesian bloodbath, it’s every man for himself within the Grand Old Party.”

Regarding the “Hobbesian bloodbath” — just read the most recent posts by the two Iraqi bloggers on my blogroll — Riverbend and A Star from Mosul.

Sidney Blumenthal wrote in May that Bush doesn’t take his commanders’ advice as much as he claims to:

Stung by the dissent of the former commanders of the US army in Iraq who have demanded the firing of secretary of defence Donald Rumsfeld, Bush reassured the audience that he listens to generals. “I make my mind up based not upon politics or political opinion polls, but based upon what the commanders on the ground tell me is going on”, he said.

Yet currently serving US military commanders have been explicitly telling him for more than two years, and making public their view, that there is no purely military solution in Iraq. For example, General John Abizaid, the US commander, said on 12 April 2004: “There is not a purely U.S. military solution to any of the particular problems that we’re facing here in Iraq today.”

Newsweek reported on 22 May that the US military, in fact, is no longer pursuing a strategy for “victory”. “It is consolidating to several ‘superbases’ in hopes that its continued presence will prevent Iraq from succumbing to full-flown civil war and turning into a failed state. Pentagon strategists admit they have not figured out how to move to superbases, as a way of reducing the pressure – and casualties – inflicted on the U.S. Army, while at the same time remaining embedded with Iraqi police and military units. It is a circle no one has squared. But consolidation plans are moving ahead as a default position, and US ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad has talked frankly about containing the spillover from Iraq’s chaos in the region.”

Yet Bush continues to declare as his goal (with encouragement from his polling expert on the NSC) the victory that the U.S. military has given up on. And he continues to wave the banner of a military solution against “the enemy”, although this “enemy” consists of a Sunni insurgency whose leadership must eventually be conciliated and brought into a federal Iraqi government ….

In fact, the famous “Strategy for Victory” released by the White House in November 2005 (which was not, in fact, a strategy but a set of goals) discussed political, economic, and security “tracks,” so Bush could have been downplaying military victories in favor of political solutions lo these many months, if he had chosen to do so, and pretended that was the plan all along. Of course, a real leader would have been strong enough to look the American people in the eye and say “from now on we will be pursuing a political rather than a military solution.”

Peter W. Galbraith wrote in the New York Review of Books (March 9, 2006):

Much of the Iraq fiasco can be directly attributed to Bush’s shortcomings as a leader. Having decided to invade Iraq, he failed to make sure there was adequate planning for the postwar period. He never settled bitter policy disputes among his principal aides over how postwar Iraq would be governed; and he allowed competing elements of his administration to pursue diametrically opposed policies at nearly the same time. He used jobs in the Coalition Provisional Authority to reward political loyalists who lacked professional competence, regional expertise, language skills, and, in some cases, common sense. Most serious of all, he conducted his Iraq policy with an arrogance not matched by political will or military power.

Reviewing Paul Bremer’s book My Year in Iraq, Galbraith wrote,

Bremer says that Bush “was as vigorous and decisive in person as he appeared on television.” But in fact he gives an account of a superficial and weak leader. He had lunch with the President before leaving for Baghdad —a meeting joined by the Vice President and the national security team—but no decision seems to have been made on any of the major issues concerning Iraq’s future. Instead, Bremer got a blanket grant of authority that he clearly enjoyed exercising. The President’s directions seem to have been limited to such slogans as “we’re not going to fail” and “pace yourself, Jerry.” In Bremer’s account, the President was seriously interested in one issue: whether the leaders of the government that followed the CPA would publicly thank the United States. But there is no evidence that he cared about the specific questions that counted: Would the new prime minister have a broad base of support? Would he be able to bridge Iraq’s ethnic divisions? What political values should he have? Instead, Bush had only one demand: “It’s important to have someone who’s willing to stand up and thank the American people for their sacrifice in liberating Iraq.” According to Bremer, he came back to this single point three times in the same meeting. Similarly, Ghazi al-Yawar, an obscure Sunni Arab businessman, became Bush’s candidate for president of Iraq’s interim government because, as Bremer reports, Bush had “been favorably impressed with his open thanks to the Coalition.”

This tells us that Bush’s chief priority is his own emotional gratification. And I see no evidence that has changed. So as we go forward and try to figure out what out government is doing, keep that in mind. Whatever policies we adopt, Bush’s emotional gratification will be Job One.

As of now, what’s the plan? Who the hell knows? Today the Washington Post reported that more troops may be sent to Baghdad, but the New York Times reported that there are no plans to send more troops to Baghdad. (And why do I suspect General Casey got a phone call from the White House ordering him to retract the first story until after the midterm elections?)

See also:

“The Next Six Months”

Mark Benjamin, “U.S. generals call for Democratic takeover”

Drew Brown, “Some active-duty troops voice their dissent from U.S. policy in Iraq”

John Dickerson, “President Bush Renames His Iraq Plan”

Christopher Dickey, “A Brother’s Rage”

Tom Engelhardt, “Playing the Numbers Game with Death in Iraq”

Michael Gordon, “Iraqi Realities Undermine the Pentagon’s Predictions”

Ron Hutcheson and Margaret Talev, “Announcement draws skeptical reaction in U.S.”

Mark Tran, “US soldier to voice Iraq conflict opposition“