Hopeless and Getting Worse?

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Here’s another chapter in the continuing saga, “How We Screwed the Pooch in Iraq” —

Peter Baker and Robin Wright write in today’s Washington Post that while President Bush refuses to consider a withdrawal timetable for Iraq, he has been rigidly following a timetable for building a democratic government in Iraq.

When U.S. administrator L. Paul Bremer transferred sovereignty to Iraqi authorities in June 2004, he left behind a script with hard-and-fast deadlines for drafting a constitution and forming a government, a script that culminates Thursday with another election for a permanent parliament.

The story of the 18-month process that unfolded after Bremer left Baghdad was one of steadfast fidelity to the script, as well as a costly period of U.S. inattention and endless frustrations with squabbling Iraqi leaders, according to a wide array of Bush advisers, Iraqi politicians and others involved in the effort. While Bush refuses to set a timetable for military withdrawal, he has stuck doggedly to the Bremer political timetable despite qualms of his staff, relentless violence on the ground and disaffection of Iraq’s minority Sunni Arabs.

Bush’s deadline democracy managed to propel the process forward and appears on the verge of creating a new government with legitimacy earned at the ballot box. His approach resulted in a constitution often described as more democratic than any in the Arab world. Yet by pushing forward without Sunni acceptance, the Bush team failed to produce the national accord it sought among Iraq’s three main groups, leaving a schism that could loom beyond Thursday’s election. And the Sunni-powered insurgency that was supposed to be marginalized by an inclusive democracy remains as lethal as ever.

The Bremer timetable was not the administration’s first choice. Rather, it was forced on Bremer and his staff by the Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the spiritual leader of Iraq’s majority Shiites. The idea behind the timetable — a reasonable idea, IMO — was to allow the Iraqis to take the lead in the democratization process. And, Juan Cole writes,

The article neglects to mention a key factor in holding the Jan. 30 [parliamentary] elections on time, which was that they had been demanded by no later than that date by Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani. He would not have accepted a delay, and would have brought the Shiites out into the street to protest if one were attempted. Bush could not afford to alienate Sistani at a time when the Sunni Arabs were already in revolt.

But the rest of the Bremer schedule — the August 15 deadline for completing the constitution, the October 15 deadline for a national referendum on the constitution, and the Dec. 15 deadline for yet another parliamentary election — could have been adjusted. Juan Cole continues,

In my view, though, it was crazy to attempt to write a permanent constitution in only a couple of months, and the Aug. 15 deadline should have been extended for 6 months. As it was, the drafting process became very messy toward the end; people barely knew which language they were voting for in the referendum; and the Sunni Arabs rejected the constitution almost to a person. It was a very bad outcome, and if Iraq breaks up we will almost certainly trace the break-up to the rush to get the constitution drafted and the way in which the Kurds and Shiites stacked it with goodies for themselves at the expense of the Sunni Arabs.

When Bremer left Iraq in June 2004, after the “transfer of sovereignty,” he was replaced by John D. Negroponte. Negroponte chose to take a back seat in the democratization effort — not an unreasonable decision, given that our official position was that Iraqis were now in charge of Iraq. But in fact the democratization process sputtered and stalled once the U.S. was no longer driving it. And after Negroponte left Iraq in March 2005 to become national intelligence director, four critical months went by before President Bush got around to appointing his successor. This was in spite of the fact that news stories from March 2005 were already naming the likely successor, Zalmay Khalilzad. Khalilzad didn’t get to his new job in Baghdad until July 2005, just a month ahead of the deadline for writing a constitution.

… the Afghan-born envoy had to get up to speed and found a jumbled situation as constitutional negotiators bogged down.

Under the Bremer timetable, they had until Aug. 15 to forge a compact resolving the most divisive issues in the new Iraq, such as the role of Islam and rights of women. Sunnis wanted the constitution to preserve a strong central state, while Shiites and Kurds were determined to carve out or preserve autonomy in their regions. But the Sunnis had no cohesive organization; Khalilzad would receive a list of demands from one faction, then a contradictory list from another.

As the deadline approached, Bush and his advisers meeting at his Texas ranch once again were consumed with the same debate as in January — whether to break the schedule to craft a deal that would satisfy the Sunnis.

Bush, who instinctively dismisses doubters and abhors changing course, again stuck to the plan. “We’ve got to keep the deadline there to force the parties to make the hard decisions to reach compromise,” Bush told advisers, according to Hadley.

With Khalilzad shuttling between parties, Bush delved into the talks personally, calling Shiite leader Abdul Aziz Hakim. “You’ve got to agree to some things that the Sunnis need to come into the process,” Hadley remembered Bush telling Hakim.

This time the deadline passed without agreement. The interim Iraqi parliament just before midnight amended the transitional law to allow more time. It took two more weeks, but over gallons of tea at late-night sessions, the Shiites and Kurds did reach a deal — bypassing the Sunni Arabs.

Those four lost months seem critical now. Why were they not critical then? Can anyone remember what was going on in March, April, May, and June that prevented Bush from making a timely appointment? Oh, wait … the Bamboozlepalooza Road Show was going strong until the first of May. But in May and June his schedule didn’t seem so challenging that he couldn’t have found time to pick up a phone and order Khalilzad to Baghdad. But even though he failed to make a timely appointment, Bush insisted that everyone else stick to the schedule.

To keep to the script and preserve the sense of momentum, the Bush administration had finessed the deadlines, punted the hard choices to the future and gambled that the Sunnis would continue to participate.

“The one single worst mistake was the rigid, shortsighted adherence to the August 15 deadline,” said Jonathan Morrow of the U.S. Institute of Peace, who advised constitutional drafters. That “had consequences for Sunnis buying into the constitutional text. . . . It’s a hopeless situation and it’s progressively more difficult to remedy.”

Juan Cole writes,

Personally, I don’t see any signs at all that this political process has had an impact on the Sunni Arab guerrilla war. And in the Shiite provinces, it has so far ensconced the Shiite religious parties and their paramilitaries (leading to a certain amount of torture and assassination by the security agencies, which are infiltrated by militiamen.)

The parliamentary election scheduled for Thursday will elected a (hopefully) permanent government in Iraq. Indications are that more Sunnis will participate than in January, and if that turns out to be the case the Bushies will whoop it up and call it a major success. It will be a long time before we know how big a success it was, of course. And if violence in Iraq continues, American voters probably won’t see much success at all.

Steve Holland reports for Reuters,

Euphoria over past elections has quickly evaporated in a cloud of violence. Experts said a decrease in Iraqi violence was more critical than elections in turning around American opinion.

Marina Ottaway, senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said the January and October elections did not lead to a higher degree of approval for Bush and doubted Thursday’s elections will do so either.

“There will have to be something much more tangible on the ground,” she said.

Return of the Sixteen Words

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Tom Hamburger, Peter Wallsten and Bob Drogin write in the Los Angeles Times,

More than a year before President Bush declared in his State of the Union speech that Iraq had tried to buy nuclear weapons material in Africa, the French spy service began repeatedly warning the CIA in secret communications that there was no evidence to support the allegation.

The previously undisclosed exchanges between the U.S. and the French, described by the retired chief of the French counter-intelligence service and a former CIA official during interviews last week, came on separate occasions in 2001 and 2002.

How many variations of this story have we seen so far? Newly undisclosed documents reveal that X warned the Bush Administration that intelligence Y wasn’t true, but the Bush Administration went ahead and used Y in their arguments for invading Iraq.

The repeated warnings from France’s Direction Generale de la Securite Exterieure, DGSE, did not prevent the Bush administration from making the case aggressively that Saddam Hussein was seeking nuclear weapons materials.

It was not the first time a foreign government tried but failed to warn U.S. officials off of dubious prewar intelligence. In the notorious “Curveball” case, an Iraqi who defected to Germany claimed to have knowledge of Iraq’s biological weapons. Bush and other U.S. officials repeatedly cited Curveball’s claims even as German intelligence officials argued that he was unstable, unreliable and incorrect.

Yeah, but Bill Clinton believed Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction back in 1998, so that means the invasion was kosher. Somehow.

Gawd, I’m tired of this.

Some Things Aren’t Equal

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I remember a workplace rumor of several years ago — the company I worked for allegedly was considering more “personal” time for employees with children. Whereupon the single and childless among us put up a howl that the policy wouldn’t be fair.

At the time I was employed full time and raising two kids by myself, so I had some pretty strong opinions about what was fair.

An unmarried woman in the next cubicle was howling about how “some people” were going to get a special advantage.

You already have an advantage, I said. Your advantage is that you don’t have children.

She did a double take. What was I talking about?

I tried to explain that the responsibility of children could be crushing, and that their needs didn’t always neatly coincide with out-of-office hours, and that employees who are parents come with built-in time restraints and stresses that the childless don’t have to deal with.

You chose to have kids, she said. Yes, but somebody’s got to do it, I said. Perpetrating the species and all. Not to mention funding Social Security and raising a new generation of consumers. We’re serving a function necessary to the nation and to society. And the company probably figured the cost of the privilege would be made up by increased productivity, which would not be the case if extended to the childless.

You’ll feel differently after your kids have moved out, she said. No, I won’t, I said. They did, and I don’t.

The policy was never instituted, possibly because childless employees put up such a stink. In their next lives they will be brood sows. But my point is that not everything is equitable, and we’re not all playing with the same hand.

I bring this up because some poor deluded girl-child named Meghan Daum actually wrote an op ed in the Los Angeles Times that advocates “choice” for men.

I don’t know Ms. Daum, but I take it the twit-ette is young, childless, and has a boyfriend who spouts this crap.

Most people now accept that women, especially teenagers, often make decisions regarding abortion based on educational and career goals and whether the father of the unborn child is someone they want to hang around with for the next few decades. The “choice” in this equation is not only a matter of whether to carry an individual fetus to term but a question of what kind of life the woman wishes to lead. … If abortion is to remain legal and relatively unrestricted — and I believe it should — why shouldn’t men have the right during at least the first trimester of pregnancy to terminate their legal and financial rights and responsibilities to the child?

Daum acknowledges that this policy would leave to some unfortunate consequences, such as financially undersupported children, but she thinks it’s more important that we be fair.

News flash, toots: Some things can’t be made fair.

Pregnancy and childbirth are unique conditions that have no equivalence in males. Requiring the poor boy to pay child supports is not equivalent to pregnancy and childbirth, which are conditions of the female — and only the female — body. That’s why she gets to choose. But once there is a child, that child is owed the support of both parents.

Ampersand at Alas, a Blog has written about “choice for men” at some length. Ampersand is a lot nicer about it than I am, as I believe categorically that any male who argues in favor of this nonsense is no man. He is an emotional adolescent, a weenie. In the past whenever I’ve written on the topic of men, some weenie will drop by and say that I must not like men. Au contraire. I like men, a lot. It’s weenies I can’t stand.

Anyway, here Ampersand argues that “Both men and women should have every reproductive choice biologically possible.” But trying to balance the facts of biology with a non-biological “equivalent” in the interest of fairness is neither fair nor equitable. It cannot be made equitable.

Period. End of story. And don’t come whining to me about what’s “fair.” Life ain’t fair. Get used to it.

Christmas Warriors II

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I am following up “Target Jesus” and “Christmas Warriors.” I want to respond at length to a commenter on “Target Jesus.”

Miki wrote,

I do feel like ,as a Christian, I’m being shoved into a little box. Where for hundreds of years Christianity was recognized as part of the national identity, now its as if we have become lepers to a small portion of the country so we must be bound, gaged and shoved into a small dark space out of the way. I’m not comfortable with that. I’m not for squashing anyone one elses religious freedoms because I dont want mine curtailed. That is the true problem here. Of course Christians are not quietly going into the closet without a struggle. Why on earth would you think they would?

I appreciate that the writer expressed her (or his) feelings honestly. She is getting into the true motives behind the Christmas wars, and I’d like to go into this a little more deeply.

I do feel like ,as a Christian, I’m being shoved into a little box.

The box you’re in is made up of your own ideas about who you think you are and how you think the world should be. It isn’t real.

Where for hundreds of years Christianity was recognized as part of the national identity,

We haven’t had a “national identity” for “hundreds of years.” In fact, many social historians don’t think we had much of a “national identity” until after the Civil War. I think you are imagining something that didn’t actually exist.

Thomas Jefferson wrote this in his autobiography, regarding the passage of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom (1786):

The bill for establishing religious freedom, the principles of which had, to a certain degree, been enacted before, I had drawn in all the latitude of reason & right. It still met with opposition; but, with some mutilations in the preamble, it was finally passed; and a singular proposition proved that it’s protection of opinion was meant to be universal. Where the preamble declares that coercion is a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion, an amendment was proposed, by inserting the word “Jesus Christ,” so that it should read “a departure from the plan of Jesus Christ, the holy author of our religion.” The insertion was rejected by a great majority, in proof that they meant to comprehend, within the mantle of it’s protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan, the Hindoo, and infidel of every denomination.

In other words, in 1786, the Virginia legislature chose to keep Christ out of this document so as to respect the rights of the “Mahometan” and “Hindoo.”

It is true that the overwhelming majority of Americans have been Christian, but not being Christian never excluded anyone from being American. There have been Jews in North America for 350 years, for example, and Jews supported independence and fought in the Revolution. There have been Buddhists in America since the 1840s; today Buddhist Americans are getting themselves killed in Iraq.

This country is not the exclusive property of Christians. It never was.

“…now its as if we have become lepers to a small portion of the country so we must be bound, gaged and shoved into a small dark space out of the way.”

This is delusional. Christianity is the dominant religion. The amount of Christian-format television and radio broadcasts continues to grow; if you’ve got cable, you can watch Christianity on TV 24/7. What other religion in this country has television programming carried nationwide on cable?

Can you name a way that Christianity is being repressed, other than attempts by Christians to repress non-Christians? For example, trying to get Christian prayers recited in public school classrooms would be forcing non-Christians to observe Christianity, which many find annoying.

I’m not for squashing anyone one elses religious freedoms because I dont want mine curtailed.

How is your religious freedom being curtailed? How is it that you are prevented from believing and worshipping as you wish? Do you have any concrete examples? I’d really like to know, because I am not seeing anybody get in the way of Christian worship in this country. Well, except for other Christians.

What I am seeing, however, is that Christians are trying to use intimidation and sometimes the authority of government to force everyone else to kowtow to Christianity. News flash: This will not win you popularity contests.

Of course Christians are not quietly going into the closet without a struggle. Why on earth would you think they would?

Why on earth would you assume that I think they would? I am not anti-Christian. I think Christianity is a great religion. I just don’t think it’s the only religion, nor do I think it’s better or worse than other religions, including mine. I have no interest in feeding your victimization fantasy. If you want someone to put down Christianity so that you can indulge in feeling sorry for yourself, please go elsewhere.

I don’t want to end this on a snarky note. A couple of other commenters to the “Target Jesus” post defended the megachurches and felt they were being unfairly dissed. And, indeed, members of the megachurches have a right to observe Christmas any way they like. As I said in the Christmas Warriors post, normally I wouldn’t care whether the megachurches cancelled a Sunday morning service or not. It’s their business. But after all the CRAPOLA about some imaginary “war on Christmas,” the cancelled Sunday services just reeked of hypocrisy.

Christmas Warriors

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Laurie Goodstein writes in the New York Times that many Christian evangelicals are criticizing the megachurches that will be closed on Christmas.

Megachurches have long been criticized for offering “theology lite,” but some critics say that this time the churches have gone too far in the quest to make Christianity accessible to spiritual seekers.

“I see this in many ways as a capitulation to narcissism, the self-centered, me-first, I’m going to put me and my immediate family first agenda of the larger culture,” said Ben Witherington III, professor of New Testament interpretation at Asbury Theological Seminary in Wilmore, Ky. “If Christianity is an evangelistic religion, then what kind of message is this sending to the larger culture – that worship is an optional extra?”

Frankly, I wouldn’t care if the megachurches cancelled a Sunday morning service, but combining that with the endless carping about the “war on Christmas” triggered the hypocrisy alarm, big time. Goodstein continues,

What some consider the deeper affront is in canceling services on a Sunday, which most Christian churches consider the Lord’s Day, when communal worship is an obligation. The last time Christmas fell on a Sunday was in 1994. Some of these same megachurches remained open them, they say, but found attendance sparse.

Since then, the perennial culture wars over the secularization of Christmas have intensified, and this year the scuffles are especially lively. Conservative Christian groups are boycotting stores that fail to mention “Christmas” in their holiday greetings or advertising campaigns. Schools are being pressured to refer to the December vacation as “Christmas break.” Even the White House came under attack this week for sending out cards with best wishes for the “holiday season.”

When the office of Gov. Sonny Perdue of Georgia sent out a press release last Friday announcing plans for a “holiday tree” lighting, a half-hour later it sent out another saying, “It is in fact a Christmas tree.”

What’s confusing to me is that the Christmas Warriors seem determined to make Christmas more secular, not less. For years Christians complained that Christmas was “too commercial” and that the emphasis on gifts and Santa Claus were a distraction from piety. But the Warriors have turned that around and are fighting to install the baby Jesus in our nation’s department stores. Church worship, however, is not so important.

Somebody needs to think this through, IMO.

However, closing churches on Christmas is nothin’ new. Adam Cohen wrote in the December 4 New York Times:

In 1827, an Episcopal bishop lamented that the Devil had stolen Christmas “and converted it into a day of worldly festivity, shooting and swearing.” Throughout the 1800’s, many religious leaders were still trying to hold the line. As late as 1855, New York newspapers reported that Presbyterian, Baptist and Methodist churches were closed on Dec. 25 because “they do not accept the day as a Holy One.”

I wonder what those Presbyterian, Baptist and Methodist pastors would say about canceling Sunday morning church service because of Christmas? The words hellfire and brimstone do come to mind.

On the eve of the Civil War, Christmas was recognized in just 18 states.

In the late 19th century, however, the whole presents-and-Santa Claus thing gained popularity.

By the 1920’s, the retail industry had adopted Christmas as its own, sponsoring annual ceremonies to kick off the “Christmas shopping season.”

Religious leaders objected strongly. The Christmas that emerged had an inherent tension: merchants tried to make it about buying, while clergymen tried to keep commerce out. A 1931 Times roundup of Christmas sermons reported a common theme: “the suggestion that Christmas could not survive if Christ were thrust into the background by materialism.” A 1953 Methodist sermon broadcast on NBC – typical of countless such sermons – lamented that Christmas had become a “profit-seeking period.” This ethic found popular expression in “A Charlie Brown Christmas.” In the 1965 TV special, Charlie Brown ignores Lucy’s advice to “get the biggest aluminum tree you can find” and her assertion that Christmas is “a big commercial racket,” and finds a more spiritual way to observe the day.

And now we’ve come full circle, with people claiming to represent Christianity fighting to put Jesus in Target but making excuses for closing churches on a Sunday because of Christmas.

Some commenters to an earlier Christmas War post concluded that I am anti-Christian. I am nothing of the kind. I am, in fact, defending the religion of Christianity from those who would cheapen and degrade it.

This post has gone on long enough; I’ll have more to say later.

Not So Much

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Yesterday I blogged about all the little, um, details Bush left out of his vision of a glorious march to victory in Iraq. Here are more.

Bush described wonderful progress in the city of Najaf:

Najaf is now in the hands of elected government officials. An elected provincial council is at work drafting plans to bring more tourism and commerce to the city. Political life has returned and campaigns for the upcoming elections have begun with different parties competing for the vote.

The Iraqi police are now responsible for day-to-day security in Najaf. An Iraqi battalion has assumed control of the former American military base and our forces are now about 40 minutes outside the city.

A U.S. Army sergeant explains our role this way, “We go down there if they call us and that doesn’t happen very often. Usually we just stay out of their way.”

Residents of Najaf are also seeing visible progress and they have no intention of returning to the days of tyranny and terror.

One man from Najaf put it this way: “Three years ago we were in ruins. One year ago we were fighting in the streets. Now look at the people shopping and eating and not in fear.”

Or maybe not. Alaa al-Morjani and Sindbad Ahmed write for the Associated Press:

Najaf is a largely peaceful Shiite city 100 miles south of Baghdad that has not suffered from the sectarian attacks ravaging other parts of the country. But rivalries between Shiite factions have occasionally become violent, and many complain that militant political parties and militias dominate city government and security forces.

On Sunday, former Prime Minister Ayad Allawi visited the Imam Ali shrine, among the holiest in Shiite Islam, and was attacked by a crowd that forced him to flee in a hail of stones and shoes. Allawi called the attack an assassination attempt. …

… In his speech Wednesday, Bush alluded to the expulsion of Sadr’s militia from the shrine last year.

But the militiamen who were from Najaf never left the city. They just stopped carrying weapons around the shrine area. In the summer, a fistfight in Najaf between followers and opponents of Sadr triggered battles throughout southern Iraq between the cleric’s supporters and followers of the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, a major party in the ruling Shiite coalition.

Funny, Bush didn’t mention any of that.

Robin Wright and Saad Sarhan write in today’s Washington Post:

In a tale of two cities, President Bush yesterday heralded progress in northern Mosul and southern Najaf as new models for rebuilding Iraq.

But last Friday, Iraq’s government imposed emergency law and a curfew in Sunni-dominated Mosul and throughout Ninevah province, and a senior U.S. official in Baghdad yesterday referred to the city of about 1.7 million as “nasty Mosul.”

And James Glanz writes in the New York Times,

President Bush on Wednesday cited a teaching hospital in Najaf as perhaps the top example of a successful rebuilding project in Iraq. Since the American-led attack against local militias leveled large portions of Najaf in August 2004, however, the hospital has been most notable as a place where claims of success have fallen far short of reality.

During two visits to the hospital by reporters for The New York Times over the past year, the most recent in late summer, work on refurbishing it had been limited to largely cosmetic work like new ceilings and lighting and fresh paint. Critical medical equipment was missing and the upper floors remained a chaotic mess.

Numerous Iraqis at the site said the hospital had not been ruined by the militia that occupied it during the 2004 fighting, but instead by looters who entered after the American military left it unguarded after the battle.

Next: WTF?

Update: Check out today’s Dan Froomkin column:

Some American journalists intent on fact-checking President Bush’s vision of Iraq are finding it too dangerous to inspect the areas Bush yesterday cited as models of success.

Which sort of tells you the story right there.

Target Jesus

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How bleeped up is this? Rachel Zoll of the Associated Press reports that some big holy roller born again in-your-face-with-JEEzus megachurches will be closed for Christmas.

This Christmas, no prayers will be said in several megachurches around the country. Even though the holiday falls this year on a Sunday, when churches normally host thousands for worship, pastors are canceling services, anticipating low attendance on what they call a family day. …

… Cally Parkinson, a spokeswoman for Willow Creek Community Church in South Barrington, Ill., said church leaders decided that organizing services on a Christmas Sunday would not be the most effective use of staff and volunteer resources. The last time Christmas fell on a Sunday was 1994, and only a small number of people showed up to pray, she said.

“If our target and our mission is to reach the unchurched, basically the people who don’t go to church, how likely is it that they’ll be going to church on Christmas morning?” she said.

Among the other megachurches closing on Christmas Day are Southland Christian Church in Nicholasville, Ky., near Lexington, and Fellowship Church in Grapevine, Texas, outside of Dallas. North Point Community Church in Alpharetta, Ga., outside of Atlanta, said on its Web site that no services will be held on Christmas Day or New Year’s Day, which also falls on a Sunday. A spokesman for North Point did not respond to requests for comment.

The closures stand in stark contrast to Roman Catholic parishes, which will see some of their largest crowds of the year on Christmas, and mainline Protestant congregations such as the Episcopal, Methodist and Lutheran churches, where Sunday services are rarely if ever canceled.

Have I ever written that most of what passes for “Christianity” in the U.S. has nothin’ to do with either Jesus or worship? I believe I have.

This is stunning. Some of the same people who have their noses out of joint because clerks at Target say “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas” aren’t interested in a religious observance of the birth of Jesus. They want Christ in Target, not in church.

It’s not just Target in trouble with the Merry Christmas crowd. Alan Cooperman writes in today’s Washington Post that they’re pissed off at President Bush because of the White House Christmas cards.

This month, as in every December since he took office, President Bush sent out cards with a generic end-of-the-year message, wishing 1.4 million of his close friends and supporters a happy “holiday season.”

Many people are thrilled to get a White House Christmas card, no matter what the greeting inside. But some conservative Christians are reacting as if Bush stuck coal in their stockings.

“This clearly demonstrates that the Bush administration has suffered a loss of will and that they have capitulated to the worst elements in our culture,” said William A. Donohue, president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights.

Bush “claims to be a born-again, evangelical Christian. But he sure doesn’t act like one,” said Joseph Farah, editor of the conservative Web site WorldNetDaily.com. “I threw out my White House card as soon as I got it.”

I don’t know where in the Gospels Jesus said “Thou shalt be a judgmental, obnoxious asshole for My sake,” but I guess it’s in there somewhere.

What Bush Didn’t Say

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As I listened to Bush’s speech today at the Council of Foreign Relations I was struck by all the things he didn’t say.

He started out by comparing Pearl Harbor with September 11. Both times we confronted new dangers with firm resolve and a will to fight without wavering, blah blah blah. He really wants to be Churchill.

He marched ahead to his standard theme: Terrorists have made it clear that Iraq is the central front on its war against humanity. So we must recognize Iraq as the central front on the war on terror.

Notice he didn’t say that anything he did made Iraq the central front on the war on terror. It just happened.

Then he recapped last week’s speech regarding the three kinds of bad people in Iraq: Sunni rejectionists, Saddam loyalists, and terrorists. The terrorists are the smallest but most lethal group, he said, led by brutal terrorist Zarqawi who has pledged allegiance to Osama bin Laden. They want use Iraq as a base from which to launch attacks against America and establish Islamic totalitarianism from Spain to Indonesia. They have the same ideology as the terrorists who attacked us on 9/11. Can’t leave out 9/11. If we were not fighting them in Iraq they’d be plotting against Americans; because we’re keeping them too busy to plot, I suppose. The usual bullshit, in other words.

Bush said that our strategy has a political side, a security side, and an economic side. This speech was supposed to be about the economic side, but frankly I didn’t hear him give many specifics about economics. And I don’t believe he mentioned oil at all, but I might have missed it.

Bush said that “terrorists” keep retaking territory that had been liberated by coalition forces because there havn’t been enough Iraqi soldiers to hold the territory after it had been liberated. What he didn’t say was that maybe there weren’t enough coalition troops at hand to do the job they’d been directed to do.

Last year, he said, a violent militia took over Najaf, but coalition and Iraqi forces retook it and forced out the militia. What he didn’t say was that the militia was not made up of Sunni “rejectionists” or “Saddam supporters” or al Qaeda-like terrorists. It was Shi’ite cleric Abu Sadr’s Mehdi army militia.

He talked about all the infrastructure that had been devastated during Saddam’s reign. What he didn’t say was that his administration’s lack of planning and failure to send enough forces to provide security after the invasion resulted in a whole lot more devastation of infrastructure, and hospitals, and schools, and lots of other things. No, he just talked about all the damage Saddam was responsible for.

Iraqis are beginning to see that a free life is a better life, Bush said. But reconstruction is going more slowly than we’d like because of a lack of security. See previous paragraph.

He whined about the awful news media that doesn’t cover good news coming out of Iraq. What he didn’t say was that security in Iraq is so bad that many journalists are afraid to leave the Green Zone. Reporting is barely possible in Iraq.

He praised Joe Lieberman. Again. Lordy, we’ve got to do something about Lieberman. Mistakes have been made, Bush said (note the passive voice; he doesn’t say who made those mistakes) but good Joe Lieberman says that the biggest mistake would be to lose our will. Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, and all that.

Without naming him, Bush criticized Jack Murtha’s recent proposal for withdrawal. It would make America less safe, Bush said, although he offered no arguments to back up that claim. It would be giving the terrorists what they want, Bush said. Yeah, that’s what they want you to think, fratboy.

The Council of Foreign Relations audience sat quietly through most of the speech. Only once did they interrupt with applause — very tepid applause — after Bush had said something about not leaving Iraq. I was listening to the speech on MSNBC and didn’t watch it much, but I did take a peek at the end to see if Bush got a standing ovation. It appears he did, but the cameras only showed the guys in the front rows. For all I know the rest of the audience was already sneaking out the door.

And, like last week, as soon as the speech ended somebody played “Stars and Stripes Forever.” Canned? I can’t imagine the Council of Foreign Relations keeps a marching band around. Kind of weird, if you ask me.

Update: Thanks to Ken Melvin for this link —

Bush’s speech, hosted by the Council on Foreign Relations, was the second in a series of four to answer criticism and questions about the U.S. presence more two and a half years after the war started. He spoke to a group of foreign policy experts, many of whom have been critical of his policies. They gave him a cool reception. Some in the audience interrupted to applaud when Bush said the U.S. would not run from Iraq, but most sat stoically during the entire speech.

Also: Here’s a transcript, courtesy of the Washington Post.

Update update: Jack Murtha is giving a rebuttal to the speech. I missed part of it, but essentially he’s saying he tried to warn the President and the Pentagon before the invasion that the job in Iraq was going to be harder than they seemed to think it was. If you find a transcript or video, please post the link!

A Bush and Its Backdrops

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President Bush will be making the second of his Iraq War sales pep talks to the Council of Foreign Relations later this morning. I don’t know if there are plans to televise it, but if it’s on I’ll monitor, at least, and post if he says anything interesting or surprising.

Dan Froomkin writes that the pathetic weenie President demanded that the group allow him to speak but not take questions, which is a big departure for them.

President Bush will deliver the second in a series of four speeches on his Iraq strategy tomorrow in Washington to several hundred members of the Council on Foreign Relations — an august group of scholars, policymakers and journalists whose Web site is an Internet hotspot for intellectual foment about foreign policy in general and Iraq in particular.

But rather than probe the group’s expertise or even respond to its concerns, Bush is just using it as a backdrop.

People were starting to talk about Bush’s “thing” for young guys in uniforms.

Bush is not likely to see the same sort of wide-eyed enthusiasm from this audience that he is used to seeing from hand-picked supporters, on-duty military audiences or intimidated employees.

But he’s not likely to encounter any undiplomatic behavior from this dignified crowd, either. And their inevitable standing ovations, out of respect for the office, will play well on television.

And if he doesn’t get a standing ovation, you can bet that he’ll deliver the next speech at one of our nation’s fine military academies.

Acts of Cognition

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Republican Sen. Lindsay Graham writes in today’s Washington Post, “In my view, the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, were an act of war, not a mere crime.”

Senator Graham goes on to make a nice argument for why we shouldn’t torture detained terrorist suspects. I want to comment only on that first sentence, however.

I remember September 13, 2001, wandering about Manhattan. I walked from Grand Central to Times Square, then took the Seventh Avenue local train to 14th Street, then walked over to Union Square. The pain in the city was palpable. Pictures of the dead — we weren’t yet acknowledging they were dead, but we knew — were stapled or taped on every available surface.

I remember feeling a kind of numb emptiness, and not just from sorrow. I remembered thinking that it would have been easier to process what I felt if the perpetrators had been more well-defined, something solid that we could circle on a map and label “enemy,” instead of wraiths from a shadow world I barely knew. If we had been attacked by another country, we could redirect our pain into simple purpose –going to war, defeating an enemy. But on September 13 it was as if we’d been attacked by mist. What would we do? The lack of a clear, well-defined path of action made the present seem so much harder to bear.

Over the next several days we learned more, of course. We learned about Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda, and we learned that much of that organization was being sheltered by the Taliban in Afghanistan. That was something tangible, with geographic boundaries. Yet we were not going to war with Afghanistan, but with something that could cross national boundaries as easily as smoke.

However, things are what they are. We have a lazy tendency to “understand” phenomena by sorting it into a pre-arranged file structure in our heads. But putting a label on something, or assigning a place for it in an ideological taxonomy, is not the same thing as knowing it as-it-is.

This is one part of my Zen studies that seems to have stuck. Words are not reality. Concepts are not reality. Zennies go way beyond thinking outside the box. Zennies are all about destroying the box altogether and evaporating all reference points in order to realize enlightenment. I can’t say I quite got to that point. But I still try to appreciate things as-they-are instead of by some system of classification.

It seems meaningless to me to classify the 9/11 attacks as either a war or a crime. They were what they were. Both, and neither.

You might have heard the old Hindu story about the blind men and the elephant; the men, feeling different parts of the elephant, got into an argument about whether the elephant was like a tree trunk, a snake, a fan, a wall, a spear, or a rope. Seems to me that arguing about whether 9/11 was an act or war or a crime is just about as blind. To understand it, you need to wipe former points of reference out of your head and take it in as-it-is. And you need to take it all in, not just whatever part seems most graspable.

Most of the chest-thumping bravado one finds on the Right makes me realize the chest-thumpers are looking at Islamic terrorism and seeing something entirely different from what I see. They’re seeing something like a conventional war; I do not. So many citizens (erroneously) embraced the invasion of Iraq out of emotional need to find a solid, tangible enemy to fight in a glorious little war. As I said, it makes processing the pain of 9/11 so much easier. But that’s an emotional crutch, not reality. And, as I argued this morning, all our thrashing around in Iraq is leaving us weaker and more vulnerable to real threats.

Real leaders would have helped us face reality while we processed our pain. Real leaders would have helped us understand the complex nature of what we faced while finding rational and effective ways to deal with it. Instead, we had Bush and Cheney. Not so much Dumb and Dumber as Dumb and Bleeping Delusional. Too bad for us.

Think of the Iraq War as the Mother of All Security Blankets. It’s what the Right clings to because they lack the fortitude (or brainpower) to face reality. And that’s why no amount of reasoning will persuade them to let go of it.