Decline and Fall

I don't link to Glenn Greenwald enough (hell, I don't link to anyone enough) but his snarky take on Michael Calderone's piece on the year's biggest political scoops, which included Sarah Palin's shopping spree and McCain's houses but made no mention of the White House's endorsement of torture, is worth reading in full. A snippet:

In fairness to Calderone and his comrades in the political press, our media currently covers a country that has very few substantial problems and an administration that is renowned around the world for being competent, honest, conventional and quite uncontroversial. In general, countries which enjoy great tranquility, prosperity, and stability -- such as the U.S. today -- can afford the luxury of fixating on the types of fun and trivial stories which comprise the list of top "scoops" heralded by Politico.

Indeed, the only real news story in Calderone's bunch is the one where the White House used supposedly independent Military Analysts as propagandists for the DoD in the news media, which Greenwald notes was also, coincidentally I'm sure, the one that sank without a trace. I wrote about it here, and here is a list of Greenwald's more thorough takes, helpfully organized by Margalis at Common Nonsense.

As an antidote, here are 25 stories that didn't make Politico's cut, from Project Censored.

Labels: Framing, media, politics

Via Art of the Possible: Jewish voters are stupid and insufficiently tribal because they voted for Obama, according to conservative columnist Don Feder. This article is all kinds of wrong, and someone needs to fisk the whole thing, but here are a few highlights:

That McCain had an unblemished, 20-year record of support for Israel, Obama is surrounded by advisors who are hostile to Israel, and Iranian Television described the latter as “highly educated” and “eloquent,” mattered not in the least.

Yeah, that Rahm Emanuel is an anti-zionist of the first order. And anything Iranian Television says must be false. If they say the sky is blue, they're wrong and deserve to be militarily occupied.

Even though Iran is led by a raving anti-Semite and Holocaust-denier – who’s said Israel “should be wiped off the face of the Earth” – even though Iran was voted most likely to commit nuclear suicide if it could take Israel with it, a plurality of Jews still said they’d oppose U.S. military action to forestall a second Holocaust.

Poor Iran. They so wanted to win "Most Likely to Create a Death Star," but that award went to Japan. There, there, it's just a popularity contest. Oh, and Ahmedinejad didn't say that.

As Jewish author Dennis Prager notes, if there was a connection between Judaism and liberalism, those Jews grounded in Torah and most committed to living a Jewish life, would be the most liberal.

Right. Because the more Orthodox you are, the more Jewish you are. And Dennis Prager is definitely the go-to guy for impartial analysis.

[Obama] attended Farrakhan’s 1995 Million Man March, and later lauded the neo-Nuremberg rally as an event that brought African-American men together and showed they were ready “to make a commitment to bring about change in our communities and our lives”

"Neo-Nuremberg rally"? WTF? Nothing hyperbolic there, Godwin.

[Obama] said the “legitimate claims” of Hezbollah are “weakened” by its violence

You mean to tell me there's absolutely nothing legitimate about Hezbollah's claims, which in turn aren't weakened by their use of violence? How on earth is that even a controversial statement?

[Obama] said the terrorist attacks of 9/11 grew out of “a climate of poverty and ignorance, helplessness and despair” – to which we must not overreact

I don't know of any actual scholar in the field who denies that "poverty and ignorance, helplessness and despair" are at least part of the root causes of terrorism. It's clearly an extremist position, taken only by those who truly hate the Judeo-Christian faith, and Israel is as good as incinerated now that Barack Hussein is in charge.

Those Jews also reject the Judeo-Christian ethic and the historic mission of the Jewish people – to repair the world under the rule of God.

Because there's only one way of interpreting the injunction to "repair the world," and that's to "vote Republican." After all, the world is in much better shape now than it was eight years ago. But Jews are too stupid to that..

How this bigoted, jingoistic moron has been allowed to write a sydicated column for a quarter century is beyond me. But he's certainly at home in today's conservative movement.

Labels: conservatism, politics, religion

After opposing "timelines for withdrawal" from Iraq on principle for years now, the Bush Administration has agreed to one. One of the things that struck me about the article was the way time constraints led to the Administration giving in on one of its key lines in the sand. My guess is that Iraqi officials stalled, and Bush blinked:

The U.S. government has lobbied hard for the status-of-forces agreement, which would replace a United Nations mandate authorizing the U.S. presence that expires on Dec. 31. Without some legal umbrella, the 150,000 U.S. forces would have to end their operations in Iraq in a few weeks' time, military officials said.

...

One issue is timing: The notoriously slow-moving Iraqi parliament is scheduled to adjourn on Nov. 25 for a three-week break to allow lawmakers to make the hajj pilgrimage.

"We have a limited window of time," warned Hoshyar Zebari, the foreign minister.

America has been generally belligerent toward the nascent Iraqi state, treating their clear wishes, such as timelines, as the suggestions of politicians clearly out of their depth.

This paternalism is the sort of thing that hawks believe projects strength, but by refusing to budge on Iraq's (and the rest of the world's) demands for more autonomy, reductions in U.S. forces, legal accountability for the actions of U.S. military and civilian personnel and a timeline for withdrawal, America has backed itself into a corner where the only options were "leave soon" or "leave now." America could have spent the last five and a half years working in good faith with Iraqi officials to transfer authority as soon as possible, but instead Bush insisted on calling the shots, thus weakening his position when the inevitable day came when America had to negotiate.

Maliki was aware of this, but the Administration seemed to be oblivious. Another example of the grotesque hubris and myopia that have characterized the Bush years. Basically, Maliki schooled Bush.

(Cross-posted at OOIBC.)

Labels: Iraq, military, OOIBC, politics

I've been reading a lot of commentaries on the movement conservative "cocoon," and I certainly agree that the Right has apparently recused itself from the "reality-based" world the rest of us live in, but I'd like to propose an alternative metaphor: the Conservative Cave.

I'm referring specifically to Plato's Allegory of the Cave, from Book VII of The Republic. If it's been a while since you read it (or are encountering it for the first time), here's the gist: imagine a group of prisoners who had been chained up their whole lives, unable to move, and only able to see the cave wall in front of them. Behind them is a fire which creates shadows on the wall, which the prisoners take to be reality. They know nothing of the sun or the rest of the world beyond the cave's walls. Now imagine that they are freed, and after a lifetime of knowing only the wall in front of them (and believing that the shadows of things on the wall were the things themselves) they are exposed to the world in all its variety. Some of those freed prisoners would embrace their new knowledge, and go back to the cave to tell those still imprisoned about the wide wonders they had seen. Others would reject their new knowledge and retreat back to the comfortably familiar ignorance in which they had always lived.

You can see where I'm going with this.

Conservatives have elected to reject the outside world in favor of their safe little cave, where Rush Limbaugh and Fox News are constantly piped in, the internet blocks everything but Red State and NRO, and the only reading material is The Weekly Standard and the Regnery catalogue. If something happens outside their world it is either ignored or filtered to the point of unrecognizability. Hence the ludicrous claims about global warming, evolution, Iraq, and Sarah Palin's cognitive abilities.

You see, it's not that conservatives are stupid or evil: they're imprisoned by their ideology, staring blankly at the wall in front of them and believing it's the whole wide world while behind them Bill Kristol makes shadow puppets with his hands. How else to account for the Right's fierce anti-intellectualism, xenophobic talk of "real" America and mindless repetition of self-evidently baseless talking points?

The Left isn't immune to this, by the way. If you think Ralph Nader isn't as blinkered by his own ideology as the editors of the National Review are by theirs, you're setting yourself up for a stay in the same prison (but yours will have Rachel Maddow and The Daily Show on TV and Democracy Now! on the radio). Feel free to imagine the libertarian, paleo-right and communist versions of the prison. The ultimate problem is ideology, and the way it distorts reality.

Labels: conservatism, Framing, politics, reason

I'm sure you've all heard the "Trig Palin is actually Sarah's grandson" rumors, and are now acquainted with the "Palin's 16 year-old got pregnant out of wedlock" story. I agree with Andrew Sullivan that the story is still fishy, especially the bit about Palin giving a speech, then flying from Texas to Alaska via Seattle on commercial air and bypassing the big, conveniently-located hospital in Anchorage to give birth somewhere more private--all after her water broke. How to end this responsibly? Here's Sullivan:

Why not kill this rumor with Palin's medical records? A 43 year old woman's pregnancy with a Downs Syndrome child would have been intensely monitored, and the records must be a mile long. Just release them, ok? If necessary in a closed room for reporters, just as with McCain. And we can all breathe a sigh of relief and move on.

I hope, for the nation's sake, this happens soon and Sarah is actually the mother, but I think we deserve to know if a potential Vice President faked a pregnancy.

BUT...

I'm glad Obama has drawn a line in the sand regarding scrutiny of candidates' children. Here's what he said at a press conference today:

Jake Tapper: Governor Palin and her husband issued a statement today saying that their 17 year old daughter Bristol who is unmarried is 5 months pregnant. Do you have a comment?

BO: I have heard some of the news on this and so let me be as clear as possible. I have said before and I will repeat again, I think people's families are off limits, and people's children are especially off limits. This shouldn't be part of our politics, it has no relevance to governor Palin's performance as a governor or her potential performance as a vice president. And so I would strongly urge people to back off these kinds of stories. You know my mother had me when she was 18. And how family deals with issues and teenage children that shouldn't be the topic of our politics and I hope that anybody who is supporting me understands that is off limits.

Those of us who comment on politics ought to follow this advice. Attacking the children of candidates perpetuates the politics of slander and trivialities, which diminishes us all. It obscures the real issues of this election. No one comes out a winner.

Hilzoy at Obsidian Wings made the human decency argument in the strongest, most humane terms I've seen:

It's easy, in the midst of a political campaign, to forget that the people involved are, after all, people. Some of them -- Sarah Palin, for instance -- place themselves under a media spotlight of their own free will. Others -- her daughter, for instance -- wind up there through no fault of their own. Imagine yourself in her position: there you are, seventeen years old, pregnant, unmarried. Maybe you understand what happened and why; and maybe your parents and friends do as well. But zillions of bloggers and reporters and pundits are about to make the most personal details of your life into a political issue, and they don't understand it at all. And yet, despite that, they are about to use you and your unborn child to score points on one another, without any regard whatsoever for you and your actual situation.

Hopefully those of us who remember Dan Quayle's despicable Murphy Brown remarks (which, incidentally, introduced the phrase "family values" into popular parlance--a dubious achievement if there ever was one) will think twice before criticizing a child for making a mistake. And no, "nyah, nyah, Republicans are hypocrites" arguments are not legitimate either. Not when it involves children and politicians' private lives in ways that say nothing substantive about their policies.

Let's rise above this and do what would have been easy anyway: critique McCain and Palin on substance.

Labels: Election '08, McCain, Obama, politics

The first day of the Republican National Convention has been more or less called off and both the current President and Vice President of the United States will be skipping their party's convention so that Bush and the rest of the GOP can focus on New Orleans relief. I'm surprised but admittedly heartened that Bush would do such a thing, although we all know that his presence at the convention would be poison to McCain's campaign, so it's not a purely statesmanlike move. Given the choice between Bush hiding his head in the sand, behaving like a petulant child and insisting that his surrogates are doing a "heck of a job," and him acting like an actual President, I'll take the latter.

But this is frightening: a contractor for the Army Corps of Engineers filled New Orleans floodwalls with newspaper, in direct violation of the terms of their contract no less, according to an eye witness in this WWLTV report, complete with video:

“It's like putting a Band-Aid on the hole of a gas tank of an airplane,” the resident said.

Instead of an airplane, it's a floodwall, and instead of a Band-Aid, the witness says two years ago, he saw the contractor filling the expansion joint or opening between the floodwalls with newspaper.

“The whole length of the wall was stuffed with newspaper.”

And when he confronted the contractor, the contractor blamed Washington for the substandard work.

“He basically told me when Congress sent down the money, it would be repaired the proper way.”

But during a recent trip to the area, two years later, it was apparent that didn't happen. Much of the newspaper had deteriorated or been eaten by bugs, but some still remained. In fact WWL cameras even captured the date May 21, 2006, on a page of the Parade magazine from the Times-Picayune.

I hope the people on the gulf coast are getting out now, or are already gone. This one looks big, and I doubt anyone in its path feels confident in the U.S. government's ability (or inclination) to make sure they are safe. I sure hope they don't still think the walls will save them.

Via Sadly, No!

Labels: Bush, McCain, politics

The web is abuzz with debates on Sarah Palin's experience, fitness to take over if the oldest President ever keels over moments after being sworn in, and how much cuter she is than Joe Biden. What I haven't seen mentioned as often (in the 40 or so hours since many of us first heard of her) is the fact that she just got her first passport about a year and a half ago, after assuming the governorship of Alaska. And from what I can tell she's used her passport just once: to visit troops in Kuwait and a military hospital in Germany. Here's the relevant graf, from the New York Times story:

Ms. Palin appears to have traveled very little outside the United States. In July 2007, she had to get a passport before she visited members of the Alaska National Guard stationed in Kuwait, according to her deputy communications director, Sharon Leighow. She also visited wounded troops in Germany during that trip.

If you've never seen a military installation in a foreign country, let me describe it for you: a walled, razor-wired compound, overwhelmingly populated by Americans, the few locals you see almost always speak decent English, and among the dining choices are one or all of the following: Burger King, Pizza Hut, Cinnabon, Starbucks and KFC. (Yes, yes, I know: "Sounds like a foreign city to me!" Bear with me.) There are lots of reasons why this is the case, and some of them are even pretty reasonable, but the fact remains that if you have only been to Ali Al Selim Air Base in Kuwait and the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany, you've only technically left the United States. Counting that as "foreign travel" is like counting airports you've had layovers in as "visits" to that city. (This is one reason why you should take the pronouncements of pundits and politicians who have "just returned from a trip to Iraq" and are ready to render judgment with a plentiful helping of salt--those people rarely, if ever, leave the seclusion of American fortresses.)

Not that there's anything wrong with visiting the troops, especially at Landstuhl. I commend her for doing that.

OK, so apparently she once visited Ireland. Which is nice, but it says a lot about her lack of interest in the rest of the world that she's only traveled to a couple of military bases and an English-speaking country, and only in the last year and a half. This is excusable (though lamentable) in the Governor of a sparsely-populated state, but not in the biography of an aspirant to the second highest office in the land, in which she would spend a sizeable chunk of her time meeting with foreign dignitaries, all of whom will know significantly more about her country than she knows about theirs.

The greatest challenges facing America right now depend heavily on what the rest of the world does: energy, the environment, national security, trade, outsourcing, and that little skirmish just north of where she tasted her first international Frappuccino come to mind. She appears to be in way over her head on all of these issues (with the possible exception of energy, on which I merely disagree strongly with her), and has evidently not been studying up, even though her name was floated early as a possible "darkhorse" running mate.

Face it: we all know why he picked her. To steal some of Obama's "historic" mojo. (Now we know why McCain was so "gracious" about congratulating Obama on his historic moment the night before this announcement.) He wouldn't have chosen her if there had been another, experienced running mate who could theoretically bring in undecideds while simultaneously kowtowing to the Religious Right. This is a pick designed to dominate a news cycle, not inspire confidence in the judgment of our next President. It's insulting to women, who evidently in McCain's view care less about the issues than if a candidate has ovaries, and it's insulting to the rest of us voters, who generally expect a veep candidate to be someone we've heard of, or at least someone who knows something about the job. The stakes are too high for such a cynical ploy. Just think of it: we could be one "Barack Obama Photographed Looking Goofy in a Helmet" incident from the reality of Vice President Palin.

By picking someone with no detectable interest in the world beyond our borders, McCain has shown himself to be serious about running for President, but unserious about being President.

Labels: conservatism, Election '08, McCain, politics

There's been an outpouring of support for me since my last post, for which I am very grateful. Special thanks goes to Edger at OOIBC and Docudharma. He re-posted PTSD... over there and his commenters have been amazing. Thank you each and every one.

It's a funny thing: when I was a conservative, I always got a lot of "it's great that you're in the Army/defending freedom/taking it to the terrorists" but when I problematized the situation a little bit--bringing up flaws in the war strategy, expressing doubts about the war itself, pointing to past mistakes made by our government that contributed to the current situation--my conservative friends couldn't find it in themselves to acknowledge that anything was wrong. And this was in 2005, by which point you would have had to be deaf, blind, mentally retarded and/or willfully ignorant to not notice that things were looking very bad. Invariably, they would tell me that it was all the media's fault (just like Vietnam!) and that I needed to insulate myself from traitors and collaborators such as Peter Jennings.

I finally had enough of the conservative movement and its pathetic inability to look in a mirror or think critically about any of its cherished platitudes and bolted. What I had expected to find, based on years of reading the likes of Russell Kirk, David Horowitz, Lew Rockwell, Victor Davis Hanson, the AEI gaggle, The National Review (I subscribed for more than five years), Human Events (my parents subscribed throughout my childhood), and other organs of the right-wing propaganda machine, was rabid anti-war neanderthals who hated America. (I should say that by the time I left, I knew this wasn't the only face the Left had to offer.)

What I found instead was compassion, understanding, a willingness to examine one's positions, and an openness to divergent points of view that utterly confounded the dichotomies I had absorbed in my youthful Right-wing radicalism. These were good, decent people by and large. I won't claim that there is no Left-wing lunatic fringe, but I will say that the crazies have not infiltrated the Left mainstream the way they have on the Right. There is no Left equivalent of Ann Coulter, at least not in terms of attention, airtime, book sales or general publicity. This is partly because the Right has much more leeway in the current media climate, but it's also because the Left does a better job of policing itself. It's true that Coulter was kicked off The Corner, but that didn't actually affect her popularity at all. When the Left ditched Hitchens (a subject about which I remain conflicted) he stayed ditched. This is not the result of some sort of Politburo that meets in the offices of The Nation every Wednesday at 9 am to decide the fate of liberalism, it's the genuine dislike of rank-and-file liberals for those who give them a bad name.

I have no doubt that the Right will eventually come to the consensus that Bush has been a disaster, but the Left would have been dogging him all along, rather than swallowing his absolutist rhetoric so gleefully as they failed to criticize even his most abhorrent policies (torture being perhaps the most egregious). The Right did that eventually with Nixon, after all, but only because of his economic policies and supposed kowtowing to Mao. When LBJ got us (deeper) into an unwinnable and morally repugnant war, the Left ensured that he would not serve another term. When Bush did it, the Right rallied around him and invented controversies about the service of an actual warrior and patriot in one of the most cynical and depraved moments in the history of our politics. Oh, and google the term "PTSD" on "corner.nationalreview.com" to see how often that issue has come up on one of the busiest political blogs in the world. That's what happens when you substitute "support my agenda" for "support the troops."

The Right loves to talk about freedom, but it suppresses freedom of expresion within its own ranks. They barely even debate anymore. As Peter Fonda put it in Easy Rider:

[Freedom's] what's it's all about, all right. But talkin' about it and bein' it, that's two different things. I mean, it's real hard to be free when you are bought and sold in the marketplace. Of course, don't ever tell anybody that they're not free, 'cause then they're gonna get real busy killin' and maimin' to prove to you that they are. Oh, yeah, they're gonna talk to you, and talk to you, and talk to you about individual freedom. But they see a free individual, it's gonna scare 'em.

Too true. Sorry I was so wrong about you guys for so long.

Labels: conservatism, personal, politics, PTSD

...is a bitch.

I haven't been officially diagnosed (that will have to wait until I get back stateside, in August) but the signs are all there: obsessive thoughts about horrific scenes I witnessed in Iraq, anxiety at the mere mention of anything having to do with that war, extreme guilt at having willingly participated in such a colossally wicked venture, sleepless nights, mood swings, constant fidgeting, and the strong proclivity to self-medicate by any means necessary. I have good days and bad days, but they've been mostly bad, and certainly worse than they were when I blogged about them before.

The worst for me is the guilt and the anger. Guilt for what I was a part of and anger that such a war could happen, or that people could still believe there is anything remotely positive about our military presence in Mesopotamia. As Thoreau put it so ably at Unqualified Offerings:

It outrages me more than I can describe that there are still apologists for this. It outrages me more than I can describe that there are people who can look at this and say "Yep, we sure made the right choice there!" And it outrages me more than I can describe that the people who look at this and see no evil are actually taken seriously. They are invited to speak and write in serious venues. They are warmly thanked for offering their amoral apologies. They are allowed to remain in power rather than impeached, convicted, removed, and stripped of privilege. They are able to walk down the street undisturbed when they should be cursed and pelted with trash. They should be sprawled on a sidewalk next the McPherson Square Metro Station, hoping to cadge enough quarters to enjoy the rare treat of laundering the vomit out of the only shirt they own, praying all the while that decent people do not recognize them beneath the matted beard and tangled hair.

In a real republic Bush would have been drummed out of office by now and the last thing any major candidate for the Presidency would say is that we might be in Iraq for another 100 years. Just thinking about it makes me so... anxious. Every time I hear a war apologist speak I am overcome with grief and it's a good hour before my mind's back on track. This is my war casualty: a complete inability to escape from that place for longer than a couple of hours.

Seeking mindless distraction, I went to see Ironman the other day, and boy was that a mistake. The predictably evil defense contractor (played by Jeff Bridges, who always looks like Jeff Lebowski to me, which is a bit disconcerting) reminded me so much of my old boss in the war-profiteering biz--warm and friendly on the outside, cold and heartless on the inside--that I spent half the movie trying to will away my flashbacks, then spent the next several hours after the movie drinking alone in my apartment. Such an innocuous reference from such a banal movie shouldn't produce such a powerful reaction, but such is life after war, for me at least. Suffice it to say I won't be watching Rendition or In the Valley of Elah any time soon.

So there it is: I'm pretty messed up in the head right now, and there's not a lot I can do but try to work through it. It's not like there are VA programs for DoD Contractors with PTSD. That's why the federal government loves contractors so much: there's no long-term commitment. A servicemember has all those whiny legislators demanding benefits (and overriding Bush's veto... we hope) for the troops, but us temps, we're on our own. Now that I'm not working for the company that paid me to go to Iraq, I'm nobody's problem but my own. Hell, I don't even have medical insurance any more. I swear to FSM I'm moving to Canada or Denmark some day.

Discovering that your soul has a price isn't a pleasant experience, but I'm the guy who signed on the dotted line, so it's my cross to bear. I wish I had read the fine print.

Cross-posted at OOIBC.

Labels: Iraq, OOIBC, personal, politics, PTSD

I'm a Rationalist Procedural Liberal Democrat Individualist Hayekian Progressive Federalist Altruist Cosmopolitan!

Or, if you prefer, a Hippie Reformer (i.e., a Pelagian Digger Right-Hegelian Whig)!

I'm glad we've managed to settle this matter once and for all.

Labels: humor, personal, politics

Your instant all-purpose three-word rebuttal to the arguments against withdrawing from Iraq: It's Already Happening. Michael Ware reacting to Bush's speech, by way of hilzoy:

MICHAEL WARE, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, Anderson, my first impression is, wow. I mean, it's one thing to return to the status quo, to the situation we had nine months ago, with 130,000 U.S. troops stuck here for the foreseeable future. It's another thing to perpetuate the myth. I mean, I won't go into detail, like the president's characterizations of the Iraqi government as an ally, or that the people of Anbar, who support the Sunni insurgency, asked America for help, or to address this picture of a Baghdad that exists only in the president's mind.

Let me just refer to this, what the president said, that, if America were to be driven out of Iraq, extremists of all strains would be emboldened. They are now. Al Qaeda could gain new recruits and new sanctuaries. They have that now. Iran would benefit from the chaos and be encouraged in its efforts to gain nuclear weapons and dominate the region. It is now.

Iraq would face a humanitarian -- humanitarian crisis. It does now. And that we would leave our children a far more dangerous world. That's happening now. (...)

COOPER: The U.S. -- but the U.S. talks about reconciliation and the need for -- for Shia-led government to -- to reconcile with Sunni, even former Sunni insurgents. Does this government -- do -- so the Sunnis want to reconcile?

WARE: Not the ones that I'm talking to, certainly not the power brokers. I mean, I'm talking about the heads of the largest Shia militias in this country, men who sit in the parliament, men who are the chairmen of the security and defense committees, the parliamentary oversight watchdog committees.

These men are not looking for reconciliation. What they want is America to get out of the way and let us loose.

It's all there: delusionally-optimistic President, the arguments against withdrawal debunked in the simplest and most direct terms, and a clear view of the situation on the ground as it actually is. If only arguing politics were always this easy.

Labels: Iraq, politics

Regarding the motivations of the insurgents I interrogated in Iraq, a week ago I wrote:

The vast majority of them weren't radical Muslims, bin Laden acolytes or Saddam hardliners; they were motivated by nationalism. They opposed the U.S. occupation of what they saw as their sovereign land (silly them!) so they lashed out in the most meaningful way they could: at the "collaborators" in their midst aiding and abetting the occupying, colonial power. It's basic insurgency doctrine, folks. In my experience, "religious fanaticism" is the veneer that some in Iraq, and even more in the West, use to cover what is essentially the struggle to get out from under the thumb of a strongman.

Later last week, The Washington Monthly published an article by Andrew Tilghman, former Stars & Stripes reporter, that came to a similar conclusion, and on Tuesday Gallup released a poll analysis that supports my anecdotal experience. (Thanks to Framing Science for the link) The pollsters discovered that political grievances, rather than religious ones, are the prime motivating factors behind Violent Islamic Extremism:

After analyzing survey data representing more than 90% of the global Muslim population, Gallup found that despite widespread anti-American sentiment, only a small minority saw the 9/11 attacks as morally justified. Even more significant, there was no correlation between level of religiosity and extremism among respondents. Among the 7% of the population that fits in the politically radicalized category -- those who saw the 9/11 attacks as completely justifiable and have an unfavorable view of the United States -- 94% said religion is an important part of their daily lives, compared with 90% among those in the moderate majority. And no significant difference exists between radicals and moderates in mosque attendance.

Gallup probed respondents further and actually asked both those who condoned and condemned extremist acts why they said what they did. The responses fly in the face of conventional wisdom. For example, in Indonesia, the largest Muslim majority country in the world, many of those who condemned terrorism cited humanitarian or religious justifications to support their response. For example, one woman said, "Killing one life is as sinful as killing the whole world," paraphrasing verse 5:32 in the Quran.

On the other hand, not a single respondent in Indonesia who condoned the attacks of 9/11 cited the Quran for justification. Instead, this group's responses were markedly secular and worldly. For example, one Indonesian respondent said, "The U.S. government is too controlling toward other countries, seems like colonizing."

The real difference between those who condone terrorist acts and all others is about politics, not piety. For example, the politically radicalized often cite "occupation and U.S. domination" as their greatest fear for their country and only a small minority of them agree the United States would allow people in the region to fashion their own political future or that it is serious about supporting democracy in the region. Also, among this group's top responses was the view that to better relations with the Muslim world, the West should respect Islam and stop imposing its beliefs and policies. In contrast, moderates most often mentioned economic problems as their greatest fear for their country, and along with respecting Islam, they see economic support and investments as a way for the West to better relations. Moderates are also more likely than the politically radicalized to say the United States is serious about promoting democracy.

Note how counter-intuitive this all seems from the Clash of Civilizations perspective through which the entire GWOT has been filtered for us. No significant difference in mosque attendance between radicals and moderates. The Quran cited only as justification for abhorring violence, not condoning it. American occupation and lack of respect are the reasons the radicals fight us, not the results of their fight against us.

The implications of a study such as this are enormous. The most obvious is that if we are going to claim to be serious about fighting terrorism, we need to focus our efforts on the factors that actually motivate people to become terrorists, not the factors we continue to insist motivate them. Killing or incarcerating a terrorist or insurgent may take one of them out of circulation, but if you create two new ones for every one you destroy, you are going backward, not forward.

I saw this dynamic when I was an interrogator in Iraq. Coalition forces would arrest an insurgent, humiliate him in front of his family, keep him in prison for months, and then release him without charges. In the meantime he learned to hate us (even if he hadn't before) and, more importantly, his family learned to hate us. While he was learning to hate us, he was in a population that was uniquely qualified to fan the flames of his hatred and teach him how he might better act on it. Meanwhile his family and close friends were now easy targets for recruitment. In getting rid of one "terrorist," we created several. Is it any wonder that the estimated number of insurgents in Iraq jumped from 5,000 (total) in 2003 to 70,000 (Sunni) in 2007, while the prison population skyrocketed from 10,000 to 60,000? (See pp. 25-26 of this Brookings Institute report for details.)

When will we realize that our presence in the Middle East and our support of tyrants such as Mubarek and the Saudi Royal Family are not only not helping ease the troubles in the region, they are the primary cause for those troubles? Middle Easterners are not stupid. They can see that America has a long history of supporting brutal dictators (remember the Shah?) and they have learned from that experience that we are not to be trusted. They see us stomping around the world with our big stick and turn to whatever means of resistance they can find to resist what they see as the assault on their culture by the biggest bully on earth. The fact that militant Islam is their only major option should not cause us to confuse their motives

Cross-posted at OOIBC.

Labels: Framing, fundamentalism, GWOT, interrogation, Iraq, Islam, OOIBC, personal, politics, terrorism

Michael Goldfarb is right to chastise some on the left for wanting to have it both ways regarding the Petraeus testimony--either Petraeus is a stooge for the Administration or he isn't. Here's the General's hand-wringing non-response to Sen. Warner's question of whether the Iraq war is making America safer:

"I don't know, actually. I have not sat down and sorted in my own mind."

That reaction seems to me to be a tacitly negative response. If he were truly the lapdog that he's been accused of being, he would have at least muttered something incoherent about success in Iraq being a "vital national interest" or something, but instead he hid behind what is, in all honesty, at least a somewhat legitimate dodge: it's not his job to assess the war's implications for the overall national security of the United States.

I say "somewhat legitimate," because, as a Four-Star General, one would think that he would have pondered this question at least a bit. Even if he hasn't spent his waking hours as MNF-I Commander agonizing over the pros and cons of the Iraq War vis-a-vis the threat to America proper, he certainly ought to have at least entertained some thoughts in that direction during the years he spent at the U.S. Army Combined Arms Center writing the Army's Counter-Insurgency doctrine. After all, he was back in the U.S. working explicitly on the Army's broader missions, which one would think would include things that fell under the heading of "support[ing] and defend[ing] the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign or domestic."

So actually, Petraeus should have been able to answer that question more fully at the time. Given the constraints of the political circus that his testimony could only be, I can understand why he would hesitate to dive right in with a bold declaration that the Iraq War is doing bupkis to protect America.

But then he got his bearings, remembered why he was there, and came clean in exactly the incoherent "vital interest" vein that we have come to expect from a political class that excels at saying nothing:

Candidly, I have been so focused on Iraq that drawing all the way out was something that for a moment there was a bit of a surprise.

But I think that we have very, very clear and very serious national interests in Iraq. Trying to achieve those interests — achieving those interests has very serious implications for our safety and for our security. So I think the answer really, to come back to it is yes.

"Very, very clear and very serious" national interests. Good boy. No word yet on what those interests actually are.

I suspect that his initial instinct--to run from that question with all his might because he knows the frank answer will be counter-productive to his Commander-in-Chief's staged love-in for a tragically ill-advised and destructive campaign--was borne out of unease. That hesitation betrayed a lot more about Petraeus' thoughts than anyone with a political axe to grind--left or right--is willing to admit.

I suspect that he is a man who is conflicted about the overall war, his role in it, and his responsibilities as a commander tasked with managing it. That he only came to his senses and played the political ball game when he had been allowed a moment to consider his options at least says that he has struggled with his faith.

Anyone who has ever believed in something and been put in a position where they had to act on those beliefs but entertained thoughts to the contrary should understand this. I know I do, because I came to Iraq the first time in 2004 with nothing but praise for the enterprise, only coming to realize that it was a bad idea and a lost cause after experience and reflection. That was a long process, though. Could General Petraeus be going through a similar existential crisis? I'd like to think so.

But even after changing my mind, I still had (and have) a job to do, as does Petraeus, only in a vastly more significant way. While I'm free to distance myself intellectually from the strategy and the entire war, he isn't. As Goldfarb concludes, "he's not there to defend the war--despite what the left is saying--he's there to defend the strategy." Goldfarb is right about that, but only in the sense that this "report" isn't really a report; it's a public relations campaign for a failed strategy. In a political culture that was less poisoned by naked partisanship, he would have been there to report on a strategy. But we always knew that wouldn't really be the case. Only a partisan hack like Goldfarb, however, would call that a good thing.

Cross-posted at OOIBC.

Labels: Iraq, military, OOIBC, politics

At least someone on the right can see the forest for the trees. While I don't agree with everything in his latest piece, By Bush's Own Standard, Surge Has Failed, his main point is unassailable, unless you're drunk on Rupert Murdoch's special Kool-Aid:

The purpose of the surge, they said, is to buy time -- "breathing space," the president says -- for Iraqi political reconciliation. Because progress toward that has been negligible, there is no satisfactory answer to this question: What is the U.S. military mission in Iraq?

Many of those who insist that the surge is a harbinger of U.S. victory in Iraq are making the same mistake they made in 1991 when they urged an advance on Baghdad, and in 2003 when they underestimated the challenge of building democracy there. The mistake is exaggerating the relevance of U.S. military power to achieve political progress in a society riven by ethnic and sectarian hatreds.

How do people not get this? The military is utterly unfit to the task of facilitating political reconciliation. Our very presence here ensures that reconciliation will not happen, because all we can do is arm our friends du jour, walling them off from each other, and bribe them to stop attacking each other, while creating potemkin villages for sympathetic journalists and politicians to base glowing reports upon.

Iraqis know damn well that America doesn't particularly care about them or their situation. We've all but abandoned our original goal of bestowing freedom and democracy upon them and are now just looking for a way to bow out that doesn't involve an airlift from the roof of our embassy in Baghdad.

But we will continue to fight here, because winning the political war in Washington is more important than winning the actual war in Iraq. Because saving (the President's) face is more important than saving (American soldiers') lives.

Labels: Iraq, military, politics

Kevin Drum's onto something here: the casualty figures in Iraq mean very little unless you take seasonality into account, which means, basically, that the level of violence in Iraq has been consistently higher in Spring and Autumn than it has been in Summer and Winter. Remember this when the Administration trots out a comparison between violence levels in April 2007 and August 2007 to show that the surge is working. It isn't. To quote Jim Henley, " They're bullshitting us."

But there's more to it than that. It turns out that the numbers don't include casualty figures for civilian deaths if they were the result of Sunni-on-Sunni or Shia-on-Shia violence:

Unfortunately, there's simply no reliable data series for civilian casualties over the course of the war, and the data for this year in particular gives every indication of being massaged to within an inch of its life (intra-Shiite violence doesn't count, car bomb fatalities don't count, al-Qaeda attacks against Sunni tribes don't count, the figures change mysteriously from one report to the next, the supposedly lower numbers for August are classified, etc. etc.)

The Administration and Pentagon are so invested in the "sectarian violence" meme that their statisticians rule out the possibility that intra-sect killings are meaningful. Which of course they are, because this isn't merely a sectarian conflict. The battle lines have been drawn in so many directions that there's no way to accurately characterize it.

Tribal feuds, for example, are often completely non-sectarian. The massacres of Sunni policemen by Sunni Islamic militants and Ba'ath Party loyalists are clearly non-sectarian. Ditto for the ongoing battles between Badr and Jaysh al-Mahdi.

My experience in 2004-2005 interrogating almost no Shiites testifies to this. Of the hundreds of Iraqis I met, almost none of them were killing or otherwise terrorizing Shias. The vast majority of them weren't radical Muslims, bin Laden acolytes or Saddam hardliners; they were motivated by nationalism. They opposed the U.S. occupation of what they saw as their sovereign land (silly them!) so they lashed out in the most meaningful way they could: at the "collaborators" in their midst aiding and abetting the occupying, colonial power. It's basic insurgency doctrine, folks. In my experience, "religious fanaticism" is the veneer that some in Iraq, and even more in the West, use to cover what is essentially the struggle to get out from under the thumb of a strongman.

The Administration won't cop to that, though, because they need to be able to paint the current troubles as "those crazy Muslims and their backward ways." Any hint that these people are motivated by the same desire for self-government that every other people who have sought to break their yokes of bondage has been motivated by must be carefully avoided to maintain the illusion that we're "liberating" them. The media and the Right scoffed when some reality-based thinkers declared that "one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter," but deep down I think we all knew that was true. Ask the Irish, the Algerians, the French Partisans or the Sioux about that distinction.

This in no way excuses the use of suicide bombs and the targeting of innocents: these tactics are deplorable no matter who employs them. But they are effective, and that's something we still don't understand, four years after "Mission Accomplished."

Labels: Bush, Iraq, military, politics

Gee, publish one item indicating the possibility that the powers-that-be are comin' to getcha, and you wouldn't believe who comes out of the woodwork. Prior to publishing my piece on Blackwater's Air Force and some other things that scare me, I had gotten maybe 1500 or so hits during the entire life of this blog, many of which were me, chacking how many hits I've had. I'm now pushing 10,000.

Most of them seem to have come here via the website of Jeff Rense, who is apparently fond of accusing the Jews of training chupacabras to implant radio sensors in the brains of neocons so that they won't leak the truth about Roswell, which is the site of ancient Atlantis. Or something like that. So let this be a lesson to you newbie bloggers: if you want to be read, publish a conspiracy theory.

I've received a few comments on the Blackwater story, most of which either accuse Blackwater of pushing the zionist agenda or the christianist agenda. One favorite ties Allah with the god of ancient Atlantis, which is just so amazingly far out there (read the Timaeus and the Critias some time: Socrates made up the city of Atlantis for the sake of argument) that I had to read it a few times to trace the mental leaps. I've seen what happens when you engage cranks (if you don't know what that is or how to spot one, check out the denialism blog and their Denialists' Deck of Cards for a humorous look at the phenomenon) so I'll avoid that here.

But there was a comment worth responding to at length, from a "Canadian Looking Dispassionately At The American Experience":

The problem with this article is it shows EXCESSIVE bias towards paramilitary groups which is what Blackwater is. Bias is good becuase it is an opinion, but excessive bias is fanaticism in its own right.

The author should also know that they are NOT generally disunited, unambitious and lacking discipline, unfaithful, unvaliant before friends, nor are they cowardly before enemies since the majority of Blackwater Associates have already been in service as Navy Seals, Army Rangers, Ex-Delta Forces, British SAS, etc. They're neither stupid nor untrained and in many cases DO IN FACT do their JOBS with professionalism and tact!

It does help to focus one's mind that 100 Grand A year + bonus is yours if you just DO YOUR DAMN JOB but many join Blackwater because they LIKE being professional soldiers and like the lifestyle. So you don't always have to rail against Blackwater since they do provide a useful service in uncivil times and being paid much more than regular forces can be sent to do the "Dirty Jobs" no one else wants to do!

Well yes, of course my piece is biased. It's my opinion, which is subject to change. Whether my bias is "excessive" or not is another story. I've spent nearly two years of my life in Iraq, and I have encountered many an employee of Blackwater and the other security firms who have security contracts here. (Technically speaking I'm a mercenary, even though I'm not even authorized to carry a weapon.)

Have I found that they are disunited, unambitious, lacking discipline, unfaithful, etc.? That's really an individual thing. They often, as my Canadian interlocutor asserts with a bit too many capital letters, "in many cases DO IN FACT do their JOBS with professionalism and tact." I'll admit, they do tend to be patriotic Americans, but that can take many forms. One form is the one that many on the Right take, which asserts that patriotism means following the President no matter what. They accuse those who protest the current state of American society of anti-Americanism. Many Blackwater contractors share this opinion. Actually, it's been my experience that this opinion is the default one among many sectors in Iraq, as this post indicates. I don't doubt that these people are patriots, but I'm really disturbed by the prospect of them flying around our country in military aircraft designed for close ground support.

I'm disturbed by the prospect of anyone doing that, though.

For most of the Blackwater types I've met, this definitely describes them: "they LIKE being professional soldiers and like the lifestyle." Sure they do--that's why they took a high-paying job to come over here. I do take issue with the "they're all former SEALs and Green Berets line, though: a good rule of thumb is that when someone claims to have been in Special Forces and starts telling stories about it, they're lying. The actual SOF guys I've known have tended to not brag much at all. The Blackwater guys I've known can't shut up about how awesome they are. A close friend who once worked for Blackwater told me that they all claim to have had some sort of high speed career, but most of them turn out to have been garden-variety infantrymen who served, it should be noted, in the 80's and 90's, when there wasn't much combat to be had.

Returning to my point, Blackwater is the closest thing we have to a Foreign Legion, and that should worry anyone who is concerned about civil liberties, if for no other reason that foreign legions, if they must exist at all, ought to be limited in their scope to foreign countries. I think my commenter hits the nail on the head when he says that they "can be sent to do the "Dirty Jobs" no one else wants to do." That's what scares me about them. Sure, right now they're all fighting the fight that our elected officials have sent Americans to fight. No matter how much deceit went into getting us into this war, Congress did, in fact, declare this war, and the President is our Commander in Chief. But what happens when that mission changes? Will our legislative branch have any say whatsoever in any domestic missions a Blackwater would conduct during peacetime? There's no reason to suspect that they would. In that case, they would be an armed wing of whoever paid them, in this case the Executive Branch of the United States government. Need I remind my readers that there is no provision in the constitution for such a thing?

Those "dirty jobs" are dirty not just because no one wants to do them, but also because they are in many cases illegal and the military can't do them. I'm one of those people who likes the fact that there are defined limits to the scope of what the military of a Constitutional Republic can do. That's why I find the Blackwater phenomenon dangerous, and that is why I think my short discussion of NSPD-51 is germane.

And for the record, I suspect that many Blackwater Paramilitary Troops would go AWOL rather than provide close air support to the suppression of, say, an anti-WTO demonstration. But do we really want to trust the individual consciences of these people to protect us should they ever be given that order?

Labels: conspiracies, mercenaries, military, politics, reason

Great piece of photoshop art from Stiftung Leo Strauss. More of their artwork here.

The worst Attorney General in American History has agreed to step down. I wonder how long it will be before he's officially persona non grata at the annual Straussian picnic?

I'm with Glenn Greenwald: it's time for the Democrats to grow a pair and block the hell out of whichever toadies Bush nominates until someone who isn't a member of the club is put forth:

It is difficult to overstate how vital this is. The unexpected resignation of Gonzales provides a truly critical opportunity to restore real oversight to our government, to provide advocates of the rule of law with a quite potent weapon to compel adherence to the law and, more importantly, to expose and bring accountability for prior lawbreaking. All of the investigations and scandals, currently stalled hopelessly, can be dramatically and rapidly advanced with an independent Attorney General at the helm of the DOJ.

That is not going to happen if the Democrats allow the confirmation of one of the ostensibly less corrupt and "establishment-respected" members of the Bush circle -- Michael Chertoff or Fred Fielding or Paul Clement or some Bush appointee along those lines. The new Attorney General must be someone who is not part of that rotted circle at all -- even if they are supposedly part of the less rotted branches -- since it is that circle which ought to be the subject of multiple DOJ investigations.

And don't tell me that congress can't afford to blow a bunch of political capital mucking up the political process while they, for "blindly partisan reasons," obstruct whoever the king deigns to nominate to be the next emanation of his will: despite the media spin, Congress's approval ratings aren't low because the American people really hate the ultra-liberal partisan politics and San Francisco values of Nancy Pelosi, they're low because they wish Congress would actually hold the Administration accountable instead of just talking about it.

Now is the perfect time for the Dems to show that they've actually got some convictions. The Fox/Limbaugh/GOP smear machine will go after them no matter what they do, but this time they've got a good, solid majority of America hoping they will step up to the plate.

Labels: Bush, politics

The editors of The Weekly Standard, ever vigilant in their mission to "support the troops" by parroting whatever the Administration is saying this week, have trotted out seven of their own soldiers to counter the NYT Op-Ed I linked to below. Their argument boils down to this: the guys in the 82nd (who wrote the earlier piece) are in a different part of Baghdad, so they can't see how wonderfully the surge is working. The Weekly Standard's guys trot out the same "attacks are down, political participation is up" mantra that the surge's proponents have been spouting from the beginning.

What they don't seem to get, however, is that there's no earthly reason to believe that the reductions in violence that have been seen are anything other than temporary. They cite Ramadi and the Anbar Province as exemplars of the effectiveness of counter-insurgency strategy and the effectiveness of holding territory:

Take Anbar Province. In 2006, al Qaeda controlled the capital of Ramadi and Marine intelligence officers declared the province effectively lost. A leaked Marine Corps report concluded, "the prospects for securing western Anbar province are dim and there is almost nothing the U.S. military can do to improve the political and social situation there."

Today Ramadi is peaceful and Anbar no longer a haven for al Qaeda. The tribal awakening that brought about political reconciliation and stability in Ramadi and Anbar primarily resulted from an improved security environment provided by American forces. Americans not only cleared Ramadi, they also held it by occupying over 65 outposts.

This security environment allowed local tribal leaders to stand up to their former al Qaeda occupiers, and now American and Iraqi forces are improving security beyond Anbar in places like Diyala and Babil Provinces.

This is all true, but only in a very limited sense. Take the example of Fallujah, Samarra or Baqubah. These are three cities where U.S. and coalition forces have in the past declared stable, turned over to the local Iraqis, and seen flare up again after we left. Every time we stabilize a place and turn it over to the locals, it goes to hell again. The key to the perceived success in Ramadi is that the Marines have continued to hold it. The "surge" only works when the increased presence remains.

This is the fatal flaw of all of the rosy predictions and spun statistics on the surge: it only works when it ceases to be a "surge" and becomes a permanent occupation. And even then its effectiveness is suspect, but that's a matter for another post.

The Weekly Standard is not, however, in the business of seriously critiquing the argument these soldiers have presented. Nor do they seem to care that one of the most telling critiques from the first piece goes completely unanswered in their riposte.

The soldiers from the 82nd wrote:

However, while creating proxies is essential in winning a counterinsurgency, it requires that the proxies are loyal to the center that we claim to support. Armed Sunni tribes have indeed become effective surrogates, but the enduring question is where their loyalties would lie in our absence. The Iraqi government finds itself working at cross purposes with us on this issue because it is justifiably fearful that Sunni militias will turn on it should the Americans leave.

It is the question of who or what our Iraqi partners actually support that continues to make this war a lost cause. the examples of Fallujah, Samarra and Baqubah show that the loyalties and alliances we have forged with different groups in this conflict are transient and subject to dissolution at a moment's notice. The Weekly Standard soldiers act as if the gains they have seen must be permanent, when recent history should lead them to conclude that only a fool would believe such a conclusion so early in the operation.

This is just another example in the litany of cynical, self-serving rhetoric cooked up by the masters of war to justify their continued prosecution of a war that has done more to harm America in the long run than any previous conflict.

Labels: conservatism, Iraq, politics

A fascinating interview with Josh Rushing, the former Marine Public Affairs Officer who was told to stop speaking to the press because he had committed the unpardonable sin of defending Al Jazeera. He now works for Al Jazeera International, where he has seen, over and over again, the mind-numbing absurdity of America's new distrust of the press. The interview is worth reading in its entirety, but this section in particular was astonishing for its sheer absurdity:

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about that first story you went out on. Talk about going to North Dakota and what happened.

JOSH RUSHING: Yeah, you know, it seemed like a simple story. We were going to do a story about Small Town America, and there's actually a part -- and, you know, the country is obsessed with immigration, how many people are coming over the border. Well, there's part of North Dakota, this kind of western, northwestern North Dakota, where the towns are actually emptying out. All the kids are graduating, going away and not coming back, to the point there's actually small towns that will give you money to put your children in the school system there and land. They'll give you free land to build your house on, just trying to attract somebody to keep these communities alive. So I wanted to see what's the value in these communities. So it's a real nice, charming story, extolling the values of Small Town America.

Well, I go up, and it was kind of interesting, because a reporter came out on my first day there, a reporter from the local newspaper, and she said she was surprised at how I was dressed. And I thought, well, maybe I'm kind of casual to be on TV. I was in blue jeans. And she said, "No, I thought you'd be in robes and a head scarf." You've got to be kidding. Why would I be in robes and a head scarf? "Well, you're Al Jazeera, you know. And that's what we were looking for." So it was --

AMY GOODMAN: So she came out to do a story on you --

JOSH RUSHING: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: -- doing a story in her town.

JOSH RUSHING: Absolutely, right. And so, you know, I gave her a nice interview. She kind of got it. And a couple days later she called me, really terrified and upset. And she said a federal agent had been to her office, had asked her to step outside. She said, "Can I bring my reporter's notebook?" And he said, "No. I'll be the one asking questions," took her out and started asking her questions like, you know, "Who did you talk to? Did he seem like a citizen? Did he seem like an American? Did he have a camera? He didn't take pictures, did he?" "Of course, he took pictures. They're doing a story, you know? A news story."

And he said there were possible international implications to me being that close to the unsecured border. Let alone, I came from Washington, D.C., where my office is three blocks from the White House. Now I'm a danger in northwestern North Dakota. So it turns out he was from the Border Protection, Customs & Border Protection. He went around and did that to everyone I interviewed so that I couldn't go back and get another interview. We were going to go back and do the high school graduation, and we were unwelcome at that point, because people were worried. They were worried -- are there international implications they don't know about? Had they said something that would put the country at risk to me, or even worse, maybe put themselves at risk from their own country? At the time, it was the NSA wiretapping story that was in the news. And even this reporter worried about calling her mom, because was she now on the wiretap database, and would that put her mom on the list, as well? So I was going through this kind of weird time, where I'm being followed by federal agents. I'm just trying to do a story about the value of Small Town America.

It's hard to make up satire like this. The point Rushing has been making ever since he saw the way Arab news media were shunned by military commanders in Iraq is that if we aren't getting our message out to the Arab world, the mission of "building democratic institutions" over there, er, here, is utterly lost. Al Jazeera, contrary to what the right has asserted and the American "liberal media" has dutifully repeated, is actually one of the best signs that open societies might actually be on their way in that/this part of the world. Any news organization willing to rake enough muck to get themselves kicked out of a monarchy for offending the regime is good with me. As noted in this Washington Post op-ed,

Most people in this country have never watched al-Jazeera. But in so many minds, it has become synonymous with al-Qaeda. I'd guess that the only thing most people know about it is that it is always the first network to receive bin Laden's videotapes. What they don't know is that al-Jazeera started nearly 10 years ago as the first independent voice in the Middle East. With the courage to tell it like it is, it offended authoritarian regimes from Saudi Arabia to Jordan. Its reporters -- and at times the network itself -- have been routinely kicked out of countries for reporting the real news instead of acting like the sleeping pill known as state-run television news.

Al-Jazeera has even been labeled "Zionist" by the Arab street and its regimes. It is the only Arabic broadcaster to put Israeli officials on television and to report the Israeli side of stories. Israeli leaders such as Ariel Sharon and Shimon Peres have been invited to appear on the network, although they ultimately did not. But Israel routinely sends Arabic-speaking officials to participate on various programs.

What many Americans also don't know is that, before Sept. 11, 2001, al-Jazeera was lauded and applauded by the Bush administration for this fearless attitude toward the dictatorships of the Middle East. High-ranking administration officials, including Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, made frequent appearances on the network.

My, how times have changed. But it's not surprising, really, when you consider that the U.S. is steadily declining on the worldwide press freedom scale. I can only hope that one of these days someone in our country's leadership will, perhaps out of benign curiosity, pick up the constitution and notice that it's actually pretty explicit about how important the press is in a free society.

Labels: GWOT, liberty, politics

"When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross."
--Sinclair Lewis

Who can deny that the above quote sounds mysteriously prophetic in regards to the Bush Adminostration?

David Brooks has written a column that should be a wakeup call to everyone--liberal and conservative alike--who cares about the future of this country. I don't pay for the New York Times, so I'll rely on Glenn Greenwald's and Andrew Sullivan's fiskings to get to what may very well be the heart of Brooks' piece:

Normal, nonideological people are less concerned about the threat to their freedom from an overweening state than from the threats posed by these amorphous yet pervasive phenomena. The "liberty vs. power" paradigm is less germane. It's been replaced in the public consciousness with a "security leads to freedom" paradigm...

The "security leads to freedom" paradigm doesn't end debate between left and right, it just engages on different ground. It is oriented less toward negative liberty (How can I get the government off my back?) and more toward positive liberty (Can I choose how to lead my life?).

This is the voice of the new "conservatism" (also known as "neoconservatism"), the one that constantly trumpets the threat from without in order to consolidate power in what I can only describe as the threat from within. This is the voice of "conservatism" that advocates executive privilege, the Patriot Act, McCarthyite witch-hunts against enemies of the administration (the Attorney-firing scandal is a perfect example of this), and the destruction of habeas corpus rights that have for more than two centuries served as the bedrock of our republic. Goldwater and Reagan are rolling in their graves.

Don't believe me? Here's Ronald Reagan, stumping for Goldwater in 1964:

If we lose freedom here, there is no place to escape to. This is the last stand on Earth. And this idea that government is beholden to the people, that it has no other source of power except to sovereign people, is still the newest and most unique idea in all the long history of man's relation to man. This is the issue of this election. Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves.

You and I are told increasingly that we have to choose between a left or right, but I would like to suggest that there is no such thing as a left or right. There is only an up or down--up to a man's age-old dream, the ultimate in individual freedom consistent with law and order--or down to the ant heap totalitarianism, and regardless of their sincerity, their humanitarian motives, those who would trade our freedom for security have embarked on this downward course.

Whe Reagan spoke those words, he was referring to the welfare state, which sought to re-organize and re-define American society in the model bequeathed to America by people who positioned themselves as the "elite" who knew better how to preserve American society than those pesky founders. In that day and age, the threat to liberty came from the left. Today it comes from the right. But it's not the right that I once knew. Which is why I am one of Rob Knop's "RUB"s--Republicans Until Bush.

Labels: conservatism, liberty, politics