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...

The Weekend That Was...

What a rotten weekend (and continuing) for John McCain. After months of being sniped at not spending enough time in Iraq and Afghanistan, Obama's Middle East tour has so far been a complete success. Starting with the successful meeting with Afghanistan's leaders, Obama shot hoops for the troops in Kuwait, even draining a three-pointer. Better yet, Iraq's Prime Minister Maliki all but endorsed the Obama plan for a 16-month withdrawal from Iraq. Despite attempt to spin Maliki's remarks as being misquoted or taken out of context, the New York Times confirmed them here...

Both the White House and McCain are in a dither over the Maliki Pivot. McCain insists that "conditions on the ground" ought to drive decision-making in Iraq, but it seems to me that that is exactly what is happening. After all, aren't Iraqi politics part of "conditions on the ground"? Don't they get a say in whether and how long foreign troops occupy their soil. (Oh, wait a minute...I guess not. ) The whole problem in Iraq from the get-go has been the Administration's ironclad conviction that they can impose a military solution on a political problem. And now, McCain offers more of the same. Plus, there are also "conditions on the ground" in the United States, whose people simply don't support the war. McCain claims that the surge has "worked." Fine. Let's declare victory and get out...

The Los Angeles Times uncritically reports that "As Sen. Barack Obama headed to Iraq for his first visit as a presidential candidate, his plan for bringing the war to a swift conclusion was triggering a political furor abroad and at home, with a U.S. military leader declaring Sunday that setting a hard deadline for withdrawing troops is risky." No one explains how setting no deadline has been been a redoubt of stability...

South Texas prepares for Hurricane Dolly. South Texas may not mean much to most, but there are those of us who have a great deal of affection for a place of which my brother once said "if it has thistles or thorns, it grows in South Texas." It's hot, it's flat, and it makes you grow up appreciating the niceties of the shade of a mesquite tree. For better or worse, it's as much Mexico as the United States. But it has its stories and its history like any other place, and the people who live there are attached to it. So remember: Whatever havoc (and hopefully, it won't be much) Dolly wreaks, it's not the fault of the people who live there. Did you hear that, Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly, and Rush Limbaugh? Luckily, South Texas doesn't depend on the promises of the Army Corps Of Engineers...

Many thanks to Foxessa for passing along this fascinating analysis of Yeats' "Sailing To Byzantium," the poem that begin with "That is no country for old men." In an accessible and enlightening way, the 10-minute video explores such seeming minutiae as Yeats' struggle to find exactly the right word with which to begin "Byzantium" (he also considered "Here" and "There") while showing how the poem conveys Yeats' grappling with encroaching old age. Watch this video, and you'll understand why the poet's choice of a single word isn't a matter of minutiae, but an artistic dilemma that can impact the meaning and direction of a work...

Ya know, I was sayin' to my wife just the other day that what this country needs is more young people defending the status quo. So my heart just breaks for these kids. It really does.

Dream Team?

With Hillary Clinton preparing to endorse Barack Obama, the punditocracy and political class has immediately begun wondering about the possibility of a Obama-Clinton ticket. She's apparently receptive to the notion, and at least one of her supporters plans to openly push for it. The idea of the nominee combining with his closest rival has precedent: In 1960, John Kennedy teamed with Lyndon Johnson and in 1980 George Bush joined Ronald Reagan. It's the quickest and simplest way to unify a party: It shows respect to the supporters of the runner-up and demands that the runner-up campaign actively for the ticket. In the case of Hillary Clinton, Obama would tap into a formidable organization and donor base.

But, he would also take on the baggage of party insiders who think they should be running the show. Putting Clinton and all that comes with her on the ticket would hardly burnish his carefully cultivated image as a new breed of politician practicing a new kind of politics. And, of course, it would mean taking on that tangled thicket of complications known as Bill Clinton. The spotlight would be on the Clintons as much or more so than Obama. Should he be elected, what role would the former president play? Does Obama really want two Clintons looking over his shoulder when one is likely one too many? Of course, the last thing Obama or the country needs is a revisitation of the events leading to Clinton's impeachment. For all of these reasons, it's hard to see Obama asking Clinton to be his vice-president. There are other ways to unify a party that smells victory anyway, so why take a cure that might well be worse than the disease...

Eric Alterman and George Zornick provide a corrective to the right-wing media characterization of illegal immigration. Apparently, Lou Dobbs et. al. really believe in a plot to build a "NAFTA Superhighway" that will connect Canada, the United States, and Mexico as part of a scheme to undermine American sovreignty. More insidiously, this crew pretty much lies about the impact of illegal immigrants on crime. Read it and weep...

Bill Fletcher of The Black Commentator reflects on the meaning of Obama's history-making victory. While appreciating its significance, Fletcher points out that "...if we are not thinking both about building for an Obama victory, but more importantly, laying the foundation for stronger social movements and a mass political organization that can advance a progressive direction, we will have misunderstood our challenge and fallen prey to illusions."

The Nation reports the following:

• Percentage of Iraqis displaced by the war: 20
  
• American cost of the Iraq war per second (as of 3/08): $4,563.18
  
• Total number of coalition personnel in Iraq at the height of the "surge" (including all contractors and civilian support): 343,100
  
• Total number of actual U.S. combat troops in Iraq at the height of the "surge" (excluding support personnel): 38,000
  
• Number of police officers in NYC: 37,000
  
• Number of embedded journalists during the March 2003 invasion: 775
• Number of embedded journalists in March 2008: 23
• Number of U.S. troops killed and wounded, Hue City, Vietnam, 1968: 147; 857
• Number of U.S. troops killed and wounded, Falluja, Iraq, 2004: 104; 1,110
• Number of Iraq troops diagnosed with PTSD: 300,000
• Number of troops stop-lossed: 58,300
• Number of troops deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq since 2001: 1,668,000
• Number of troops deployed after being declared medically unfit: 43,000

When Will They Ever Learn?

The following letter -- apparently written in all seriousness -- appears in today's Seattle Post-Intelligencer:

The news from Iraq is increasingly good and hopeful, so what are the media talking about? Scott McClellan's denunciations of the Bush administration. McClellan himself admits that the final product is not the book he set out to write and that he is a recent convert to his current views. My guess is that he succumbed to pressure from his anti-Bush publishers and sold out his soul for big royalties and media buzz. Certainly the media are hungry for new anti-Bush material.

To take only one point, the war in Iraq, Bush has already been vindicated. The war had changed the whole dynamic of the Middle East in our favor. Al-Qaida, that once powerful global network of death merchants, has been decimated. Iraq, once an enemy, is now a friend and ally. Americans, once portrayed as the enemy, are now seen by Iraqis as real people, friends, protectors and helpers.

There is another benefit to this war. America has show the willingness to act, take risks, pay a price and assume the mantle of world leadership. This is what the world has needed. Bush is one of the greats.

Plainly, this person mainlines the White House Kool-Aid. Pulling this apart is easier than knocking over a house of cards. It's just as much fun, so here goes:

• "The news from Iraq is increasingly good and hopeful." This is mother of all canards, a hoax perpetrated on a now wised-up public. I won't rebut the argument that the surge enabled some short-term security gains, although it was hardly the sole factor. But it produced no long-term political progress, which was the point in the first place.
• "The war has changed the whole dynamic of the Middle East in our favor." The war has actually changed the dynamic of the Middle East in Iran's favor, and it gave an assist to Hamas as well. Meanwhile, we're bogged down in one of the most unstable, volatile parts of the world because of our addiction to oil. We need policies that make the Middle East as irrelevant as possible to us, not ones that entangle us further.
• "Al Qaeda...has been decimated." Unfortunately, there's no evidence of this. Al Qaeda In Iraq did not exist before the war. The Pakistan-Afghanistan border remains a safe haven. The war serves as a recruiting tool. Al Qaeda has taken credit for the bombings of mass transit systems in London and Madrid. None of this sounds like an organization that has been decimated.
• "Iraq, once an enemy, is now a friend and ally." There is no Iraq. It's a shattered vessel of sects and splinter groups vying for power by fighting each other and by killing Americans. The official Iraqi government has proven unable stop them and remains in power only because the United States props it up. With friends like that...
• "Americans, once portrayed as the enemy, are now seen by Iraqis as real people, friends, protectors and helpers." Then how come so many Iraqis keep trying to kill Americans? Why can't Americans venture outside of the Green Zone unescorted by the military? Why do polls of Iraqis consistently show that they want us out?
• "Bush is one of the greats." No comment. Although the question "great what?" comes to mind.

Meanwhile, the Washington state Republican party wants to deny citizenship to children born in America of parents who are illegal immigrants. Why is it that the right wing -- which claims a monopoly on patriotism -- constantly looks for ways to tinker with the Constitution? If it's not this, it's a balanced budget amendment, a so-called defense of marriage amendment, or an anti-choice amendment. The Bush Administration's contempt for the Constitution and constitutional rights is part-and-parcel of this -- a logical extension of a generalized right-wing attitude of claiming to love America while fearing everything about it...

Quote of the Day:
"Our will is being tested, but we are resolute. We have a better way. Stay strong! Stay the course! Kill them! Be confident! Prevail! We are going to wipe them out! We are not blinking!"
-President George W. Bush, April 6, 2oo4

Dr. John releases City That Care Forgot tomorrow. Early reviews (here and here) are highly favorable.

R.I.P, Bo Diddley...

Note to S. B.: Have you seen The Krayolas yet? And if not, whadderya waitin' for? They're at the Blue Star Brewing Company -- part of the Blue Star Arts Complex (a great place, incidentally) -- on August 1.

"We acted robustly"

Once upon a time, an uncooperative man named Larry predicted that a war would cost as much as $200 million. Nonsense, said manly, robust Donald, the war will cost $50-$60 million tops, depending on the breaks. And other countries will pay for it anyway. And the war killed an evil dictator and liberated a nation to live in freedom and peace and with gratitude toward Donald and his friends. And everyone lived happily ever after.

Remember those days? The Iraq war lost its fairy tale luster long ago. Now, Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Beam have produced a study detailing the true costs of this endless snuff film. (Thanks to Stone Soup Musings for calling my attention to this.) Not only are we flushing $12.5 billion a month right down the toilet, Stiglitz and Beam estimate that the final cost of the war will exceed $3 trillion dollars. (In other words, Donald was off by 6,000 per cent.) This means that:

• The Iraq war will cost more than any war in our country's history except World War II;
• World War II cost about $1,000 per troop in 2007 dollars. The Iraq war costs $4,000 per troop;
• When it comes to casualties, the Defense Department keeps two sets of books. The second set, available only via the Freedom of Information Act, shows that the actual number of casualties in Iraq may be as much as double the official list.

Now, people will argue that the expense is ultimately irrelevant: That 9/11 and national security justifies it (ignoring the fact that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11.) They'll point out that the United States didn't prevail in World War II by not spending what it took to win. Even so, this leaves more than a few questions unanswered. Why did the Administration feel compelled to lowball the American people regarding the cost of the war? Why are the costs still off budget? (Congress appropriates money for the war separately from omnibus budget legislation.) Why have taxes not been raised to pay for the war? How will the costs of the war ultimately be extracted from the American economy, as they surely will?

In World War II, there was a strategy to win. In World War II, the country mobilized to fight by raising taxes, selling war bonds, enacting conservation measures, and instituting a military draft that ensured shared sacrifice. Today, we buy SUVs while military families bleed and break under stress. The United States emerged from World War II as the most powerful nation in the world and with a shining international reputation. The war in Iraq has isolated us internationally and polarized us at home. And, sadly, the bill hasn't come due yet. The stark truth remains that the Bush Administration sold the public a short, easy war on the cheap and delivered a protracted, bloody conflict of gargantuan expense. And conservatives wonder why Bush's approval stays at 30%.

Not that I'm for a border fence, but this is typical of the Bush Administration: Take a project of dubious merit (and with little chance for success), rush it, and waste billions of dollars while enriching a defense contractor. 

This Just In: President Bush claims that the economy is not, I repeat not headed for a recession. Asserting he has already "acted robustly" (presumably he means the tax rebate) to forestall a recession, he dismisses the need for further stimulus. Given that he's at odds with most economists -- some believe that a recession has already started -- The Question again comes up: What planet is he living on? 

By the way, he looks terrible -- not at all robust. Maybe it's finally dawning on him what a complete failure his administration has been. Sure. And maybe the tobacco companies will admit that cigarettes cause cancer, too.

Correction: A friend notes that Don Mattingly's nickname is "Donnie Baseball," not "Donnie Ballgame." Even so, where do you think the idea came from?

Book of Rules

This morning, the sound system at Eddie Bauer blessed my ears with one of the greatest songs ever: The Heptones' "Book of Rules." Check it out here. Not only can you dance to it and hum it to yourself all day long, it has great lyrics in the bargain...

President Bush doesn't care much about the rules -- at least, he believes that they don't apply to him. Senator Robert Casey (D-PA) caught him trying to sneak a signing statement past the American people...again. Here's what Casey had to say. In short, the president has excused himself from obeying law set forth in the recent Department of Defense authorization bill (i.e., the defense budget). According to the president, he can ignore the following requirements of the bill:

1. Establishment a commission on wartime contractors and profiteering;
2. A ban on the funding of permanent bases in Iraq

Think of it: The administration is claiming for itself the right to enter the United States into a long-term agreement with the Iraqi government -- one that would establish a more or less permanent presence in Iraq -- without consulting the Senate. In essence, they can enter into a treaty agreement on their own, something explicitly prohibited by law. Thus, the administration claims that a treaty is only a treaty when they say it is, and that the elected representatives of the people have no voice in the matter. It's a never-ending source of amazement to me that President Bush can speak with a straight face (o.k., maybe he does smirk when he says it) about democracy in Iraq when he clearly doesn't give a damn about it at home.

The Real Question

I'm listening to a Republican focus group on NPR arguing that we are "winning" the war in Iraq. Hearing that, it struck me that all of the debate about whether or not the surge is working -- and the President has pulled his usual bait-and-switch on this point -- is beside the point, and that once again the MSM has failed to pursue the real issue. I'd like to hear every candidate answer the following questions: Regardless of whether or not you believe that the Iraq war is justified and winnable, should the United States be in a war that has no public support? If yes, why? If no, what are your plans for ending American involvement in the conflict.

The debate about winning and losing is increasingly surreal and irrelevant. (I mean, can you believe this drivel?) The American people no longer want our country to be in this war. Public opinion polling is plain on this point, so why are we routinely ignored by the president and by the media? The administration's contempt for public opinion is well known, so that's not a surprise. But considering the army of reporters that have descended on Iowa and New Hampshire, you'd think that one of them might have raised this point. Or not: No one lately has accused the MSM of originality of thought.