Interlude

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A bit of an exchange among Todd Purdum, Kate O‘Beirne, and Mike Barnicle on Wednesday night’s Hardball:

BARNICLE: One of the themes in your “Vanity Fair” magazine piece this month, the presidents 41 and 43, both Bushes, is the streak of stubbornness that is akin to both of them. This stubbornness, apparently this is stay the course all the way in Iraq.

PURDUM: It does seem a little bit like stay the course. And of course in some ways, stubbornness is a very admirable quality and both Bushes got where they are because they are stubborn and they are willing to fight against the odds and prove the smart money wrong.

But this feels so much more in a way something like Lyndon Johnson or a slow, steady drip, drip, drip in which it‘s impossible to get any other good news and there are glimmers of good news here and there, to get any traction because of the ongoing drain of the war. It colors everything.

O‘BEIRNE: Of course, one man‘s stubbornness is another man‘s resolve frankly and one thing the people have admired about George Bush, and I think Republican rank and file continue to admire it, is his resolve when it comes to fighting this threat we face.

Oh, yes, resolve. President Bush is one resolved man. He is like a rock in a storm; nothing moves him.

So let’s see how the President is applying this resolve — Condi has been dispatched to do the diplomacy thing; this week the President decided to focus on his domestic agenda. No, seriously. Peter Baker of the Washington Post reported that last Sunday the President went on a bicycle ride and hosted a children’s T-ball game on the South Lawn. Then he flew to Florida to have dinner with “community leaders” who turned out to be “a bunch of former Miami Dolphins football players, an actor and the flamboyant host of a raunchy and ribald Spanish-language variety show,” according to Dan Froomkin. Tuesday he had his annual physical. Wednesday he was in Ohio meeting with “firefighters and other rescuers who helped flood victims in Lake County.” He also attended a fundraising dinner for gubernatorial candidate Ken Blackwell. Thursday he flew to Texas and delivered a speech on immigration reform. Today he’s at the ranch, beginning his August vacation.

But what’s this — he’s only going to be on vacation for ten days this year? Not the whole month? Does that mean he’s going to do some work this August?

White House press secretary Tony Snow says Bush is taking a shorter break not because of criticism but because he has other things to do, including campaigning for Republican candidates in the fall elections, pushing for immigration reform and attending a family wedding in Kennebunkport, Maine.

OK, never mind.

Meanwhile, back in Iraq —

American generals have laid bare the facts: Baghdad is on the brink of chaos, and the specter of all-out civil war looms. …

… The stakes could not be higher: The fate of the U.S. mission in Iraq is on the line as fighting in Lebanon to the west and the rise of a militant Iran to the east threaten American interests throughout the Middle East.

Without a firm grip on Baghdad, the U.S. and its Iraqi allies cannot control the country. But Baghdad’s diverse population of Sunnis, Shiites, Kurds, Turkomen and Christians makes for a volatile mix as the country’s religious and ethnic groups compete for power in the new Iraq. All the tensions that threaten to tear the country apart play themselves out in Baghdad.

As I mentioned this morning, Shiites in Baghdad held a huge anti-American and anti-Israel rally. Anger at Israel’s bombing of Lebanon is driving Iraq into further chaos, as many predicted. Violence in Lebanon increases. Shit is, um, happening.

President Bush delegated foreign policy to his Secretary of State and went on vacation. President Bush is totally dissociated with whatever is happening in the Middle East. This isn’t resolve; it’s pathology.

Good New, Bad News, Part I

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From James Fallows’s new article in the current issue of Atlantic Online (emphasis added):

No modern nation is immune to politically inspired violence, and even the best-executed antiterrorism strategy will not be airtight.

But the overall prospect looks better than many Americans believe, and better than nearly all political rhetoric asserts. The essence of the change is this: because of al-Qaeda’s own mistakes, and because of the things the United States and its allies have done right, al-Qaeda’s ability to inflict direct damage in America or on Americans has been sharply reduced. Its successor groups in Europe, the Middle East, and elsewhere will continue to pose dangers. But its hopes for fundamentally harming the United States now rest less on what it can do itself than on what it can trick, tempt, or goad us into doing. Its destiny is no longer in its own hands.

“Does al-Qaeda still constitute an ‘existential’ threat?” asks David Kilcullen, who has written several influential papers on the need for a new strategy against Islamic insurgents. Kilcullen, who as an Australian army officer commanded counter-insurgency units in East Timor, recently served as an adviser in the Pentagon and is now a senior adviser on counterterrorism at the State Department. He was referring to the argument about whether the terrorism of the twenty-first century endangers the very existence of the United States and its allies, as the Soviet Union’s nuclear weapons did throughout the Cold War (and as the remnants of that arsenal still might).

“I think it does, but not for the obvious reasons,” Kilcullen told me. He said the most useful analogy was the menace posed by European anarchists in the nineteenth century. “If you add up everyone they personally killed, it came to maybe 2,000 people, which is not an existential threat.” But one of their number assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife. The act itself took the lives of two people. The unthinking response of European governments in effect started World War I. “So because of the reaction they provoked, they were able to kill millions of people and destroy a civilization.

“It is not the people al-Qaeda might kill that is the threat,” he concluded. “Our reaction is what can cause the damage. It’s al-Qaeda plus our response that creates the existential danger.”

That’s a point I attempted to make on C-SPAN last February. There’s aren’t enough jihadists in the world to invade and occupy the United States and destroy our government and our military. Only we can do that.

And I say we’re doing a heck of a job.

Fallows interviewed a number of experts — some from military intelligence, some from academia — to understand exactly where we are now, antiterrorism-wise. The essential point of Fallows article is that, although the threat of terrorist attacks in the U.S. remains, there is reason for optimism. In some ways America is safer, he says.

However, as I read the article it struck me that, in just about every area where problems remain, the Bush Administration is heading in the wrong direction.

The good news: The experts that Fallows interviewed say that the old al Qaeda, the one that existed on September 11, no longer has operational ability. Among jihadists Osama bin Laden is not much more than a “Che Guevara–like” symbol. What we have now is “a global proliferation of ‘self-starter’ terrorist groups.” These groups certainly can inflict damage — the London and Madrid bombings, for example — but they lack the resources and organizational ability to pull off another September 11. This, some speculate, is the primary reason there hasn’t been another terrorist attack in the U.S. since.

At the moment about the only way a terrorist group could equal or top September 11 is with a nuclear weapon. And “if nuclear weapons constitute the one true existential threat,” the experts say, “then countering the proliferation of those weapons themselves is what American policy should address, more than fighting terrorism in general.”

Naturally, the Bush Administration has taken a different approach.

The Department of Homeland Security, on the other hand, is, um, probably not the reason there hasn’t been another terrorist attack in the U.S. since. “Indeed, nearly all emphasized the haphazard, wasteful, and sometimes self-defeating nature of the DHS’s approach,” Fallows writes.

Muslim Americans are another reason we’ve been terrorist-attack free for almost five years.

“The patriotism of the American Muslim community has been grossly underreported,” says Marc Sageman, who has studied the process by which people decide to join or leave terrorist networks. According to Daniel Benjamin, a former official on the National Security Council and coauthor of The Next Attack, Muslims in America “have been our first line of defense.” Even though many have been “unnerved by a law-enforcement approach that might have been inevitable but was still disturbing,” the community has been “pretty much immune to the jihadist virus.”

Something about the Arab and Muslim immigrants who have come to America, or about their absorption here, has made them basically similar to other well-assimilated American ethnic groups—and basically different from the estranged Muslim underclass of much of Europe. … most measures of Muslim disaffection or upheaval in Europe—arrests, riots, violence based on religion—show it to be ten to fifty times worse than here.

Muslims in Europe are not always economically disadvantaged. They just don’t assimilate:

The difference between the European and American assimilation of Muslims becomes most apparent in the second generation, when American Muslims are culturally and economically Americanized and many European Muslims often develop a sharper sense of alienation. “If you ask a second-generation American Muslim,” says Robert Leiken, author of Bearers of Global Jihad: Immigration and National Security After 9/11, “he will say, ‘I’m an American and a Muslim.’ A second-generation Turk in Germany is a Turk, and a French Moroccan doesn’t know what he is.”

We have a lot more experience with assimilating people here, of course. Yet we cannot be complacent. Anti-Muslim sentiment in the U.S. is up (thanks loads, Ms. Malkin) and extreme views can be found among American Muslims. Seeing to it that the rightie hatemongers don’t screw up one of our few advantages ought to be a priority.

There’s another gain against terrorism that we’re in the process of losing. In most Muslim countries support for jihadist violence among “civilian” populations has eroded —

“Like Tourette’s syndrome, they keep killing Muslim civilians,” says Peter Bergen. “That is their Achilles’ heel. Every time the bombs go off and kill civilians, it works in our favor. It’s a double whammy when the civilians they kill are Muslims.” Last November, groups directed by al-Zarqawi set off bombs in three hotels in Amman, Jordan. Some sixty civilians were killed, including thirty-eight at a wedding. The result was to turn Jordanian public opinion against al-Qaeda and al-Zarqawi, and to make the Jordanian government more openly cooperative with the United States.

Israel’s attacks on Lebanon blew that one out of the water, I’m afraid. We had already blown it in Iraq —

There, insurgents have slaughtered civilians daily, before and after the death this spring of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq. But since American troops are also assumed to be killing civilians, the anti-insurgent backlash is muddied.

In fact, according to Caleb Carr, the only thing that keeps al Qaeda alive at all is Iraq.

Back to the original point:

In the modern brand of terrorist warfare, what an enemy can do directly is limited. The most dangerous thing it can do is to provoke you into hurting yourself.

This is what David Kilcullen meant in saying that the response to terrorism was potentially far more destructive than the deed itself. And it is why most people I spoke with said that three kinds of American reaction—the war in Iraq, the economic consequences of willy-nilly spending on security, and the erosion of America’s moral authority—were responsible for such strength as al-Qaeda now maintained.

“You only have to look at the Iraq War to see how much damage you can do to yourself by your response,” Kilcullen told me. He is another of those who supported the war and consider it important to fight toward some kind of victory, but who recognize the ways in which this conflict has helped al-Qaeda. So far the war in Iraq has advanced the jihadist cause because it generates a steady supply of Islamic victims, or martyrs; because it seems to prove Osama bin Laden’s contention that America lusts to occupy Islam’s sacred sites, abuse Muslim people, and steal Muslim resources; and because it raises the tantalizing possibility that humble Muslim insurgents, with cheap, primitive weapons, can once more hobble and ultimately destroy a superpower, as they believe they did to the Soviet Union in Afghanistan twenty years ago. The United States also played a large role in thwarting the Soviets, but that doesn’t matter. For mythic purposes, mujahideen brought down one anti-Islamic army and can bring down another. …

… “Many believe that the United States, bloodied and exhausted by the insurgency, stripped of its allies, will eventually withdraw,” Brian Jenkins writes of the jihadist view. From that perspective, “this defeat alone could bring about the collapse of the United States, just as collapse followed the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan.”

The rest of the article catalogues the many ways the war in Iraq is hurting the United States and helping jihadists. And time and time again, the Bush Administration follows Osama bin Laden’s original game plan. We fell into bin Laden’s trap, in other words. And even though bin Laden himself is not reaping the benefits, other jihadists certainly are. Staying in Iraq will continue to drain the United States and strengthen jihad. There are serious perils to leaving, also. There’s no happy remedy to the mess Bush made.

But the situation in Iraq continues to deteriorate. The Associated Press reports:

Hundreds of thousands of Shiites chanting “Death to Israel” and “Death to America” marched through the streets of Baghdad’s biggest Shiite district today in a show of support for Hezbollah militants battling Israeli troops in Lebanon. …

…Al-Sadr followers painted U.S. and Israeli flags on the main road leading to the rally site, and demonstrators stepped on them — a gesture of contempt in Iraq. Alongside the painted flags was written: “These are the terrorists.”

Protesters set fire to American and Israeli flags, as well as effigies of President Bush and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, showing the men with Dracula teeth. “Saddam and Bush, Two Faces of One Coin” was scrawled on Bush’s effigy.

The Shiites were the people we “liberated,” remember.

I’ve got more to say about Iraq and the James Fallows article, but I’ll say it this afternoon.

Tin Foil Time

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Monday I wrote, “I have no doubt the audiences of Faux Nooz and rightie talk radio are being told, over and over, ad nauseum, that the atrocity at Qana was staged, and that the Fable of the Staged Atrocity at Qana is already firmly established in rightie mythos.” I didn’t even have to look.

Via Digby, even Jefferson Morley of the Washington Post called the “Qana was staged” rumor the “right-wing equivalent of the Sept. 11 conspiracy theories.” Glenn Greenwald noticed that the righties are even making all-too-familiar arguments about how buildings collapse.

As Morley says, the Qana conspiracy theories fall apart when you ask about details, such as “How did Hezbollah truck in bodies to the Qana site without the pervasive Israeli aerial surveillance catching it on film?” or “How did any a demolition crew prep the World Trade Center towers for implosion without anyone noticing?” Oh, wait, wrong conspiracy. Sorry.

It won’t matter what evidence comes along that refutes “Qana was staged”/”WTC controlled detonation” theories. These notions are firmly embedded in the heads of the susceptible.

And the moral is, beware of believing what you want to believe.

Hot Stuff

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We on the East Coast have been promised an end to the triple-digit heat. It’s hot in Europe, too. In France 112 people died of heat in July. Germany and Britain endured their hottest July ever.

Well, folks, yesterday snow fell in Johannesburg, South Africa for the first time in 25 years.

I don’t fully understand this, but this article says melting polar ice puts more cold water into the oceans, which in turn stirs up global winds and causes change in weather patterns. So cool places get hot and hot places get cool.

About That Graphic

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The Hate Brigade is trying to stir up outrage over Jane Hamsher’s graphic showing Joe Lieberman in blackface. I didn’t see the graphic until this morning, and I still haven’t seen it in the original context. But this rightie blogger wants to “lure” me into the “fray.” I carry firedoglake on my blogroll, so I’m honor bound to apologize for anything on firedoglake that is inexcusably nasty.

Without seeing the context I can’t comment on the Hamsher graphic specifically. Context is all. When Spike Lee put his actors in blackface, what was he saying? Was he making a racist statement or a statement about racism? The latter, obviously. Lee turned old racist imagery back on itself to blast the racisms and racial hypocrisies still among us. Whether depicting someone in blackface is racist or beyond the pale depends on the message the graphic is intended to convey. Seems to me blackface is only racist per se to racists, who can’t see the difference.

Awhile back I defended Steve Gilliard’s use of blackface in a graphic, because in context there was nothing racist in what Steve was saying with the graphic. Pretty much the opposite, actually; the message intended by the proudly sable Mr. Gilliard was that an African American politician was pandering to racists. And Joe Lieberman is in fact stooping to some bare-assed race baiting, as Mr. Gilliard explains here. Holy Joe deserves to be slammed for it.

Old cartoon depictions of African Americans, like this one (from Puck, 1893) at the Library of Congress, are creepy. Is this poster, published in the 1890s, racist? You betcha. Blackface symbolized white dominance. These once-common images are shocking today. The people who drew them were saying something very ugly about African Americans. Spike Lee notes that such images are hidden away today —

C: About the montage at the end of Bamboozled, which shows how black people have been represented in America – why was it all old film and TV clips? Why didn’t you bring it up to date?

SL: I didn’t feel it was necessary, because there are movies that do that for me already – look at the black characters in The Legend Of Bagger Vance, The Green Mile, Family Man. I thought it was more important to deal with history, because there was a lot of stuff in those films that most people haven’t seen. In the clips of Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney putting on blackface – if you see that film on TV today in the US, they cut that out. We found a cartoon where Bugs Bunny was in blackface, and we wanted to include that, but Warner Brothers refused to let us use it. I don’t think those clips should be buried. I think it’s good we see this stuff. It’s evidence of the misrepresentation of a people.

C: The film seems to make comparisons between gangsta rap and minstrel shows.

SL: I feel that gangsta rap is a 21st century form of a minstrel show, and the sad thing is, a lot of those guys don’t even know it. Rap music is huge, all over the world, but a small percentage of the people that buy it are actually black. And with excessive use of the N-word, a lot of young white kids think it’s OK to use that word, and they go call black people that word also.

As I said, blackface is creepy; it’s shocking; it makes us uncomfortable. I understand that whites don’t want to look at it, particularly whites who aren’t being honest with themselves about their own racism. But if you’re going to deal with racism, whether our society’s or our own, we have to look at this stuff. We have to acknowledge it and pass through it and get beyond it. Racists can’t do that. Instead, they shut their eyes and call us liberals racists because we’re able to look, and process, and turn racism back on itself.

Spike Lee’s point in “Bamboozled” was that the entertainment industry is still stereotyping African Americans. When Steve Gilliard puts Michael Steele in blackface, he’s saying that Steele is still shackled by the racism that blackface has come to personify. And I suspect that’s what Jane Hamsher was saying about Mr. Lieberman.

Update: More distinguished and erudite commentary from Tbogg.

Update update: La Lulu is having a fine time throwing charges of racism at the leftie “nutroots” and smearing Ned Lamont by association. Let us remember some of La LuLu’s past efforts, such as the time she obsessed over her fear of scary black people, as I discussed here:

In one of her most brilliants posts yet, Michelle Malkin calls the suspects “black Muslim radicals” and provides us with an overview of recent terrorist threats coming from black Muslim radicals, going back to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and including the Beltway snipers and black Muslim inmates in Folsom Prison. She even takes a swipe at “the old school black Muslim thugs (and Jesse Jackson pals) of the Chicago-based El Rukn.”

And then she says … get ready for this … “Bob Owens catches the Democratic Underground already playing the race card.”

Awesome. You don’t have to parody Malkin. She does it herself.

This is also the same woman who went on a rampage because U.S. newspapers wouldn’t publish racist caricatures of Muslims, remember.

Update update update: See Steve Gilliard on Lieberman and the racist College Republicans.

BIG Update x 4: Don’t miss David Neiwert.

9/11 Unanswered Questions

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There are unanswered questions about what happened on September 11 that, unfortunately, are being eclipsed by the “controlled detonation” nonsense. Today Dan Eggen of the Washington Post wrote about some big ones —

Some staff members and commissioners of the Sept. 11 panel concluded that the Pentagon’s initial story of how it reacted to the 2001 terrorist attacks may have been part of a deliberate effort to mislead the commission and the public rather than a reflection of the fog of events on that day, according to sources involved in the debate.

Suspicion of wrongdoing ran so deep that the 10-member commission, in a secret meeting at the end of its tenure in summer 2004, debated referring the matter to the Justice Department for criminal investigation, according to several commission sources. Staff members and some commissioners thought that e-mails and other evidence provided enough probable cause to believe that military and aviation officials violated the law by making false statements to Congress and to the commission, hoping to hide the bungled response to the hijackings, these sources said.

In the end, the panel agreed to a compromise, turning over the allegations to the inspectors general for the Defense and Transportation departments, who can make criminal referrals if they believe they are warranted, officials said.

These questions dwell mainly on what NORAD and the FAA were up to on September 11. Someone painstakingly put together this moment-by-moment timeline that reveals the dropped balls and miscommunications that went on that day. (Caveat: I have not fact-checked the timeline point by point, but it appears to be well researched and it jibes with what I remember, so I’m linking to it. If anyone spots any discrepancies feel free to speak up. I have no idea who put it together. The site it’s on is, um, odd.) For example, Boston air traffic control realized that one airplane, American Airlines 11, had been hijacked at 8:25. Air traffic control informed NORAD Command Center at 8:28. NORAD Command Center told NORAD headquarters at 8:32 that an airplane may have been hijacked. NORAD headquarters was supposed to inform the military, but did not. At 8:34 Boston air traffic control called the military. There was some confusion about whether this emergency is real or part of a drill. At 8:46, NORAD finally got two F-15s in the air. At exactly the same time AA 11 crashed into WTC Tower 1. At this time, neither the President nor Vice President had been informed of the emergency.

And on and on. The FAA in particular was haplessly receiving information but not passing it on. The air traffic controllers of various airports were not told what was going on and had to figure it out for themselves. With no direction coming from their superiors (Bush appointees? We should check that.), middle managers at the FAA and NORAD were making decisions themselves. As the disaster progressed White House and top intelligence officials were getting all their information about what was going on from television news. Even after NORAD pilots were in the air, they were not receiving directions or information and were circling aimlessly over Long Island while the President sat in an elementary school classroom listening to children read.

The timeline is actually an entertaining bit of literature, as is the same author’s September 11 Conspiracy Theory page.

Back to Dan Eggen:

For more than two years after the attacks, officials with NORAD and the FAA provided inaccurate information about the response to the hijackings in testimony and media appearances. Authorities suggested that U.S. air defenses had reacted quickly, that jets had been scrambled in response to the last two hijackings and that fighters were prepared to shoot down United Airlines Flight 93 if it threatened Washington.

In fact, the commission reported a year later, audiotapes from NORAD’s Northeast headquarters and other evidence showed clearly that the military never had any of the hijacked airliners in its sights and at one point chased a phantom aircraft — American Airlines Flight 11 — long after it had crashed into the World Trade Center.

Maj. Gen. Larry Arnold and Col. Alan Scott told the commission that NORAD had begun tracking United 93 at 9:16 a.m., but the commission determined that the airliner was not hijacked until 12 minutes later. The military was not aware of the flight until after it had crashed in Pennsylvania.

These and other discrepancies did not become clear until the commission, forced to use subpoenas, obtained audiotapes from the FAA and NORAD, officials said. The agencies’ reluctance to release the tapes — along with e-mails, erroneous public statements and other evidence — led some of the panel’s staff members and commissioners to believe that authorities sought to mislead the commission and the public about what happened on Sept. 11.

Already some “controlled detonation” people have caught wind of “making false statements to Congress” and “criminal referrals” and are hailing this story as vindication of their beloved controlled detonation theory, which of course it isn’t. What it is, is a documentation of utter disarray, most likely caused by incompetence. But I think it is extremely important to understand exactly what went wrong and exactly where balls were dropped and who dropped them. I want to know if corrections have been made. And I want to know if any Bush crony appointees were involved, even though I doubt Shrub had been president long enough to utterly screw up the FAA the way he screwed up FEMA. I’ve misunderestimated him before.

In August 2002 the BBC reported that some of the few military pilots who did get into the air that day were so unprepared they had no ammunition. The pilots were afraid that they’d have to crash their jets into commercial airplanes to stop them. I have yet to hear a word of this breathed on America media.

It’s been almost five years. Of course, they’re still finding bone fragment of victims, mostly on the roof of the Deutsche Bank building. Better late than never.

Update: Some still blame Bill Clinton.

Update update: See also Michael Bronner, “9/11 Live: The NORAD Tapes,” Vanity Fair.

A Narrow Victory for Science in Kansas

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[Update: Sally Cauble defeated Connie Morris by 54.15 to 45.85 percent of the vote. This means the anti-science board members will have no more than four members out of ten on the next board, even if the anti-science candidates all win in the general election.]

Here’s a spot of good news to start the day. Yesterday in a Republican primary election, anti-science conservatives lost control of the Kansas State Board of Education. But, so far, just barely. One anti-science incumbent lost to a pro-science challenger, which will deprive the right-wingers of their majority on the board. Another pro-science challenger is winning, but as of this morning that election hasn’t been called yet.

The Kansas Board of Education, which oversees statewide education policy, has ten members, and anti-science conservatives have held a six to four majority for the past two years. The six have blighted education in Kansas with right-wing policies on teaching evolution, sex education, and charter schools. Yesterday’s election results mean that the right-wingers will have no more than half of the seats, assuming they all win in the general election, and if the votes still being counted go to the pro-science challenger, the anti-science members of the board will be a minority.

From the Kansas City Star:

Kansas has long been a key front in the war over evolution and creationism, and Tuesday’s vote attracted national attention once again: National and international media covered the races, and in the weeks leading up to the election, out-of-state groups on both sides of the fray joined the debate.

This year, 16 candidates filed for five seats on the board; in previous years’ elections the field was less than half that number.

Last year, the board’s six conservatives pushed through science curriculum standards criticizing the theory of evolution. They hired Bob Corkins, an anti-tax lobbyist with no experience in the education field, as education commissioner.

This year, the board’s conservatives voted to encourage local schools to require permission slips for sex-education class and stress the teaching of abstinence.

As bad as the board is, apparently it used to be worse.

All the controversy had moderates hoping for a repeat of 2000, when voters kicked out of office board members who had voted to minimize the teaching of evolution, the age of the Earth and the big-bang theory. The new board members reversed those decisions.

Of the five seats up for re-election, only one was held by a pro-science Republican Democrat, Janet Waugh. Mrs. Waugh won her primary yesterday. [Update: Waugh is unopposed in the general election.] Pro-science moderate challenger Jana Shaver beat anti-science incumbent Brad Patzer. Pro-science challenger Sally Cauble is hanging on to a 54 to 46 percent lead over anti-science incumbent Connie Morris, according to the most recent news stories. The two remaining right-wing incumbents won their primaries.

The five Republican primary winners will face five pro-science Democrats in the general election in November, so it’s possible the anti-science portion of the board will shrink even further if some Democrats win. But Ms. Shaver’s primary win means that, no matter what happens in the general election, the anti-science members will hold no more than half the seats.

Of the election yet to be determined between Sally Cauble and Connie Morris, John Hanna of the Associated Press writes:

Morris’ race in western Kansas was the most closely watched. The former teacher has described evolution as “an age-old fairy tale” and “a nice bedtime story” unsupported by science.

Go, Sally Cauble!

The Big Issue appears to be the standards adopted by the current board for teaching evolution:

The standards say that the evolutionary theory that all life had a common origin has been challenged by fossils and molecular biology. And they say there is controversy over whether changes over time in one species can lead to a new species.

In other words, the “standards” mandate teaching children lies.

The school board contest was part of a larger effort by the intelligent design movement to introduce its ideas in public schools.

A suburban Atlanta school district is locked in a legal dispute over its putting stickers in 35,000 biology textbooks declaring evolution “a theory, not a fact.”

Last year, in Dover, Pa., voters ousted school board members who had required the biology curriculum to include mention of intelligent design. A federal judge struck down the policy, declaring intelligent design is religion in disguise.

A poll by six news organizations last year suggested about half of Kansans thought evolution should be taught alongside intelligent design. …

… Control of the school board has slipped into, out of and back into conservative Republicans’ hands since 1998, resulting in anti-evolution standards in 1999, evolution-friendly ones in 2001 and anti-evolution ones again last year.

Late-night comedians have been making cracks about Kansas, portraying it as backward and ignorant. Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show” broadcast a four-part series titled, “Evolution Schmevolution.”

I’ll update with the result of the Cauble-Morris election as soon as I know it. [Update at top of post — Cauble wins!]

Update: Another story on the election, from the New York Times. See also commentary from The Talking Dog (a highly evolved critter, I must say).

He Might As Well Go On Vacation

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At Slate, John Dickerson writes that yesterday the Saudi Ambassador, Prince Turki al-Faisal, “spoke to a few dozen scholars, journalists, administration officials, and foreign-service officers” at a Washington DC restaurant.

[B]eneath the diplomat’s even manner was a sharp message for President Bush: If you keep failing to act in the Middle East, the region will be irrevocably damaged. …

…The Bush administration has been faulted for not acting quickly enough after the recent violence started, but Prince Turki criticized Bush for not acting to solve the tension long before the recent flare up began. Two months ago, Prince Saud al-Faisal, the Saudi foreign minister, brought a letter to Bush from King Abdullah advocating the steps necessary for implementing Middle East peace. “The president expressed excitement and willingness,” said the ambassador, “but, alas, there was no follow through.” The inactivity contributed to the current crisis: “The decisions made yesterday bear their bitter fruit today.” …

…Turki urged a return to the peace plan proposed by Abdullah in 2002 as offering Israel the most comprehensive solution, including an end of hostilities and normalized relations in return for total Israeli withdrawal from Arab occupied territories, including Jerusalem. “The United States must play the role of pacifier and lead the world to peace and not be led by Israel’s ambitions,” he said, characterizing the Bush administration not just as inactive, but as such a supine thing that it can be led around by Israel.

It’s August. Do you know where your President is? Dan Froomkin tells all —

Bush spent the evening at the exclusive Joe’s Stone Crabs restaurant talking about sports and movies with a bunch of former Miami Dolphins football players, an actor and the flamboyant host of a raunchy and ribald Spanish-language variety show.

It was only hours after Bush had learned that an Israeli air strike had killed dozens of Lebanese children, a moment for soul-searching if there ever was one.

But what did Bush want to talk about?

Former Dolphin Jim Kiick told Steve Wine of the Associated Press that topics of conversation included movies, the 1972 Dolphins and fellow attendee and former Dolphin Dan Marino’s achievements — but little politics.

Shouldn’t Bush be going on vacation soon?

Smart War

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This is something that’s been slooshing around in my head for a while … Richard Norton-Taylor writes on The Guardian web site that

Israel is learning a lesson that the armies of other countries, including the US, have already grasped. Military force can no longer guarantee victory, certainly not in the conflict Israel and its western allies say they are engaged in – the “war on terror”, as the Bush White House calls it, or the “long war”, as the Pentagon now prefers.

Whether you call them guerrillas, insurgents or terrorists, you cannot bomb them into submission, as the US has found to its cost in Iraq, and as Israel is discovering in Lebanon. Even Tony Blair appeared to admit this in his weekend speech to Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp organisation. “My concern is that we cannot win this struggle by military means or security measures alone, or even principally by them,” he said. “We have to put our ideas up against theirs.”

The neocons still haven’t figured this out yet, of course. But this got my attention:

Senior officers in the British army are wondering whether they will ever again fight a war, let alone win one, in the conventional sense.

I sincerely believe the old-fashioned government-declared war between nation-states has become a relic of history. I could be wildly mistaken, of course. Time will tell.

For them, the phrase “war on terror” is a misnomer, one that elevates the enemy and suggests terrorist groups can be defeated by force of arms alone.

Before the attacks of September 11 2001 on New York and Washington, the MoD had published a paper entitled The Future Strategic Context for Defence. No conventional military threats to Britain were likely to emerge, it predicted, in the 30 years to 2030. Instead, it identified terrorism, along with international crime. Prompted by the experiences of the military in the Balkan conflicts of the 1990s (which are far from settled), the MoD, in a further attempt to drive home the military’s limitations, decided to develop what it calls a “comprehensive approach”. In this century, it says in a paper ordered by the chiefs of staff, “the symptoms of crisis will be spawned by a combination of climate change, ideology, greed, ethnic animosity, residual territorial claims, religious fanaticism and competition for resources”.

Military force is no answer to these. What is needed is a “clearer understanding of the root causes” of potential (and actual) conflicts. Revealing the MoD’s [the UK’s Ministry of Defense] liking for acronyms, the paper says there should be more cooperation with OGDs (other government departments), NGOs (non-governmental organisations) and IOs (international organisations).

There’s that “root causes” thing again. The problem is that when Bush talk about “root causes” he seems to think that it’s just fine to bomb the smithereens out of the problem population while the smart guys work out the “root causes.”

The British general who knows this best is David Richards, who yesterday took command of an expanded Nato force in Afghanistan. He knows he is engaged in a battle for “hearts and minds”, a task that requires political and civil institutions, diplomacy and negotiations, not the barrel of a gun or a bomb from a warplane.

The reasons for the futility of force are many, but very crudely — Through history wars have been fought for all kinds of reasons, not the least of which is smoldering enmity left over from the last war. Since the 17th century, when firepower began to dominate warfare, governments had a near-monopoly on war. This was partly because only nation-states had the big guns. But now the forces of changing technology and globalization have made it possible for stateless groups to wage war, too. This is true even though these stateless groups don’t have as many fighters or as much military ordnance as the “regulars,” and this takes us to “asymmetric warfare.”

Just after September 11 Richard Norton-Taylor wrote that asymmetric warfare isn’t new, but in the post-9/11 world it has taken on new dimensions. Such warfare has to be fought on many levels — psychological (the old “hearts and minds” thing), political, diplomatic, financial, and economic, as well as military.

You cannot apply a simple military response when you are challenged politically. The Americans tried in Vietnam and failed, says Wilkinson. [Phillip Wilkinson of King’s College, London]

He is about to go to Washington at the invitation of the Pentagon – the US defence department – to discuss, among other things, the development of “logic and language” and political discourse in “complex emergencies”. What exactly is meant by “war” or “victory”?

These are good questions in a world which has said goodbye (though many, perhaps most, military leaders are slow to recognise the fact) to the era of Clausewitz, the great 19th century German strategist, who was preoccupied with wars between states and the conventional enemy’s “centre of gravity”.

It seems that Mr. Wilkerson traveled in vain. The Bush Administration never did think through the basic question — What exactly is meant by “war” or “victory”? They use the words, but I bet if you gave ’em paper and pencils and asked them to write down what they mean by “war” and “victory,” coherently and concisely, they couldn’t do it. This is, IMO, the primary reason our foreign policy is such a mess.

Another current buzz-phrase is “fourth generation warfare,” or 4GW. There is a great deal of information on 4GW here. I suggest everyone become acquainted with 4GW basics, because understanding it helps clarify many things. Here’s just a bit —

We appear to be returning to the situation that characterizes most of human experience, where both states and non-states wage war. In 4GW, at least one side is something other than a military force organized and operating under the control of a national government, and one that often exploits the weakness of the state system in many parts of the world. For a graphical depiction of how the “generations” evolve, please download The Evolution of Conflict (194KB PowerPoint – version 2/December 2005). …

… One way to tell that 4GW is truly new is that we don’t even have a name for its participants—typically dismissing them as “terrorists,” “extremists,” or “thugs.”

Name calling, though, is not often an effective substitute for strategy.

The attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center dispelled the notion that 4GW is simple “terrorism.” But one can sympathize with our political and military leaders, because 4GW is a strange form of warfare, one where military force plays a smaller role than in earlier generations, supporting initiatives that are more political, diplomatic, and economic.

As important as finding and destroying the actual combatants, for example, is drying up the bases of popular support that allow them to recruit for, plan, and execute their attacks. Perhaps most odd of all, being seen as too successful militarily may create a backlash, making the opponent’s other elements of 4GW more effective.

Get this …

The distinction between war and peace will be blurred to the vanishing point. It will be nonlinear, possibly to the point of having no definable battlefields or fronts. The distinction between ‘civilian’ and ‘military’ may disappear.

Not comforting. Anyway, it seems the days of “total war,” which according to Wikipedia involves “the total subordination of politics to the war effort,” are gone. Now, the war effort must be subordinate to politics. Back in 1864 William Tecumseh Sherman set out to “make Georgia howl” and break the will of southern civilians to support the Confederate army. The March to the Sea helped the Union achieve a complete victory over the Confederacy. But that sort of war, and that sort of victory, are over.

The Bush Administration and the government of Israel have refused to face up to these new realities, and instead are trying to wage an old-fashioned World War II-type war. And it won’t work.

One of the reasons it won’t work is explained in this op ed by Caleb Carr, “Why Good Countries Fight Dirty Wars.” Carr writes that popular notions about “honor” in warfare are so much hoohaw.

The citizen-soldiers sent into the field by the United States or any other Western popular government are expected, by virtue of not so long ago having been free civilians themselves, to be more empathetic with the plight of the noncombatants with whom they come into contact. Certainly, brutal incidents like the My Lai massacre or the Abu Ghraib scandal occur from time to time, but they are widely viewed as cultural aberrations.

This interpretation, however, is as simplistic as it is misleading. All too often the armies of modern democracies have tolerated and even initiated outrages against civilians, in manners uneasily close to those of their totalitarian and terrorist enemies. Israeli troops are currently demonstrating this fact in their response to the Hezbollah rocket offensive — a response most of the world community, according to recent polls, believes is taking an unacceptably disproportionate toll on Lebanese civilians. And there have been times when democratic leaders have been even more open about their brutal intentions: Speaking of the Allied bombing campaign during World War II that culminated in that consummate act of state terrorism, the firebombing of Dresden, Germany, Winston Churchill flatly stated that the objective was “to make the enemy burn and bleed in every way.”

I urge you to read all of Carr’s op ed. Essentially what he says is that conventional warfare and civilian populations just don’t mix, and never did. Soldiers in war will commit atrocities. You can apply training and discipline to keep atrocities to a minimum, but you’re being foolish if you expect to eliminate them. And when applied to asymmetric warfare and 4GW, any abuse of civilians amounts to an army shooting itself in the foot. But instead of a smart, disciplined, fourth generation war, the Bush Administration launched a fiasco. Michael Hirsh:

Reading “Fiasco,” Thomas Ricks’s devastating new book about the Iraq war, brought back memories for me. Memories of going on night raids in Samarra in January 2004, in the heart of the Sunni Triangle, with the Fourth Infantry Division units that Ricks describes. During these raids, confused young Americans would burst into Iraqi homes, overturn beds, dump out drawers, and summarily arrest all military-age men—actions that made them unwitting recruits for the insurgency. For American soldiers battling the resistance throughout Iraq, the unspoken rule was that all Iraqis were guilty until proven innocent. Arrests, beatings and sometimes killings were arbitrary, often based on the flimsiest intelligence, and Iraqis had no recourse whatever to justice. Imagine the sense of helpless rage that emerges from this sort of treatment. Apply three years of it and you have one furious, traumatized population. And a country out of control.

Caleb Carr concludes,

… what happens when a democratic army faces an opponent whose command-and-control structure, as well as its fighting units, is intimately woven into the fabric of civilian society? Is there any solution to the problem of such insurgencies? There is, but it involves the same kind of thinking that pragmatic commanders throughout the modern age have turned to: increased and innovative discipline.

Right now, there are senior U.S. commanders in Iraq (notably Army Lt. Gen. Peter Chiarelli) who are urging new and strict training to teach American troops the cultural, political and military methods necessary to fight this kind of war, steps that could be as revolutionary in reforming how the U.S. projects its power as the more primitive but equally critical reforms instituted by Cromwell and Frederick the Great were for their nations.

If support for such steps among top Pentagon and White House leaders continues to be as halfhearted as it has proved to date, however, the beast inside America’s armed forces will remain alive, and America’s own noncombatants will suffer for it along with the nation’s soldiers, as an active desire for revenge on the part of increasing numbers of foreign civilians steadily mounts.

We’re screwed.

All week the righties have been whining that Israel just can’t help killing civilians because Hezbollah operates out of residential areas, and that ain’t fair. It’s the old “unintentional collateral damage” problem. Back in the days when “victory” meant utterly crushing another nation-state and forcing it to surrender, “unintentional collateral damage” could be tolerated. But now it cannot. Righties like Rush Limbaugh are trying to stir up outrage against the “Hezbos” who don’t wear uniforms and who bivouac in residential neighborhoods and it ain’t fair, but righties are still living in a way pre-9/11 world. .

Here Edward “Captain Ed” Morrissey argues that “terrorists” don’t have to follow rules, and this creates “an impossible double standard for Israel.” Well, yes, that’s the nature of asymmetric warfare. He complains that Israel is criticized for the bombing of Qana while Hezbollah is not criticized for the rockets that it has launched against Israel. Hey, welcome to the world of 4GW. Remember, Hezbollah started the current ruckus not by attacking civilians, but by ambushing Israeli soldiers on the Lebanon-Israel border (which side of the border they were on when this happened depends on whom you ask). In other words, this was an act between two groups of soldiers. It would have been entirely appropriate for Israel to have responded in a discriminatory way that kept the conflict limited to precise strikes, probably by ground troops or special ops, on Hezbollah strongholds. Instead, Israel indiscriminately bombed residential areas and civilian infrastructure even in areas of Lebanon where Hezbollah is not concentrated. Many wise people tried to tell them this was a real bad idea, and they wouldn’t listen.

“We have a right to defend ourselves!” they cried. Yes, but defend yourself smart. Not stupid.

The Oblivious Right thinks that all this hand-wringing over civilians is for weenies. Catch this …

Part of what is crippling Western leaders is the sacrifice-worship of the altruist morality, which programs them, in response to human suffering, to suspend thinking and react emotionally. Natan Sharansky recounts a discussion he had with former president Jimmy Carter about why the Palestinian-Israeli “peace process” kept failing. Carter responded, “You know, you are right, but don’t try to be too rational about these things. The moment you see people suffering, you should feel solidarity with them and try to help them without thinking too much about the reasons.”

Somehow I think some context got left out there, but let’s go on … in fact, it is the righties and the neocons who have suspended thinking and are reacting emotionally. They refuse to sit down and think through consequences; they cannot say precisely what they even mean by “war” and “victory.” They don’t clarify their grand objectives, but think only of killing an ill-defined and amorphous enemy. They still think they are fighting total war, in which the political consequences are subordinated to the war effort.

But even more insidious is a kind of cognitive altruism that tells men to sacrifice, not just their interests, but their judgment, subordinating their knowledge to the opinions and prejudices of others. That is what seems to be operating here. Whatever Secretary Rice knows about the Iranians’ strategy is discarded the moment lurid images of civilian casualties are splashed across the front pages of European newspapers and the broadcasts of Arab television stations. Just as, in this self-abnegating morality, you have to consider the interests of everyone except yourself–so, in this morality of cognitive self-abnegation, you have to consider everyone’s opinion except your own. Thus, faced with the united force of “world opinion,” the formerly “tough-minded” Secretary of State was flustered into an ignominious surrender of American interests.

He’s saying that we shouldn’t be so tender-hearted about the poor civilians or so craven to win the favor of world opinion. But in 4GW, the objective is not to win a military victory but to effect political change. The objective is to dry up Hezbollah’s base of support, not make them more popular. The objective is to encourage peaceful economic enterprises and democratic governments, not blow them to bits while you’re trying to get at the “bad guys.”

This is a strange kind of war, in which we have more than enough military capability to crush the enemy’s “lousy army.” Nor do we lack the intellectual power to understand and counteract the enemy’s strategy. But we lack the moral confidence to use both our power and our knowledge.

Yes, exactly; just as it says above: “4GW is a strange form of warfare, one where military force plays a smaller role than in earlier generations, supporting initiatives that are more political, diplomatic, and economic.”

The righties can’t understand why our superior military might can’t prevail. They cannot wrap their heads around the simple truth that the means they want to use and the objectives don’t fit. At this point, for example, we could bring peace to Iraq with military might, but we’d have to slaughter most of its population and leave Iraq a barren wasteland in the process. And yes, I believe we could do that. But I don’t believe that is the objective. If the objective is to effect political change and turn a population away from Islamic totalitarianism and toward the West, our use of force must be smart and strategically discriminating. Israel didn’t think that through, and that’s why Israel is losing in Lebanon. And the Bush Administration didn’t think that through, and that’s why we’re losing in Iraq.