There's No Business Like Shoe Business

During his first debate with John McCain, Barack Obama said that the Wall Street financial crisis was the final verdict on the Bush economic policy. Now, the final verdict on Bush's foreign policy is here, and it came in the form of two hurled shoes. The man threw the second shoe, he said, for "...the widows, the orphans and those who were killed in Iraq..." Although security guards kicked the man repeatedly, he has apparently become a folk hero in the Arab world. As Robert Scheer writes in The Nation, once again American intentions fell victim to the simple reality that an occupied people tend to hate and resist the occupying force.

It's an article of faith among the right wing that ungrateful Iraqi people have turned on their selfless American friends who want only to bring that country into the cozy bosom of democracy. (Don't miss this gem, which contains such penetrating observations as "Iraq is a large country" and "U.S. troops have been trained to be nice to Iraqis.") American foreign policy makers have long had difficulty distinguishing between benign, theoretical intentions and hard consequences. In Iraq, the results of this failure are dismal.

Last Friday, the Senate Armed Services committee released a bipartisan report concluding that "senior officials" sanctioned the torture techniques used at Abu Ghraib and Gitmo. Besides causing severe damage to the reputation of the United States, torture has likely contributed directly to the deaths of American soldiers. One committee witness testified that

there are serving U.S. flag-rank officers who maintain that the first and second identifiable causes of U.S. combat deaths in Iraq – as judged by their effectiveness in recruiting insurgent fighters into combat – are, respectively the symbols of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.

Moreover, the report concluded that the truth about Abu Ghraib and Gitmo bolsters Taliban and Al Qaeda recruiting. And to what end? The report also states that the torture techniques were "...based, in part, on Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean war to elicit false confessions" (emphasis mine). Think about this for a second: The Bush administration sanctioned an approach to interrogation that it knew led to false confessions. What, then, could possibly have been the motives of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, et. al.? 

Consider this story from last Sunday's New York Times about a 513-page federal history now under review that covers the failure of reconstruction efforts in Iraq. The money quotes:

Among the overarching conclusions of the history is that five years after embarking on its largest foreign reconstruction project since the Marshall Plan in Europe after World War II, the United States government has in place neither the policies and technical capacity nor the organizational structure that would be needed to undertake such a program on anything approaching this scale.

The bitterest message of all for the reconstruction program may be the way the history ends. The hard figures on basic services and industrial production compiled for the report reveal that for all the money spent and promises made, the rebuilding effort never did much more than restore what was destroyed during the invasion and the convulsive looting that followed.

Five years after the invasion of Iraq, the history concludes, “the government as a whole has never developed a legislatively sanctioned doctrine or framework for planning, preparing and executing contingency operations in which diplomacy, development and military action all figure.”

Thus we and the Iraqis are force-fed the rotting fruit of undeclared, preemptive war and the reliance on military power at the expense of diplomacy. And Bush gets away with a ducking a pair of shoes, a failed administration, and a certain historical verdict that will rank him among the worst presidents ever. Hardly seems fair...

The history also quotes then Secretary of State Colin Powell as complaining that the Defense Department  “kept inventing numbers of Iraqi security forces — the number would jump 20,000 a week! ‘We now have 80,000, we now have 100,000, we now have 120,000," an assertion backed up Paul Bremer and General Ricardo Sanchez. This rang a bell, so I conducted a little research. 

Sure enough, on October 29, 2004 during his first debate with John Kerry, Bush claimed that 

...that the best way for Iraq to be safe and secure is for Iraqi citizens to be trained to do the job. And that's what we're doing. We've got 100,000 trained now, 125,000 by the end of this year, 200,000 by the end of next year...

We now know that those numbers were not merely inflated, they were pulled out of thin air and offered to the American people as plain fact...

Eric Alterman writes that claims that United States is a "center-right" country is just another conservative canard...

Obama's nomination of Colorado senator Ken Salazar as Secretary of the Interior creates yet another vacancy in the Senate. (The other two are New York and Delaware.) Hendrick Hertzberg writes that some appointed senators have had distinguished careers...

Over at FiveThirtyEight.com, Nate Silver wonders whether the Republicans are a national party any more. Democrats won 219 House races by 15% or more; 218 are needed for a majority. He also argues that Obama's victory was even more decisive than it seems...

Some people should never, ever have children...