L8er

From TNR blog.

What would William F. Buckley think?

The National Review's "The Corner" blog just gets nuttier and nuttier this election season.

There is a cult-like atmosphere around Barack Obama, which his campaign has carefully and successfully fabricated, which concerns me. The messiah complex.--Mark Levin on "The Corner"

What the hell is a writer for a magazine that has twice endorsed George W. Bush for president doing complaining about anyone's "messiah complex"??? This blog post--like Lisa Schiffren's "Obama is a Communist" post previously noted here--is just bizarre. As David Kurtz quips at Talking Points Memo,

Barack Obama is noted for his powerful intellect, but I don't think he gets nearly enough credit for the mental dexterity it takes to be simultaneously an Islamic theocrat, atheistic communist and national socialist while posing as a center left candidate.

A long post on Iraq war retrospection and the virtues of intuition

Slate is now running a series of essays by prominent neocons who supported invading Iraq and now regret it. They are worth reading. And I want to say that I truly appreciate the thoughtfulness and brutal candor that went into these. They got me thinking about the most fatal misjudgments the Bush enablers made in the run up to war.

1. Thinking Bush and Co. follow the same moral rules as the rest of us; lacking an immediate negative gut reaction to the notion of giving these people war powers

Andrew Sullivan's essay is headlined, "How Did I Get Iraq Wrong? I seriously misjudged Bush's sense of morality."

...my biggest misreading was not about competence. Wars are often marked by incompetence. It was a fatal misjudgment of Bush's sense of morality. I had no idea he was so complacent—even glib—about the evil that good intentions can enable. I truly did not believe that Bush would use 9/11 to tear up the Geneva Conventions.

In my view, that misjudgment was the central failure of neocons and liberal hawks leading up to the war. They focused on the facts more than the personalities involved--and call me cynical, but in politics that is never a good idea.

The facts: Saddam Hussein is a real asshole and the world would be better off without him. He has WMDs, or at the very least is going to get them as soon as he can (as far as we knew at the time). And he is a ticking time bomb in the middle of a region that we, the US, need to stabilize.

--->OK, now let intuition step in here. That all makes some sense, even ignoring the bogus Iraq-al Qaeda connection. But wait. We're going to go to war...against Iraq again?...at the urging of this guy and his pack?

That's where it all breaks down. There are some people that just should not be behind the wheel of a vehicle like the focused might of an invading American military, and George W. Bush is one of those people. That's because he's not like us. Guy might run down a pedestrian if it fits his kooky world view. Do you really want to be part of that?

There's a reason we have political reflexes. They keep you from getting burned, as when you pull your hand away from a hot stove, and I trust them a good deal of the time.

Tragically, as Sullivan points out, the knee-jerk reaction of many liberals to the prospect of war with Iraq may have only helped push prominent neocons into the pro-war camp. He writes,

When I heard the usual complaints from the left about how we had no right to intervene, how Bush was the real terrorist, how war was always wrong, my trained ears heard the same cries that I had heard in the 1980s. So, I saw the opposition to the war as another example of a faulty Vietnam Syndrome, associated it entirely with the far left—or boomer nostalgia—and was revolted by the anti-war marches I saw in Washington. I wasn't wrong about some of this. Some of those reflexes were at work (which is why I find Obama's far more pragmatic opposition so striking in retrospect). I became much too concerned with fighting that old internal ideological battle and failed to think freshly or realistically about what the consequences of intervention could be.

Morality is one thing--competence at waging war is another. Sullivan seems to disagree, but I am completely with Jeffrey Goldberg in his own misjudgment about the wisdom of giving the Bush administration the OK to fight Iraq. I would never have expected this level of clusterfuck either, much as I hate those guys.

If one of my mistakes was to trust men like August Hanning, another larger mistake was to put my trust in the Bush administration, not so much on matters of intelligence—faulty intelligence was a near-universal phenomenon—but on matters of basic competence. I will admit to a prejudice here: I believed—note the tense, please—that Republicans were by nature ruthless, unsentimental, efficient, and, most of all, preoccupied with winning. It simply never occurred to me that Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney would allow themselves to lose a war. Which is what they have very nearly done.

2. Buying into the idea of opportunistic democratic state-building in the Middle East

Besides who was making the case to attack Iraq, the whats of the situation set intuitive alarm bells dinging for people like me. Not being the most dedicated student of U.S middle east policy, I admit, I can only call the connection between the following things a little fishy.

a) The U.S. and particularly, we may speculate, the Bush family, have a well-earned grudge against Saddam Hussein. Some of our friends (?) in the region also have a problem with him.
b) All of a sudden, after 9/11, we invaded Afghanistan. A move, by the way, that I supported then and still do. The clear tie between al Qaeda and the Taliban seemed to justify this invasion.
c) Then, all of a sudden, not only do we discover that Saddam Hussein has WMDs, but also that he has been supporting al Qaeda. We have to go in there. It just seems a little...I dunno...too convenient.

Neocons like Richard Cohen not only failed to hear the alarm bells. They agreed that this was a convenient excuse to invade Iraq, another great misjudgment that helped drive us toward this war. Cohen writes,

[After 9/11] I wanted to go to "them," whoever "they" were, grab them by the neck, and get them before they could get us....Saddam was a sociopath, a uniformed button man, Luca Brasi of Arabia. He was a nasty little fascist, and he needed to be dealt with.

That, more or less, is how I made my decision to support the war in Iraq. It did not take me all that long, however, to have second thoughts—and I expressed them in my column. It was clear that Saddam was unconnected to Osama Bin Laden...So, the only justification left was, really, what the neocons had started with: a war to reorder the Middle East. This had a certain appeal, since the region was unstable, undemocratic, repressive, and downright dangerous.

3. Failing to consider the full potential costs of war

And finally, the misjudgment that is acknowledged in almost all of these essays: underestimating the potential costs, in blood and treasure, as they say, of the Iraq project. Ooops.

Andrew Sullivan:

...what I failed to grasp is that war is also a monster, and unless one weighs all the possibly evil consequences of an abstractly moral act, one hasn't really engaged in a truly serious moral argument. I saw war's unknowable consequences far too glibly.

Jacob Weisberg:

...if I'm going to advocate occupying another country, I'd damned well better learn something about its history and culture. Were I part of the generation that lived through Vietnam, I might have avoided this blunder.

Josef Joffe:

By destroying Saddam's armies, the United States flattened the strongest bulwark against Iranian expansion. By empowering the Shiites, it opened the way to an ideological alliance between Najaf and Qum, the two centers of the faith on either side of the Iraq-Iran border. And by entangling itself in an open-ended war in Iraq, the United States squandered precisely those military assets that would have kept Iran in awe. Would the Ahmadinejad regime grasp so boldly for nuclear weapons if U.S. power and credibility were still intact?

Fiddling while Rome burns, as usual

Dan Froomkin is right. George Bush's continued cockiness in the face of economic downturn, endless war, and awful poll numbers is just "inexplicable." In his column today, Froomkin quotes from a Roll Call interview with Bush ("We have more debt, but we've also got more assets") and reminds us of the 2004 press conference when Bush was unable to come up with a single mistake he had made when asked.

Yeah, that was pretty weird, wasn't it? I mean, that's the first "tricky" question kids learn to answer at a job interview! "What's your biggest weakness? Have you ever made a mistake, and how did you handle it?"

But remember, Bush has never really had a "job interview." Born in the boardroom, thinks he rocked the interview, to paraphrase Jim Hightower.

Not what we wanted to hear

"Nations must fight climate change like terrorism, Rice says" (CNN)

Oy. You mean, by blaming some country we don't happen to like for climate change, and then invading that country based on trumped up allegations? And then there's the opportunistic expansion of presidential power and curtailment of civil liberties. Is that in the voluntary climate change plan, too?

Does Christmas come in August now?

It has been quite a month. At least three times so far this August, Santa* has delivered to our door an extra-special morning newspaper.

Rove to Leave White House Post

Embattled Gonzales Resigns

G.O.P. Senator [Larry Craig] Pleaded Guilty After Restroom Arrest [for "lewd conduct"]**

All while most Washingtonians are off dreaming of sugarplums.

*Or, to be more accurate, Ben

**Does anyone else think it's kind of crazy that this took so long to break? This happened in June?

Your daily WTF? courtesy of the White House

After only one night in jail, Scooter Libby suffered severe emotional distress including claustrophobia, Adderall withdrawal, and the tragic lack of lip gloss. He got sprung on house arrest and spent the following day ordering gourmet cupcakes and playing with his pet chihuahua at his Bel Air estate. ("Bush Commutes Libby's Prison Sentence", WP)

Come on, it's not that far from the truth.

18 months later...

Amazing. Gonzales may well be here for the duration. The Republican performance on the Senate no-confidence vote yesterday (NYT), plus Bush's public statements of support for his buddy (Reuters, most recently), point to --->no resignation.

It does make some sense. Until recently, the surest way to retain an appointed office in the Bush administration has been getting publicly attacked (with resignation demanded!) by the left. The Bushies really close ranks around their own when threatened. None of this "resigning to spend more time with his family" bollocks. It's a decider thing. Genius, really, and an important step toward creating your own realities.

Except, of course, for those specifically marked for the slaughter, like Scooter Libby and Donald Rumsfeld. These folks are not answering only for their own sins, but also, representationally, for those of the entire administration. I figure they are kind of like the guy who gets burned at the stake or thrown in the bog at the end of the year to appease the gods and ensure a good harvest.

Perhaps if you have a problem with a particular Bush appointee and want him out, you better do what you can to make sure he gets tapped to be the sacrifice. I'm not so sure direct public pressure for a particular official's firing works at all. It seems to have the opposite effect, in fact. Take Rumsfeld (please!): during the Abu Ghraib revelations, when many Americans were calling for his head, he offered to resign. Twice. (CNN)

Thoughts?

The Man is dead. Long live The Man.

I was just realizing that my whole full-time working life (2001-now) has been spent under the boot of the Bush administration and most of it under an extreme right-wing Congressional majority. It's hard to break out of certain reactive ways of thinking, and not be completely bitter and paranoid all the time.

I think that all progressive organizer-type-people should be sent to some kind of detox-counseling-yogic ashram to release some of the tension, resentment and fear of the last six years. Not that our problems are over, but...it's kinda hard to do your thing when we have this national case of political PTSD.

Wag the axis of evil

Glenn Kessler and Peter Baker make a good point in the WP today: "Nearly five years after President Bush introduced the concept of an 'axis of evil' comprising Iraq, Iran and North Korea, the administration has reached a crisis point with each nation." The article analyzes how the U.S.'s relations with any one of the axis countries tend to impact its relations with the other two. That's interesting, but here's an analysis I want to see:

Is the blossoming of the axis of evil in the last five years more an indication of the Bush administration's prescience, or of its commitment to follow through on its own long-held plans for balls-out nation-building? Was the axis of evil speech a self-fulfilling prophecy or self-fulfilling propaganda? It's unclear to me how much influence or control the administration has really had over North Korea's nuclear ambitions. But it's by no means certain that Iraq would have exploded/imploded had the U.S. never invaded. And the hamfisted occupation of Iraq has almost certainly played a role in Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad's stewing homicidal rage. So I say, that makes the Bush administration itself the agent of crisis in at least 2 of the 3 axis of evil nations.

There are those--including, reportedly, Bush himself--who see the invasion of Iraq as part of our divinely foreordained march towards the Apocalypse. (Alternet) Perhaps it's true and the President is an instrument of the Lord. Y'know, my mother always said, "God helps those who help themselves."

Bowling alone?

Sometimes I wonder why anyone would want to work in politics or civil service. But W said it best at today's Presidential press conference:

"...the best way to do hope is through a form of government."

So I like to think that each of us, in our own small way, is doing a little bit of hope every single day.

"The Treason Card", indeed

The Wall Street Journal, overall, is an excellent newspaper. But the editorial page, which is managed separately, can be, well, a little nutty at times. I had somehow missed this particular example of WSJ editorial nuttiness, as related by Paul Krugman in the NYT today ("The Treason Card"):

Does anyone remember the editorial that The Wall Street Journal published on Sept. 19, 2001? "So much for Florida," the editorial began, celebrating the way the terrorist attack had pushed aside concerns over the legitimacy of the Supreme Court decision that installed Mr. Bush in the White House. The Journal then warned Mr. Bush not to give in to the "temptation" to "subjugate everything else to the priority of getting bipartisan support for the war on terrorism." Instead, it urged him to use the "political capital" generated by the atrocity to push through tax cuts and right-wing judicial appointments.

Wait, what? They really published this? On Sept. 19, 2001? Guess I missed it because like most of America I was too busy comforting friends and relatives who lost loved ones at the WTC, tracking down my NYC friends, or simply dazed with the vicarious trauma.

Beyond the foulness of anyone openly considering taking political advantage of an event that claimed 3000 lives, not eight days after the fact, there is an added element of loathsomeness here because the WSJ is, in a way, the paper of record of lower Manhattan. I mean, the Wall Street Journal lost subscribership in that tragedy.

Where this same editorial board gets off accusing the New York Times of acting treasonously for breaking the bank data sifting story, I just don't know.

Bizarre diplomacy

Something about the very notion of Junichiro Koizumi at Graceland makes me giggle. (WP)

The climate's changing. The cause matters.

At first glace, it seems the Bush administration has taken a huge step forward in acknowledging the problem of climate change and the need to find solutions. Time was, this administration was systematically editing the merest mention of climate change out of agency documents and stifling employee discussion of the topic. But last week, the president called climate change a "serious problem." (AFP) What a change of heart!

Errr...not quite. Here's the rest of the quote:

"There's a debate over whether it's manmade or naturally caused...we ought to get beyond that debate and start implementing the technologies necessary to enable us to achieve a couple of big objectives..."

Of course, there is less debate over whether climate change is caused by human activity than Mr. Bush suggests. But putting that aside, doesn't the question of whether the phenomenon is "manmade or naturally caused" have direct bearing upon what solutions we should adopt? Doesn't that tell us a little something as to how much control we have over the future course of the problem, and what the most effective solutions might be?

Boy genius

"Rove Blames Iraq War for Low Bush Numbers" (AP): Noting that Bush's likeability ratings are much higher than his approval ratings, Rove said today that "People like this president...They're just sour right now on the war.''

The war...the banner policy of Bush's presidency.

This is sort of like saying, "my ex still likes me...she just disapproves of my performance as a boyfriend, and that's only because she caught me in bed with her best friend right after I totaled her car."

The real sadness and irony here is that Rove is probably onto something when he suggests that likeability matters more than job approval.