Granfalloon Junction

Three Scandals or One?

2005-11-06T22:07:00.000-08:00

In the fifth year of George W. Bush's presidency, three great storm clouds have come piling up from the recent past to converge in the present, and throw the deepest possible shadow over the future.

The first cloud is of course the scandal surrounding the disclosure of CIA operative Valerie Plame's identity, in connection with which the Vice President's Chief of Staff, I. Lewis Libby, was recently indicted, and the President's own closest advisor, Karl Rove, remains in possible legal jeopardy.

The second cloud is that which swirls around the question of whether the Bush administration knowingly distorted intelligence in making its case for war against Saddam Hussein, thereby creating the impression of an imminent threat where none existed--a question recently given new life by, among other things, Sen. Harry Reid's bold use of Senate Rule 21 to force the majority to undertake a promised, but never-delivered, Intelligence Committee investigation of the matter.

The third cloud shadowing the Bush presidency is one that first appeared on the scene with the Abu Ghraib revelations in April 2004, and that has gained new urgency from such events as the disclosures regarding prisoner abuse by Capt. Ian Fishback of the 82nd Airborne, and the recent revelation of a CIA-run network of secret prisons abroad.

The betrayal of Valerie Plame, the distortion of pre-war intelligence, the torture of prisoners: Each of these scandals has, by itself, the potential to damage the Bush presidency deeply enough, that nothing short of an internal coup--along the lines of what Howard Baker did for Ronald Reagan's second term in the wake of Iran-Contra--will save it.

Is there anything of substance connecting the three scandals? Do they share a common root?

That we cannot know--at least not yet. For each of the three scandals is surrounded by its own firewall. Mr. Libby, as John Dean recently remarked, is the firewall for Mr. Cheney--or, at least, what Patrick Fitzgerald's five indictments allege to be Libby's systematic program of deception is acting as a barricade to prevent Mr. Fitzgerald from following the trail of Valerie Plame's exposure wherever in the administration it might lead. If Mr. Libby knew that George W. Bush would not be in a position to extend to him, in the event of a conviction, the same courtesy that George H. W. Bush extended to the Iran-Contra conspirators, this might concentrate his mind more on his own fate. But Mr. Bush seems unlikely to let Mr. Libby feel thus abandoned, so long as the firewall stays in good repair.

The situation is even less promising in the other two cases, for there we have no special prosecutor to test the resilience of the firewalls. On the question of torture, it is true, Sen. McCain is making himself troublesome to the administration and its loyal defenders in the House majority. But Sen. McCain is asking only that the administration disavow torture from now on. He has 90 votes in the Senate for that, but he does not have 90 votes for getting the administration to come clean about who is responsible for the torture that has already happened. On that question, the firewall is probably manned by reliable majorities in both houses.

Sen. Reid, meanwhile, has certainly shown that the Senate minority is not without weapons of its own, and he has successfully deployed one of these to compel at least a formal resumption of the stalled-then-abandoned investigation into the politicization of pre-war intelligence. But Sen. Reid's arsenal cannot contain many more weapons like that one, and the majority knows this. Moreover, his Rule 21 gambit succeeded largely through the element of surprise, and the majority is unlikely to be taken unawares a second time. It remains to be seen whether his threat created enough fear to force from the majority more than token adherence to the promise of completing a genuine investigation into how intelligence was used (and misused) in the run-up to the war.

Under these circumstances, it will hard enough for any one scandal to be traced to its ultimate source, much less for the links between any two, or all three, to be disclosed. If I were to guess, I would say that all roads, in the end, lead back to what Col. Wilkerson, Colin Powell's former Chief of Staff, has called the "cabal" centered around Dick Cheney. At least, it very much looks as if the "Team B" mentality, with which the Vice President has long been associated--contempt for regular military and intelligence institutions and procedures, belief that real power should be in the hands of parallel institutions staffed by trusted hawks-- has dominated the administration's foreign policy agenda. It might fall to historians, more than to contemporaries, to test that intuition.

Whatever the actual connections between them, however, these three embarrassments are now crystallizing into a unified scandal more powerful than any since Watergate. And as in Watergate, the disparate elements of super-scandal are held in concentric orbits by the inescapable gravity of a war gone bad--or rather, of an administration's failed wager concerning such a war.

Nixon wagered his presidency on the idea that he could extract the country from Vietnam by drawing down troops while unleashing more and wider-ranging violence on the enemy. This was the real "secret plan" to end the war, on the promise of which he had campaigned. The draw-down would placate a home front that had, at the very least, lost faith in the government's predictions of imminent success. The redoubled destruction, meanwhile, would make the North Vietnamese pliant at the bargaining table, out of fear of what "crazy" Nixon would do next.

Nixon lost that wager because neither the Vietnamese enemy nor the American people responded as he had hoped they would. The former proved endlessly resilient, and the latter proved unwilling to overlook that fact--or to forgive Nixon for not having reckoned with it. The more obvious it became that the wager had been a bad one, the more Nixon staked on it, lashing out both publicly and clandestinely at all those who raised their voices in protest at the ever-rising losses. Watergate is the name history ultimately gave to the secret portions of that organized lashing-out.

George W. Bush placed his own wager in the spring and summer of 2002. The spontaneous upwelling of national unity following 9-11 had given him an unprecedented amount of what he likes to call "political capital," and he was determined to use it to make even more. But Bush's political capital of 2002 was, like Nixon's of 1969, highly leveraged. Bush was betting that a splendid little war would silence critics who pointed to the absence of an imminent threat, or of a connection between Hussein and the perpetrators of 9-11, or of substantial international support. Even more, regime change in Iraq, charter member of the "axis of evil," would transform the War on Terror into the political equivalent of World War II--and Bush himself into a sort of right-wing FDR.

Like Nixon, Bush's initial wager was consumed by the uncertainties of war. And like Nixon, he has responded to bruising losses by throwing good coin after bad. It was bad enough to have exaggerated the threat posed by Iraq in order to get us into the war; it was worse yet to let panic about the war's course take over administration policy, driving it to an increasingly flagrant and widespread use of torture abroad, and an increasingly ruthless program of character assassination of the war's critics here at home. The former gave us Abu Ghraib and the other torture scandals, the latter gave us the exposure of Valerie Plame as a means to bury Joe Wilson.

One of the things that set Watergate apart from the typical Washington scandal was how what began with the disclosure of a seemingly small-bore bit of political skullduggery--the famous third-rate burglary--ultimately precipitated the unveiling of an entire political demimonde of force and fraud underlying the Nixon presidency.

In that respect, it is starting to look like 1973 all over again.

GOP Governing Philosophy

2005-09-08T20:41:00.000-07:00

The original intent of Federal disaster assistance is to supplement State and local response efforts. Many are concerned that Federal disaster assistance may have evolved into both an oversized entitlement program and a disincentive to effective State and local risk management. Expectations of when the Federal Government should be involved and the degree of involvement may have ballooned beyond what is an appropriate level. We must restore the predominant role of State and local response to most disasters. Federal assistance needs to supplement, not supplant, State and local efforts.

Having Federal assistance supplement, not supplant State and local efforts is, most likely, going to be one of the more difficult measures aimed at responsibility and accountability that this Administration will have to work through.

-- Joe M. Allbaugh, Bush crony and unqualified political hack, who preceded equally unqualified political hack Micheal Brown (his ~~former college roommate~~ good friend and handpicked successor), as director of FEMA, testifying before Congress in 2001.

Shorter GOP governing philosophy: Don't do anything right for the people, it only encourages them.

Harold Meyerson covers the longer version here.

UPDATE: The Shrill One is on the case as well. Best line: "Why did the administration make the same mistakes twice? Because it paid no political price the first time." Or, to translate for the benefit of Washington journalists, "pointing the finger," now, means saving American lives, the next time these jokers have to deal with a national emergency.

SECOND UPDATE: It seems that even the normally somnambulant New York Times editorial board has taken to sounding something like the Executive Committee of the Liberal Conspiracy that wingnuts always imagine it to be: "Political patronage has always been a hallmark of Washington life. But President Bill Clinton appointed political pals at FEMA who actually knew something about disaster management." The Times editorial board, comparing Bush unfavorably to--Clinton? Maybe the apocalypse really is upon us.

Excuses, Excuses (and Lies)

2005-09-03T23:54:00.000-07:00

Josh Marshall reads the WaPo article describing how the White House is engaged in a full-scale effort to shift blame for the slow, woefully inadequate emergency response to Katrina onto the backs of state and local officials. Apparently, the original "Who knew?" excuse just wasn't cutting it, so now they're rolling out this new and improved model. Or as Josh puts it:

Now at least we have the storyline. The Bush administration wasn't caught sleeping on the job while New Orleans went under with a gutted FEMA run by a guy who got fired from his last job policing horse shows. In fact, according to the new White House storyline, the governor of Louisiana and the mayor of New Orleans didn't ask for help quickly enough. And the White House was powerless to act until they did. Apparently they couldn't even reschedule the president's vacation until the locals got the right forms signed.

Unfortunately for the career of this latest excuse, AmericaBlog is ready with this reality check, drawn straight from the White House's own August 27th press release on "Federal Emergency Assistance for Louisiana," which reads, in part:

The President today declared an emergency exists in the state of Louisiana...

The President's action authorizes the Department of Homeland Security, Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), to coordinate all disaster relief efforts which have the purpose of alleviating the hardship and suffering caused by the emergency on the local population...

Specifically, FEMA is authorized to identify, mobilize, and provide at its discretion, equipment and resources necessary to alleviate the impacts of the emergency...

The 27th was the Saturday before Katrina hit. So which is it? Was the President overstepping his constitutional authority on Saturday the 27th? Or is the White House currently engaged in a campaign of organized lying to cover up the federal government's mismanagement of a disaster relief effort it was duly authorized to coordinate?

UPDATE: Over at TPM Cafe, nascardaughter has dug up the actual legal criteria that govern DHS/FEMA involvement. There's little doubt they were met in this case. No more excuses, indeed.

SECOND UPDATE: (Via Atrios) Pamela Leavey at The Democratic Daily reads the same WaPo article that Josh did and finds that, despite its overall critical tone, it contains at least one uncritically recycled, baldfaced lie from an anonymous Bush administration official, to wit:

As of Saturday, Blanco still had not declared a state of emergency, the senior Bush official said.

Pamela Leavey conclusively demonstrates that this claim is utterly false, simply by linking to both the official state declaration of emergency [PDF], dated the 26th, and the letter Gov. Blanco sent to Bush [PDF] on the 28th, informing him that a state emergecy had been declared, and asking him to make the appropriate federal declaration (which, as we have seen, he subsequently did, on the 27th).

This raises the questions: Why did the Washington Post reporters and editors accept, at face value, and then publish, in their newspaper, a plainly politically self-serving, anonymous leak from an administration official, rather than doing the very minimal fact checking that would have been required to determine that the leak was a baldfaced lie? And: What is the WaPo going to do now, to redress such a flagrant instance of journalistic and editorial malpractice?

I won't be holding my breath.

Epidemic of Real Journalism Continues to Rage in Wake of Katrina

2005-09-03T22:59:00.000-07:00

Headlines on the Washington Post homepage, September 3, 2005, 11:00 PM PST:

Thousands Await Help, While Feds Shift Blame

What Went Wrong: Disarray at the Top Despite 9/11

The latter article, in particular, by Susan B. Glasser and Josh White, is unflinching in calling failure by its proper name, and calling bullshit on official ass-covering.

Okay: Who are these people and what have they done with the gentle courtiers of the Washington press corps?

Who Knew?

2005-09-01T22:24:00.000-07:00

I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees.

President George W. Bush, Interview with Diane Sawyer
ABC's Good Morning America, Sept. 1, 2005

It was a broiling August afternoon in New Orleans, Louisiana, the Big Easy, the City That Care Forgot. Those who ventured outside moved as ifthey were swimming in tupelo honey. Those inside paid silent homage to the man who invented airconditioning as they watched TV "storm teams" warn of a hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico. Nothing surprising there: Hurricanes in August are as much a part of life in this town as hangovers on Ash Wednesday.

But the next day the storm gathered steam and drew a bead onthe city. As the whirling maelstrom approached the coast, more than a million people evacuated to higher ground. Some 200,000 remained, however--the car-less, the homeless, the aged and infirm, and those die-hard New Orleanians who look for any excuse to throw a party.

The storm hit Breton Sound with the fury of a nuclear warhead, pushing a deadly storm surge into Lake Pontchartrain. The water crept to the top of the massive berm that holds back the lake and then spilled over. Nearly 80 percent of New Orleans lies below sea level--more than eight feet below in places--so the water poured in. A liquid brown wall washed over the brick ranch homes of Gentilly, over the clapboard houses of the Ninth Ward, over the white-columned porches, until it raced through the bars and strip joints on Bourbon Street like the pale rider of the Apocalypse. As it reached 25 feet over parts of the city, people climbed onto roofs to escape it.

Thousands drowned in the murky brew that was soon contaminated by sewage and industrial waste. Thousands more who survived the flood later perished from dehydration and disease as they waited to be rescued. It took two months to pump the city dry, and by then the Big Easy was buried under a blanket of putrid sediment, a million peoploe were homeless, and 50,000 were dead. It was the worst natural disaster in the history of the United States.

When did this calamity happen? It hasn't--yet. But the doomsday scenario is not far-fetched. The Federal Emergency Management Agency lists a hurricane strike on New Orleans as one of the most dire threats to the nation, up there with a large earthquake in California or a terrorist attack on New York City.

Joel K. Bourne, Jr., "Gone With the Water"
National Geographic Magazine, October 2004

In Bush's defense, I guess you could say that the National Geographic story was a sort of "historical document." Oh wait--they used that one already, didn't they?

UPDATE: Homeland Security Chief Michael Chertoff is also on message. Unfortunately for him, it seems that the mainstream media's tolerance level for baldfaced lying has finally been breached (or was it just overflowed?) by the category five BS coming out of official Washington this week, resulting in a veritable flood of actual journalism, as evidenced by this CNN lede:

Defending the U.S. government's response to Hurricane Katrina, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff argued Saturday that government planners did not predict such a disaster ever could occur.

But in fact, government officials, scientists and journalists have warned of such a scenario for years.

Do You Know What it Means?

2005-08-31T22:54:00.000-07:00

Do you know what it means to miss New Orleans
And miss it each night and day
I know I'm not wrong, the feeling's getting stronger
The longer I stay away

Miss the moss-covered vines, tall sugar pines
Where mockingbirds used to sing
I'd love to see that old lazy Mississippi
Hurrying into Spring

The moonlight on the bayou
A Creole tune that fills the air
I dream about magnolias in bloom
And I'm wishin I was there

Do you know what it means to miss New Orleans
When that's where you left your heart
And there's one thing more, I miss the one I care for
More than I miss New Orleans

Words By Louis Alter
Music by Eddie DeLange
Recorded by Louis Armstrong, 1947

More here and here, from Syntax of Things, and also here, from fauxreal, over at Moon of Alabama. All of which I submit, in place of an argument, against the sort of thinking that could come up with a response like this.

Wes Clark on Iraq

2005-08-29T21:29:00.000-07:00

Gen. Wesley Clark has followed up his excellent Washington Post Op-Ed ("Before It's Too Late in Iraq"), as well as the interesting online discussion that ensued, with his first guest blog post over at TPM Cafe. The main subject in all three cases is the General's proposed "success strategy" for Iraq. My own summary of the first day's commentary by Cafe habitués--the good, the bad and the silly--is here.

Realism and Democratic Foreign Policy

2005-08-20T19:18:00.000-07:00

John Ikenberry has an interesting and useful post up at TPM Cafe that touches on the relationship between "liberal" and "realist" schools in international relations theory and current orientations among Republican and Democratic policy makers. It struck me as a useful corrective to the utterly obsolete view that Dems are the stary-eyed idealists, and Republicans the hard-headed realists, when it comes to questions of power and foreign affairs. Anyone who still thinks this is the case, has been asleep for the last four years.

My comment elaborating on the point is here. Cafe denizen Dan K's thoughts on the matter are also worth checking out.

The World's Best Bassless Rock Band Hearts Fender Amps

2005-08-10T21:11:00.000-07:00

Guitar Player has an interesting interview with Sleater-Kinney about their new, apparently quite heavy album (The Woods), in the course of which Corin Tucker gives her vintage Fender Showman some major props:

GUITAR PLAYER: Corin, how do you manage to fill up so much low-frequency space without being a bass player?

TUCKER: My ’65 blackface Fender Showman is the absolute best amp for holding down the bottom end of the sonic spectrum in this band. That amp is the key to the versatility of my sound. It’s super heavy, flexible, and it has a really low, bassy sound.

If I were a marketing VP at Fender, I'd cut Corin a hefty check right now. You can't buy PR like that. In fact, as it turns out, lead guitarist Carrie Brownstein is into Fender amps now too. She's also got a mean collection of pedals:

GUITAR PLAYER: Carrie, what’s your setup?

BROWNSTEIN: I was using a Vox AC30 up until we recorded the new record, when I switched to a ’64 blackface Fender Super Reverb because I wanted more versatility. The Vox is overpowering. It’s very loud on stage, and although it has a grittiness that I love, the midrange is really pronounced. I feel like the Fender fills out the highs and lows a little better, and it’s a much warmer amp than the Vox.

My main guitar is a 1972 Gibson SG, and I also have a ’78 Guild with a Bigsby. The Guild is kind of brittle and “garage-y,” and the SG has a real warm sound. As far as pedals go, I have a Maestro fuzz, a Boss BD-2 Blues Driver, a Z.Vex Super Hard On, and a Roland AD-50 DoubleBeat—which produces some of the most blown-out fuzz distortion I’ve ever heard.

GUITAR PLAYER: The Super Hard On is an ironic pedal name for a female guitarist.

BROWNSTEIN: Yeah. Every time I set that one up on stage it prompts endless jokes from the front row.

George W. Bush, Philosopher

2005-08-03T23:41:00.000-07:00

Kudos to John Cole over at Balloon Juice, for parting company with Bush so decisively over the latter's massively stupid (or massively cynical--take your pick) endorsement of the teaching of so-called "Intelligent Design" alongside Evolution. Says Cole:

Intelligent Design in a religion class--fine. Intelligent design in a philosophy class--fine. Intelligent Design in science classes? Not fine.

That's a pretty sound position. I would like to add, however, that the proper place for "Intelligent Design" in a philosophy class would not exactly be a place of honor, either.

The argument does indeed have a philosophical pedigree, and a pretty long one at that. But it is chiefly remembered, these days, as one of the arguments that Hume blasted to smithereens over two centuries ago, leaving behind a smoldering pile of intellectual rubble. In the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Hume puts the Argument from Design in the mouth of Cleanthes, and gives the most devastating criticisms of that argument to Philo, the skeptic.

Cleanthes tries to maintain that the material world, with its fantastic combination of order and complexity, somehow proves the existence and character of its Creator. Philo correctly identifies this as an anthropomorphic argument from analogy (just as the human mind is the author, or cause, of such artifacts as buildings and watches, so too the Divine Mind must be the Author, or Cause, of the natural order as a whole, of Being). He then proceeds to shatter the analogy with a barrage of counter-arguments, the two most powerful of which are:

1. That the Argument from Design commits the fallacy of composition--of assuming that what is true of a part (of creation) must be true of the whole. It assumes, without warrant, that the human mind is to the material on which it works, as God is to the cosmos. But, as Philo says, "What peculiar privilege has this little agitation of the brain which we call thought, that we must thus make it the model of the whole universe?" Why should the part of creation that is the human mind, in its relation to the limited number of things that can be considered that mind's artifacts, be treated as the template for the way causality works in the world at large?

2. That the Argument from Design is arbitrary in stopping where it does (with an ideal/mental world being the cause of a material world), because, if you take its premises seriously, there is no reason that an ideal/mental world should not itself have a cause. And with that, you have an infinite regress (turtles all the way down): "Have we not the same reason to trace that ideal world into another ideal world, or new intelligent principle? But if we stop, and go no further, why go so far? Why not stop at the material world? How can we satisfy ourselves wihout going on ad infinitum?"

The perception of the world as a glorious design that bespeaks the hand of its Designer is, like the perception that human beings both do and don't fit harmoniously into this design (both are and are not made for it), so commonplace that it seems to be almost a part of human nature. But it is not, for that reason, a proof of, or argument for anything--least of all for the existence of a creator, or the methods of creation. And the minute one tries to make it a proof, one ends up discrediting the very thing one was trying to establish. (Putting an end to that kind of thing is one way to describe the philosophical project Kant undertook after Hume--so the story goes--awoke him from his dogmatic slumber.)

Every Frog March Begins With a Single Step

2005-07-11T22:42:00.000-07:00

It has been a long time in coming. Twenty-one months ago, in one of my rare fits of optimism, I wrote the following about the Plame affair:

During the Clinton years, we got used to more-or-less constant pseudo-scandals -- great waves of public disgrace signifying nothing. These were of course topped off by a single, authentic scandal. But even that exception proved the rule, as the story of one very public middle-aged man's entanglement in a very private moral snare was overwhelmed by the sheer size and volume of the scandal machinery deployed to exploit his personal failing for partisan gain.

So it comes as something of a shock to be confronted with the real thing, probably for the first time since Iran-Contra, and it's perhaps understandable that most journalists have had a hard time getting their bearings. They are, after all, out of practice handling the real thing. But that is where we are.

After some initial confusion (much of it intentionally sewn by administration apologists) the basics of the story are now completely clear for all to see: At least two top White House officials repeatedly disclosed the identity of an undercover CIA officer, in probable violation of federal law, in order to punish and/or discredit an influential critic of the administration's Iraq policy.

Early efforts to tone down the story were doomed by the facts: According to several sources, the CIA officer in question is apparently a career spy who has worked under the deepest level of cover. Her work focused on the very issue (WMD proliferation) that the administration hyped as their rationale for speeding to war in Iraq, and the CIA itself has formally notified the Justice Department that national security was in fact compromised by the revelation of her identity. The officials who revealed it were both highly placed and quite deliberate in their efforts to get the story out. Finally, there is nothing remotely routine about this particular kind of leak (that of a covert officer's identity) -- least of all originating from the White House.

I do not see how this can now stop short of high administration officials being questioned under oath (and probably under the gaze of television cameras) about their involvement. Because the Democrats do not control any of the relevant investigative machinery, it is possible that the day of reckoning may be put off for a while. (If Bush holds on to win reelection, '04 may prove to be his '72.) But once the process begins, the incentives for more disclosures -- whether anonymously to the press (Deep Throat) or publicly to the investigators (John Dean) -- is likely to become overwhelming.

Will it bring the administration down? This depends on how much of a house cleaning (if any) Bush is willing and able to do, and how soon he does it (if at all). The longer he waits, the worse will be the eventual revelations, for the closer they will come to the presidency. At the limit of recklessness (or assuming there is already an evidentiary trail that leads straight to the top, one that is too well established to permit of erasure), the administration will bring itself down -- exactly as Nixon's did.

I am pretty sure this is the beginning of the end.

In retrospect, I ought to have closed with Churchill's old line: "This is not the end, it is not even the beginning of the end, but it may be the end of the beginning." For that's what the original Plame revelation has proved to be: the end of that first phase of the Bush administration's grand snow job regarding the Iraq war, during which no potentially fatal public mistakes had yet been committed in the effort to cover up the fundamental chicanery of the whole project.

By that schedule, we might only now be reaching the beginning of the end -- the phase when the normally-somnabulent Washington Press corps rouses itself, shakes off its collective professional stupor and begins to realize that, on this matter (as indeed on nearly everything touching the Iraq war), they have been played for fools. At least that is what Garance Franke-Ruta and Kevin Drum think, while both Digby and Yglesias are, for different reasons, quite a bit more pessimistic.

Franke-Ruta and Drum have on their side the fact that today's blistering White House press gaggle, following upon the Newsweek revelation (that Karl Rove was Matt Cooper's source) triggered a rare trifecta of homepage headlines in both The New York Times and The Washington Post, as well as an actual piece of critical journalism from the often-obsequious AP.

I, too, would like to believe that this one good day portends many more to come -- that the floodgates of critical press scrutiny will at last swing wide. But I fear that Yglesias is probably right:

"The issues here, fundamentally, run much deeper than the subjective attitudes of the press corps vis-à-vis the White House. It has to do with the conception of journalism as primarily a stenographic activity, concerned with duly recording official statements and, perhaps, balancing those statements with contradictory quotations from official or quasi-official members of the opposition."

For the time being, therefore, I am pinning my hopes, not on any sudden change in professional self-conception on the part the Washington press, but rather on Mr. Fitzgerald, his Grand Jury, and his subpoena power. Until and unless the Democrats can win control of the House in '06 (so far still an unlikely prospect, given the system of incumbent protection), this is the only game in town -- and by far the most likely source of continuing pressure on the press to begin probing the manifold web of lies whereby the country was led down a pre-determined path to unprovoked war.

And that, let us never forget, is what the Plame affair is all about. It is the most prominent of many loose hanging threads which, if pulled sufficiently far, could unravel the entire dark, knotted history of what Mark Danner has called "the secret way to war." As Danner reminds us:

Whether or not the Downing Street memo could be called a "smoking gun," it has long since become clear that the UN inspections policy that, given time, could in fact have prevented war—by revealing, as it eventually would have, that Saddam had no threatening stockpiles of "weapons of mass destruction"—was used by the administration as a pretext: a means to persuade the country to begin a war that need never have been fought.

The crime behind the crime, in other words, is perhaps the highest crime the executive of a democratic country can commit -- namely, deceiving his own people in order to make war, not for their necessity, but at his pleasure.

For the leak of Plame's identity was a naked attempt by the White House to discredit Joe Wilson's public airing of his finding that the Niger uranium story -- so instrumental to the Bush case for war -- was transparently false. As Josh Marshall and others have reminded us, behind the attack on Wilson's public unmasking of the Niger yellowcake hoax stand the forged documents themselves -- the ones that launched that hoax to begin with. And, we might add, alongside those documents sits the putative "evidence" of the aluminum tubes that proved not to be appropriate for uranium enrichment, and all the tall tales of "curveball" regarding Iraqi WMD, not a single one of which proved to be true.

The attack on Wilson was not simply an ad hoc response, however ruthless and possibly even illegal, to a particularly troublesome administration critic. It was instead part of a systematic cover-up of the process whereby, in the words of the Downing Street Memo, the pre-war "intelligence and facts" had been "fixed around the policy" of regime change in Iraq.

This, and not simply the legal culpability of Karl Rove in this single incident (bad as that is), is the real quarry here -- just as the real quarry in Watergate wasn't mere legal culpability for the famous "third-rate burglary" but an entire mechanism of force and fraud aimed at supressing domestic opposition to the continuation of a bitterly unpopular war, deceitfully and unjustly begun. And Nixon of course did not launch his war, but rather inherited it; the Bush administration is, in this respect, like the worst of Johnson and Nixon combined.

Only time will tell if a quarry of that size can be brought to bay without an opposition party being in control of at least part of the federal government. But I tend to think that it can not be. So even if this is the beginning of the end, we still have a long, long way to go before we reach that end.

City Air Makes Free

2005-07-08T02:00:00.000-07:00

On a day when every decent person in the world is a Londoner, London Mayor Ken Livingstone speaks for all of us:

I want to say one thing specifically to the world today. This was not a terrorist attack against the mighty and the powerful. It was not aimed at Presidents or Prime Ministers. It was aimed at ordinary, working-class Londoners, black and white, Muslim and Christian, Hindu and Jew, young and old. It was an indiscriminate attempt to slaughter, irrespective of any considerations for age, for class, for religion, or whatever.

That isn’t an ideology, it isn’t even a perverted faith - it is just an indiscriminate attempt at mass murder and we know what the objective is. They seek to divide Londoners. They seek to turn Londoners against each other. I said yesterday to the International Olympic Committee, that the city of London is the greatest in the world, because everybody lives side by side in harmony. Londoners will not be divided by this cowardly attack. They will stand together in solidarity alongside those who have been injured and those who have been bereaved and that is why I’m proud to be the mayor of that city.

Finally, I wish to speak directly to those who came to London today to take life.

I know that you personally do not fear giving up your own life in order to take others - that is why you are so dangerous. But I know you fear that you may fail in your long-term objective to destroy our free society and I can show you why you will fail.

In the days that follow look at our airports, look at our sea ports and look at our railway stations and, even after your cowardly attack, you will see that people from the rest of Britain, people from around the world will arrive in London to become Londoners and to fulfil their dreams and achieve their potential.

They choose to come to London, as so many have come before because they come to be free, they come to live the life they choose, they come to be able to be themselves. They flee you because you tell them how they should live. They don’t want that and nothing you do, however many of us you kill, will stop that flight to our city where freedom is strong and where people can live in harmony with one another. Whatever you do, however many you kill, you will fail.

American Patriotism

2005-07-04T20:42:00.000-07:00

For his Independence Day post, Billmon writes a moving elegy for American patriotism, half-disguised as a repudiation of it. The disguise isn't very convincing. Only someone for whom the American idea still exercises a powerful attraction would bother to write words like these:

But hatred and revenge are patriotism's curse, not its justification. When Lincoln spoke of "mystic cords of memory" and urged his countrymen to put their common heritage ahead of their political divisions, he wasn't appealing to their tribal loyalties, but their loyalty to an ideal: democratic government under the law. If American patriotism has any claim to be an exception to the general run of blind national chauvinism, it has to be found in that idea. If America is to be an exceptional nation, one worth glorifying above all others, it has to be because of the quality of her justice and the strength of her democracy -- not because of the language she speaks, or the God she worships or the color of her skin. And not because of her material wealth or military power or imperial ambitions. Least of all those.

Pat Buchanan and I agree on very few things, but he wrote something many years ago that I can endorse wholeheartedly: "America was a great country before she was a rich country." In many ways a greater country, I would probably add -- not because she was poor (if you've seen real poverty, Third World poverty, you know there's nothing to admire about it) but because she stood a little less apart from the rest of humanity, and had to rely a little more heavily on the promises inscribed on the Statue of Liberty, rather than power of her aircraft carriers, to impress the world.

It's hardly surprising, of course, that such ardent patriotism will occasionally wish itself out of existence, as when Billmon prefaces these remarks by saying, "I'm not a big fan of patriotism, at least not as most Americans understand the word. Patriotism is just another word for nationalism...." No, it isn't, and the long passage I just quoted proves that Billmon knows it isn't -- as does that anguished qualifier, "at least as most Americans understand the word." This is not a repudiation, but a stifled plea for renewal.

Nor is that mood anything new. The truest American patriots have often been close to the edge of despair -- and often enough over it. And since the standard raised at our birth was nothing less than a promise of the extraordinary made ordinary -- of that rarest and most fragile of historical flowers, political liberty, made the common possession of all human kind -- the so-to-speak objective case for despair has always been strong. James Baldwin once said that he could not possibly dispute what Malcom X was telling his followers about the reality of race in America -- that any alternative to the future being offered by Malcom had to begin with the acknowledgment that he was speaking a long-supressed truth about the American past and present.

Any country, moreover, that had a birth knows it can die and therefore, as Stanley Cavell once remarked, "feels mortal." In other words, both America's existence and its identity are always subject to doubt, and the one because of the other -- hence its unquenchable need for, and suspicion of, dissent. Hannah Arendt, writing about the crises of the Republic at the bitter end of the sixties, once called dissent "the hallmark of free government" because "one who knows that he may dissent knows also that he somehow consents when he does not dissent."

The social contract, in other words, is no mere harmless abstraction here, but a considerable existential-political burden. As Mark Danner recently put it, "Finding yourself forced to see the gulf between what you are told about the world... and what you yourself can't help but understand about that world -- this is not always a welcome kind of vision to have." Americans are a people whose founding and subsequent history forces such a vision upon them. And since we are so often unequal to that vision (how could we not be?), we will often be found refusing it, with modes of refusal that run the gamut from the merely ridiculous to the astonishingly destructive.

But, from time to time, we do embrace the vision, without reservation or evasion. And at such times, we admit to ourselves exactly what Billmon (almost) says: that without a dedication to enacting the ideal of "democratic government under law," there would be no such thing as American patriotism -- and then our love of country really would amount to nothing better than one more tribal nationalism among others, no more to be admired, and (because of our enormous power) far more to be feared, than most. And this outcome, of course, is one possible destination for America, and one that always has its advocates among us. American patriotism, we might say, is never a given for us, but rather a possibility we must continually struggle to keep alive.

That, at least, is how I read the following words of Lincoln's, given before Independence Hall in Philadelphia, in February of 1861, as this greenest of presidents elect was making his way to Washington, to assume the leadership of a Republic teetering on the brink of Civil War -- a war over the question of what it means to be an American:

Mr. Cuyler:—I am filled with deep emotion at finding myself standing here in the place where were collected together the wisdom, the patriotism, the devotion to principle, from which sprang the institutions under which we live. You have kindly suggested to me that in my hands is the task of restoring peace to our distracted country. I can say in return, sir, that all the political sentiments I entertain have been drawn, so far as I have been able to draw them, from the sentiments which originated, and were given to the world from this hall in which we stand. I have never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence. (Great cheering.) I have often pondered over the dangers which were incurred by the men who assembled here and adopted that Declaration of Independence—I have pondered over the toils that were endured by the officers and soldiers of the army, who achieved that Independence. (Applause.) I have often inquired of myself, what great principle or idea it was that kept this Confederacy so long together. It was not the mere matter of the separation of the colonies from the mother land; but something in that Declaration giving liberty, not alone to the people of this country, but hope to the world for all future time. (Great applause.) It was that which gave promise that in due time the weights should be lifted from the shoulders of all men, and that all should have an equal chance. (Cheers.) This is the sentiment embodied in that Declaration of Independence.

Now, my friends, can this country be saved upon that basis? If it can, I will consider myself one of the happiest men in the world if I can help to save it. If it can’t be saved upon that principle, it will be truly awful. But, if this country cannot be saved without giving up that principle—I was about to say I would rather be assassinated on this spot than to surrender it. (Applause.)

Now, in my view of the present aspect of affairs, there is no need of bloodshed and war. There is no necessity for it. I am not in favor of such a course, and I may say in advance, there will be no blood shed unless it be forced upon the Government. The Government will not use force unless force is used against it. (Prolonged applause and cries of "That’s the proper sentiment.")

My friends, this is a wholly unprepared speech. I did not expect to be called upon to say a word when I came here—I supposed I was merely to do something towards raising a flag. I may, therefore, have said something indiscreet, (cries of "no, no"), but I have said nothing but what I am willing to live by, and, in the pleasure of Almighty God, die by.

Does Gen. Abazaid Know Something We Don't?

2005-06-26T14:54:00.000-07:00

Absolutely I think this war [in Iraq] has made us safer. Look, we are fighting the same people in Afghanistan and in Iraq, and our partners are fighting the same people in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan that brought us 9/11. We should never lose sight of that.

-- Gen. John Abazaid, Commander of U.S. Central Command, on Face the Nation, June 26, 2005

The reports describe friendly contacts and indicate some common themes in both sides' hatred of the United States. But to date we have seen no evidence that these or the earlier contacts ever developed into a collaborative operational relationship. Nor have we seen evidence indicating that Iraq cooperated with al Qaeda in developing or carrying out any attacks against the United States.

-- The 9/11 Commission Report, section 2.5, July 22, 2004.

Lt. Col. Frederick P. Wellman, who works with the task force overseeing the training of Iraqi security troops, said the insurgency doesn't seem to be running out of new recruits, a dynamic fueled by tribal members seeking revenge for relatives killed in fighting.

"We can't kill them all," Wellman said. "When I kill one I create three."

-- "Officers Say Arms Can't End Iraq War" by Tom Lasseter, Knight Ridder Newspapers, Monday 13 June 2005

The [Congressional and intelligence] officials said the [CIA] report spelled out how the urban nature of the war in Iraq was helping combatants learn how to carry out assassinations, kidnappings, car bombings and other kinds of attacks that were never a staple of the fighting in Afghanistan during the anti-Soviet campaigns of the 1980's. It was during that conflict, primarily rural and conventional, that the United States provided arms to Osama bin Laden and other militants, who later formed Al Qaeda.

The assessment said the central role played by Iraq meant that, for now, most potential terrorists were likely to focus their energies on attacking American forces there, rather than carrying out attacks elsewhere, the officials said. But the officials said Saudi Arabia, Jordan and other countries would soon have to contend with militants who leave Iraq equipped with considerable experience and training.

-- "Iraq May Be Prime Place for Training of Militants, C.I.A. Report Concludes" by Douglas Jehl, The New York Times, June 22, 2005

Does Gen. Abazaid claim to know something that the 9/11 Commission didn't? Like, for instance, does he know of the existence of evidence that al-Qaeda was operating in Hussein-controlled Iraq before our invasion? If so, he should really consider sharing this evidence with someone.

Or perhaps he doesn't really know of any evidence that would counter the 9/11 Commission's conclusions, and isn't really saying that al-Qaeda was in Iraq before we invaded, but is instead citing some version of the so-called "flypaper" theory, according to which the Iraq war is helping us to win the war against jihadist terror by drawing foreign jihadists into Iraq where we can kill them? In that case, does Gen. Abazaid know something that Lt. Col. Wellman and the CIA don't know? Because, according to them, it sure sounds like we're making more terrorists than we're killing.

Or does the General know of some exotic system of logic according to which the way to really solve a problem is to first make it much worse, and then struggle for years to recover from the effects of having made it worse?

How To Negotiate With Terrorists

2005-06-26T01:02:00.001-07:00

Let the Bush administration show you how: The increasingly indispensible Times of London has the story and Billmon has the first extended commentary. Here's the gist:

After weeks of delicate negotiation involving a former Iraqi minister and senior tribal leaders, a small group of insurgent commanders apparently came face to face with four American officials seeking to establish a dialogue with the men they regard as their enemies.

The talks on June 3 were followed by a second encounter 10 days later, according to an Iraqi who said that he had attended both meetings. Details provided to The Sunday Times by two Iraqi sources whose groups were involved indicate that further talks are planned in the hope of negotiating an eventual breakthrough that might reduce the violence in Iraq.

As Billmon points out, this is a good thing. We already knew, from both the top U.S. commander (Gen. George W. Casey) and the chief U.S. military spokesman (Brig. Gen. Donald Alston) in Iraq, that a military solution of the insurgency was out of the question. We also knew, from Gen. Abizaid's recent testimony before Congress, that the insurgency has lost none of its potency in the last half year, and that it is now buttressed by a greater number of foreign fighters than ever before. We also learned, from a classified CIA report whose existence and contents were leaked to the New York Times, that the insurgency is proving to be a training ground for foreign terrorists, similar to what Afghanistan provided in the 80's and 90's, but with a potentially even more dangerous emphasis on urban warfare.

Given that the most our armed forces can accomplish is to maintain the current military stalemate, while Iraqi politicians negotiate a constitutional settlement that bleeds off sufficient Sunni support to undermine the insurgency; and given that speed is of the essence, since the longer it takes the politicians to do this, the more American troops will die (at the rate of over two a day), and the more foreign terrorists will get trained for eventual urban Jihad in their home countries; -- given all that, negotiations are probably a wise and (dare I say it?) realistic thing to be doing.

It's clear from the details of the Times story that a principal aim of the U.S. negotiators is to try to convince the insurgency's leadership to in effect give up the Zarqawi group. At the moment, the insurgency leaders are primarily demanding a timetable (in the 1 to 5 year range) for a full U.S. withdrawal. The outlines of a possible deal seem to be coming into focus -- one that would purge the hard core of foreign terrorists from the insurgency, and guarantee an end to the occupation, but without necessitating an immediate U.S. withdrawal that would leave the fledgling Iraqi state helpless. Of course, neither side is ready to sign onto anything like such a deal yet, but the path to it has been opened.

All in all then, this news looks like a genuine cause for hope. But, of course, it is also an occasion for richly-deserved ridicule.

Because, in the first place, it is the White House itself that has assiduously refused to distinguish between any type of insurgent activity, on the one side, and terrorism, on the other, and that has insisted on labeling the entire insurgency as simply "the terrorists." And, in the second place, it was only a couple of days ago that President Bush's top political and policy advisor Karl Rove was publicly denouncing liberals for being soft on terrorism (specifically, for desiring a non-military reponse to 9-11 -- an obvious lie), so soft in fact that they would rather harm our own troops than let them fight the enemy (not just a lie, but an indecent slander).

And now here is the Bush adminstration, doing the very reality-based thing of trying to split the insurgency by appealing to the relative moderates within it, to those with limited, concrete, non-nihilistic political goals, against the true Jihadis. It is a good play, but one that, if the shoe were on the other foot, if it were being recommended by Democrats, would call down on their heads a veritable torrent of denunciations and fiery imprecations from every corner of rightwingerdom. And so we are now entitled to ask the following question of those same right-wing pundits:

Where is the outrage?!

Last Throes

2005-06-21T21:32:00.000-07:00

The New York Times finally picks up on a story that Knight Ridder Washington Bureau first reported over a week ago: Sunni insurgents in central Iraq are getting better at killing U.S. troops. How? By building a better Improvised Explosive Device (IED).

The insurgency continues to adapt to U.S. countermeasures faster than we can come up with new ones. Now that armored Humvees are finally getting to Iraq in significant numbers, the insurgents are starting to deploy IEDs with shaped charges capable of piercing such armor. And now that our forces are jamming radio signals to foil detonators made from cell phones and garage door openers, the insurgents are turning to infrared detonators that are impervious to radio jamming. Most disturbing of all, these adaptations aren't just keeping the insurgency lethal -- they are actually making it more lethal than ever before.

The result? IEDs now account for 70% of U.S. casualties, and the death toll from IEDs reached a new high in May and June. This, in turn, helps account for why the U.S. death toll is currently running at 2.13 per day in the period since the Iraqi elections -- as against 1.89 per day in the period between the "end of major combat operations" [sic] and the "handover of sovereignty" [sic]. All of which, in turn, helps explain why (as the increasingly indispensable Knight Ridder service also reported about a week ago) top U.S. military officers in Iraq are now openly saying that the insurgency cannot be ended by military means.

Maybe this is the kind of complication that the head of MI6 had in mind when he expressed his now famous worry that, "There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action." In any case, if these are, as the Vice President would have it, the insurgency's "last throes," I'd hate to see what the damn thing looks like in the full bloom of health.

How to Bribe a Member of Congress

2005-06-13T08:30:00.000-07:00

Special San Diego edition. Sweetheart defense contract deals, real estate speculation as a form of money laundering, and our very own Randy "Duke" Cunningham (R - Escondido). The San Diego Union Tribune has the scoop, and Josh Marshall has the executive summary. My favorite Cunningham line: "I feel very confident that I haven't done anything wrong." Um, Duke, if you didn't do anything wrong, wouldn't "feeling confident" about it be beside the point?

The Grammar of Life

2005-06-12T22:26:00.000-07:00

I thought that the strongest passage in this post by Majikthise, offering a philosophical defense of the pro-choice position, was one that came almost as an aside, in a footnote:

We don't ordinarily describe a woman as a mother until she gives birth to at least one live baby.

That strikes me as entirely correct, and extremely pertinent, but it is undercut by what Majikthise says in the very next sentence:

It's interesting how the anti-choice bias permeates our language.

I have always been struck, on something like the contrary, by the myriad ways that ordinary usage undercuts the strict "pro-life" position, and tends rather to call attention to the overwhelming significance of birth, in marking the beginning of a person's life. Majikthise gives what amounts to one example of this, but coming up with many more is trivially easy:

-- When we ask someone "How old are you?" we do not ordinarily expect that person to respond by giving the years since her conception (or quickening, or viability).

-- To mark a person's passage through life, we do not ordinarily celebrate days of conception (or quickening, or viability, but I won't keep repeating that part). We celebrate "birthdays."

-- When we tell a person's life story (or when someone tells us theirs), the event with which it ordinarily begins (perhaps after some "family background") is that person's birth, and not (unless he is Tristram Shandy) his conception.

-- We often ask people "Where were you born?" We do not ordinarily ask them, "Where were you conceived?" nor even expect them to know the answer to such a question -- although, in a certain kind of company, it can be odd fun to speculate.

-- Tombstones and other ceremonial markers, when they have dates on them, ordinarily give, in addition to a date of death, a date of birth, not a date of conception.

-- We do not ordinarily expect there to be a "funeral" to mark a miscarriage, nor do we ordinarily speak about a miscarried zygote or embryo or fetus the way we would about someone at their funeral, e.g., as "the deceased," "the loved one," and so on.

-- When we ask "How many are there in your family?" we do not ordinarily expect zygotes or embryos or fetuses to be counted, although it is quite ordinary to hear something like "and one on the way," or "and soon to be one more."

In addition to looking at ordinary usage in this J. L. Austin sort of way, it can also be quite useful to do some modest Heidegger/Nietzsche type of linguistic operations on heavily freighted terms such as these. For instance, I think it is philosophically (and morally) significant that the use of the word "conception" in this context is much more abstracted from the primary and direct human experience out of which it arose, than is the use of the word "birth," and that, if we trace both words back to their most primitive meanings, we find that only one of them is directly and aboriginally associated with the beginning of a unique human life.

"To conceive" comes from the Latin concipere, whose root meanings describe commonplace acts such as to take in (or up), to receive, to catch. From those humble beginnings, the verb was carried over into many other realms, including purely mental operations such as imagining or understanding, as well as both mothering and becoming pregnant. It's easy to imagine how the latter two meanings arose: The root meanings describe acts that could easily be related metaphorically, not to the beginning of life, but to (part of) the (hetero-)sexual act, in particular as seen from a female point of view -- hence the association, by extension, with both mothering and pregnancy. The association with the beginnng of a unique human life, however, is nowhere to be found in the word's long history.

"To be born" comes from Scandanavian roots, by way of Middle English, and seems to have always meant what it means for us -- the act or event of coming into the world, of being seen, as it were, for the first time. The Latin equivalent, nasci, likewise has as its primary meaning to be born or begotten. Other meanings include to rise or dawn; to start or originate; to be produed by spontaneously; to come into existence or being; to spring forth or grow; and, simply, to live. Note the striking absence from these meanings of any imagery associated with parental figures or originating causes, and the exclusive focus on the being which (or who) is making its first appearance, its beginning in the world.

To conceive, we might say, is something that is done (in both its biological and other senses) by those who are already in a position to make a beginning of their own. It is the taking in of the seed that is necessary for that beginning. A philosopher might call this seed an intuition; an artist might call it an inspiration; a biologist or a farmer would probably be thinking of more literal inseminations.

To be born is something else entirely. It is (to borrow a little from Hannah Arendt, who was borrowing from Augustine) the actual beginning of something new in the world. And if it happens to be a human birth, it is the begnning of one who is himself or herself a beginner -- one capable of beginning things anew. It is then the appearance in the world of an original who is also, potentially, an originator.

In sum, there is something in language, deeper even than the legacy of patriarchal institutions, that resists every attempt to divorce the beginning of personhood from that momentous first appearance in the world, as one unique being among others, that we call birth.

Kinsley Misses a Memo

2005-06-12T12:05:00.000-07:00

Kevin Drum get this one exactly right: Michael Kinsely's op-ed piece in this morning's L.A. Times ("The Left Gets a Memo") is a puzzlingly self-contradictory attempt to discount the significance of the Downing Street Memo.

Depending on which paragraph of Kinsley's column one reads, the Memo's revelations -- that the Bush administration had decided on war in advance of going to the U.N., and that such a diplomatic effort was being urged by the British as a way to create the legal justification required for their own participation in that war -- are either an overblown part of a "paranoid theory," or else so obvious that "you don't need a secret memo" to know that they are true.

But Kinsley's column looks even more foolish in light of the latest leaked memo, the one Kevin called our attention to yesterday, namely the Cabinet Office briefing paper that was circulated to participants in the same meeting, the minutes of which the Downing Street Memo records. Two paragraphs from the London Times own coverage of the newly leaked document stand out:

The suggestions that the allies use the UN to justify war contradicts claims by Blair and Bush, repeated during their Washington summit last week, that they turned to the UN in order to avoid having to go to war. The attack on Iraq finally began in March 2003.

The briefing paper is certain to add to the pressure, particularly on the American president, because of the damaging revelation that Bush and Blair agreed on regime change in April 2002 and then looked for a way to justify it. [emphasis added]

So here is the London Times saying that the new memo is evidence that Bush and Blair are lying right now, in real time, about what really took place back in 2002, and that the President and the PM had agreed, at least in principle, on an unprovoked war to remove Saddam Hussein in April 2002. And, indeed, a look at the opening paragraphs of the briefing paper itself strongly supports such a reading:

1. The US Government's military planning for action against Iraq is proceeding apace. But, as yet, it lacks a political framework. In particular, little thought has been given to creating the political conditions for military action, or the aftermath and how to shape it.

2. When the Prime Minister discussed Iraq with President Bush at Crawford in April he said that the UK would support military action to bring about regime change, provided that certain conditions were met: efforts had been made to construct a coalition/shape public opinion, the Israel-Palestine Crisis was quiescent, and the options for action to eliminate Iraq's WMD through the UN weapons inspectors had been exhausted.

3. We need now to reinforce this message and to encourage the US Government to place its military planning within a political framework, partly to forestall the risk that military action is precipitated in an unplanned way by, for example, an incident in the No Fly Zones. This is particularly important for the UK because it is necessary to create the conditions in which we could legally support military action. Otherwise we face the real danger that the US will commit themselves to a course of action which we would find very difficult to support.

I wonder if the meaning of these words is plain enough for Kinsley's taste? To my eyes they seem to say rather plainly that:

The PM pledged his support in April 2002 for a war whose purpose was the removal of Saddam Hussein from power;
That he however attached certain conditions to this support, some of which, in the event, were clearly met (the shaping of public opinion), and some of which, just as clearly, were abandoned mid-stream (the exhaustion of the diplomatic option of using UN inspectors to disarm Saddam); and
That the PM's inner circle was deeply concerned that the Americans were in such a hurry to get to the battlefield that -- unless they received sufficient British prodding -- they might not get a legal justification in place before the shooting started, and that the U.K. would then be drawn into an undisguised war for regime change, which would be legally and politically unsupportable for the British government.

Whether or not the cutting-short of the inspections process, and the launching of the war on the basis of UNSCR 1441, without an additional resolution authorizing force, satisfied the legal and political requirements of the British government, is of course subject to interpretation -- and a lively debate among British politicians. What isn't, I think, subject to interpretation is that the Americans wanted a war to remove Saddam, whether it could be legally and morally justified, or not, and that the British, who did care about justifiability, were playing catch up.

It could also be argued, I suppose, that the new memo supports the theory that, had the British withheld their support, the war might have been averted. Perhaps yes, perhaps no -- we will probably never know, as I suspect the British didn't know, but could ultimately only guess, like everyone else in the world, at the depth of Bush's determination to go it alone, if need be. But in any case, this hardly diminishes what the new memo confirms: Justification or no justification, the Americans were set on making war to change the regime in Baghdad. It merely means that their intentions might still conceivably have been frustrated -- which is precisely what hardliners like Cheney feared might happen if the UN route was taken.

In the end, of course, Cheney needn't have worried: Success in meeting one of Blair's conditions in particular (namely, the shaping of public opinion -- at least in the US and the UK) made up for any failure in meeting the others. The Bush/Blair team's success on this front was, in all senses of the word, spectacular: They managed to convince a majority on both sides of the Atlantic that, in effect, the UN inspectors' work could only be trusted if it shored up the case for war -- since the "right" answer about Saddam's possession of WMD had become, by then, a foregone conclusion. Given that "reality," why lose valuable time waiting around to find out what the inspectors might say?

But perhaps Mr. Kinsley believes that a more innocuous interpretation of these new revelations is possible? Or perhaps he concurs with the London Times' sinister reading of them, but thinks that the American people have already absorbed the news that they were (and are still being) lied to by their President about when and why he decided to make war Iraq? Or indeed perhaps -- to judge by today's column -- he believes both of these things simultaneously?

The Bush Sag is Overdetermined

2005-06-10T23:05:00.000-07:00

Depending on whose polls you believe, President Bush's approval/disapproval ratings are either just barely above the worst numbers he's ever had, or else they've just hit a new low.

What could be the explanation for this "conundrum," as Alan Greenspan might put it? Let's try out some theories:

Perhaps Americans are worried because the all-volunteer Army fell short of its recruitment goal in May, for the fourth month in a row, this time by 25% -- after having lowered that goal by 16%. [Link]

Or maybe they are disturbed by that fact that, despite an extensive effort to reduce the risk to our troops in Iraq from Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs), the insurgency seems to be getting steadily better at using them to kill American soldiers trying to get from point A to point B. [Link]

Or else it might be that people are growing more skeptical about our ability to train enough Iraqis to replace the American forces there -- especially after hearing about Iraqi army units that sing ballads to Saddam Hussein, and Iraqi national guard units that refuse to take training from U.S. troops at all, for fear of being assassinated when they return to their homes. [Link] [Link]

Or maybe it's not the Iraqi news so much as the sour economic news, like the fact that every time the pace of job creation seems to be picking up, it subsequently tanks -- as it did in May. [Link]

Or perhaps people are getting nervous about the economy because the trade deficit is ballooning again, putting us on track for beating out 2004 as the worst year ever. [Link]

Or maybe, like Alan Greenspan himself, they're puzzled about the ever-narrowing gap between short and long term interest rates, but more worried about it than he is, because they know that, if this keeps up, we'll eventually reach an "inverted yield curve" -- one of the most reliable harbingers of a recession. [Link] [Link]

As you can see, there are many plausible candidates for the underlying cause of the decline in Bush's popularity. In such cases, it is rare for a single theory to to explain the phenomenon completely. On the contrary, indeed: Managing to get yourself reelected, only to plummet in the polls within six months of your second inauguration, probably requires screwing up on multiple fronts simultaneously.

The Bush sag is overdetermined.

One Step Closer to Disaster in Iraq

2005-06-09T20:50:00.000-07:00

On a day that cost the lives of four more American soldiers, Iraq takes one more step toward open civil war.

To understand what is going on, it helps to remember (or learn) that Abdul Aziz al-Hakim is a very important figure in the new Iraq. He is: the head of the Shiite coalition that controls a majority in parliament (the Iraqi Alliance); the leader of one of the two major parties in that coalition -- namely, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI); and the former leader of SCIRI's armed wing, the Iranian-trained Badr Brigade -- in which capacity he succeeded his brother, Mohammed Bakr al-Hakim, who was assassinated in Najaf in 2003. He is, in other words, probably the second most powerful man in Iraq at the moment -- deferring only to Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the most senior and revered Shiite cleric.

What happened is this: At a conference marking the second anniversary of the Badr militia's establishment inside Iraq, the Shiite Prime Minister, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, and the Kurdish President (and Peshmerga militia leader), Jalal Talabani, got together with their host, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, to praise one another's militias, and to announce that those same militias (specifically, the Peshmerga and the Badr Brigade) should be allowed to continue to exist in the new Iraq, and should moreover be used in operations against the (largely Sunni-based) insurgency.

American officials have openly opposed the continuation of the militias, or their use in the counter-insurgency. It seems likely, however, that retention of the Peshmerga was a non-negotiable demand for Kurdish participation in government (since it is the ultimate guarantee of their independence), and that the Shiites resolved, perhaps partly in response, to retain theirs as well. So the political stars have aligned to give the new Iraq, in addition to a Sunni insurgency, two private armies -- one for Shiites, and one for Kurds. If one were aiming to start an all-out civil war, this wouldn't be a bad way to arrange for it to happen.

The Times coverage mentions that the statement of support for the militias was intended to rebut Sunni criticisms of them, but fails to note, as Knight Ridder does, that many Sunnis are convinced that Badr death/torture squads are already operating inside the Iraqi army and police.

A Reform Agenda for the Democrats

2005-06-05T23:30:00.001-07:00

Here are a few modest items the Democrats should consider, if they are serious about proposing a powerful reform agenda for the next midterm elections:

The Executive Summary:

End pork-barrel spending by eliminating the use of the "legislative rider"
Restore fiscal sanity by making (structurally) balanced budgets mandatory
Secure, by constitutional amendment, the right to vote in presidential elections
Link radical tax simplification to restored tax progressivity
Equalize the treatment of earned income and (amortized) capital gains
Link continued support for free trade to the passage of single-payer health insurance

The Long Version:

1. End pork barrel spending. This one will be tough, since both parties are deeply culpable in it, incumbents are dependent on it for rewarding local notables and campaign contributors, and it provides much of grease for the many wheels that must turn to pass bigger pieces of legislation. But the public interest case against such spending is ironclad: It is, almost by definition, spending directed at private or partial interests. There may be some ceremonial attempt to dress it up with a public purpose, but the spending itself is always targeted so as to benefit a narrow constituency. Rousseau made the case long ago--no act can be just for the whole community, that treats a mere part of it directly. Such acts lack the generality that legitimacy demands. They also, of course, erode political responsibility. Influential constituents are effectively paid off, helping to ensure that they and others will not judge the performance of the representative by asking themselves public questions about that performance--questions about whether this or that action was good for the whole constituency.

But how to break the hold that such spending has on congress--and more to the point how to convince a deeply skeptical public that either party is truly prepared to do so? The mechanism responsible for most of this kind of spending is the legislative "rider"--the spending amendment tacked onto a larger, and necessary appropriations bill. (Such riders are also often used, these days, to subvert regulations on behalf of special, local interests--especially corporate interests in the extractive industries seeking "relief" from environmental laws.) The line-time veto was supposed to be the cure for the legislative rider, but, first, the Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional, and, second, the line-item veto probably would have encouraged the president to pare the pork very selectively--favoring legislative friends and punishing foes. Better to attack the problem at its source.

Democrats should pledge to do three things:

* Stop all attempts to attach riders of their own to appropriations bills. This is comparatively easy to give up anyway, when you are out of power, but the gesture is an important one from the public's perspective. People are far more likely to believe you are sincere about forcing all politicians to give up some goodies if you have already given them up yourselves.

* Reintroduce the strictest possible "germaneness" rules in both houses (currently the Senate is the worst offender), as soon as Democrats are once again in the majority. The publicly-circulated drafts of these rules should contain provisions requiring super-majorities to overturn them. Even such provisions can be abolished by a narrow but determined majority that wants to bring the riders back, of course, but they put one more stumbling block in the way of such a majority and the more, the merrier.

* Support a constitutional amendment banning the practice for all time. Democrats have, and the whole, been loathe to propose constitutional amendments to accomplish what amount to relatively mundane legislative purposes. Such tactics smack of grandstanding and can easily be used to cover up an intention to do nothing substantive in the meantime. We should get over it. The amendment signal is one of the most effective that a party can send, for it can serve as a powerful wedge, even for a party out of power. The Donkey needs to learn from and emulate, not scorn, successful Elephantine strategies.

2. Restore fiscal sanity. A balanced budget amendment once seemed more trouble than it was worth -- a hamfisted approach to a complex problem. But no more. The fiscal madness of the present regime knows no bounds and it must be stopped cold. There is no way for a party out of power to even begin to fight for this in the context of the budget process, and there is great danger that if it is confined to a mere list of the opposition's legislative priorities, it will not be taken seriously by anyone in the media, and therefore make no impact on the public mind. Reviving this old PR weapon and turning it against the GOP -- but this time backed by a real commitment to enacting it -- is just the ticket.

The amendment's permitted exceptions to budgetary balance should be very strictly defined: Only *declared* war, or official economic recession (as defined, say, by the National Bureau of Economic Research) should justify new borrowing, and then only with the concurrence of both houses of congress and the president. Since both war and recession can have lengthy aftermaths that might justify continued deficit spending, that should be permitted as well, provided congress and the president continue to certify that there is residual need.

More importantly, the amendment should require scrupulous accounting of the amounts involved, meaning that the deficit spending should be authorized under a separate, special appropriation, containing spending for the permitted purposes only. And that spending authority, being essentially temporary in nature, should be subject to more frequent renewal than normal appropriations -- say, once every quarter. This would have the extra advantage of encouraging economic stimulus that is as immediate and direct as possible, while the combination of a required declaration of war and the quarterly appropriations would restore to congress some of its lost institutional responsibility for foreign policy matters.

By being the ones to put this back onto the public agenda, we can frame the debate in such a way that it leaves ample room for (and even encourages) the kind of Keynesian fiscal policies that Democrats have long known are sometimes necessary to combat economic downturns. Meanwhile, the requirement of structural fiscal balance would both cement the popular image of the Democrats as the party of fiscal responsibility (fostered under Clinton but dissipated somewhat since we have been out of power) and force the GOP to abandon its policy of slowly starving popular middle class entitlements it cannot destroy through frontal assault, while rewarding upper-income taxpayers with endless giveaways of borrowed money. What could be better?

3. Secure the right to vote in presidential elections. This is one that has almost no hope of passage, due to resistance by the smaller states, but that is bound to have widespread popular appeal once the stakes are made clear. Since the bulk of those states are among the staunchest Republican strongholds, and since the case for reform is overwhelming, the Democrats have little to lose, and much to gain. Small-state conservatives will scream bloody murder, but they will also have to put themselves on record as opposing the principle of one person, one vote, and the idea that the American people have a right to select their own president for themselves. All the historical resonances of the great struggles to expand the franchise will be called up, and we can honestly say that the purpose of the amendment is to secure once and for all one of the most sacred things in a democracy--the people's confidence in the integrity and meaning of their ballots.

As matters now stand, there is no right to vote for president of the United States. The ascendant interpretation (since Bush v. Gore) holds that the legislatures of the several states could, in principle, appoint their electors in any way they see fit. Meanwhile, the scrutiny occasioned by two close elections in a row have revealed what a mess our presidential balloting process is, with a bizarre patchwork of better and worse systems that Bush v. Gore would surely invalidate as an unconstitutional violation of equal protection--had that decision not arbitrarily declared itself without authority to serve as a precedent. Lastly, partisans of both sides now have ample reason to distrust the way the electoral college distorts the popular vote: Bush won the former in 2000 despite losing the latter, while in 2004 a swing of a bit more than a hundred thousand votes in Ohio would have put the shoe on the other foot. With the country so closely divided along party lines, we can expect to see more of the same.

It's time to end this farce, before it leads to a genuine constitutional crisis. The Democrats should propose a very simple constitutional amendment, modeled after the Seventeenth, along these lines:

The President and Vice-President shall be elected by the people of the United States. The electors shall have the qualifications requisite for electors of members of the House of Representatives.

The presidential ballot shall be conducted by a uniform mechanism, to be determined and overseen by a Federal Election Commission composed according to the statute in force when this amendment was proposed, and to be implemented with all deliberate speed.

This amendment shall not be so construed as to affect the election or term of any President or Vice President chosen before it becomes valid as part of the Constitution.

4. Link radical tax simplification to restored tax progressivity. Republicans are getting set to exploit a confusion they have worked hard to foster--between tax simplification and the reduction of progressivity. Democrats need to severe these two issues in the public mind, and the way to do it is simple: turn the Republican framing of the issue on its head.

The Democratic party should go on record as supporting the complete elimination of all non-standard personal income tax deductions, save two. The two are, obviously, home mortgage interest and state and local taxes. Eliminating the latter is a clear violation of federalism--and one that would hurt Democrats (in high tax states) more than it would Republicans. Eliminating the deductibility of home mortgage interest may make abstract economic sense but, I suspect, is politically fatal. Millions of Americans have made their most important investment decision (in effect) on the basis of that deduction. Killing it would probably devastate the housing sector in the short term, and would certainly piss off legions of homeowners and aspiring homeowners. We don't want to go there.

But everything else is fair game. The key to making this a just set of changes, of course, is retain, and even enhance, the progressive structure of marginal rates. Keep the proposal revenue neutral, but use higher top brackets, a bigger standard deduction, and an expanded ERTC to shift as much of the burden as possible off the shoulders of everyone making less than $200,000 per year.

This is reminiscent of the Kerry plan in the use of that cutoff, but it should be a real simplification scheme. Besides the marginal rate structure, only four components would remain--the (higher) standard deduction, the (higher) EITC, and the deductibility of state and local taxes and home mortgage interest. All the rest of the code, goes. Make sure the resulting bill is small enough to print as a sidebar in a major daily newspaper.

5. Equalize the treatment of earned income and capital gains. Okay, so it's not that simple. We also need an answer to the question of what to do about capital gains. Millions of Americans confront this when dealing with a home sale (though there is not much for them to worry about under current law) as well as with the treatment of retirement income.

Obviously, existing tax sheltered investments have to be grandfathered in. It wouldn't be fair to change the tax treatment of Roth IRAs, let's say, for funds already invested there.

But the treatment of capital gains going forward needs to be put on a clearer and more reasonable basis--one that everyone can understand, one that encourages national savings, and one that is fair to taxpayers who don't have a lot of (or any) capital gains to worry about.

The easiest way to accomplish all this is to amortize capital gains tax rates over the life of the investment. In a nutshell, a taxpayer who realized capital gains would pay at the rate that corresponds to their average annual gain. The calculation is trivial: Divide your total gains by number of years you've held the asset. Add this to your current year taxable income. Consult the tax table to get your effective rate. Done.

It will be objected that adding the average annual gain to current year income could introduce all sorts of distorted incentives. First, decisions about when to sell would hinge on finding a tax year when other income was lower than normal. This doesn't seem like much of a distortion though--it is basically a slight additional incentive to sell in a year when you aren't already flush. If it were the other way around, then we might have a problem. More seriously, one could argue that the effective base rate in the year of sale is likely to be much higher than the average of earlier years, since taxable income was probably less during those years. That's true, and if it becomes a serious objection, then a slightly more complex calculation would be needed, whereby one would have to find that average taxable income, and add the average gains to it instead of to current-year income. This still seems pretty simple: Add up all taxable income for the period of the investment, divide by the number of years held, add the average annual gain from the investment itself, look up the rate, done.

Obviously the main advantage here is that capital gains are treated just like earned income (taxed at the same rate) and, at the same time, massive incentives are created for holding lucrative investments for the long haul--as well as disincentives for liquidating them quickly. It's hard to imagine that kind of investment bias in favor of long time horizons doing anything but good for the economy, on balance.

6. Link support for free trade to single-payer health insurance. Under Clinton, the Democratic party began to take some serious steps toward acknowledging the Law of Comparative Advantage--that expanded world trade is not zero sum, and that it can benefit both Americans and the millions of foreigners it helps lift out of poverty. This dose of neoliberal seriousness about the realities of wealth creation was overdue. But there is also no denying that expanded trade puts enormous economic and social pressure on constituencies the Democrats still consider part of their natural base, especially workers in industrial manufacturing. And if those same groups don't always reciprocate by giving Democratic presidential candidates overwhelming support, that may in part be because they don't perceive Democrats as offering a serious alternative to slow death by foreign competition. It is probably the case that the national party's support for free trade has cost Democratic candidates at all levels some opportunities to credibly attack their Republican opponents as callous and out of touch with manufacturing workers' real concerns. What to do?

The usual Democratic and progressive response has been to link continued support for free trade policies to expanded labor and environmental standards. This is admirable in intention, but it is probably not nearly a serious enough response to the way expanded trade is reshaping the economic landscape for American workers. Fighting a rearguard action on behalf of embedding such standards in trade agreements is likely to run up against the hard reality that many of our trading partners' competitive advantage consists entirely in cheaper labor and greater willingness to accept higher levels of environmental degradation in the short run, in exchange for faster wealth creation. A serious, as opposed to a cosmetic effort to raise labor and environmental standards probably just translates, for the foreseeable future, into opposition to expanded trade. This sets us at odds with (some of) the conditions for rapid wealth creation in developing countries, and forces us to tack continuously against the prevailing winds of economic change here at home. Globalization is not going away, but the effort to humanize it by exporting our social standards to national economies unready to assume their burdens, is probably doomed to failure. So, to ask it again, what to do?

The core problem is that the benefits and costs of expanded trade are unfairly distributed within our national economy. More opportunity for some (e.g., those working in rising industries and enjoying cheaper imports) is purchased at the expense of much more economic insecurity for others (job losses, downward pressure on wages, vanishing benefits). The country as a whole may benefit, but too many of us get hurt along the way.

This is a job for what the welfare state does best--the socialization of economic risk. Job training for displaced workers is fine, but that is at best doing something for the losers in the game. What we need are policies that help everyone weather economic storms. The fact that those policies will be relied on more often or more heavily by workers displaced by trade need not, and shouldn't, set such workers apart from the rest of us. After all, no one really knows what industries will be next to wind up on the short end of Schumpeter's "creative destruction" (as evidenced by the somewhat surprising recent surge in the outsourcing of highly skilled software programming jobs).

It is crucial that the argument here be made in a moral register: Expanded trade benefits the country as a whole (by further enriching both us and our trading partners, whose prosperity is important to us for moral and national security reasons). But exposing ourselves more and more to the world market also means making our economy even more dynamic than it already is. And that means more risk for everyone. Since the country as a whole is enjoying the fruits of this transformation, it is only fair that the country as a whole should pay the price of the ticket as well. It would be immoral to force certain groups and individuals to bear all the costs, just because they happened to be unlucky enough to be doing a job that economic logic says is more efficiently done elsewhere. This a matter of communal responsibility -- if we are all going to win from expanded trade, then we have to treat everyone like winners, and not create a class of outcasts that we shun and forget about.

In order for this to lead to something more than rhetorical flourishes and more two-bit retraining schemes, it needs to be done on a big scale. Imagine a grand bargain: The Democratic party pledges itself to the most dogmatic adherence to free trade principles (and this means the elimination of all subsidies as well as a negotiated end to all tariffs) in exchange for a firm commitment to single-payer national health insurance, based on the universalization of Medicare, but financed out of the general fund (i.e, from the progressive income tax), rather than payroll taxes. No single aspect of economic risk is so threatening to most Americans than the loss of health insurance. No single cost of employment is so onerous to employers. Relieving both burdens would go a long way towards ameliorating the loss of "good jobs" to outsourcing (since "good jobs" often mean in practice jobs with benefits, the key one of which is health insurance) and encouraging the rehiring of workers who need new jobs.

We would need a mechanism to link the two commitments to one another, since there is no chance of accomplishing all this in any one legislative package in any single congressional session. One way to do it would be to offer the GOP a public pact--agree to support single payer, and we will agree to support every free trade measure that comes up for a vote. What could be fairer?

Now of course they won't go for it--not least because the GOP's own commitment to free trade is not especially popular with much of its white working class base. But that simply means that the Democrats will have handed themselves a powerful potential wedge issue, one potentially capable of forcing pro-business Republicans to choose between their interest in expanded trade and their ideological aversion to socially shared risk. In the meantime, the Democrats would have both an economically and a morally rock solid position on trade. They could honestly say--we stand ready to do the right thing for America, but it won't be the right thing, unless the other side is willing to meet us half way. Having taken that position, they should then loudly proclaim it on every occasion they can. This puts the onus where it belongs, on the most directly interested advocates of expanded trade, to agree to a fair distribution of the costs and benefits.

Such a stance would have enormous educational value. The "grand bargain" aspect would attract plenty of press attention, giving the Democrats the opportunity to make their case about why expanded trade and shared risk go together.

How to Make a List of Evil Books

2005-06-05T16:00:00.000-07:00

Kevin Drum (to his great intellectual and human credit) has trouble entering into the spirit of Wingnut mockery. In trying to come up with a counter-list with which to mock the Human Events hit parade of harmful 19th and 20th century books, he fails to appreciate that the original list was, itself, a pure mockery.

That list set outright quackery (Mein Kampf, Mao's Quotations) -- books one forces oneself to read, if at all, purely out of historical interest, to better understand the events they so disasterously influenced -- alongside some certifiable classics (The Communist Manifesto, Beyond Goood and Evil, Keynes' General Theory), plus some distinctly more minor classics (Kinsey, Friedan), any or all of which might be found among the furniture of a well-educated mind, and which remain readable for their intrinsic value as books.

The mockery comes, of course, from having selected all the non-quack books from among those that various segments of the left would have some sentimental attachment to, or identification with. Once one understands this modus operandi, it is actually quite easy to reproduce an equally-mocking counter-list.

The formula is simplicity itself: Take one piece of vile and dangerous quackery, then add one minor classic beloved by adherents of the conservative movement. Repeat as often as desired. Bonus points if the conservative-beloved book actually has a fair amount of enduring, redeeming value. Let's try a quick exercise in the application of the recipe:

Hitler's Mein Kampf
William F. Buckley's God and Man at Yale
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
Barry Goldwater's Conscience of a Conservative
de Gobineau's Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races
Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind
Thomas Dixon's The Clansman
Whittaker Chamber's Witness

And so on and so forth, until you have the number you need -- ten, twenty, a hundred, whatever it may be.

It's understandable that the formula is a bit uncomfortable for a good liberal to apply, even when mockery is the intention. Most liberals probably realize that most good books, like most good ideas and words, are a little rank. Part of what makes a book a classic -- something worth reading past its historical pull date -- is its ability to continue prompting new questions, and giving new answers, for new generations of (very different) readers. In that process, there are bound to be accretions of interpretation that are mutually incompatible, even hostile. But the classic keeps getting read anyway.

For instance: Nietzsche made the Human Events list, and J.S. Mill got honorable mention. Mill's On Liberty (the book cited) is a foundational text for modern liberalism, while most liberals won't have much direct political use for anything of Nietzsche's. But those same liberals might still be inclined to admit him as one of the greatest philosophers of the last two centuries, and read him with avidity and pleasure (perhaps as the greatest exponent of Emersonian ideas writing in German, for instance).

So Kevin, back to your list-drawing board. But, this time, remember: Try just this once to think more like a Wingnut.

Patriotism vs. Nationalism

2005-06-03T22:58:00.000-07:00

Responding to a Matthew Yglesias post that also caught my eye, Digby nails one:

...I suspect that what people really want from liberals is not patriotism, but chauvinism, one important facet of which is characterized in this context by the belief that your national culture and interests are superior to any other. (Our vaunted "exceptionalism" is not made up of a whole lot more than that simple definition.) And, yes, some liberals do not sign on to that, for good reason. Because it's bullshit. And America, the home of mutts from all over the world, the give-me-your-tired-your-poor immigrant nation, should be more aware of the shallowness and idiocy of this than any other country in the world. It's not as if we are Germans trying to preserve the fairy tale of a thousand year Reich. It's one of the good things about not being European, with all that baggage --- or would be if we thought about it for half a minute.

This doesn't settle the issue Yglesias raised, of course. But I do think it opens the issue up in the right direction.

The issue is this: What do we do about the fact that the equation of patriotism with mindless nationalism is deeply entrenched in today's conventional wisdom? There is obvious cause for celebration here, if you happen to be a movement conservative, since criticism of the present order of things is, indeed, an integral part of what it means to be liberal or progressive in any sense. Lefties, therefore, who are forever criticizing this or that aspect of American life, will always sound "unpatriotic." The equation dictates that their very lack of satisfaction -- their lack of recognition of America's unsurpassed greatness -- translates directly into a diminished love (or even an active hatred) of their country.

That the left so often finds itself fighting from a conservative standpoint these days only shows that the right is now bold enough to attempt to undo the fruits of past progressive changes, not that left and right have fundamentally changed ideological places. There certainly have been changes in what we might call the ideological temperature of the two sides of the spectrum. But the left, however weakly, is still more likely to want to use government power to redress the inequalities that are generated as a natural byproduct of capitalist development. Fighting for equal liberty remains, in a profound sense, what "the left" is for -- why we so much as have a left -- as Michael Walzer recently reminded us.

To return to the main point, I don't think Yglesias and Digby really disagree that the patriotism/nationalism equation is both wrong and deeply entrenched, and that something needs to be done about that. But purely on the level of tactics, Yglesias seems more willing for Democrats to try and conform themselves to the equation (at least rhetorically or stylistically), while Digby seems to think that tactic has, and will continue to backfire, until we find a way to break the equation itself.

If that is a right reading of their relative views, then I'm with Digby on this one. Precisely because a true lover of this country will always want to see it made better -- to see its enormous promise increasingly fulfilled -- we must shatter the notion that love of country requires the feeling of national superiority or preeminence. Indeed, I would go further and say that we need to do all we can to fashion and promote a competing alloy of sentiment and principle -- that to be a sound lover of one's country is to seek out, and be able to see its flaws, as much as to enjoy and celebrate its blessings.

We need to do this both because it is the right thing to do (such a feeling of uncritical superiority is ultimately incompatible with the kind of love that seeks the good of the beloved), and also because there is no way we could convincingly give the appearance of a party that is comfortable with equating chauvinism and patriotism, without actually becoming such a party -- and thereby losing the will or capacity to change things for the better, even should we happen to win back power. We would then have fooled only ourselves. The substantive philosophical question and the tactical political question are, in this instance, but two sides of the same coin.

Not Dead, Not Even Past

2005-06-02T23:09:00.000-07:00

Billmon has the toughest, most cynical, but also by far the best post I've read yet on the self-revelation of Mark Felt as Deep Throat. See Sore Throat for the whole text. Here is a quick summary of the main points, plus a longish quote that deserves wider circulation:

Against the nostalgic trend in much left-of-center blogging about Felt's coming out (as in: Too bad we don't have our own Deep Throat to expose the Bush White House's secrets!) Billmon points out that we have had, in fact, no shortage of whistle-blowers and truth-tellers, anonymous and otherwise, over the last four years, and that most of the major media have responded no more (and perhaps somewhat less) half-heartedly than they did to the initial Watergate revelations.

He next points out some highly pertinent institutional reasons why none of this whistle-blowing and investigative work is likely to lead to justice being done for the multitude of crimes and misdemeanors racked up by Bush and company -- highlighting the significant degree to which the Bush regime is more heavily insulated against scrutiny and criticism than Nixon's could ever hope to be. The American people have had, he insists, "plenty of opportunities to learn the filthy truth about this administration and this war," but, in their majority at least, have refused those opportunities. And he's right: even more than was the case in Vietnam/Watergate, the most damning secrets are the open ones.

Billmon concludes with three paragraphs that make for hard reading, because of their bitterness, but necessary reading too, because the indignation behind them is a democratic and patriotic emotion in desperately short supply these days:

What the health of the Republic requires, in other words, may not be a new crop of leakers and whistleblowers, or a fresh young generation of Woodwards and Bernsteins -- or even a more independent, aggressive media. What it may need is a new population (or half of a population, anyway), one that hasn't been stupefied or brainwashed into blind submission, that won't look upon sadistic corruption and call it patriotism, and that will refuse to trade the Bill of Rights for a plastic Jesus and a wholly false sense of security.

That's a much taller order than asking the Gods to send us another Deep Throat -- or even a Luke Skywalker. It's also not an easy thing for liberals, with their old-fashioned faith in democracy, to face: That the Evil Emperor might have a majority (a narrow one, but still a majority) on his side. But a truth isn't any less true for being politically unpalatable.

Which is why right now it's easy for me to imagine Richard Nixon, looking up from the inner circle of hell and lamenting his immense bad luck in being elected to the presidency 30 years too soon.

Indeed. A paranoid person might even think of the secret (but hardly hidden) political history of the last 30 years as a systematic effort to see to it that the remaining vulnerabilities of an executive controlled by the extreme right -- the vulnerabilities that permitted Nixon's downfall -- were all removed, one after another; an effort to ensure that, the next time they had a shot at presidential power, there would be no turning back from where the conservative movement has, since its inception in the late forties, always wanted to take the country.

Nixon disappointed them, in part because of his ideological deviations (often they were just sensible compromises with contemporary political reality), but mostly because of his failure to hold onto power. As Billmon points out, one party rule in congress, along with the presidency's enhanced war powers, and a greatly expanded facility in the use of both secrecy and propaganda, have given the right the tools to protect their leaders, once in office, in a way that movement conservatives circa 1974 could hardly have dared hope for.

So instead, I would add, they turned on him -- but only after it became clear that he was a goner. Nixon had spent his whole career building up credibility with the extreme right, so he could afford a few deviations from the party line -- even major ones like detente and Sino-American rapprochement. But he could not afford to lose his grip on power, which is exactly what started happening in an accelerated way in the lead-up to the 74 mid-term elections. In the end, even his resignation couldn't stave off a devastating series of political blows in 74 and 76.

The right never forgot that shellacking, and you might say that it determined, as a collective entity, never to let it happen again. In addition to the institutional matters Billmon cites, a highly organized and well-financed ideological effort to make the premises of right-wing politics into the new, post-Vietnam/Watergate conventional wisdom, succeeded beyond all expectations, forging a new, post-liberal consensus -- if not on the details of public policy, then certainly on the symbols of popular anxiety and the targets of popular resentment.

Perhaps just as important, the winds of history were at the conservative movement's back -- with the largely one-party white South shifting its regional loyalty, year by year, election by election, from the original defenders of their uniqueness (the Democrats), to their new-found ones (the Republicans), a shift that probably reached its apogee until the 94 mid-term election.

In short, Billmon has been one of the few major bloggers who have dared to consider that we have not so much fallen from the heights of Watergate, as that we have advanced that much further along the downward trajectory Watergate helped define.