This is a fantastic essay on Iraq and terrorism by Richard Vague, a very successful businessman, CEO of Juniper Financial Corporation and avowed conservative. It is unfortunate that if we were going to have a conservative “CEO President”, as George W. Bush claimed to be, we didn’t get one with the thoughtfulness and enlightenment shown by Vague in this essay.

There are so many excellent points in here, and if I started quoting the good parts I’d end up with the whole thing, so I’ll include a snippet of the conclusion, and then you need to go and read the whole thing and forward it to your friends and family, especially the ones who still think invading Iraq was a good idea, or that were are well served by the current Administration.

We are not strengthening domestic defenses against terrorism adequately—nor pursuing true global terrorists vigorously—because of the enormous financial drain and military distraction of Iraq. That onerous burden diverts money from causes that could in fact make the world safer.

The war in Iraq is increasing the number of terrorists and the instances of terrorism world-wide because our administration has a misunderstanding of the true nature and causes of this violence.

Because of this same lack of understanding, we are not laying the diplomatic and economic groundwork necessary to reduce terrorism in the future.

Acts of oppression and occupation, the tinder of terrorism, will not quietly disappear. We have the opportunity to make a difference, especially in those areas of the world where population growth soars, economic equality worsens, and the seeds of extremism take root.

Wow. As Matthew Yglesias points out, you have to say something really, really stupid in order to fall on your face while criticzing Thomas Friedman. But Martin Peretz, the co-owner and editor-in-chief of the New Republic, has managed to do the impossible, and in truly spectacular fashion:

Poor Tom Friedman. He is looking for a Muslim Martin Luther King. There is none, Tom. If one were living on earth, they’d break his windows. Imprison him. Or kill him. Finished. And no, there also won’t be that nice banner Tom imagines: “No Shiites, No Sunnis. We are all children of the Prophet Mohammad.” How can anyone dissolve the bitter sectarian enmity of 13 centuries? You have to read this piece by Tom. You really have to. It’s called “Martin Luther Al-King,” and it’s on the op-ed page of Wednesday’s Times. It’s desperate and pointless.

As Yglesias points out, Martin Luther King Jr. was imprisoned and killed right here in America. Seriously, exactly how brain dead do you have to be to say something like this? Futhermore, it wasn’t like King was confronting some recent tussle over zoning laws, but over 500 years of slavery and its aftermath.

It pains me to say this, and I will never forgive TNR for making it necessary for me to do so, but: Friedman is basically right. A charismatic figure that can appeal to multiple sides of the conflict, in a country where most people want peace, would be very, very helpful. He probably would be killed, but so was Gandhi and King.

This post at TIME’s new group blog Swampland is why I think they should just turn over the whole blog to Ana Marie Cox, because then it would at least be intentionally funny.

The author, Jay Carney, starts off with this head scratcher:

When George W. Bush takes the podium in the House tonight, he will peer into an audience of scowling, hostile faces. He will see lawmakers made bitter by the failure of his Iraq gambit, and by his call to risk compounding that failure by adding more U.S. troops to the lethal sectarian stew in Baghdad. He will see members of both the House and the Senate seething over his miscalculations, his six years of contempt for the Congress and his legacy of debt, bloated government and partisan animosity.

Then he’ll look at the Democrats, who will be smiling.

The idea that Congressional Republicans would be seething over Bush’s “miscalculations, his six years of contempt for the Congress and his legacy of debt, bloated government and partisan animosity” is absurd, as each one of those things is almost entirely the fault of the Republican Congress. Some hypocritical Senator may ramble to a reporter about pork or war, but to cast that docile group of free spenders as any kind of fiscally responsible foreign policy experts is inane.

Carrey then goes on to say Bush could deliver some sort of Clinton-esque performance tonight that will captivate Americans “for finally addressing an issue that matters deeply to Americans all across the country…”, i.e., healthcare. There’s two fairly obvious problems with this prediction:

1. The President can’t speak very well and is fundamentally incapable of inspiring all but the most hardcore power-worshipers.

2. Bush has a long history of annoncing ambitious non-warmaking policy initiatives, only to abandon them out of boredom, varying degrees of resistence (usually not all that strong, either), or because he wasn’t actually serious about them in the first place. Think Mars, Social Security, curing our ‘oil addiction’, etc…

My prediction is his speech will be as terrible as all his other speeches or worse. He will try to pander to the left and middle with talk of global warming (though he’ll probably use neutered euphemisms like ‘climate change’ to avoid specifically mentioning ‘global warming’; controlling the language and all that) and healthcare, and will attempt to obfuscate his historic hostility to science, specifically the roadblocks he’s thrown up in front of global warming research. He’ll end up appeasing no one and it will be a flop across the board. The right will feel stabbed in the back, and nobody else gives a shit what he says either way.

The only thing I’m curious about is when discussing our healthcare problems, if he’ll slip in the word ‘folks’.

This story up at Radar looks at the fortunes of pundits who supported the Iraq invasion versus those who counciled against it. It’s really, really depressing, if not very surprising.

I didn’t think it was possible for me to despise Thomas Friedman any more than I already do, but I was wrong.

via Chris Hayes.

Condi Rice loooooooooves Fox News.

This is just my two cents, but if you are a news agency and the government loves you you are not doing your job.

John Podhoretz wonders Is Wesley Clark Not All That Smart?:

He said it was silly to assume we’d be greeted as liberators in Baghdad. O’Reilly said, Well, we went into Kabul and were greeted that way. To which Clark responded, “Yes, but the Afghan people had been oppressed by the Taliban.” O’Reilly then said, You mean people weren’t oppressed in Iraq? Well, yes, there was unhappiness there, said Clark. Or he might have said there was some happiness there, I couldn’t quite tell. Either way, Clark basically just said the people of Iraq weren’t really that oppressed by Saddam’s rule.

Another (obviously biased) summary can be found at News Hounds. I didn’t see the segment, because I absolute refuse to watch Fox News, but what Clark seems to have said isn’t all that stupid. Afghanistan and Iraq are two different places, with two different histories, and two different cultures. Let’s review:

Afghanistan had been torn apart by decades of war, and was very recently mostly conquered by religious zealots, the Taliban (who though composed primarily of Afghanis, grew out of Pakistan). For the next several years, Afghanistan was in a state of civil war with the Taliban on one side and a collection of warlords on the other. When the U.S. came in, Afghanis had no real or imagined reason to hate the United States, and every reason to think things would improve for them, that they would finally see stability and peace.

Iraq had been ruled for decades by a brutal dictator, but could be seen as a relatively prosperous and stable country. Then following the disasterous war with Iran, Iraq attempted to annex Kuwait and it’s oil (possibly under the impression they had tacit U.S. permission) to in part help pay for the aforementioned war. The U.S. then (justly) lead a coalition of nations, including other Arabs, and absolutely crushed the Iraqi Army, killing thousands of Iraqis. This was followed by more than a decade of crippling sanctions that reduced Iraq to a third world nation. Then, following al’Qaeda’s attack on the U.S., America declared war on Iraq again.

Now, Hussein was a monster and Iraqis may have hated him, but why would they like the U.S.? After decades of actively supporting and enabling Hussein’s brutal rule, we followed it with 10+ years of war, devastating sanctions, air strikes, and then another war. It could be argued we had little choice to follow a policy other than we did (which is not my belief), but whatever the case may be it set the stage for a population that would be significantly more hostile to U.S. forces than those of Afghanistan.

Podhoretz is aware of all that. Plus, the events themselves show Wesley Clark is right: Iraqis obviously did not greet the U.S. as liberators (despite U.S. government attempts to show otherwise) as Afghanis did. How exactly does that make Clark (who I am not a fan of) “not all that smart”?

This poll analysis by Charles Franklin at pollster.com takes a look at the President’s numbers. It’s a mostly interesting break down of the polls, and some informed speculation on where they could be heading after the President’s speech today.

Franklin seems suprised that while Bush’s numbers have more or less bottomed out, his specifical approval ratings on Iraq continues to fall:

The graph above compares approval of Bush’s overall job with approval of his handling of Iraq. The two have generally trended together and mostly “bounced” together. What is interesting is the change over the fall of 2006 when the Iraq job approval declined sharply while the overall job decline was less and has recently been relatively flat. The sharp decline is based on a decent number of polls, so is not likely to be an artifact of a small number of polls.

This is not surprising in the least. That bottom 30% or so that represent the floor for Bush’s overall rating is probably some combination of: 1) hardcore, cult-of-personality Bush worshipers forced to admit the war isn’t going well, but who refuse to admit Bush is a bad president overall, 2) certain conservative social activists and tax-cutting fanatics who Bush has delivered for who, while perhaps critical of the war, consider Bush’s attention to their issues (stem-cell research, the Supreme Court, gay marriage, irresponsible tax cuts, etc…) more important than the war, and 3) people who don’t really follow politics or world events, have a general awareness that some war somewhere isn’t going well, but because of their upbringing they otherwise reflexsively trust the president.

via Andrew Sullivan

I may or may not do more of this, but there’s a lot of posts at Reason’s blog today that I want to comment on and I’m going to do it all in one post (in no particular order). I like Hit & Run, but I only find myself in agreement with about half of their posts. While a libertarian blog should have a libertarian perspective, I feel they often make incredible leaps in logic on their way to claiming libertarian ideology is the solution for a given problem.

For example, in Also, Federal Express Is More Reliable Than the U.S. Postal Service, Jacob Sullen looks at a study that comes to the not-so-surprising conclusion that:

Defendants with private lawyers fare better, as measured by the length of their sentences…than defendants with government-provided lawyers.

Sullen then jumps to the conclusion that this means we should get rid of public defense and privatize the whole thing. I have a couple of problems with this. The first and most obvious is that millions of people cannot afford a lawyer and would be forced to defend themselves, creating an even bigger criminal justice gap between rich and poor. The second is that its not just the quality of the individual, his lawyer skills honed by years of capitalist competition, that makes the lawyers of rich people more successful than public defenders. Thats part of it, but more importantly these lawyers are working in larger teams with access to more specialists, more researches, and generally more resources available. One of the central ideas behind our justice system is that it treats everyone equally. Even though this is not the case now, getting rid of public defense would mean your chances of being found guilty of a crime would be even more tightly tied to your financial worth.

In Is Bush the Son About To Become Like Bush the Father on Taxes?, Nick Gillespie suggests Bush may soon raise taxes:

You gotta wonder: Would Bush see a payroll tax hike as a way of buying some version of support for the war?

I don’t think so. Also, whether or not raising taxes is a good idea or not is irrelevent. He is beyond buying off Democrats with mild tax hikes, and the only part of his legacy that any significant number of people will regard as positive is his tax cuts (I’m not one of those people. Tax cuts are good as a general idea, but not when we keep spending at higher and higher levels, and that missing revenue is just transformed into massive debt accruing interest).

Next, Ronald Bailey writes in Global Warming Could Kill 4.5 Billion by 2012–Does That Have Your Attention?:

Leftwingers would never exaggerate the risks of climate change–would they?

This snarky comment would have a little more impact if Bailey (who lacks scientific credentials, is a paid oil industry shill, and only recently admitted global warming was real after years of making money claiming it was a hoax) had quoted something other than an obscure, socialist newspaper in Canada. The fact is, most of the Left hold positions on global warming in line with the nonpartisan, scientific consensus. This contrasts with Bailey, who is at least honest enough to admit to having an ideological investment in global warming being a myth.

In a post titled L’etat, c’est Hannity, David Weigel has an excellent take on Sean Hannity’s show, Enemy of the State, and how the kind of thinking that allowed for it is also responsible for the ass-backwards arguments we seem to be forced into about Iraq:

This sort of thinking makes our current Iraq debate even more frustrating than it should be. I’d like to discuss how to bring the Iraq conflict to a close - Hannity et al would like to know why we refuse to support our president, our commander in chief, this man who has been tested by fire and has a spine of steel and so on.

Finally, a post by Kerry Howley If Only We’d Built a Fence Around the Towers mocking Tom Tancredo’s idiotic, multi-billion dollar, boondoggle-in-waiting fence plan. It includes this priceless quote from a Tancredo aide:

It’s simple: What did 9/11 cost us versus what would it cost to maintain a fence to help prevent that?

Yeah! If we had a $50 billion fence along the Mexican border, Arab terrorists would never have been able to fly airplanes into New York City!

It’s been widely interpreted that Adm. Fallon’s appointment to the head of CENTCOM means the US is seriously considering an imminent assault on Iran by air and sea. However, I somewhat agree with Robert Farley at TAPPED, who writes:

I’m unconvinced by the more alarmist interpretations of Admiral Fallon’s shift to CENTCOM. SecDef Rumsfeld argued from the beginning of his tenure against the practice of assigning combatant commands to particular services. In this context, the shift can be understood as part of the effort to reduce territoriality and increase “jointness” among the services. Fallon has spent most of his career in the Pacific, but he’s well respected in the service and at State. His work institutionalizing maritime cooperation between the East Asian navies has been very well regarded. I suspect that, rather than preparation for war with Iran, the move of Fallon from PACCOM to CENTCOM is intended to put the best person in the most critical theater.

I “somewhat agree,” in that I don’t believe this is a prelude to airstrikes (though not with Farley’s level of conviction). I disagree that “the move of Fallon from PACCOM to CENTCOM is intended to put the best person in the most critical theater.” This Administration, needless to say, has a terrible record of finding the right man for the job, and I don’t see why they’d suddenly adjust their own political priorities to be in line with broader U.S. interests. I think it’s more likely Fallon is the most respectable commander Bush could find who agrees with his increasingly incoherent war policy, and will pursue it the most vigorously.

As far as the worries about an imminent invasion of Iran: no reasonable person is going to accuse George Bush of being a strategic genius and I’m sure he’d like to start another war, but the elite consensus he depended on for the Iraq invasion has completely turned against him, and the White House’s ability to dictate the narrative to the media has erroded substantially. Just as important, he also no longer possesses a docile, Republican Congress.

Of course, every time I think Bush can’t get any dumber, he moves the goalposts. Massive airstrike against Iran would be a really bad idea. Iran would immediately declare war and flood Iraq with hundreds of thousands of fighters and suicide bombers. We could win a war with Iran, but at what cost in blood and money? And to what benefit? We certainly would not be able to occupy Iran, a country two-and-a-half times the population of Iraq.

Do we really have to put up with six more years of this?

Give the man some credit. While its been clear for some time that much of the far right lives to grovel at the foot of the state aparatus, few have been as upfront about their devotion to the altar of power as Sean Hannity with his ENEMY OF THE STATE feature on Fox News.

via Andrew Sullivan, who adds:

No word on whether Hannity will be requiring two minutes’ hate to accompany it.

John Coumarianos at Innocents Abroad comments on a essay by Daniel DiSalvo which discusses how:

The ongoing strife among intellectuals on the left suggests that the Democratic Party has a long way to go before embracing a set of core principles that can unite the party, forge a new coalition, and provide a rationale for governing.

Mr. Coumarianos adds

For now, it seems unlikely that intellectuals, party strategists, and elected officials can forge a coherent message subduing or resolving the tension between the revival of Harry Truman’s patriotism and radical Left multiculturalism.

Unfortunately, DiSalvo’s full essay requires a subscription to read. However, I do want to comment on this idea that Democrats are more divided than any other party in any other period in the U.S., and on the idea that this is a bad thing.

There are over 300 million people in America and only two political parties. Getting that many people represented by one of two all-encompassing world views is both undesirable and impossible. The last several years of Republican solidarity were bad for everyone, especially conservatives who oppose big goverment, favor states rights and value personal liberty.

Moreover, Republicans possessed no coherent governing strategy, only a consistent and disciplined public relations strategy. If various members of the Democratic Party do not agree on different issues, then so be it because it may be their voters don’t agree. A politician’s job isn’t to serve the Party, it is to represent in government the will of their constituents. Now that they are in power, I would hate for the Democratic Party to mimic the RNC in this way.

via Andrew Sullivan.

If you can stomach it, here is a transcript of Thomas Friedman appearing along with David Brooks on Meet the Press. To start:

…in Syria, the—basically, the government of Syria killed the prime minister next door, and wants to get off with a parking ticket. This is a freak show, OK? There’s no other part of the world that’s behaving like this.

First, it should be noted that there has yet to emerge irrefutable evidence of Syrian involvement, though I personally think its likely. The problem I have is that Friedman’s tendency to use facts, allegations and fantasy as interchangeable concepts already contributed to one strategic disaster, which obviously has not humbled him in the least. Second, the Syrian government is run by thugs, but we knock off world leaders we don’t like all the time; literally every couple of years, and quite often after they’ve been democratically elected. And we openly talk of doing more of it (such as in Venezuela). And as far as I am aware we have yet to receive even a parking ticket-level reprimand. So, yes Thomas, there is at least one “other part of the world that’s behaving like this.”

And it gets back to something, you know, I, I argued, you know, before the war, which is that some things are true, even if George Bush believes them, and one of them is that this part of the world is really falling off, all right, in a dangerous way.

It didn’t take a genius to see there were some serious problems developing the Middle East that had potentially grave implications for the United States. That initial conclusion does not logically flow into the one Bush and Friedman made next: to douse the fire with gasoline.

As David alluded to, that if this cracks up, you know, what you get, they actually need a civil war.

This idea, that the problem is they really need to just go ahead and have a civil war (just to, you know, get it out of their system) has been gestating for several months. Its part of a growing list of excuses that allow various pundits and politicians to avoid saying “I supported and helped enable an incredibly stupid and ill-considered military adventure. I’m really, really sorry for all the people that died because I can’t think passed the length of my dick.”

It’s grotesque that people who once championed this war, supposedly on behalf of suffering Iraqis, would take this position. Finding that their fanciful wishes didn’t magically spring to life after bombing the shit out of Iraq and mindlessly destabilizing the whole social structure, Friedman and his fellow war-advocates have grown bitter at the Iraqi people, and just tired of the whole thing. I suspect somewhere deep down, Friedman wouldn’t be all that upset to see the Iraqis punished this way, for undermining his grand utopian vision.

We had a civil war in our country. We had a civil war because we thought some people in our country believed really bad things. Really bad things about human dignity and equality, about, you know, the right of one people to enslave another. They’re having a civil war in Iraq, only it’s not about ideas, it’s about tribal issues. There is no Abe Lincoln there. It’s the South vs. the South, that’s the problem with the fight right now.

This is classic Friedman. Take something complicated (like the Civil War) and reduce it to a naive simplification with little historical truth. All that’s missing is an ode to globalization wrapped in some half-baked and nonsensical parable.

As Friedman himself has mentioned before, the vast majority of Iraqis are not participating in the civil war, and they don’t want it. It is neither inevitable, nor does anyone get anything out of it. Especially Iraq or the United States. Whatever arises from the bloody ruins from such a conflict (likely a right-wing theocracy of some sort), it won’t be a democracy friendly to the West.

Thomas Friedman was one of the more important media figures that influenced the center and center-left masses to get onboard the Iraq Adventure Train. He didn’t need all of the B.S. about flowers and democracy from the Whitehouse, because he’d already come to those conclusions himself. I have absolutely no suggestion as to what the U.S. should do next. There are lots of bad options, all with unforeseeable consquences. But to listen to Friedman wash his hands and blame Iraqis for this (I believe predictable) mess is more than I can stomach. The only things I want to hear from Friedman are an apology, and an announcement he is retiring to Arizona to play golf.

Transcript via Brendan Nyhan

Glenn Greenwald (of Unclaimed Territory) has a scathing rebuke of neocon revisionists up at The American Conservative (it looks as if it will run in their print issue as well). This whitewashing goes beyond even the Incompetence Dodge.

Is there some sort of secret tenure these people get? Why are they still employed?

This obviously is a bit old (for the internet anyway), but its really funny:

Not that is takes a great deal of effort, but Anonymous Liberal at Unclaimed Territory gives us what could alternately be called “Bill Kristol’s Greatist Hits (or lack thereof)”. This is prompted in part by the announcement of Kristol’s new position at TIME.

That this person can still find a job is baffling. The only place you can find less accountability than the Bush White House is the editorial boards at our nation’s leading magazines and newspapers. Few people outside neoconservative circles would be able to match Kristol’s record for pathetically inaccurate predictions, recklessly juvenile and shortsighted foreign policy positions, and utter lack of humility. He is widely regarded by the right as being some kind of serious authority depsite the fact that he is not just consistently wrong, but always and dramatically wrong about very important things.

Timothy Garton Ash, at The Guardian:

What an amazing bloody catastrophe. The Bush administration’s policy towards the Middle East over the five years since 9/11 is culminating in a multiple train crash. Never in the field of human conflict was so little achieved by so great a country at such vast expense. In every vital area of the wider Middle East, American policy over the last five years has taken a bad situation and made it worse.

To sum up:

So here’s the scoresheet for Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Israel, Palestine, Lebanon and Egypt: worse, worse, worse, worse, worse, worse and worse.

I would disagree with the author on one point, however:

On the credit side, all we have to show is Libya’s renunciation of weapons of mass destruction…

While I’m sure the Bush Administration deserves some credit for this, just by virtue of being in power when it happened (kind of like Reagan and the USSR), Libya’s ‘renunciation’ was not provoked by a fear of invasion. They’d been making steps for years towards rejoining the international community out of economic self interest, and this was just one of the final steps. It would have happened with or without the Iraq occupation.

David Willets, in the Guardian, talks about why he drifted away from libertarianism. While he may have ended up in a somewhat different place than I did, his reasoning is familiar:

Willetts says he realized that particular shortcoming in modern Conservative thought as a result of his own personal experience. As a young man he was a libertarian, “but when you get older - particularly when you have kids - you suddenly start thinking, ‘Well, I don’t actually want drugs being traded outside the school gates. I do care about what’s broadcast on TV. I do worry about the kind of society my children are going to live in. I do worry about the environment, because, long after I’ve gone, I don’t want to feel that the Arctic ice cap is melting and that half of Britain is flooded.’ Someone described a libertarian as being someone in favor of childless immortals. My personal and autobiographical definition of conservatism is a free marketeer with children.

Emphasis mine. Its glib and dismissive, but I think its a pretty accurate insult. The more you think about it, the more absurd libertarianism becomes as an system for organizing large and complex societies. He continues, talking about what he feels are (or should be) the two basic principles of modern conservatism in Britain:

…there are two key emotions that people feel in modern Britain. One is the value of personal freedom, of personal choice, of trust in other people and a wariness about the state’s ability to make us good, or the state’s ability to solve problems. All this tends towards an empowering of the individual. Secondly - this is the bit which is much harder to express - there’s a belief, or an understanding, that there is more to life than an individual’s acts of consumption and choice strung together. An understanding that you have ties to your family, ties to your neighborhood, ties to your society. An understanding that you have obligations, and that public service matters.

I suppose the second part is what he would say delineates a conservative from a libertarian, the idea that you do have an inescapable obligation to your family and your community that takes precedence over your personal desires. We are not little gods, created out of nothing and owing nothing. However, I would just argue that this is not really specifically a conservative idea. Certainly not one that separates it from the majority of political movements or broad human thinking.

via Clive at the Daily Dish.

-Matthew

From CNN:

Although the White House had initially suggested that Bush would deliver his speech on Iraq strategy before Christmas, he has decided to delay it until early next year.

Defending that decision, Bush said, “I will not be rushed into making a difficult decision … a necessary decision.”

I just finished reading Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August (which I plan on writing more about), and one of the central themes is the contrast between men who made critical and painful decisions in time, and those that did not or could not and led their men to annihilation. In World War I, there was an equal abundance both of men who rose to the leadership challenges of the war and those whose arrogance, ignorance, indecision and stupidity led directly to death and suffering on a catastrophic level.

(more…)