Dr. Paul never makes apologies about his personal opposition to abortion, and I don't blame him for that - he's and old man with 18 grandkids, a conservative Christian, and a OB/GYN to boot. However I think he's being disingenous when he says states can adequately handle the most controversial (not most important) issue in the USA. I just watched the YouTube of Ron Paul on The View. He repeatedly declares that Roe v. Wade allows unrestricted abortion at any stage of pregnancy. This is clearly not true - he may disagree on many of the 11 points below (probably #1 the most), but the last three flatly contradict what he said on The View. He also says he is OK with women/girls having to travel to a different state for an abortion if they live in a state that decides to have an outright ban, with parental consent laws and no exceptions for rape/incest. Is that not unfair to a broke 17 year old girl who was the victim of rape or incest? Aside from abortion for minors, Ron Paul expects adult women to abandon their friends, jobs and hometowns, and "vote with their feet" by moving to a different state if their state would ban abortion? Isn't Roe v. Wade protection from the tyranny of the majority? I mean, come on - it allows for first trimester abortions, but allows the states to take over in trimesters two and three. Seems pretty fair and reasonable given the modern human society we live in. I agree that no one's tax money should be used to fund abortions. Am I getting anything wrong here?
Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113, 93 S.Ct. 705, 35 L.Ed.2d 147 (1973) [alternate] [District Court opinion] [Transcripts of Oral Argument (#1) (#2)] the landmark (7-2) abortion decision voided the abortion laws of nearly every state. Striking down a Texas statute that prohibited all abortions except to save the mother's life, the Supreme Court, per Blackmun, held that abortion was a constitutional right that the states could only abridge after the first six months of pregnancy. More specifically, the Court held that: (1) the Court had jurisdiction; (2) Roe's case was not moot, despite the birth of her child, because the case was "capable of repetition, yet evading review;" (3) the right to privacy includes the right to abortion; (4) since abortion is a fundamental right, state regulation must meet the "strict scrutiny" standard, which means the state must show it has a "compelling interest" in having the law; (5) the word "person" in the 14th Amendment, does not apply to the unborn; (6) the state has an important interest in both preserving the heath of a pregnant woman and in protecting fetal life; (7) the state's interest in maternal health becomes compelling at three months; (8) the state's interest in fetal life becomes compelling at viability--six months; (9) the state may not regulate abortion at all during the first trimester; (10) the state may regulate abortion during the second three months, but only for the protection of the woman's health; (11) the state may regulate or ban abortion during the third trimester to protect fetal life.
On every other issue, I admire Ron Paul for bravely sticking to his beliefs. But when he starts talking about abortion, he fidgets about, breaks eye contact with the interviewer, and becomes a politician. I just wish he would tell the truth and say "I'm opposed to abortion and I think repealing Roe v. Wade is the first step towards allowing states to criminalize it". I'm not sure there is anything you can say that will change my mind on this. I don't think anyone should expect to agree with any candidate 100% on everything.
I am in agreement with Ezra Klein:
THE ODD APPEAL OF RON PAUL.
As Dana says, it's a bit hard to square the immense affection Ron Paul receives from putative civil libertarians with his intensely restrictive attitude towards such issues as whether a woman will be forced to use her body as a vessel for childbearing. But, as Peter Suderman argues, it's probably a mistake to focus too intensely on policy when trying to evaluate the appeal of Paul. Rather, Paul provides a home for those who feel alienated, misled, lied to, and marginalized by mainstream politics. As one of my commenters said, "It's like he's quietly amassing and army of outcasts from the Perot and Nader campaigns." Add in outcasts from whomever the Libertarian party tends to run and I think you've got a pretty good sense of the coalition.
With Paul, the positions aren't the point. His candidacy is tonal, aesthetic in nature. It's a movement united behind Howard Beale: They're mad as hell at politics, and not going to take it anymore. The force of that statement is far more important than whether Beale's political opinions or likely comportment in office precisely match up with what his supporters would desire. Paul's candidacy is an indictment of the system, not an argument for who would best administer it.
UPDATE: Glenn Greenwald convincingly addresses politician purity on abortion here:
Thursday December 20, 2007 05:07 EST
Harry Reid's pro-life stance vs. Ron Paul's
Writing at The American Prospect blog, Dana Goldstein criticizes Andrew Sullivan for endorsing Ron Paul as the GOP candidate (Sullivan also endorsed Democrat Barack Obama, his clearly preferred candidate) and specifically objected to Sullivan's praise of Paul on civil libertarian grounds. Goldstein's complaint: Paul's pro-life position means he believes in freedom "only when it comes to half of the population" and therefore no "thinking person committed to individual rights" could coherently support him.
Ezra Klein offers qualified agreement: "it's a bit hard to square the immense affection Ron Paul receives from putative civil libertarians with his intensely restrictive attitude towards such issues as whether a woman will be forced to use her body as a vessel for childbearing." The premise here appears to be that abortion is not merely one issue, but an issue of such overarching importance that having the wrong position there ought to preclude "any thinking person committed to individual rights" from supporting that individual, regardless of their views on every other issue.
That's all fair enough, or at least certainly reasonable -- and my purpose here isn't to dispute that view -- though it still ought to be noted that feminist Naomi Wolf, who has devoted much of her adult life to advocating for reproductive rights, among many other pro-choice and liberal political figures, seems to disagree with Goldstein's view. Wolf has repeatedly praised Paul as one of the very few national political figures who recognizes the profound threats to American freedoms and who appears willing to take meaningful action in response.
In a speech last month, Wolf cited Paul's sponsorship of The American Freedom Agenda Act of 2007 (.pdf) -- which would restore habeas corpus, prohibit torture and rendition, bar warrantless surveillance, protect journalists from prosecution for reporting on classifed matters, outlaw the use of secret evidence, and compel Congress to sue to challenge the validity of signing statements -- as a measure necessary to "stabilize democracy long enough to take a breath."
During the Q&A session following the speech, Wolf was asked if there were any presidential candidates who were similarly committed to standing against the tidal wave of liberty erosion in the U.S., and she responded (video is here):
There is only one candidate, I'm sorry to say -- well, there's three candidates -- Ron Paul has always talked about these issues, and it's amazing to see -- he's on the other side, but I have a lot of respect for a lot of what he's saying. And he has supporters really from both parties who are passiontate about him, because he's saying things like: "You know what? We don't need an empire. Let's just give up our domination all over the world and let's just have a Republic." You know, I get chills thinking about that: "Let's have a Republic. We don't need an emprie." Can you imagine? So he would. And Kucinich and Chris Dodd are both committed, and they've always talked constitutional issues.It's fair to assume that Naomi Wolf is no less opposed to Paul's pro-life position than Goldstein and Klein are, but she presumably thinks that other issues can be weighed against it in importance, including the fact that Paul seems to be one of the very few candidates who has made the erosion of constitutional liberties a centerpiece of his campaign, and is the only candidate with a credible campaign making a substantive case against the premises of America's imperial, militaristic role in the world (i.e., not merely objecting to the invasion of Iraq on cost-benefit grounds but rejecting the core premises that led to it and other U.S. interventions against countries that haven't attacked us).
It's hard to see why a pro-choice politician who affirms the basic premises of America's imperialism and who has no real intention to roll back the massive abuses of the Constitution is any more acceptable in decent company than a pro-life politician who repudiates America's war-making and who does intend to do what is possible to restore America's basic constitutional framework. How do those issues get weighed exactly? And who, in Goldstein's view, are the candidates with sterling records across the board on liberty, war-making and constitutional rights, whom a "thinking person committed to individual rights" can enthusiastically support?
* * * * *
In any event, if one accepts Goldstein's premise -- that no decent person would ever support any pro-life politician regardless of other concerns -- it is difficult to understand how her position is reconciled with support for Democrats generally, given that they have installed in one of their two most powerful positions -- Senate Majority Leader -- a fairly dogmatic pro-life politician in Harry Reid. Here is what Taylor Marsh, one of Reid's constituents, said (accurately) when Reid was chosen by Democratic Senators to lead them in the Senate:
This week, something pretty amazing happens.
Senator Harry Reid of Nevada takes over the minority leader spot in the Senate.
That he's replacing long-time Republican thorn, Tom Daschle, is only one big headline.
The other is that Senator Reid is a pro-life Democrat and devout Mormon from red state Nevada.
Senator Reid offers something special for the minority spot, because he is one of the first powerful Democrats in a long time who is devoutly pro-life:
Voted YES on criminal penalty for harming unborn fetus during other crime. (Mar 2004)
Voted YES on banning partial birth abortions except for maternal life. (Mar 2003)
Voted YES on maintaining ban on Military Base Abortions. (Jun 2000)
Voted YES on banning partial birth abortions. (Oct 1999)
Voted YES on disallowing overseas military abortions. (May 1999)
Rated 29% by NARAL, indicating a pro-life voting record. (Dec 2003)Despite that solid pro-life record, Marsh (who is now a Clinton supporter) appeared to view Reid's election positively, calling it "quite serendipitous" and praising him as being "pretty independent." Indeed, Democrats elected Reid as their Leader despite this, from the Christian Broadcasting Network:
For example, on the issue of abortion, he says he's pro-life which puts him at odds with the majority of his party.
Says Senator Reid, "I don't in any way apologize for being pro-life. I'm pro-life."And this is what The Progressive said when Senate Democrats elected him as Leader:
Harry Reid is a pro-life converted Mormon, vocal in his opposition to gay marriage, unlikely to appeal to the activist faction of the party. Though he does not support a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage (on the grounds that it interferes with states' rights), he did vote for the Defense of Marriage Act. He voted against a ban on assault weapons and was endorsed by the National Rifle Association.
He voted to authorize force in Iraq. On his website, the Senator does not offer much in the way of contrition for that vote. He argues that the world is a safer place without Saddam and stresses continuing the search for WMD, suggesting it's possible they were "smuggled out of the country." Regarding the likely new head of the Democratic National Committee, Howard Dean, Reid says, "I'm not sure Howard Dean is the answer to our problems. For right or wrong Howard Dean is recognized as part of the left, the anti-war crowd. I'm not sure we need more acrimony."Are all Senate Democrats -- who elected the unapologetically pro-life Reid unanimously to be their Leader -- guilty of the same things of which Goldstein accuses Paul supporters (or even those who find good things to say about Paul's campaign): namely, exhibiting complete indifference to the freedom and liberty of half of the population? How could they not be? Most of the Senate Democratic caucus is pro-choice -- many vehemently so -- but they apparently assumed that the benefits of Reid's leadership on other issues enabled them to overlook his pro-life dogma, the same calculation pro-choice boosters of Paul (such as Wolf) are making. What's the difference?
* * * * *
Ultimately, this is the key issue: the unfortunate reality is that there are fundamental issues concerning America's foreign policy, economic instability, and basic conceptions of governance which simply aren't addressed in meaningful ways in our mainstream discourse, which includes most if not all of the leading presidential campaigns. As Ezra somewhat hints at, many people (including myself) who think that Paul's candidacy has important positive elements (without wanting him to be President) believe that to be the case because he's injecting into our political discussions critical ideas and debates (such as his belief in a republic rather than an empire) which are otherwise all but excluded.
I don't see how someone can claim to be opposed to, say, America's presumed right to attack countries that haven't attacked us while simultaneously insisting that the only candidates worth listening to are ones who affirm that right. That makes no sense to me. Nor do I understand how someone can claim that we suffer from a civil liberties and constitutional crisis while thinking that the only legitimate candidates worth hearing from are ones who won't do very much about that other than to nibble around its edges.
Presidential campaigns aren't just about selecting the next person who will be President. They are also about debating political questions that need attention and expanding the scope of issues we consider and the ideas that are worth hearing. A campaign can be valuable by virtue of its ability to achieve those objectives.
By definition, one cannot coherently claim to find our mainstream political culture fundamentally corrupted but then simultaneously be wedded only to mainstream political discourse. Trying to narrow debate that way does nothing but perpetuate the status quo.
That doesn't mean that people who are deeply dissatisfied with the political framework are precluded from supporting highly imperfect, mainstream candidates. Especially in a presidential race, there are lots of good, pragmatic reasons why one might do so. But it should mean that such a person would want to expand rather than contract the scope of political debate we have, particularly during the primary season when the opportunity to debate such issues exists. There will be plenty of time later -- in fact, shortly -- for those who want to hear nothing other than boisterous cheering for the Democratic nominee and attacks on the GOP candidate.
Nonetheless, if the standard is (as Goldstein suggests) that, regardless of any other considerations, anyone who is pro-life ought to be removed from good company -- along with those who support any such individuals -- that's a perfectly principled position, but it ought not be applied selectively. It would mean, by definition, that none of the Democratic Senators (who unanimously chose to elect as their Leader one of the very few pro-life Senators in their midst) can be said genuinely to support individual rights, and that doesn't appear to be a conclusion which many people actually embrace.
Thursday, December 20, 2007
Tuesday, December 18, 2007
Frontline on Wiretapping
I want terrorist communications to be monitured by US intelligence as long as there is judicial oversight. I do not want my Constitutional rights against unreasonable searches to be violated. I'm sitting here watching Frontline on PBS, near the end of the first hour of the program on the president's wiretapping program. I am trying to be vigiliant about spotting any liberal bias in the way this information is presented and in the way the questions are asked. This is PBS after all, and any republican-lackey radio host worth his salt knows PBS is liberal bias incarnate. I want to be completely convinced before I start any angry rants. The history of illegal government surveillance of American citizens is as old as the telegram, continuing through the advent of telephones and existing in some form during every decade of the 20th century. By exposing specific facts about the activity of George Bush's current administration in a single case, it becomes painfully obvious that roughly 10% of PURELY DOMESTIC phone and internet communications are being monitored ILLEGALLY by the government in a blanket surveillance program. And this is what we know from one brave whistleblower - just think of the other privacy abuses going on using other telecoms and internet providers. A lawsuit in California was filed after the AT&T employee in San Diego discovered the illegal equipment in a secret room that diverted ALL communications to a government data miner by using a splitter. The National Security Administration and AT&T will not answer questions about this case. One of the most revolting parts is when Diane Feinstein asks Alberto Gonzales if any other programs exist where the president is using his self-defined "special executive authority", and Gonzales makes her repeat the question, then says he cannot answer it. He is a crafty lawyer indeed - his loyalty to his benefactor is strong. I have a lot of respect for Frontline for airing this - every American needs to know the details of how our 4th Amendment rights are being blatantly violated at this very moment. When they were questioned about this illegal spying operation, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and President George Bush lied to the American people.
Must-See Movies about the USA
These could be considered political propaganda by some people, but I found all extremely compelling. Will add to this list in the future...
The Fog of War
Why We Fight
Murder on a Sunday Morning
Jesus Camp
Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson (PBS)
Citizen Ruth
Ghosts of Abu Ghraib (HBO)
The Fog of War
Why We Fight
Murder on a Sunday Morning
Jesus Camp
Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson (PBS)
Citizen Ruth
Ghosts of Abu Ghraib (HBO)
Sunday, December 16, 2007
Ben Stein
Ben Stein's Christmas message on CBS Sunday Morning was a good one:
http://www.cbsnews.com/sections/i_video/main500251.shtml?id=3623803n
Seems like old Ben is mellowing out a little.
http://www.cbsnews.com/sections/i_video/main500251.shtml?id=3623803n
Seems like old Ben is mellowing out a little.
Saturday, December 15, 2007
Listen to TR
"The president desires to know in the fullest and most circumstantial manner all the facts, ... for the very reason that the president intends to back up the Army in the heartiest fashion in every lawful and legitimate method of doing its work; he also intends to see that the most vigorous care is exercised to detect and prevent any cruelty or brutality and that men who are guilty thereof are punished. Great as the provocation has been in dealing with foes who habitually resort to treachery, murder and torture against our men, nothing can justify or will be held to justify the use of torture or inhuman conduct of any kind on the part of the American Army,” - Teddy Roosevelt
Friday, October 26, 2007
Detainee Treatment
STUART HERRINGTON
Sunday, October 21, 2007
Recently revealed White House memos have raised the ugly question yet again: Is torturing prisoners captured in the Global War on Terrorism an effective and permissible use of our nation's might?
I served 30 years in the U.S. Army as an intelligence officer, which included extensive experience as an interrogator in Vietnam, in Panama and during the 1991 Gulf War. In the course of these sensitive missions, my teams and I collected mountains of excellent, verified information, despite the fact that we never laid a hostile hand on a prisoner. Had one of my interrogators done so, he would have been disciplined and most likely relieved of his duties.
Since my retirement, I have twice answered the Army's call, journeying to Guantanamo and Iraq to evaluate interrogation procedures. Subsequently, when the terrible tsunami of verified reports of detainee torture by American soldiers overwhelmed the dikes, the Army asked me to assist in training a new battalion of Iraq-bound Army interrogators in non-coercive interrogation techniques.
As regular readers of these pages may recall, I am a native Pittsburgher, the product of a superlative education at Mt. Lebanon High School and Duquesne University. I was commissioned through Army ROTC at Duquesne after completing a liberal arts curriculum. Fundamental concepts of right and wrong were basic building blocks of this education.
Forty-plus years ago, as fall winds coursed across the Bluff, ethics professor Dr. Arthur Schrynemakers, in a voice of Dutch-accented English that still rings in my memory, declared to my freshman class that ethical principles were absolute. Right was right; wrong was wrong. When he pointed his finger at those of us in the front row and thundered that it was ethically impermissible to commit an evil act and attempt to justify it because that evil act might lead to some future good, we listened -- and some of us remembered.
Coming from this background, it has been disappointing to observe the ongoing debate about torture in interrogation, usually carried out be people who have never interrogated a soul. Nor is it easy to accept that the current debate is framed pragmatically by the question, "Does torture work or not?"
In a recent interview with NPR's Terry Gross, I told her that 10 years ago the notion we would even be having such a dialogue was unthinkable. Somehow, perhaps blinded by the horrors of 9-11 and its aftermath, or by that barrage of chilling video footage of hooded executioners snuffing out the lives of journalists, civilians and soldiers, we have lost sight of other equally relevant questions: Is torture right or wrong? Is the brutalizing of helpless prisoners a practice that will advance or harm our nation's position as it wages a just war against Islamist extremists?
One can almost hear the late Dr. Schrynemakers expound on this question. Wagging his finger, he would note that government sanctioning of mistreatment of prisoners by its intelligence officers is an essentially evil act committed in the name of self-defense, which has propelled our great country down a slippery moral slope and imperiled us further.
Treat captives as guests
I and other authentic practitioners of the interrogation art respect our adversaries, however wrong we may deem their cause. We know that obtaining information from a captive who is motivated by his beliefs, his country, his honor or perhaps by the very human desire to live a full life with his family, is an elusive task that requires a patient, systematic approach.
One has to "go to school" on each captive. Who is he? Can I communicate with him in his language? What are his core beliefs? His loves? Hates? Fears? Where do his loyalties lie? Does he have a family, an inflated ego, perhaps some other core vulnerability? Does he have a hobby or some passion that might get him talking? What do we know about his activities before he fell into our hands? What about his religion? Sect? Tribe? Culture? Or the history of his movement? What have other captives in our hands said about him? Did he have documents or a computer that were seized with him? What drives this unique individual?
Professional interrogation is thus a developmental process, requiring extensive preparation. It requires in-depth assessment of the prisoner, all complemented by a healthy measure of guile, wits and patience.
Seasoned interrogators know that an important first step is to disarm one's adversary by resorting to the unexpected. Treat a captured general or colonel with dignity and respect. Better yet, treat a sergeant like he is a colonel or general.
In interrogation centers I ran, we called prisoners "guests" and extended military courtesies, such as saluting captured officers. We strove to undermine a prisoner's belief system, which we knew instructed him that Americans are unschooled infidels who would bully him and resort to intimidation, threats and brutality. Patience was essential. We rejected the view that interrogators could merely "take off the gloves" and that information would somehow magically flow if we brutalized our "guests." This notion was uninformed and counterproductive, not to mention illegal, and we made sure our chain of command understood that bowing to such tempting theories would result in bad information.
Persuasive? I'd always thought so, and it certainly worked for us in contingency after contingency in Asia, Latin America and the Middle East. But when I explained these immutable principles to an auditorium of young Army interrogators last year, one reaction puzzled me. "Sir," a young soldier queried, "that 'tender-loving-care approach' sounds all well and good, but it takes time. What do we do when the chain of command sends out a requirement and says they need the information by the end of the day, and that thousands of lives may depend upon it?"
The very question tells us that intelligence professionals have failed to educate their commanders that detainee interrogation is not like a water spigot. "Give the inquisitors the freedom to push the envelope of brutality and good information will follow" seems to have become the watchword since 9-11.
It also tells us that our young soldiers take away lessons from today's pop culture. Self-styled "experts" on interrogation frequently cite the "ticking bomb scenario" (featured on shows like "24") to justify the Jack Bauer-like tormenting of a prisoner. According to this construct, it is necessary and acceptable to torture in the name of saving an American city from "the next 9-11." This has a magnetic appeal to legions of Americans, among them future soldiers.
But the so-called ticking time bomb scenario is a Hollywood construct that I never encountered in my 30-year career. Even so, it has become the rallying cry of many well-intentioned but ethically challenged military and civilian personnel. And it has been hawked by a large constituency of senior government officials, from the White House to the Department of Justice to Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon, and is most recently evidenced in the surfacing of a January 2005 memo, written almost a year after Abu Ghraib, that characterizes face slapping and waterboarding as acceptable conduct.
Keep the gloves on
When a professional interrogator sits across from a captured Iraqi general who possesses information about the Iraqi nuclear program, or who knows why Saddam did not toss nerve gas at our massed forces, the interrogator knows he is facing a formidable adversary, an educated, trained professional strongly inclined by his Iraqi patriotism and survival instincts to deny his interrogator such information. The interrogator's challenge in such situations is to assess and manipulate the situation, somehow persuading his captive to make disclosures in spite of the prisoner's visceral fear of the consequences if he helps the enemy. The role of the interrogator is, in essence, that of a recruiter. The prisoner must be convinced that if he reveals state secrets, his captor will handle his trust with discretion and take care of him.
Generations of professional interrogators have possessed such skills, and used them to obtain information vital to our country. Those who have not mastered these techniques fall back on the ultimate admission of incompetence and resort to brutality. Once this moral frontier is crossed, captives on the receiving end of such treatment respond to their survival instincts. Spurred by cunning and fueled by the hatred stoked by their tormentor's brutality, they respond as our American aviators responded in the Hanoi Hilton, showing their contempt by lying, invention, stalling -- anything to stop the abuse -- or by accepting death before dishonor.
For 30 years, I was fortunate to work with talented professionals. We benefited from good training, including the need to adhere to the law. We never felt pressured "to take the gloves off" and mistreat our captives. On the contrary, our chain of command encouraged good treatment, and there was never a thought of traveling down the wrong road.
Regrettably, such an approach may not have satisfied a number of our senior leaders since 9-11, but it would surely have pleased Dr. Schrynemakers. It was a good approach then, and it remains so.
Three men in custody
Question: What do these three men have in common?
A wounded North Vietnamese Army sergeant, captured only after he exhausted his ammunition, brags that his Army is "liberating" the South and refuses to cooperate under harsh treatment by South Vietnamese interrogators. He then provides Americans with information about his unit, its missions, its infiltration route. He even assists in interrogating other prisoners. Granted amnesty, he serves in the South Vietnamese Army for the duration of the war.
A captured Panamanian staff officer, morose and angry, initially lies and stonewalls his American interrogator but ultimately reveals his role in his leader's shadowy contacts with North Korea, Cuba, Libya and the Palestine Liberation Organization. He provides information about covert arms purchases and a desperate attempt to procure SAM missiles to shoot down American helicopters in the event of an American invasion.
An Iraqi general, captured and humiliated during Operation Desert Storm, is initially frightened and defiant but eventually cooperates, knowing that Saddam Hussein's penalty for treason was certain death. Before repatriation, the general hands his captor his prayer beads and a scrap of paper bearing an address, saying with emotion, "Our Islamic custom requires that we show gratitude to those who bestow kindness and mercy. These beads comforted me through your Air Force's fierce bombings for 39 days, but they are all I have. When Saddam is gone, please come to my home. You will be an honored guest and we will slaughter a lamb to welcome you."
Answer: All three were treated by their American captors with dignity and respect. No torture; no mistreatment.
-- Stuart Herrington
First published on October 21, 2007 at 12:00 am
Sunday, October 21, 2007
Recently revealed White House memos have raised the ugly question yet again: Is torturing prisoners captured in the Global War on Terrorism an effective and permissible use of our nation's might?
I served 30 years in the U.S. Army as an intelligence officer, which included extensive experience as an interrogator in Vietnam, in Panama and during the 1991 Gulf War. In the course of these sensitive missions, my teams and I collected mountains of excellent, verified information, despite the fact that we never laid a hostile hand on a prisoner. Had one of my interrogators done so, he would have been disciplined and most likely relieved of his duties.
Since my retirement, I have twice answered the Army's call, journeying to Guantanamo and Iraq to evaluate interrogation procedures. Subsequently, when the terrible tsunami of verified reports of detainee torture by American soldiers overwhelmed the dikes, the Army asked me to assist in training a new battalion of Iraq-bound Army interrogators in non-coercive interrogation techniques.
As regular readers of these pages may recall, I am a native Pittsburgher, the product of a superlative education at Mt. Lebanon High School and Duquesne University. I was commissioned through Army ROTC at Duquesne after completing a liberal arts curriculum. Fundamental concepts of right and wrong were basic building blocks of this education.
Forty-plus years ago, as fall winds coursed across the Bluff, ethics professor Dr. Arthur Schrynemakers, in a voice of Dutch-accented English that still rings in my memory, declared to my freshman class that ethical principles were absolute. Right was right; wrong was wrong. When he pointed his finger at those of us in the front row and thundered that it was ethically impermissible to commit an evil act and attempt to justify it because that evil act might lead to some future good, we listened -- and some of us remembered.
Coming from this background, it has been disappointing to observe the ongoing debate about torture in interrogation, usually carried out be people who have never interrogated a soul. Nor is it easy to accept that the current debate is framed pragmatically by the question, "Does torture work or not?"
In a recent interview with NPR's Terry Gross, I told her that 10 years ago the notion we would even be having such a dialogue was unthinkable. Somehow, perhaps blinded by the horrors of 9-11 and its aftermath, or by that barrage of chilling video footage of hooded executioners snuffing out the lives of journalists, civilians and soldiers, we have lost sight of other equally relevant questions: Is torture right or wrong? Is the brutalizing of helpless prisoners a practice that will advance or harm our nation's position as it wages a just war against Islamist extremists?
One can almost hear the late Dr. Schrynemakers expound on this question. Wagging his finger, he would note that government sanctioning of mistreatment of prisoners by its intelligence officers is an essentially evil act committed in the name of self-defense, which has propelled our great country down a slippery moral slope and imperiled us further.
Treat captives as guests
I and other authentic practitioners of the interrogation art respect our adversaries, however wrong we may deem their cause. We know that obtaining information from a captive who is motivated by his beliefs, his country, his honor or perhaps by the very human desire to live a full life with his family, is an elusive task that requires a patient, systematic approach.
One has to "go to school" on each captive. Who is he? Can I communicate with him in his language? What are his core beliefs? His loves? Hates? Fears? Where do his loyalties lie? Does he have a family, an inflated ego, perhaps some other core vulnerability? Does he have a hobby or some passion that might get him talking? What do we know about his activities before he fell into our hands? What about his religion? Sect? Tribe? Culture? Or the history of his movement? What have other captives in our hands said about him? Did he have documents or a computer that were seized with him? What drives this unique individual?
Professional interrogation is thus a developmental process, requiring extensive preparation. It requires in-depth assessment of the prisoner, all complemented by a healthy measure of guile, wits and patience.
Seasoned interrogators know that an important first step is to disarm one's adversary by resorting to the unexpected. Treat a captured general or colonel with dignity and respect. Better yet, treat a sergeant like he is a colonel or general.
In interrogation centers I ran, we called prisoners "guests" and extended military courtesies, such as saluting captured officers. We strove to undermine a prisoner's belief system, which we knew instructed him that Americans are unschooled infidels who would bully him and resort to intimidation, threats and brutality. Patience was essential. We rejected the view that interrogators could merely "take off the gloves" and that information would somehow magically flow if we brutalized our "guests." This notion was uninformed and counterproductive, not to mention illegal, and we made sure our chain of command understood that bowing to such tempting theories would result in bad information.
Persuasive? I'd always thought so, and it certainly worked for us in contingency after contingency in Asia, Latin America and the Middle East. But when I explained these immutable principles to an auditorium of young Army interrogators last year, one reaction puzzled me. "Sir," a young soldier queried, "that 'tender-loving-care approach' sounds all well and good, but it takes time. What do we do when the chain of command sends out a requirement and says they need the information by the end of the day, and that thousands of lives may depend upon it?"
The very question tells us that intelligence professionals have failed to educate their commanders that detainee interrogation is not like a water spigot. "Give the inquisitors the freedom to push the envelope of brutality and good information will follow" seems to have become the watchword since 9-11.
It also tells us that our young soldiers take away lessons from today's pop culture. Self-styled "experts" on interrogation frequently cite the "ticking bomb scenario" (featured on shows like "24") to justify the Jack Bauer-like tormenting of a prisoner. According to this construct, it is necessary and acceptable to torture in the name of saving an American city from "the next 9-11." This has a magnetic appeal to legions of Americans, among them future soldiers.
But the so-called ticking time bomb scenario is a Hollywood construct that I never encountered in my 30-year career. Even so, it has become the rallying cry of many well-intentioned but ethically challenged military and civilian personnel. And it has been hawked by a large constituency of senior government officials, from the White House to the Department of Justice to Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon, and is most recently evidenced in the surfacing of a January 2005 memo, written almost a year after Abu Ghraib, that characterizes face slapping and waterboarding as acceptable conduct.
Keep the gloves on
When a professional interrogator sits across from a captured Iraqi general who possesses information about the Iraqi nuclear program, or who knows why Saddam did not toss nerve gas at our massed forces, the interrogator knows he is facing a formidable adversary, an educated, trained professional strongly inclined by his Iraqi patriotism and survival instincts to deny his interrogator such information. The interrogator's challenge in such situations is to assess and manipulate the situation, somehow persuading his captive to make disclosures in spite of the prisoner's visceral fear of the consequences if he helps the enemy. The role of the interrogator is, in essence, that of a recruiter. The prisoner must be convinced that if he reveals state secrets, his captor will handle his trust with discretion and take care of him.
Generations of professional interrogators have possessed such skills, and used them to obtain information vital to our country. Those who have not mastered these techniques fall back on the ultimate admission of incompetence and resort to brutality. Once this moral frontier is crossed, captives on the receiving end of such treatment respond to their survival instincts. Spurred by cunning and fueled by the hatred stoked by their tormentor's brutality, they respond as our American aviators responded in the Hanoi Hilton, showing their contempt by lying, invention, stalling -- anything to stop the abuse -- or by accepting death before dishonor.
For 30 years, I was fortunate to work with talented professionals. We benefited from good training, including the need to adhere to the law. We never felt pressured "to take the gloves off" and mistreat our captives. On the contrary, our chain of command encouraged good treatment, and there was never a thought of traveling down the wrong road.
Regrettably, such an approach may not have satisfied a number of our senior leaders since 9-11, but it would surely have pleased Dr. Schrynemakers. It was a good approach then, and it remains so.
Three men in custody
Question: What do these three men have in common?
A wounded North Vietnamese Army sergeant, captured only after he exhausted his ammunition, brags that his Army is "liberating" the South and refuses to cooperate under harsh treatment by South Vietnamese interrogators. He then provides Americans with information about his unit, its missions, its infiltration route. He even assists in interrogating other prisoners. Granted amnesty, he serves in the South Vietnamese Army for the duration of the war.
A captured Panamanian staff officer, morose and angry, initially lies and stonewalls his American interrogator but ultimately reveals his role in his leader's shadowy contacts with North Korea, Cuba, Libya and the Palestine Liberation Organization. He provides information about covert arms purchases and a desperate attempt to procure SAM missiles to shoot down American helicopters in the event of an American invasion.
An Iraqi general, captured and humiliated during Operation Desert Storm, is initially frightened and defiant but eventually cooperates, knowing that Saddam Hussein's penalty for treason was certain death. Before repatriation, the general hands his captor his prayer beads and a scrap of paper bearing an address, saying with emotion, "Our Islamic custom requires that we show gratitude to those who bestow kindness and mercy. These beads comforted me through your Air Force's fierce bombings for 39 days, but they are all I have. When Saddam is gone, please come to my home. You will be an honored guest and we will slaughter a lamb to welcome you."
Answer: All three were treated by their American captors with dignity and respect. No torture; no mistreatment.
-- Stuart Herrington
First published on October 21, 2007 at 12:00 am
Thursday, October 25, 2007
A Billion Dollars a Year?
I agree with this guy minus one percent - 49% on incomes exceeding half a million, plus the wealth taxes he mentions, until we pay off the 9 trillion. If something can't go on forever, it will stop.
By Robert Reich
Oct. 25, 2007
New data from the Internal Revenue Service show that income inequality continues to widen. The wealthiest 1 percent of Americans earn more than 21 percent of all income. That's a postwar record. The bottom 50 percent of all Americans, when all their wages are combined, earn just 12.8 percent of the nation's income.
Considering the magnitude of challenges ahead for America, it seems only reasonable that taxes should rise on the wealthy. Taxing the super-rich is not about class envy, as conservatives charge. It's about the nation having enough money to pay for national defense and homeland security, good schools and a crumbling infrastructure, the upcoming costs of boomers' Social Security (the current surplus has masked the true extent of the current budget deficit, but it won't for much longer) and, hopefully, affordable national health insurance. Not to mention the trillion dollars or so it will take to fix the Alternative Minimum Tax, which is now starting to hit the middle class.
To some extent, the major Democratic candidates for president appear to agree. They are unanimous in their pledge to roll back the Bush tax cuts. That means that the wealthiest Americans, who are now taxed at a marginal rate of 35 percent, would go back to paying the 38 percent marginal rate they paid under Bill Clinton. So far, however, no Democrat has suggested that the nation should raise the marginal tax rate on the richest Americans above that 38 percent, as will probably be necessary if America is to avoid an economic meltdown in the years ahead.
The biggest emerging pay gap is actually within the top 1 percent of all earners. It's mainly a gap between corporate CEOs, on the one hand, and Wall Street financiers -- hedge-fund managers, private-equity managers (think Mitt Romney) and investment bankers -- on the other. According to a study by University of Chicago professors Steven Kaplan and Joshua Rauh, more than twice as many Wall Street financiers are in the top half of 1 percent of earners as are CEOs. The 25 highest-paid hedge-fund managers are earning more than the CEOs of the largest 500 companies in the Standard and Poor's 500 combined. While CEO pay is outrageous, hedge-fund and private-equity pay is way beyond outrageous. Several of these fund managers are taking home more than a billion dollars a year.
At the very least, you might think that Democrats would do something about the anomaly in the tax code that treats the earnings of private-equity and hedge-fund managers as capital gains rather than ordinary income, and thereby taxes them at 15 percent -- lower than the tax rate faced by many middle-class Americans. But Senate Democrats recently backed off a proposal to do just that. Why? It turns out that Democrats are getting more campaign contributions these days from hedge-fund and private-equity partners than Republicans are getting. In the run-up to the 2006 election, donations from hedge-fund employees were running better than 2-to-1 Democratic. The party doesn't want to bite the hands that feed.
If the rich and super-rich don't pay their fair share, the middle class will get socked with the bill. But the middle class can't possibly pay it. America's middle class is under intense financial pressure. Median wages and benefits, adjusted for inflation, have been going nowhere for 30 years; health costs are soaring (employers are quickly shifting co-payments, deductibles and premiums to their employees), fuel costs are out of sight, the prices of the houses occupied by the middle class are in the doldrums.
What's fair? I'd say a 50 percent marginal tax rate on the very rich, meaning those earning over $500,000 per year. I'd also suggest an annual wealth tax of one-half of 1 percent on the net worth of people holding more than $5 million in total assets. Can't be done, you say? Well, the highest marginal tax rate under Republican Dwight Eisenhower was 91 percent. It dropped under John Kennedy to the 70 percent range. You say the rich will leave the country rather than face a marginal tax of 50 percent? Let them, and take away their citizenship.
If the Democrats stand for anything, it's a fair allocation of the responsibility for paying the costs of maintaining this nation. So far, neither the Democratic candidates for president nor the Senate Democrats have shown much eagerness to advocate this fundamental principle. It seems the rich have bought them out.
By Robert Reich
Oct. 25, 2007
New data from the Internal Revenue Service show that income inequality continues to widen. The wealthiest 1 percent of Americans earn more than 21 percent of all income. That's a postwar record. The bottom 50 percent of all Americans, when all their wages are combined, earn just 12.8 percent of the nation's income.
Considering the magnitude of challenges ahead for America, it seems only reasonable that taxes should rise on the wealthy. Taxing the super-rich is not about class envy, as conservatives charge. It's about the nation having enough money to pay for national defense and homeland security, good schools and a crumbling infrastructure, the upcoming costs of boomers' Social Security (the current surplus has masked the true extent of the current budget deficit, but it won't for much longer) and, hopefully, affordable national health insurance. Not to mention the trillion dollars or so it will take to fix the Alternative Minimum Tax, which is now starting to hit the middle class.
To some extent, the major Democratic candidates for president appear to agree. They are unanimous in their pledge to roll back the Bush tax cuts. That means that the wealthiest Americans, who are now taxed at a marginal rate of 35 percent, would go back to paying the 38 percent marginal rate they paid under Bill Clinton. So far, however, no Democrat has suggested that the nation should raise the marginal tax rate on the richest Americans above that 38 percent, as will probably be necessary if America is to avoid an economic meltdown in the years ahead.
The biggest emerging pay gap is actually within the top 1 percent of all earners. It's mainly a gap between corporate CEOs, on the one hand, and Wall Street financiers -- hedge-fund managers, private-equity managers (think Mitt Romney) and investment bankers -- on the other. According to a study by University of Chicago professors Steven Kaplan and Joshua Rauh, more than twice as many Wall Street financiers are in the top half of 1 percent of earners as are CEOs. The 25 highest-paid hedge-fund managers are earning more than the CEOs of the largest 500 companies in the Standard and Poor's 500 combined. While CEO pay is outrageous, hedge-fund and private-equity pay is way beyond outrageous. Several of these fund managers are taking home more than a billion dollars a year.
At the very least, you might think that Democrats would do something about the anomaly in the tax code that treats the earnings of private-equity and hedge-fund managers as capital gains rather than ordinary income, and thereby taxes them at 15 percent -- lower than the tax rate faced by many middle-class Americans. But Senate Democrats recently backed off a proposal to do just that. Why? It turns out that Democrats are getting more campaign contributions these days from hedge-fund and private-equity partners than Republicans are getting. In the run-up to the 2006 election, donations from hedge-fund employees were running better than 2-to-1 Democratic. The party doesn't want to bite the hands that feed.
If the rich and super-rich don't pay their fair share, the middle class will get socked with the bill. But the middle class can't possibly pay it. America's middle class is under intense financial pressure. Median wages and benefits, adjusted for inflation, have been going nowhere for 30 years; health costs are soaring (employers are quickly shifting co-payments, deductibles and premiums to their employees), fuel costs are out of sight, the prices of the houses occupied by the middle class are in the doldrums.
What's fair? I'd say a 50 percent marginal tax rate on the very rich, meaning those earning over $500,000 per year. I'd also suggest an annual wealth tax of one-half of 1 percent on the net worth of people holding more than $5 million in total assets. Can't be done, you say? Well, the highest marginal tax rate under Republican Dwight Eisenhower was 91 percent. It dropped under John Kennedy to the 70 percent range. You say the rich will leave the country rather than face a marginal tax of 50 percent? Let them, and take away their citizenship.
If the Democrats stand for anything, it's a fair allocation of the responsibility for paying the costs of maintaining this nation. So far, neither the Democratic candidates for president nor the Senate Democrats have shown much eagerness to advocate this fundamental principle. It seems the rich have bought them out.
Wednesday, October 24, 2007
Ron Paul Doing his Duty
Ron Paul sponsors American Freedom Agenda Act of 2007.
This bill would repeal the Military Commissions Act of 2006, restore full habeas corpus requirements, prohibit the use of secret evidence under all circumstances, and end the practice of rendition to other countries to torture terrorism suspects. It also would grant standing to Congress to sue the President over any signing statement that proposes that the President may ignore any provision of the legislation for any reason. This bill has no chance of passing in today's political fever swamp.
This bill would repeal the Military Commissions Act of 2006, restore full habeas corpus requirements, prohibit the use of secret evidence under all circumstances, and end the practice of rendition to other countries to torture terrorism suspects. It also would grant standing to Congress to sue the President over any signing statement that proposes that the President may ignore any provision of the legislation for any reason. This bill has no chance of passing in today's political fever swamp.
Tuesday, October 23, 2007
Texas Tea
I still don't think this was the original rationale, but I think the value of the oil in Iraq is now a factor that will influence decisions concerning how many and how long US soldiers stay in that country...
It’s the Oil
Jim Holt
Iraq is ‘unwinnable’, a ‘quagmire’, a ‘fiasco’: so goes the received opinion. But there is good reason to think that, from the Bush-Cheney perspective, it is none of these things. Indeed, the US may be ‘stuck’ precisely where Bush et al want it to be, which is why there is no ‘exit strategy’.
Iraq has 115 billion barrels of known oil reserves. That is more than five times the total in the United States. And, because of its long isolation, it is the least explored of the world’s oil-rich nations. A mere two thousand wells have been drilled across the entire country; in Texas alone there are a million. It has been estimated, by the Council on Foreign Relations, that Iraq may have a further 220 billion barrels of undiscovered oil; another study puts the figure at 300 billion. If these estimates are anywhere close to the mark, US forces are now sitting on one quarter of the world’s oil resources. The value of Iraqi oil, largely light crude with low production costs, would be of the order of $30 trillion at today’s prices. For purposes of comparison, the projected total cost of the US invasion/occupation is around $1 trillion.
Who will get Iraq’s oil? One of the Bush administration’s ‘benchmarks’ for the Iraqi government is the passage of a law to distribute oil revenues. The draft law that the US has written for the Iraqi congress would cede nearly all the oil to Western companies. The Iraq National Oil Company would retain control of 17 of Iraq’s 80 existing oilfields, leaving the rest – including all yet to be discovered oil – under foreign corporate control for 30 years. ‘The foreign companies would not have to invest their earnings in the Iraqi economy,’ the analyst Antonia Juhasz wrote in the New York Times in March, after the draft law was leaked. ‘They could even ride out Iraq’s current “instability” by signing contracts now, while the Iraqi government is at its weakest, and then wait at least two years before even setting foot in the country.’ As negotiations over the oil law stalled in September, the provincial government in Kurdistan simply signed a separate deal with the Dallas-based Hunt Oil Company, headed by a close political ally of President Bush.
How will the US maintain hegemony over Iraqi oil? By establishing permanent military bases in Iraq. Five self-sufficient ‘super-bases’ are in various stages of completion. All are well away from the urban areas where most casualties have occurred. There has been precious little reporting on these bases in the American press, whose dwindling corps of correspondents in Iraq cannot move around freely because of the dangerous conditions. (It takes a brave reporter to leave the Green Zone without a military escort.) In February last year, the Washington Post reporter Thomas Ricks described one such facility, the Balad Air Base, forty miles north of Baghdad. A piece of (well-fortified) American suburbia in the middle of the Iraqi desert, Balad has fast-food joints, a miniature golf course, a football field, a cinema and distinct neighbourhoods – among them, ‘KBR-land’, named after the Halliburton subsidiary that has done most of the construction work at the base. Although few of the 20,000 American troops stationed there have ever had any contact with an Iraqi, the runway at the base is one of the world’s busiest. ‘We are behind only Heathrow right now,’ an air force commander told Ricks.
The Defense Department was initially coy about these bases. In 2003, Donald Rumsfeld said: ‘I have never, that I can recall, heard the subject of a permanent base in Iraq discussed in any meeting.’ But this summer the Bush administration began to talk openly about stationing American troops in Iraq for years, even decades, to come. Several visitors to the White House have told the New York Times that the president himself has become fond of referring to the ‘Korea model’. When the House of Representatives voted to bar funding for ‘permanent bases’ in Iraq, the new term of choice became ‘enduring bases’, as if three or four decades wasn’t effectively an eternity.
But will the US be able to maintain an indefinite military presence in Iraq? It will plausibly claim a rationale to stay there for as long as civil conflict simmers, or until every groupuscule that conveniently brands itself as ‘al-Qaida’ is exterminated. The civil war may gradually lose intensity as Shias, Sunnis and Kurds withdraw into separate enclaves, reducing the surface area for sectarian friction, and as warlords consolidate local authority. De facto partition will be the result. But this partition can never become de jure. (An independent Kurdistan in the north might upset Turkey, an independent Shia region in the east might become a satellite of Iran, and an independent Sunni region in the west might harbour al-Qaida.) Presiding over this Balkanised Iraq will be a weak federal government in Baghdad, propped up and overseen by the Pentagon-scale US embassy that has just been constructed – a green zone within the Green Zone. As for the number of US troops permanently stationed in Iraq, the defence secretary, Robert Gates, told Congress at the end of September that ‘in his head’ he saw the long-term force as consisting of five combat brigades, a quarter of the current number, which, with support personnel, would mean 35,000 troops at the very minimum, probably accompanied by an equal number of mercenary contractors. (He may have been erring on the side of modesty, since the five super-bases can accommodate between ten and twenty thousand troops each.) These forces will occasionally leave their bases to tamp down civil skirmishes, at a declining cost in casualties. As a senior Bush administration official told the New York Times in June, the long-term bases ‘are all places we could fly in and out of without putting Americans on every street corner’. But their main day-to-day function will be to protect the oil infrastructure.
This is the ‘mess’ that Bush-Cheney is going to hand on to the next administration. What if that administration is a Democratic one? Will it dismantle the bases and withdraw US forces entirely? That seems unlikely, considering the many beneficiaries of the continued occupation of Iraq and the exploitation of its oil resources. The three principal Democratic candidates – Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards – have already hedged their bets, refusing to promise that, if elected, they would remove American forces from Iraq before 2013, the end of their first term.
Among the winners: oil-services companies like Halliburton; the oil companies themselves (the profits will be unimaginable, and even Democrats can be bought); US voters, who will be guaranteed price stability at the gas pump (which sometimes seems to be all they care about); Europe and Japan, which will both benefit from Western control of such a large part of the world’s oil reserves, and whose leaders will therefore wink at the permanent occupation; and, oddly enough, Osama bin Laden, who will never again have to worry about US troops profaning the holy places of Mecca and Medina, since the stability of the House of Saud will no longer be paramount among American concerns. Among the losers is Russia, which will no longer be able to lord its own energy resources over Europe. Another big loser is Opec, and especially Saudi Arabia, whose power to keep oil prices high by enforcing production quotas will be seriously compromised.
Then there is the case of Iran, which is more complicated. In the short term, Iran has done quite well out of the Iraq war. Iraq’s ruling Shia coalition is now dominated by a faction friendly to Tehran, and the US has willy-nilly armed and trained the most pro-Iranian elements in the Iraqi military. As for Iran’s nuclear programme, neither air strikes nor negotiations seem likely to derail it at the moment. But the Iranian regime is precarious. Unpopular mullahs hold onto power by financing internal security services and buying off elites with oil money, which accounts for 70 per cent of government revenues. If the price of oil were suddenly to drop to, say, $40 a barrel (from a current price just north of $80), the repressive regime in Tehran would lose its steady income. And that is an outcome the US could easily achieve by opening the Iraqi oil spigot for as long as necessary (perhaps taking down Venezuela’s oil-cocky Hugo Chávez into the bargain).
And think of the United States vis-Ã -vis China. As a consequence of our trade deficit, around a trillion dollars’ worth of US denominated debt (including $400 billion in US Treasury bonds) is held by China. This gives Beijing enormous leverage over Washington: by offloading big chunks of US debt, China could bring the American economy to its knees. China’s own economy is, according to official figures, expanding at something like 10 per cent a year. Even if the actual figure is closer to 4 or 5 per cent, as some believe, China’s increasing heft poses a threat to US interests. (One fact: China is acquiring new submarines five times faster than the US.) And the main constraint on China’s growth is its access to energy – which, with the US in control of the biggest share of world oil, would largely be at Washington’s sufferance. Thus is the Chinese threat neutralised.
Many people are still perplexed by exactly what moved Bush-Cheney to invade and occupy Iraq. In the 27 September issue of the New York Review of Books, Thomas Powers, one of the most astute watchers of the intelligence world, admitted to a degree of bafflement. ‘What’s particularly odd,’ he wrote, ‘is that there seems to be no sophisticated, professional, insiders’ version of the thinking that drove events.’ Alan Greenspan, in his just published memoir, is clearer on the matter. ‘I am saddened,’ he writes, ‘that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.’
Was the strategy of invading Iraq to take control of its oil resources actually hammered out by Cheney’s 2001 energy task force? One can’t know for sure, since the deliberations of that task force, made up largely of oil and energy company executives, have been kept secret by the administration on the grounds of ‘executive privilege’. One can’t say for certain that oil supplied the prime motive. But the hypothesis is quite powerful when it comes to explaining what has actually happened in Iraq. The occupation may seem horribly botched on the face of it, but the Bush administration’s cavalier attitude towards ‘nation-building’ has all but ensured that Iraq will end up as an American protectorate for the next few decades – a necessary condition for the extraction of its oil wealth. If the US had managed to create a strong, democratic government in an Iraq effectively secured by its own army and police force, and had then departed, what would have stopped that government from taking control of its own oil, like every other regime in the Middle East? On the assumption that the Bush-Cheney strategy is oil-centred, the tactics – dissolving the army, de-Baathification, a final ‘surge’ that has hastened internal migration – could scarcely have been more effective. The costs – a few billion dollars a month plus a few dozen American fatalities (a figure which will probably diminish, and which is in any case comparable to the number of US motorcyclists killed because of repealed helmet laws) – are negligible compared to $30 trillion in oil wealth, assured American geopolitical supremacy and cheap gas for voters. In terms of realpolitik, the invasion of Iraq is not a fiasco; it is a resounding success. Still, there is reason to be sceptical of the picture I have drawn: it implies that a secret and highly ambitious plan turned out just the way its devisers foresaw, and that almost never happens.
It’s the Oil
Jim Holt
Iraq is ‘unwinnable’, a ‘quagmire’, a ‘fiasco’: so goes the received opinion. But there is good reason to think that, from the Bush-Cheney perspective, it is none of these things. Indeed, the US may be ‘stuck’ precisely where Bush et al want it to be, which is why there is no ‘exit strategy’.
Iraq has 115 billion barrels of known oil reserves. That is more than five times the total in the United States. And, because of its long isolation, it is the least explored of the world’s oil-rich nations. A mere two thousand wells have been drilled across the entire country; in Texas alone there are a million. It has been estimated, by the Council on Foreign Relations, that Iraq may have a further 220 billion barrels of undiscovered oil; another study puts the figure at 300 billion. If these estimates are anywhere close to the mark, US forces are now sitting on one quarter of the world’s oil resources. The value of Iraqi oil, largely light crude with low production costs, would be of the order of $30 trillion at today’s prices. For purposes of comparison, the projected total cost of the US invasion/occupation is around $1 trillion.
Who will get Iraq’s oil? One of the Bush administration’s ‘benchmarks’ for the Iraqi government is the passage of a law to distribute oil revenues. The draft law that the US has written for the Iraqi congress would cede nearly all the oil to Western companies. The Iraq National Oil Company would retain control of 17 of Iraq’s 80 existing oilfields, leaving the rest – including all yet to be discovered oil – under foreign corporate control for 30 years. ‘The foreign companies would not have to invest their earnings in the Iraqi economy,’ the analyst Antonia Juhasz wrote in the New York Times in March, after the draft law was leaked. ‘They could even ride out Iraq’s current “instability” by signing contracts now, while the Iraqi government is at its weakest, and then wait at least two years before even setting foot in the country.’ As negotiations over the oil law stalled in September, the provincial government in Kurdistan simply signed a separate deal with the Dallas-based Hunt Oil Company, headed by a close political ally of President Bush.
How will the US maintain hegemony over Iraqi oil? By establishing permanent military bases in Iraq. Five self-sufficient ‘super-bases’ are in various stages of completion. All are well away from the urban areas where most casualties have occurred. There has been precious little reporting on these bases in the American press, whose dwindling corps of correspondents in Iraq cannot move around freely because of the dangerous conditions. (It takes a brave reporter to leave the Green Zone without a military escort.) In February last year, the Washington Post reporter Thomas Ricks described one such facility, the Balad Air Base, forty miles north of Baghdad. A piece of (well-fortified) American suburbia in the middle of the Iraqi desert, Balad has fast-food joints, a miniature golf course, a football field, a cinema and distinct neighbourhoods – among them, ‘KBR-land’, named after the Halliburton subsidiary that has done most of the construction work at the base. Although few of the 20,000 American troops stationed there have ever had any contact with an Iraqi, the runway at the base is one of the world’s busiest. ‘We are behind only Heathrow right now,’ an air force commander told Ricks.
The Defense Department was initially coy about these bases. In 2003, Donald Rumsfeld said: ‘I have never, that I can recall, heard the subject of a permanent base in Iraq discussed in any meeting.’ But this summer the Bush administration began to talk openly about stationing American troops in Iraq for years, even decades, to come. Several visitors to the White House have told the New York Times that the president himself has become fond of referring to the ‘Korea model’. When the House of Representatives voted to bar funding for ‘permanent bases’ in Iraq, the new term of choice became ‘enduring bases’, as if three or four decades wasn’t effectively an eternity.
But will the US be able to maintain an indefinite military presence in Iraq? It will plausibly claim a rationale to stay there for as long as civil conflict simmers, or until every groupuscule that conveniently brands itself as ‘al-Qaida’ is exterminated. The civil war may gradually lose intensity as Shias, Sunnis and Kurds withdraw into separate enclaves, reducing the surface area for sectarian friction, and as warlords consolidate local authority. De facto partition will be the result. But this partition can never become de jure. (An independent Kurdistan in the north might upset Turkey, an independent Shia region in the east might become a satellite of Iran, and an independent Sunni region in the west might harbour al-Qaida.) Presiding over this Balkanised Iraq will be a weak federal government in Baghdad, propped up and overseen by the Pentagon-scale US embassy that has just been constructed – a green zone within the Green Zone. As for the number of US troops permanently stationed in Iraq, the defence secretary, Robert Gates, told Congress at the end of September that ‘in his head’ he saw the long-term force as consisting of five combat brigades, a quarter of the current number, which, with support personnel, would mean 35,000 troops at the very minimum, probably accompanied by an equal number of mercenary contractors. (He may have been erring on the side of modesty, since the five super-bases can accommodate between ten and twenty thousand troops each.) These forces will occasionally leave their bases to tamp down civil skirmishes, at a declining cost in casualties. As a senior Bush administration official told the New York Times in June, the long-term bases ‘are all places we could fly in and out of without putting Americans on every street corner’. But their main day-to-day function will be to protect the oil infrastructure.
This is the ‘mess’ that Bush-Cheney is going to hand on to the next administration. What if that administration is a Democratic one? Will it dismantle the bases and withdraw US forces entirely? That seems unlikely, considering the many beneficiaries of the continued occupation of Iraq and the exploitation of its oil resources. The three principal Democratic candidates – Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards – have already hedged their bets, refusing to promise that, if elected, they would remove American forces from Iraq before 2013, the end of their first term.
Among the winners: oil-services companies like Halliburton; the oil companies themselves (the profits will be unimaginable, and even Democrats can be bought); US voters, who will be guaranteed price stability at the gas pump (which sometimes seems to be all they care about); Europe and Japan, which will both benefit from Western control of such a large part of the world’s oil reserves, and whose leaders will therefore wink at the permanent occupation; and, oddly enough, Osama bin Laden, who will never again have to worry about US troops profaning the holy places of Mecca and Medina, since the stability of the House of Saud will no longer be paramount among American concerns. Among the losers is Russia, which will no longer be able to lord its own energy resources over Europe. Another big loser is Opec, and especially Saudi Arabia, whose power to keep oil prices high by enforcing production quotas will be seriously compromised.
Then there is the case of Iran, which is more complicated. In the short term, Iran has done quite well out of the Iraq war. Iraq’s ruling Shia coalition is now dominated by a faction friendly to Tehran, and the US has willy-nilly armed and trained the most pro-Iranian elements in the Iraqi military. As for Iran’s nuclear programme, neither air strikes nor negotiations seem likely to derail it at the moment. But the Iranian regime is precarious. Unpopular mullahs hold onto power by financing internal security services and buying off elites with oil money, which accounts for 70 per cent of government revenues. If the price of oil were suddenly to drop to, say, $40 a barrel (from a current price just north of $80), the repressive regime in Tehran would lose its steady income. And that is an outcome the US could easily achieve by opening the Iraqi oil spigot for as long as necessary (perhaps taking down Venezuela’s oil-cocky Hugo Chávez into the bargain).
And think of the United States vis-Ã -vis China. As a consequence of our trade deficit, around a trillion dollars’ worth of US denominated debt (including $400 billion in US Treasury bonds) is held by China. This gives Beijing enormous leverage over Washington: by offloading big chunks of US debt, China could bring the American economy to its knees. China’s own economy is, according to official figures, expanding at something like 10 per cent a year. Even if the actual figure is closer to 4 or 5 per cent, as some believe, China’s increasing heft poses a threat to US interests. (One fact: China is acquiring new submarines five times faster than the US.) And the main constraint on China’s growth is its access to energy – which, with the US in control of the biggest share of world oil, would largely be at Washington’s sufferance. Thus is the Chinese threat neutralised.
Many people are still perplexed by exactly what moved Bush-Cheney to invade and occupy Iraq. In the 27 September issue of the New York Review of Books, Thomas Powers, one of the most astute watchers of the intelligence world, admitted to a degree of bafflement. ‘What’s particularly odd,’ he wrote, ‘is that there seems to be no sophisticated, professional, insiders’ version of the thinking that drove events.’ Alan Greenspan, in his just published memoir, is clearer on the matter. ‘I am saddened,’ he writes, ‘that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.’
Was the strategy of invading Iraq to take control of its oil resources actually hammered out by Cheney’s 2001 energy task force? One can’t know for sure, since the deliberations of that task force, made up largely of oil and energy company executives, have been kept secret by the administration on the grounds of ‘executive privilege’. One can’t say for certain that oil supplied the prime motive. But the hypothesis is quite powerful when it comes to explaining what has actually happened in Iraq. The occupation may seem horribly botched on the face of it, but the Bush administration’s cavalier attitude towards ‘nation-building’ has all but ensured that Iraq will end up as an American protectorate for the next few decades – a necessary condition for the extraction of its oil wealth. If the US had managed to create a strong, democratic government in an Iraq effectively secured by its own army and police force, and had then departed, what would have stopped that government from taking control of its own oil, like every other regime in the Middle East? On the assumption that the Bush-Cheney strategy is oil-centred, the tactics – dissolving the army, de-Baathification, a final ‘surge’ that has hastened internal migration – could scarcely have been more effective. The costs – a few billion dollars a month plus a few dozen American fatalities (a figure which will probably diminish, and which is in any case comparable to the number of US motorcyclists killed because of repealed helmet laws) – are negligible compared to $30 trillion in oil wealth, assured American geopolitical supremacy and cheap gas for voters. In terms of realpolitik, the invasion of Iraq is not a fiasco; it is a resounding success. Still, there is reason to be sceptical of the picture I have drawn: it implies that a secret and highly ambitious plan turned out just the way its devisers foresaw, and that almost never happens.
Tuesday, October 16, 2007
Torture Rebuked
Someone tell these guys they have Bush Derangement Syndrome!
US Army Capt. Kyle Teamey, a current military intelligence officer:
When I was in the officer's basic course, one of the instructors, only half-jokingly, proclaimed, "Beatings and drugs are for fun, not for information." His point was you can get anyone to say anything you want through torture. Good information came from psychology, interpersonal skills, and long hours with your prisoner. The best interrogators I've worked with tended to be very good at reading people and very good at using their understanding of the person and their culture to get them to talk - no waterboarding required. We should be developing an ideological alternative (or alternatives) to jihad and are instead alienating our allies, enraging the populations from which the terrorists arise, and most importantly, alienating our COG [center of gravity] in the form of the U.S. electorate. A liberal democracy, such as the US, operating in an environment with pervasive media cannot afford to dally in tactics that may provide some short term gains at the expense of long term success. It is not just the US that has made this error in judgment. The Brits and French did the same in their COIN [counterinsurgency] campaigns in 20th century and suffered for it. We should learn from their mistakes - and ours.
That provoked this comment from retired US Air Force Col. Robert Certain, who was held as a prisoner of war after being shot down over North Vietnam:
We ex-POWs don't look kindly on sadistic behavior, especially when it degenerates into torture. Kyle is right, it doesn't do much to get useful info, it only gives the sadist some thrills.
Retired US Army Lt. Col. Terry Daly, a veteran of military intelligence operations in the Vietnam War, then added:
I have yet to speak with an experienced, successful interrogator who advocates mistreating their subjects. As personally satisfying as it may seem to beat the hell out of detainees, it doesn't usually get you what you want -- accurate, reliable information that you can trust and upon which you can act. In Vietnam the Provincial Interrogation Centers routinely used skilled Vietnamese interrogators to obtain accurate, detailed information on the organization, personnel and structure of the Vietnamese Communist Infrastructure -- exactly the type of information Guantanamo should be producing by the pound on radical Islamic terrorism. I think we make a major strategic error when we support such would-be macho men as we see in this administration showing their supposed toughness by advocating torture, when we know it doesn't work.
US Air Force Col. William Andrews, who was a POW during the 1991 Persian Gulf War, added:
When I was shot down over Iraq in 1991, I expected to be tortured . . . because I was in the hands of the bad guys. As I was beaten, I had a sense of moral superiority over brutal men who had a monopoly on physical power in the interrogation room. This moral superiority came from the knowledge that we were the good guys and we didn't treat our prisoners that way. We were better than they were. I believe we cannot ever afford to give that up.
Francis Stone, retired lieutenant colonel, US Air Force:
"All of the approaches to interrogation supported by President Bush as "nontorture" (head slapping, freezing temperatures, water boarding) qualify as torture under international law. During my last year in Vietnam, 1968 to '69, I was in charge of US Air Force interrogation of Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army prisoners. None of what Bush labels as legal was legal under the Geneva Conventions, to which the United States is still a signatory. US Army, Marine, and Army of Republic of Vietnam personnel were constantly amazed at the interrogation results produced by the Air Force, and we were never allowed to touch prisoners, let alone head-slap them. Every human being has needs, and we learned those needs and exploited them. Neither Bush's bullying approach in the Mideast nor his unlawful interrogation program has worked. Sophisticated psychological methods are not being used by the Bush people, so the alleged "nontorture" will continue."
**Here's some soldier input on Iraq:
Today marks five years since the authorization of military force in Iraq, setting Operation Iraqi Freedom in motion. Five years on, the Iraq war is as undermanned and under-resourced as it was from the start. And, five years on, Iraq is in shambles. As Army captains who served in Baghdad and beyond, we've seen the corruption and the sectarian division. We understand what it's like to be stretched too thin. And we know when it's time to get out.
There is one way we might be able to succeed in Iraq. To continue an operation of this intensity and duration, we would have to abandon our volunteer military for compulsory service. Short of that, our best option is to leave Iraq immediately. A scaled withdrawal will not prevent a civil war, and it will spend more blood and treasure on a losing proposition.
America, it has been five years. It's time to make a choice.
This column was written by 12 former Army captains: Jason Blindauer served in Babil and Baghdad in 2003 and 2005. Elizabeth Bostwick served in Salah Ad Din and An Najaf in 2004. Jeffrey Bouldin served in Al Anbar, Baghdad and Ninevah in 2006. Jason Bugajski served in Diyala in 2004. Anton Kemps served in Babil and Baghdad in 2003 and 2005. Kristy (Luken) McCormick served in Ninevah in 2003. Luis Carlos Montalván served in Anbar, Baghdad and Nineveh in 2003 and 2005. William Murphy served in Babil and Baghdad in 2003 and 2005. Josh Rizzo served in Baghdad in 2006. William "Jamie" Ruehl served in Nineveh in 2004. Gregg Tharp served in Babil and Baghdad in 2003 and 2005. Gary Williams served in Baghdad in 2003.
US Army Capt. Kyle Teamey, a current military intelligence officer:
When I was in the officer's basic course, one of the instructors, only half-jokingly, proclaimed, "Beatings and drugs are for fun, not for information." His point was you can get anyone to say anything you want through torture. Good information came from psychology, interpersonal skills, and long hours with your prisoner. The best interrogators I've worked with tended to be very good at reading people and very good at using their understanding of the person and their culture to get them to talk - no waterboarding required. We should be developing an ideological alternative (or alternatives) to jihad and are instead alienating our allies, enraging the populations from which the terrorists arise, and most importantly, alienating our COG [center of gravity] in the form of the U.S. electorate. A liberal democracy, such as the US, operating in an environment with pervasive media cannot afford to dally in tactics that may provide some short term gains at the expense of long term success. It is not just the US that has made this error in judgment. The Brits and French did the same in their COIN [counterinsurgency] campaigns in 20th century and suffered for it. We should learn from their mistakes - and ours.
That provoked this comment from retired US Air Force Col. Robert Certain, who was held as a prisoner of war after being shot down over North Vietnam:
We ex-POWs don't look kindly on sadistic behavior, especially when it degenerates into torture. Kyle is right, it doesn't do much to get useful info, it only gives the sadist some thrills.
Retired US Army Lt. Col. Terry Daly, a veteran of military intelligence operations in the Vietnam War, then added:
I have yet to speak with an experienced, successful interrogator who advocates mistreating their subjects. As personally satisfying as it may seem to beat the hell out of detainees, it doesn't usually get you what you want -- accurate, reliable information that you can trust and upon which you can act. In Vietnam the Provincial Interrogation Centers routinely used skilled Vietnamese interrogators to obtain accurate, detailed information on the organization, personnel and structure of the Vietnamese Communist Infrastructure -- exactly the type of information Guantanamo should be producing by the pound on radical Islamic terrorism. I think we make a major strategic error when we support such would-be macho men as we see in this administration showing their supposed toughness by advocating torture, when we know it doesn't work.
US Air Force Col. William Andrews, who was a POW during the 1991 Persian Gulf War, added:
When I was shot down over Iraq in 1991, I expected to be tortured . . . because I was in the hands of the bad guys. As I was beaten, I had a sense of moral superiority over brutal men who had a monopoly on physical power in the interrogation room. This moral superiority came from the knowledge that we were the good guys and we didn't treat our prisoners that way. We were better than they were. I believe we cannot ever afford to give that up.
Francis Stone, retired lieutenant colonel, US Air Force:
"All of the approaches to interrogation supported by President Bush as "nontorture" (head slapping, freezing temperatures, water boarding) qualify as torture under international law. During my last year in Vietnam, 1968 to '69, I was in charge of US Air Force interrogation of Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army prisoners. None of what Bush labels as legal was legal under the Geneva Conventions, to which the United States is still a signatory. US Army, Marine, and Army of Republic of Vietnam personnel were constantly amazed at the interrogation results produced by the Air Force, and we were never allowed to touch prisoners, let alone head-slap them. Every human being has needs, and we learned those needs and exploited them. Neither Bush's bullying approach in the Mideast nor his unlawful interrogation program has worked. Sophisticated psychological methods are not being used by the Bush people, so the alleged "nontorture" will continue."
**Here's some soldier input on Iraq:
Today marks five years since the authorization of military force in Iraq, setting Operation Iraqi Freedom in motion. Five years on, the Iraq war is as undermanned and under-resourced as it was from the start. And, five years on, Iraq is in shambles. As Army captains who served in Baghdad and beyond, we've seen the corruption and the sectarian division. We understand what it's like to be stretched too thin. And we know when it's time to get out.
There is one way we might be able to succeed in Iraq. To continue an operation of this intensity and duration, we would have to abandon our volunteer military for compulsory service. Short of that, our best option is to leave Iraq immediately. A scaled withdrawal will not prevent a civil war, and it will spend more blood and treasure on a losing proposition.
America, it has been five years. It's time to make a choice.
This column was written by 12 former Army captains: Jason Blindauer served in Babil and Baghdad in 2003 and 2005. Elizabeth Bostwick served in Salah Ad Din and An Najaf in 2004. Jeffrey Bouldin served in Al Anbar, Baghdad and Ninevah in 2006. Jason Bugajski served in Diyala in 2004. Anton Kemps served in Babil and Baghdad in 2003 and 2005. Kristy (Luken) McCormick served in Ninevah in 2003. Luis Carlos Montalván served in Anbar, Baghdad and Nineveh in 2003 and 2005. William Murphy served in Babil and Baghdad in 2003 and 2005. Josh Rizzo served in Baghdad in 2006. William "Jamie" Ruehl served in Nineveh in 2004. Gregg Tharp served in Babil and Baghdad in 2003 and 2005. Gary Williams served in Baghdad in 2003.
Gore Derangement Syndrome
First came Clinton Derangement Syndrome, then Bush Derangement Syndrome, and now...
October 15, 2007
Op-Ed Columnist
Gore Derangement Syndrome
By PAUL KRUGMAN
On the day after Al Gore shared the Nobel Peace Prize, The Wall Street Journal’s editors couldn’t even bring themselves to mention Mr. Gore’s name. Instead, they devoted their editorial to a long list of people they thought deserved the prize more.
And at National Review Online, Iain Murray suggested that the prize should have been shared with “that well-known peace campaigner Osama bin Laden, who implicitly endorsed Gore’s stance.” You see, bin Laden once said something about climate change — therefore, anyone who talks about climate change is a friend of the terrorists.
What is it about Mr. Gore that drives right-wingers insane?
Partly it’s a reaction to what happened in 2000, when the American people chose Mr. Gore but his opponent somehow ended up in the White House. Both the personality cult the right tried to build around President Bush and the often hysterical denigration of Mr. Gore were, I believe, largely motivated by the desire to expunge the stain of illegitimacy from the Bush administration.
And now that Mr. Bush has proved himself utterly the wrong man for the job — to be, in fact, the best president Al Qaeda’s recruiters could have hoped for — the symptoms of Gore derangement syndrome have grown even more extreme.
The worst thing about Mr. Gore, from the conservative point of view, is that he keeps being right. In 1992, George H. W. Bush mocked him as the “ozone man,” but three years later the scientists who discovered the threat to the ozone layer won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. In 2002 he warned that if we invaded Iraq, “the resulting chaos could easily pose a far greater danger to the United States than we presently face from Saddam.” And so it has proved.
But Gore hatred is more than personal. When National Review decided to name its anti-environmental blog Planet Gore, it was trying to discredit the message as well as the messenger. For the truth Mr. Gore has been telling about how human activities are changing the climate isn’t just inconvenient. For conservatives, it’s deeply threatening.
Consider the policy implications of taking climate change seriously.
“We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals,” said F.D.R. “We know now that it is bad economics.” These words apply perfectly to climate change. It’s in the interest of most people (and especially their descendants) that somebody do something to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, but each individual would like that somebody to be somebody else. Leave it up to the free market, and in a few generations Florida will be underwater.
The solution to such conflicts between self-interest and the common good is to provide individuals with an incentive to do the right thing. In this case, people have to be given a reason to cut back on greenhouse gas emissions, either by requiring that they pay a tax on emissions or by requiring that they buy emission permits, which has pretty much the same effects as an emissions tax. We know that such policies work: the U.S. “cap and trade” system of emission permits on sulfur dioxide has been highly successful at reducing acid rain.
Climate change is, however, harder to deal with than acid rain, because the causes are global. The sulfuric acid in America’s lakes mainly comes from coal burned in U.S. power plants, but the carbon dioxide in America’s air comes from coal and oil burned around the planet — and a ton of coal burned in China has the same effect on the future climate as a ton of coal burned here. So dealing with climate change not only requires new taxes or their equivalent; it also requires international negotiations in which the United States will have to give as well as get.
Everything I’ve just said should be uncontroversial — but imagine the reception a Republican candidate for president would receive if he acknowledged these truths at the next debate. Today, being a good Republican means believing that taxes should always be cut, never raised. It also means believing that we should bomb and bully foreigners, not negotiate with them.
So if science says that we have a big problem that can’t be solved with tax cuts or bombs — well, the science must be rejected, and the scientists must be slimed. For example, Investor’s Business Daily recently declared that the prominence of James Hansen, the NASA researcher who first made climate change a national issue two decades ago, is actually due to the nefarious schemes of — who else? — George Soros.
Which brings us to the biggest reason the right hates Mr. Gore: in his case the smear campaign has failed. He’s taken everything they could throw at him, and emerged more respected, and more credible, than ever. And it drives them crazy.
October 15, 2007
Op-Ed Columnist
Gore Derangement Syndrome
By PAUL KRUGMAN
On the day after Al Gore shared the Nobel Peace Prize, The Wall Street Journal’s editors couldn’t even bring themselves to mention Mr. Gore’s name. Instead, they devoted their editorial to a long list of people they thought deserved the prize more.
And at National Review Online, Iain Murray suggested that the prize should have been shared with “that well-known peace campaigner Osama bin Laden, who implicitly endorsed Gore’s stance.” You see, bin Laden once said something about climate change — therefore, anyone who talks about climate change is a friend of the terrorists.
What is it about Mr. Gore that drives right-wingers insane?
Partly it’s a reaction to what happened in 2000, when the American people chose Mr. Gore but his opponent somehow ended up in the White House. Both the personality cult the right tried to build around President Bush and the often hysterical denigration of Mr. Gore were, I believe, largely motivated by the desire to expunge the stain of illegitimacy from the Bush administration.
And now that Mr. Bush has proved himself utterly the wrong man for the job — to be, in fact, the best president Al Qaeda’s recruiters could have hoped for — the symptoms of Gore derangement syndrome have grown even more extreme.
The worst thing about Mr. Gore, from the conservative point of view, is that he keeps being right. In 1992, George H. W. Bush mocked him as the “ozone man,” but three years later the scientists who discovered the threat to the ozone layer won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. In 2002 he warned that if we invaded Iraq, “the resulting chaos could easily pose a far greater danger to the United States than we presently face from Saddam.” And so it has proved.
But Gore hatred is more than personal. When National Review decided to name its anti-environmental blog Planet Gore, it was trying to discredit the message as well as the messenger. For the truth Mr. Gore has been telling about how human activities are changing the climate isn’t just inconvenient. For conservatives, it’s deeply threatening.
Consider the policy implications of taking climate change seriously.
“We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals,” said F.D.R. “We know now that it is bad economics.” These words apply perfectly to climate change. It’s in the interest of most people (and especially their descendants) that somebody do something to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, but each individual would like that somebody to be somebody else. Leave it up to the free market, and in a few generations Florida will be underwater.
The solution to such conflicts between self-interest and the common good is to provide individuals with an incentive to do the right thing. In this case, people have to be given a reason to cut back on greenhouse gas emissions, either by requiring that they pay a tax on emissions or by requiring that they buy emission permits, which has pretty much the same effects as an emissions tax. We know that such policies work: the U.S. “cap and trade” system of emission permits on sulfur dioxide has been highly successful at reducing acid rain.
Climate change is, however, harder to deal with than acid rain, because the causes are global. The sulfuric acid in America’s lakes mainly comes from coal burned in U.S. power plants, but the carbon dioxide in America’s air comes from coal and oil burned around the planet — and a ton of coal burned in China has the same effect on the future climate as a ton of coal burned here. So dealing with climate change not only requires new taxes or their equivalent; it also requires international negotiations in which the United States will have to give as well as get.
Everything I’ve just said should be uncontroversial — but imagine the reception a Republican candidate for president would receive if he acknowledged these truths at the next debate. Today, being a good Republican means believing that taxes should always be cut, never raised. It also means believing that we should bomb and bully foreigners, not negotiate with them.
So if science says that we have a big problem that can’t be solved with tax cuts or bombs — well, the science must be rejected, and the scientists must be slimed. For example, Investor’s Business Daily recently declared that the prominence of James Hansen, the NASA researcher who first made climate change a national issue two decades ago, is actually due to the nefarious schemes of — who else? — George Soros.
Which brings us to the biggest reason the right hates Mr. Gore: in his case the smear campaign has failed. He’s taken everything they could throw at him, and emerged more respected, and more credible, than ever. And it drives them crazy.
Monday, October 08, 2007
War Tax
President Bush has never asked the American people to sacrifice for the Iraq War...
October 7, 2007
Charge It to My Kids
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Every so often a quote comes out of the Bush administration that leaves you asking: Am I crazy or are they? I had one of those moments last week when Dana Perino, the White House press secretary, was asked about a proposal by some Congressional Democrats to levy a surtax to pay for the Iraq war, and she responded, “We’ve always known that Democrats seem to revert to type, and they are willing to raise taxes on just about anything.”
Yes, those silly Democrats. They’ll raise taxes for anything, even — get this — to pay for a war!
And if we did raise taxes to pay for our war to bring a measure of democracy to the Arab world, “does anyone seriously believe that the Democrats are going to end these new taxes that they’re asking the American people to pay at a time when it’s not necessary to pay them?” added Ms. Perino. “I just think it’s completely fiscally irresponsible.”
Friends, we are through the looking glass. It is now “fiscally irresponsible” to want to pay for a war with a tax. These democrats just don’t understand: the tooth fairy pays for wars. Of course she does — the tooth fairy leaves the money at the end of every month under Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson’s pillow. And what a big pillow it is! My God, what will the Democrats come up with next? Taxes to rebuild bridges or schools or high-speed rail or our lagging broadband networks? No, no, the tooth fairy covers all that. She borrows the money from China and leaves it under Paulson’s pillow.
Of course, we can pay for the Iraq war without a tax increase. The question is, can we pay for it and be making the investments in infrastructure, science and education needed to propel our country into the 21st century? Visit Singapore, Japan, Korea, China or parts of Europe today and you’ll discover that the infrastructure in our country is not keeping pace with our peers’.
We can pay for anything today if we want to stop investing in tomorrow. The president has already slashed the National Institutes of Health research funding the past two years. His 2008 budget wants us to cut money for vocational training, infrastructure and many student aid programs.
Does the Bush team really believe that if we had a $1-a-gallon gasoline tax — which could reduce our dependence on Middle East oil dictators, and reduce payroll taxes for low-income workers, pay down the deficit and fund the development of renewable energy — we would be worse off as a country?
Excuse me, Ms. Perino, but I wish Republicans would revert to type. I thought they were, well, conservatives — the kind of people who saved for rainy days, who invested in tomorrow for their kids, folks who didn’t believe in free lunches or free wars.
No wonder The Wall Street Journal had a story Tuesday headlined, “G.O.P. Is Losing Grip on Core Business Vote.” It noted that traditional fiscal conservatives were defecting from the G.O.P. “angered by the growth of government spending during the six years that Republicans controlled both the White House and Congress.” And no wonder Alan Greenspan told The Journal: “The Republican Party, which ruled the House, the Senate and the presidency, I no longer recognize.”
Of course, the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, the Democrat David Obey, in proposing an Iraq war tax to help balance the budget was expressing his displeasure with the war. But he was also making a very important point when he said, “If this war is important enough to fight, then it ought to be important enough to pay for.”
The struggle against radical Islam is the fight of our generation. We all need to pitch in — not charge it on our children’s Visa cards. Previous American generations connected with our troops by making sacrifices at home — we’ve never passed on the entire cost of a war to the next generation, said Robert Hormats, vice chairman of Goldman Sachs International, who has written a history — “The Price of Liberty” — about how America has paid for its wars since 1776.
“In every major war we have fought in the 19th and 20th centuries,” said Mr. Hormats, “Americans have been asked to pay higher taxes — and nonessential programs have been cut — to support the military effort. Yet during this Iraq war, taxes have been lowered and domestic spending has climbed. In contrast to World War I, World War II, the Korean War and Vietnam, for most Americans this conflict has entailed no economic sacrifice. The only people really sacrificing for this war are the troops and their families.”
In his celebrated Farewell Address, Mr. Hormats noted, George Washington warned against “ungenerously throwing upon posterity the burdens we ourselves ought to bear.”
October 7, 2007
Charge It to My Kids
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
The New York Times
Every so often a quote comes out of the Bush administration that leaves you asking: Am I crazy or are they? I had one of those moments last week when Dana Perino, the White House press secretary, was asked about a proposal by some Congressional Democrats to levy a surtax to pay for the Iraq war, and she responded, “We’ve always known that Democrats seem to revert to type, and they are willing to raise taxes on just about anything.”
Yes, those silly Democrats. They’ll raise taxes for anything, even — get this — to pay for a war!
And if we did raise taxes to pay for our war to bring a measure of democracy to the Arab world, “does anyone seriously believe that the Democrats are going to end these new taxes that they’re asking the American people to pay at a time when it’s not necessary to pay them?” added Ms. Perino. “I just think it’s completely fiscally irresponsible.”
Friends, we are through the looking glass. It is now “fiscally irresponsible” to want to pay for a war with a tax. These democrats just don’t understand: the tooth fairy pays for wars. Of course she does — the tooth fairy leaves the money at the end of every month under Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson’s pillow. And what a big pillow it is! My God, what will the Democrats come up with next? Taxes to rebuild bridges or schools or high-speed rail or our lagging broadband networks? No, no, the tooth fairy covers all that. She borrows the money from China and leaves it under Paulson’s pillow.
Of course, we can pay for the Iraq war without a tax increase. The question is, can we pay for it and be making the investments in infrastructure, science and education needed to propel our country into the 21st century? Visit Singapore, Japan, Korea, China or parts of Europe today and you’ll discover that the infrastructure in our country is not keeping pace with our peers’.
We can pay for anything today if we want to stop investing in tomorrow. The president has already slashed the National Institutes of Health research funding the past two years. His 2008 budget wants us to cut money for vocational training, infrastructure and many student aid programs.
Does the Bush team really believe that if we had a $1-a-gallon gasoline tax — which could reduce our dependence on Middle East oil dictators, and reduce payroll taxes for low-income workers, pay down the deficit and fund the development of renewable energy — we would be worse off as a country?
Excuse me, Ms. Perino, but I wish Republicans would revert to type. I thought they were, well, conservatives — the kind of people who saved for rainy days, who invested in tomorrow for their kids, folks who didn’t believe in free lunches or free wars.
No wonder The Wall Street Journal had a story Tuesday headlined, “G.O.P. Is Losing Grip on Core Business Vote.” It noted that traditional fiscal conservatives were defecting from the G.O.P. “angered by the growth of government spending during the six years that Republicans controlled both the White House and Congress.” And no wonder Alan Greenspan told The Journal: “The Republican Party, which ruled the House, the Senate and the presidency, I no longer recognize.”
Of course, the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, the Democrat David Obey, in proposing an Iraq war tax to help balance the budget was expressing his displeasure with the war. But he was also making a very important point when he said, “If this war is important enough to fight, then it ought to be important enough to pay for.”
The struggle against radical Islam is the fight of our generation. We all need to pitch in — not charge it on our children’s Visa cards. Previous American generations connected with our troops by making sacrifices at home — we’ve never passed on the entire cost of a war to the next generation, said Robert Hormats, vice chairman of Goldman Sachs International, who has written a history — “The Price of Liberty” — about how America has paid for its wars since 1776.
“In every major war we have fought in the 19th and 20th centuries,” said Mr. Hormats, “Americans have been asked to pay higher taxes — and nonessential programs have been cut — to support the military effort. Yet during this Iraq war, taxes have been lowered and domestic spending has climbed. In contrast to World War I, World War II, the Korean War and Vietnam, for most Americans this conflict has entailed no economic sacrifice. The only people really sacrificing for this war are the troops and their families.”
In his celebrated Farewell Address, Mr. Hormats noted, George Washington warned against “ungenerously throwing upon posterity the burdens we ourselves ought to bear.”
Wednesday, September 26, 2007
Civil Liberties Under Threat
(Originally Posted 9/26/07)
Civil liberties under threat
The real price of freedom
Sep 20th 2007
From The Economist print edition
It is not only on the battlefield where preserving liberty may have to cost many lives
“THEY hate our freedoms.” So said George Bush in a speech to the American Congress shortly after the attacks on America in September 2001. But how well, at home, have America and the other Western democracies defended those precious freedoms during the “war on terror”?
As we intend to show in a series of articles starting this week (see article), the past six years have seen a steady erosion of civil liberties even in countries that regard themselves as liberty's champions. Arbitrary arrest, indefinite detention without trial, “rendition”, suspension of habeas corpus, even torture—who would have thought such things possible?
Governments argue that desperate times demand such remedies. They face a murderous new enemy who lurks in the shadows, will stop at nothing and seeks chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. This renders the old rules and freedoms out of date. Besides, does not international humanitarian law provide for the suspension of certain liberties “in times of a public emergency that threatens the life of the nation”?
There is great force in this argument. There is, alas, always force in such arguments. This is how governments through the ages have justified grabbing repressive new powers. During the second world war the democracies spied on their own citizens, imposed censorship and used torture to extract information. America interned its entire Japanese-American population—a decision now seen to have been a cruel mistake.
There are those who see the fight against al-Qaeda as a war like the second world war or the cold war. But the first analogy is wrong and the moral of the second is not the one intended.
A hot, total war like the second world war could not last for decades, so the curtailment of domestic liberties was short-lived. But because nobody knew whether the cold war would ever end (it lasted some 40 years), the democracies chose by and large not to let it change the sort of societies they wanted to be. This was a wise choice not only because of the freedom it bestowed on people in the West during those decades, but also because the West's freedoms became one of the most potent weapons in its struggle against its totalitarian foes.
If the war against terrorism is a war at all, it is like the cold war—one that will last for decades. Although a real threat exists, to let security trump liberty in every case would corrode the civilised world's sense of what it is and wants to be.
When liberals put the case for civil liberties, they sometimes claim that obnoxious measures do not help the fight against terrorism anyway. The Economist is liberal but disagrees. We accept that letting secret policemen spy on citizens, detain them without trial and use torture to extract information makes it easier to foil terrorist plots. To eschew such tools is to fight terrorism with one hand tied behind your back. But that—with one hand tied behind their back—is precisely how democracies ought to fight terrorism.
Take torture, arguably the hardest case (and the subject of the first article in our series). A famous thought experiment asks what you would do with a terrorist who knew the location of a ticking nuclear bomb. Logic says you would torture one man to save hundreds of thousands of lives, and so you would. But this a fictional dilemma. In the real world, policemen are seldom sure whether the many (not one) suspects they want to torture know of any plot, or how many lives might be at stake. All that is certain is that the logic of the ticking bomb leads down a slippery slope where the state is licensed in the name of the greater good to trample on the hard-won rights of any one and therefore all of its citizens.
Human rights are part of what it means to be civilised. Locking up suspected terrorists—and why not potential murderers, rapists and paedophiles, too?—before they commit crimes would probably make society safer. Dozens of plots may have been foiled and thousands of lives saved as a result of some of the unsavoury practices now being employed in the name of fighting terrorism. Dropping such practices in order to preserve freedom may cost many lives. So be it.
Civil liberties under threat
The real price of freedom
Sep 20th 2007
From The Economist print edition
It is not only on the battlefield where preserving liberty may have to cost many lives
“THEY hate our freedoms.” So said George Bush in a speech to the American Congress shortly after the attacks on America in September 2001. But how well, at home, have America and the other Western democracies defended those precious freedoms during the “war on terror”?
As we intend to show in a series of articles starting this week (see article), the past six years have seen a steady erosion of civil liberties even in countries that regard themselves as liberty's champions. Arbitrary arrest, indefinite detention without trial, “rendition”, suspension of habeas corpus, even torture—who would have thought such things possible?
Governments argue that desperate times demand such remedies. They face a murderous new enemy who lurks in the shadows, will stop at nothing and seeks chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. This renders the old rules and freedoms out of date. Besides, does not international humanitarian law provide for the suspension of certain liberties “in times of a public emergency that threatens the life of the nation”?
There is great force in this argument. There is, alas, always force in such arguments. This is how governments through the ages have justified grabbing repressive new powers. During the second world war the democracies spied on their own citizens, imposed censorship and used torture to extract information. America interned its entire Japanese-American population—a decision now seen to have been a cruel mistake.
There are those who see the fight against al-Qaeda as a war like the second world war or the cold war. But the first analogy is wrong and the moral of the second is not the one intended.
A hot, total war like the second world war could not last for decades, so the curtailment of domestic liberties was short-lived. But because nobody knew whether the cold war would ever end (it lasted some 40 years), the democracies chose by and large not to let it change the sort of societies they wanted to be. This was a wise choice not only because of the freedom it bestowed on people in the West during those decades, but also because the West's freedoms became one of the most potent weapons in its struggle against its totalitarian foes.
If the war against terrorism is a war at all, it is like the cold war—one that will last for decades. Although a real threat exists, to let security trump liberty in every case would corrode the civilised world's sense of what it is and wants to be.
When liberals put the case for civil liberties, they sometimes claim that obnoxious measures do not help the fight against terrorism anyway. The Economist is liberal but disagrees. We accept that letting secret policemen spy on citizens, detain them without trial and use torture to extract information makes it easier to foil terrorist plots. To eschew such tools is to fight terrorism with one hand tied behind your back. But that—with one hand tied behind their back—is precisely how democracies ought to fight terrorism.
Take torture, arguably the hardest case (and the subject of the first article in our series). A famous thought experiment asks what you would do with a terrorist who knew the location of a ticking nuclear bomb. Logic says you would torture one man to save hundreds of thousands of lives, and so you would. But this a fictional dilemma. In the real world, policemen are seldom sure whether the many (not one) suspects they want to torture know of any plot, or how many lives might be at stake. All that is certain is that the logic of the ticking bomb leads down a slippery slope where the state is licensed in the name of the greater good to trample on the hard-won rights of any one and therefore all of its citizens.
Human rights are part of what it means to be civilised. Locking up suspected terrorists—and why not potential murderers, rapists and paedophiles, too?—before they commit crimes would probably make society safer. Dozens of plots may have been foiled and thousands of lives saved as a result of some of the unsavoury practices now being employed in the name of fighting terrorism. Dropping such practices in order to preserve freedom may cost many lives. So be it.
Monday, September 24, 2007
Democratic Congress Approval Rating
*Glenn Greenwald:
Why is the Democratic Congress so unpopular?
The most misused and exploited political statistic is, far and away, the low (and rapidly shrinking) approval ratings for Congress. A new Gallup poll released today found "Congress' approval rating the lowest it has been since Gallup first tracked public opinion of Congress with this measure in 1974."
For the past several months, Congress' approval ratings have been as low as, and often lower than, George Bush's unprecedentedly low ratings. Various media pundits and right-wing advocates use this fact constantly to insinuate that Bush is not uniquely unpopular and Americans have not really turned against Republicans, but rather, there is just a generic dissatisfaction with our political institutions, or more misleadingly still, that Americans are actually angry at Congress for not "doing enough" (by which it is meant that they are excessively investigating and obstructing and not "cooperating" enough).
But the reason for these low approval ratings is as clear as it is meaningful -- the overall ratings for Congress are so low because Democrats disapprove of the Democratic Congress almost as much as Republicans do. There is nothing unusual about how Republicans or independents rate the Democratic Congress; the only aspect of any of this that is unusual is that Democrats rate the Congress so low even though it is controlled by their own party. Virtually every poll demonstrates this. From the most recent CBS News poll:That is just extraordinary. Democrats express disapproval for the Democratic Congress almost to the same extent as Republicans do. Today's Gallup Poll Report noted how unusual this is:
Frustration with Congress spans the political spectrum. There are only minor (but not statistically meaningful) differences in the approval ratings Democrats (21%), Republicans (18%), and independents (17%) give to Congress. Typically, partisans view Congress much more positively when their party is in control of the institution, so the fact that Democrats' ratings are not materially better than Republicans' is notable.In fact, when it comes to analyzing the amazingly low ratings for Congress, this is the only aspect that is actually notable. The Democratic Congress commands such little approval for one reason only -- because its own party is so disappointed with its performance.
By comparison, look at the party breakdown for Bush's approval ratings and how overwhelmingly Republicans continue to approve of the President. From the same CBS poll:That is the typical state of affairs. If Democrats approved of their Congress even close to the rate that Republicans approve of Bush, then Congress' approval ratings would be at a fairly average level, even high. But not only is Congress' unpopularity due primarily to Democratic anger, the recent drops in Congressional popularity are due almost exclusively to growing Democratic and independent (but not Republican) frustration with the Congress:
The nine-point drop in Congress' job approval rating from last month to this month has come exclusively from Democrats and independents, with Democrats' ratings dropping 11 points (from 32% to 21%) and independents' ratings dropping 13 points (from 30% to 17%). Republicans' 18% approval rating is unchanged from last month.Since Democrats took over Congress in January, there have been three major attributes characterizing their conduct: (1) a failure to stop or restrict the war in Iraq; (2) a general failure/unwillingness to stop Bush on much of anything else of significance (FISA, a failure to reverse any of the excesses of the GOP Congress, such as the Military Commissions Act, lack of limits on his ability to attack Iran, etc.); and (3) numerous investigations, sometimes flashly but thus far inconsequential. There is no rational way to argue that the numerous investigations (item (3)) are responsible for Congressional unpopularity given how overwhelmingly Americans want Congressional investigations of the administration.
Thus, the only rational conclusion is that Congress is so unpopular, particularly among Democrats, because of their ongoing capitulations to the Bush administration, their failure to place any limits on his Iraq policy, and their general inability/refusal to serve as a meaningful check on the administration. Democrats and independents overwhelmingly dislike the President. Thus, the weaker Congress is in defying the President, the more unpopular Congress becomes.
Contrary to the general impression created by the media when discussing this polling data, Congress' extremely low standing does not undermine or dilute the intense unpopularity of Bush and his party among Americans. To the contrary, it bolsters it and arises from it.
Americans still trust the Democratic Congress far more than the President on "the major issues facing the country." Congress is so deeply unpopular not because they are investigating or obstructing too much, but because they are investigating and obstructing far too little. Every time "Blue Dog" Democrats and Democratic consultants and mindless, conventional-wisdom-spouting TNR types successfully argue that, especially on national security and war issues, Democrats need to capitulate to Bush lest they be politically harmed, they make Democrats look weaker, more like losers, and more impotent (the opposite of the "strength" they think they are projecting) and dig this political hole further and further.
With a President and a Republican Party this deeply unpopular, the only thing the Democrats could really do to harm themselves is to minimize the distinctions between them and Bush, and fail to take a strong stand against the administration. With very rare exception, that is exactly what they have been doing, and that is why they are held in such low esteem. That, of course, has been the predominant critique of Beltway Democratic insiders for quite some time, but this polling data proves this view rather conclusively.
Why is the Democratic Congress so unpopular?
The most misused and exploited political statistic is, far and away, the low (and rapidly shrinking) approval ratings for Congress. A new Gallup poll released today found "Congress' approval rating the lowest it has been since Gallup first tracked public opinion of Congress with this measure in 1974."
For the past several months, Congress' approval ratings have been as low as, and often lower than, George Bush's unprecedentedly low ratings. Various media pundits and right-wing advocates use this fact constantly to insinuate that Bush is not uniquely unpopular and Americans have not really turned against Republicans, but rather, there is just a generic dissatisfaction with our political institutions, or more misleadingly still, that Americans are actually angry at Congress for not "doing enough" (by which it is meant that they are excessively investigating and obstructing and not "cooperating" enough).
But the reason for these low approval ratings is as clear as it is meaningful -- the overall ratings for Congress are so low because Democrats disapprove of the Democratic Congress almost as much as Republicans do. There is nothing unusual about how Republicans or independents rate the Democratic Congress; the only aspect of any of this that is unusual is that Democrats rate the Congress so low even though it is controlled by their own party. Virtually every poll demonstrates this. From the most recent CBS News poll:That is just extraordinary. Democrats express disapproval for the Democratic Congress almost to the same extent as Republicans do. Today's Gallup Poll Report noted how unusual this is:
Frustration with Congress spans the political spectrum. There are only minor (but not statistically meaningful) differences in the approval ratings Democrats (21%), Republicans (18%), and independents (17%) give to Congress. Typically, partisans view Congress much more positively when their party is in control of the institution, so the fact that Democrats' ratings are not materially better than Republicans' is notable.In fact, when it comes to analyzing the amazingly low ratings for Congress, this is the only aspect that is actually notable. The Democratic Congress commands such little approval for one reason only -- because its own party is so disappointed with its performance.
By comparison, look at the party breakdown for Bush's approval ratings and how overwhelmingly Republicans continue to approve of the President. From the same CBS poll:That is the typical state of affairs. If Democrats approved of their Congress even close to the rate that Republicans approve of Bush, then Congress' approval ratings would be at a fairly average level, even high. But not only is Congress' unpopularity due primarily to Democratic anger, the recent drops in Congressional popularity are due almost exclusively to growing Democratic and independent (but not Republican) frustration with the Congress:
The nine-point drop in Congress' job approval rating from last month to this month has come exclusively from Democrats and independents, with Democrats' ratings dropping 11 points (from 32% to 21%) and independents' ratings dropping 13 points (from 30% to 17%). Republicans' 18% approval rating is unchanged from last month.Since Democrats took over Congress in January, there have been three major attributes characterizing their conduct: (1) a failure to stop or restrict the war in Iraq; (2) a general failure/unwillingness to stop Bush on much of anything else of significance (FISA, a failure to reverse any of the excesses of the GOP Congress, such as the Military Commissions Act, lack of limits on his ability to attack Iran, etc.); and (3) numerous investigations, sometimes flashly but thus far inconsequential. There is no rational way to argue that the numerous investigations (item (3)) are responsible for Congressional unpopularity given how overwhelmingly Americans want Congressional investigations of the administration.
Thus, the only rational conclusion is that Congress is so unpopular, particularly among Democrats, because of their ongoing capitulations to the Bush administration, their failure to place any limits on his Iraq policy, and their general inability/refusal to serve as a meaningful check on the administration. Democrats and independents overwhelmingly dislike the President. Thus, the weaker Congress is in defying the President, the more unpopular Congress becomes.
Contrary to the general impression created by the media when discussing this polling data, Congress' extremely low standing does not undermine or dilute the intense unpopularity of Bush and his party among Americans. To the contrary, it bolsters it and arises from it.
Americans still trust the Democratic Congress far more than the President on "the major issues facing the country." Congress is so deeply unpopular not because they are investigating or obstructing too much, but because they are investigating and obstructing far too little. Every time "Blue Dog" Democrats and Democratic consultants and mindless, conventional-wisdom-spouting TNR types successfully argue that, especially on national security and war issues, Democrats need to capitulate to Bush lest they be politically harmed, they make Democrats look weaker, more like losers, and more impotent (the opposite of the "strength" they think they are projecting) and dig this political hole further and further.
With a President and a Republican Party this deeply unpopular, the only thing the Democrats could really do to harm themselves is to minimize the distinctions between them and Bush, and fail to take a strong stand against the administration. With very rare exception, that is exactly what they have been doing, and that is why they are held in such low esteem. That, of course, has been the predominant critique of Beltway Democratic insiders for quite some time, but this polling data proves this view rather conclusively.
Friday, August 17, 2007
Michael Vick
I don't know if you've been following the Michael Vick dogfighting case, or if you care at all about it. I have been a Michael Vick fan since his playing days at Virginia Tech - I graduated in the VT class of 2000. I watched him move on to QB the Falcons in Atlanta - he's a tremendously exciting player to watch. After reading the 18-page indictment, I thought he came out looking very guilty, and probably deserving of some jail time. I didn't know much about dogfighting, or what it takes to "succeed" in dogfighting, or any of the other details that are associated it, and just really didn't care that much about it. I understood that this was a cruel way to be entertained, and that it results in many dogs dying cruel and painful deaths. Well, last night my wife and I watched the in-depth coverage on Bryant Gumbel's Real Sports on HBO (episode debut was 8/14/07). The segment on dogfighting is about 20 minutes long, and halfway thru it I looked at my wife and I could tell she felt the same way I did: FURIOUS!!! I got flushed red, hot and sweaty, and my heart was pounding in my chest. Honestly, watching the abominable treatment of these animals was just completely horrible. As bad as watching the dogs rip each other to shreds in the fighting ring was, the worst part of the program showed how these criminals often steal household pets out of people's backyards, then use them as chew toys for their hyped-up psycho fighting dogs so they can learn how to kill. Any dog lover will tell you that dogs can convey their emotions with their facial expressions. Seeing someone's poor stolen pet get it's back legs viciously BROKEN in the jaws of a pit bull was awful. Another man's small black lab puppy was stolen, and had it's leg broken by a club so it could not run away. Another pet bulldog had it's mouth taped shut so it could not defend itself at all. In the sprit of getting all the information on something, please watch that show if you can. All I can say is I thought dogfighting was generally bad before - now my feelings are so much more intense, fierce, and deep. If the legal system finds Vick guilty of these charges, he is dead to me.
Tuesday, July 31, 2007
Lessons Learned from Iraq
Rod Dreher comments on what things he believed at the onset of the war, that he no longer does as a result of the war. A short list:
1. Having been absolutely certain that the war was the right thing to have done, and that we would prevail easily, I am no longer confident that I can discern when emotion is affecting my judgment unduly.
2. I no longer implicitly trust governmental institutions, including the military -- neither in their honesty nor their competence.
3. I no longer believe the Republican Party is superior in foreign policy judgment to the Democrats.
4. I no longer have confidence in the ability of our military, or any military, to solve deep cultural and civilizational problems through force alone. I mean, I thought nothing could stand in the way of the strongest military fielded since the days of ancient Rome. No more.
5. I have a far greater appreciation for how rare and fragile liberal democracy is, and a corresponding revulsion at the American assumption that it's the natural state of mankind. Which is to say, the war has made me rethink my ideas about human nature, and I'm far more pessimistic now than I ever was.
Andrew Sullivan rejoinder:
Initially, I thought that nothing in my views had really changed all that much, but as I reflect on my views five years ago at the start of the war debate I realise that a number of important assumptions that I once held (and some of which I held fairly strongly) were wrong. The constant in all of these beliefs was unfounded idealism, optimism and confidence in the basic soundness of democratic government. Anyone who knew me in 2002 would never have mistaken me for an idealist or an optimist, but I retained enough of these foolish habits of mind that the disillusionment that followed was fairly severe.
On conservatism and American politics:
1) First among these was my assumption that most Americans who called themselves conservatives distrusted government and feared the expansion of government power. That was the conservatism I had been raised with, and it seemed to be the one that had a visceral appeal to a large number of conservatives during the ’90s. Obviously, this conservatism is held by only a fairly small number of conservatives, and, as wiser people than I have known all along, the popularity of a “roll back the state” message is extremely superficial.
2) One of my other false beliefs connected to this was that most conservatives were conservatives first and GOP partisans second (if at all), and would therefore be just as outraged by GOP government activism and overreach as they had been in the 1990s. This was the worst sort of naivete on my part, and it was repeatedly shown to be false. To point out that some of the same people who wanted to attack Iraq opposed aggression against Yugoslavia was almost useless–partisans are well aware that they use a double standard, and they have no problem with it. Again, I mistook the attitudes of conservatives whom I knew for what was true for “conservatives” generally–this was just sloppy analysis.
3) Another false belief that I held was that most conservatives were conservative as a result of custom and reflection, with rather more emphasis on the latter, and to discover that most conservatives were such on the basis of little more than visceral dislike of various hate figures was something that took some time to accept.
4) Another mistaken assumption was that most conservatives were likewise wary of government power overseas and that they would therefore be extremely skeptical of foreign adventurism. It seemed obvious to me that if I and others who took this view simply pointed out the bizarre Wilsonian pretensions of the administration, that would cure them of their enthusiasms.
5) Yet another false belief was that most conservatives were not nationalists, when obviously the defining feature of most Americans who call themselves conservatives is that they are, in fact, nationalists. Had I been reading more Lukacs in my younger days, I would have already known this.
6) One more false belief was that the power of nationalism and hyper-nationalism in America generally was fairly weak. I’m not sure why I ever thought this was the case. This was one where I could not have been more wrong. This was the result of wishful thinking and not much else.
In each case, I made poor judgements about American politics because I substituted my understanding of conservatism for the conservatism held by tens of millions of people. I remain convinced that the latter should understand conservatism more as I do, but it has been a long five years learning just how completely far from that most conservatives are. I imagined that the brief outpouring of nationalism after 9/11 in which most of us were swept up was a passing phase, a fever that would lift quickly and leave few traces. It had not occurred to me until later that 9/11 tapped into a vast reservoir of nationalism, and even in spite of Iraq nothing seems to be able to suppress it (and, perversely, withdrawal from Iraq may serve as yet another boost to it).
On democracy and the media:
1) Despite some long-standing dislike for mass democracy, I continued to operate until 2002-03 under the assumption that a deliberative process of informed debate would bar the way to the launching of an entirely unjustified and unprovoked war. Ha! In other words, I had the strange idea that arguments and evidence mattered and that public opinion was responsive to reality. Once again, I was not nearly pessimistic enough, and as certain as I was of the impossibility of spreading democracy in the Near East from the very beginning I remained until then embarrassingly deluded and blind to the profound inadequacies of democratic government. For some inexplicable reason, probably the result of all those years of conditioning in civics classes, I thought that the transparently weak and false claims put forward by the government would be undone by our adversarial political system and the checks to executive abuse would prevent wanton aggression. In short, I believed, against all better knowledge and judgement, that the structures of representative government would function to stop an unjust war from happening. Never mind that this had never happened in the past–for some reason, I thought it was going to work this time. At the time that the war started, I believed that the people in these structures had failed to do their duty, but as time went on I began to understand that the structures themselves are incapable of preventing executive abuses of power, because all of those structures have subordinated themselves completely to the executive in these matters. Call it the death of my constitutional optimism.
2) I had the totally unfounded, naive, youthful idea that it was the duty of journalists to hold government to account. They may theoretically have such a duty, but when it comes to questions of war most seemed to think that discretion was the better part of valour. Perhaps because they were excessively worried that they would be pilloried as fifth columnists and subversives, many journalists who were otherwise not at all sympathetic to what Mr. Bush was trying to do simply rolled over and let a campaign of disinformation against the public succeed (and, what was worse, they became active participants in that campaign).
Of course, I cannot speak for anyone but myself, but I find it a bit humbling that I and other noninterventionists could have perceived the numerous misleading government statements, the likely pitfalls following the invasion, the absurdity of implanting alien political and social norms into an entirely different culture and unknown part of the world and the malign effects of the war on our political institutions, and yet at the same time I could be so mistaken about my countrymen and supposed political confreres. As someone who opposed any invasion of Iraq from the day the idea was first floated (Jan. 29, 2002), I did not make many of the same mistakes that war supporters did, but I regret them all the same, since my failure to understand the political reality of my own country led me to make arguments in my letters and conversations that were not going to be very persuasive. Antiwar activists were often effectively arguing past, or rather above, the public. We were arguing the impracticalities and immorality of such a war; the other side could tap into a visceral desire for revenge and payback, regardless of the target. War advocates understood the irrationality of democracy (including the crowd-pleasing lie that democracies are naturally peaceful) very well and exploited it for all it was worth. Antiwar activists have been labouring for years under the delusion that popular attitudes can be affected by having better policy arguments and superior command of knowledge about a region. Current war supporting pundits have much in common with this approach, since the standard refrain of pro-war commentators is something like, “The American people will never approve of a policy of surrender,” just as some antiwar commentators might effectively claim (as I know I did) that ”the American people will never approve of a policy of aggression.” I was wrong then in my judgement of the public mood; they are wrong now.
It occurs to me that the reason why antiwar activists are so strongly attached to the mantra of “Bush lied” (besides the reality that he and his officials did lie on numerous occasions) is that they are attempting to square a nation that embraced a manifestly unjust, unnecessary war with their confidence in the functioning of our system of government. In this view, if people will so easily embrace such an obviously wrongheaded policy, sane foreign policy will not be possible in a democratic system.
1. Having been absolutely certain that the war was the right thing to have done, and that we would prevail easily, I am no longer confident that I can discern when emotion is affecting my judgment unduly.
2. I no longer implicitly trust governmental institutions, including the military -- neither in their honesty nor their competence.
3. I no longer believe the Republican Party is superior in foreign policy judgment to the Democrats.
4. I no longer have confidence in the ability of our military, or any military, to solve deep cultural and civilizational problems through force alone. I mean, I thought nothing could stand in the way of the strongest military fielded since the days of ancient Rome. No more.
5. I have a far greater appreciation for how rare and fragile liberal democracy is, and a corresponding revulsion at the American assumption that it's the natural state of mankind. Which is to say, the war has made me rethink my ideas about human nature, and I'm far more pessimistic now than I ever was.
Andrew Sullivan rejoinder:
Initially, I thought that nothing in my views had really changed all that much, but as I reflect on my views five years ago at the start of the war debate I realise that a number of important assumptions that I once held (and some of which I held fairly strongly) were wrong. The constant in all of these beliefs was unfounded idealism, optimism and confidence in the basic soundness of democratic government. Anyone who knew me in 2002 would never have mistaken me for an idealist or an optimist, but I retained enough of these foolish habits of mind that the disillusionment that followed was fairly severe.
On conservatism and American politics:
1) First among these was my assumption that most Americans who called themselves conservatives distrusted government and feared the expansion of government power. That was the conservatism I had been raised with, and it seemed to be the one that had a visceral appeal to a large number of conservatives during the ’90s. Obviously, this conservatism is held by only a fairly small number of conservatives, and, as wiser people than I have known all along, the popularity of a “roll back the state” message is extremely superficial.
2) One of my other false beliefs connected to this was that most conservatives were conservatives first and GOP partisans second (if at all), and would therefore be just as outraged by GOP government activism and overreach as they had been in the 1990s. This was the worst sort of naivete on my part, and it was repeatedly shown to be false. To point out that some of the same people who wanted to attack Iraq opposed aggression against Yugoslavia was almost useless–partisans are well aware that they use a double standard, and they have no problem with it. Again, I mistook the attitudes of conservatives whom I knew for what was true for “conservatives” generally–this was just sloppy analysis.
3) Another false belief that I held was that most conservatives were conservative as a result of custom and reflection, with rather more emphasis on the latter, and to discover that most conservatives were such on the basis of little more than visceral dislike of various hate figures was something that took some time to accept.
4) Another mistaken assumption was that most conservatives were likewise wary of government power overseas and that they would therefore be extremely skeptical of foreign adventurism. It seemed obvious to me that if I and others who took this view simply pointed out the bizarre Wilsonian pretensions of the administration, that would cure them of their enthusiasms.
5) Yet another false belief was that most conservatives were not nationalists, when obviously the defining feature of most Americans who call themselves conservatives is that they are, in fact, nationalists. Had I been reading more Lukacs in my younger days, I would have already known this.
6) One more false belief was that the power of nationalism and hyper-nationalism in America generally was fairly weak. I’m not sure why I ever thought this was the case. This was one where I could not have been more wrong. This was the result of wishful thinking and not much else.
In each case, I made poor judgements about American politics because I substituted my understanding of conservatism for the conservatism held by tens of millions of people. I remain convinced that the latter should understand conservatism more as I do, but it has been a long five years learning just how completely far from that most conservatives are. I imagined that the brief outpouring of nationalism after 9/11 in which most of us were swept up was a passing phase, a fever that would lift quickly and leave few traces. It had not occurred to me until later that 9/11 tapped into a vast reservoir of nationalism, and even in spite of Iraq nothing seems to be able to suppress it (and, perversely, withdrawal from Iraq may serve as yet another boost to it).
On democracy and the media:
1) Despite some long-standing dislike for mass democracy, I continued to operate until 2002-03 under the assumption that a deliberative process of informed debate would bar the way to the launching of an entirely unjustified and unprovoked war. Ha! In other words, I had the strange idea that arguments and evidence mattered and that public opinion was responsive to reality. Once again, I was not nearly pessimistic enough, and as certain as I was of the impossibility of spreading democracy in the Near East from the very beginning I remained until then embarrassingly deluded and blind to the profound inadequacies of democratic government. For some inexplicable reason, probably the result of all those years of conditioning in civics classes, I thought that the transparently weak and false claims put forward by the government would be undone by our adversarial political system and the checks to executive abuse would prevent wanton aggression. In short, I believed, against all better knowledge and judgement, that the structures of representative government would function to stop an unjust war from happening. Never mind that this had never happened in the past–for some reason, I thought it was going to work this time. At the time that the war started, I believed that the people in these structures had failed to do their duty, but as time went on I began to understand that the structures themselves are incapable of preventing executive abuses of power, because all of those structures have subordinated themselves completely to the executive in these matters. Call it the death of my constitutional optimism.
2) I had the totally unfounded, naive, youthful idea that it was the duty of journalists to hold government to account. They may theoretically have such a duty, but when it comes to questions of war most seemed to think that discretion was the better part of valour. Perhaps because they were excessively worried that they would be pilloried as fifth columnists and subversives, many journalists who were otherwise not at all sympathetic to what Mr. Bush was trying to do simply rolled over and let a campaign of disinformation against the public succeed (and, what was worse, they became active participants in that campaign).
Of course, I cannot speak for anyone but myself, but I find it a bit humbling that I and other noninterventionists could have perceived the numerous misleading government statements, the likely pitfalls following the invasion, the absurdity of implanting alien political and social norms into an entirely different culture and unknown part of the world and the malign effects of the war on our political institutions, and yet at the same time I could be so mistaken about my countrymen and supposed political confreres. As someone who opposed any invasion of Iraq from the day the idea was first floated (Jan. 29, 2002), I did not make many of the same mistakes that war supporters did, but I regret them all the same, since my failure to understand the political reality of my own country led me to make arguments in my letters and conversations that were not going to be very persuasive. Antiwar activists were often effectively arguing past, or rather above, the public. We were arguing the impracticalities and immorality of such a war; the other side could tap into a visceral desire for revenge and payback, regardless of the target. War advocates understood the irrationality of democracy (including the crowd-pleasing lie that democracies are naturally peaceful) very well and exploited it for all it was worth. Antiwar activists have been labouring for years under the delusion that popular attitudes can be affected by having better policy arguments and superior command of knowledge about a region. Current war supporting pundits have much in common with this approach, since the standard refrain of pro-war commentators is something like, “The American people will never approve of a policy of surrender,” just as some antiwar commentators might effectively claim (as I know I did) that ”the American people will never approve of a policy of aggression.” I was wrong then in my judgement of the public mood; they are wrong now.
It occurs to me that the reason why antiwar activists are so strongly attached to the mantra of “Bush lied” (besides the reality that he and his officials did lie on numerous occasions) is that they are attempting to square a nation that embraced a manifestly unjust, unnecessary war with their confidence in the functioning of our system of government. In this view, if people will so easily embrace such an obviously wrongheaded policy, sane foreign policy will not be possible in a democratic system.
Friday, July 13, 2007
Don't Tread on Me
History of the flag:
http://www.foundingfathers.info/stories/gadsden.html
Should have known old Ben Franklin had something to do with it.
http://www.foundingfathers.info/stories/gadsden.html
Should have known old Ben Franklin had something to do with it.
Thursday, July 05, 2007
Where Humans Came From
*Andrew Sullivan:
Roughly 2,000 generations ago, the entirety of humanity was reduced to as few as 2,000 or so individuals living in Africa. From that small group of survivors, who were living just 60,000 years ago, every human on earth is descended. 60,000 years is a blip on a glacial timescale. As we migrated around the globe, we left little genetic footprints along the way that can be found in all of us - but all roads lead back to Africa just 60,000 years ago.
See this article from Vanity Fair by the Director of the project, called the Genographic Project, for more information. In fact, you can submit an anonymous sample via cheek swab (and $100) and get your own ancestor's migratory route out of Africa - yes, it's all non-profit and for scientific research.
Roughly 2,000 generations ago, the entirety of humanity was reduced to as few as 2,000 or so individuals living in Africa. From that small group of survivors, who were living just 60,000 years ago, every human on earth is descended. 60,000 years is a blip on a glacial timescale. As we migrated around the globe, we left little genetic footprints along the way that can be found in all of us - but all roads lead back to Africa just 60,000 years ago.
See this article from Vanity Fair by the Director of the project, called the Genographic Project, for more information. In fact, you can submit an anonymous sample via cheek swab (and $100) and get your own ancestor's migratory route out of Africa - yes, it's all non-profit and for scientific research.
Monday, June 11, 2007
Voter Motivation
Do you think democrats Jim Webb and John Tester won Senate seats last November because of their policy strengths or because the public perceived them to be the more authentic macho American guy? Did they win over independents with their health care arguments or did boots and buzz cuts have anything to do with it? Did red Virginia all of a sudden change its mind about the policies of the democratic party or did voters buy into an image? In addition to Tom Frank's, entire books have been written about the motivations of the American voter. It is not the policy. Voters are not that informed. Typically voters establish loyalty to one political party by age 25 and do not change it for life. The rate of participation in our elections indicates that most voting-eligible Americans do not care enough to even bother to vote. As far as candidates go, it's not the product; it's the salesman. I am not saying republicans are phony and democrats are authentic. I'm saying both parties are phony populists and republicans are better at fooling people. Think John Kerry with a shotgun or George Bush in a cowboy hat. Democrats always get bashed for cozying up with the Hollywood elite, but it's republicans who actually put actors on the ballot (Reagan, Schwarzenegger, Fred Thompson). Could that be because actors are good at acting? Now 17 months away from the presidential election, regular Americans don't care - they'll just wait for the "experts" or their favorite TV/radio personality to tell them whom to vote for. A personal example of this would be my vote for Bush because Al Gore has a lisp and seems kind of faggoty. Like you, I had a limited political awareness until recently (this president's term), and I sure thought those 1990's Limbaugh jokes about democrats were knee-slappin funny. I always get into trouble at my in-laws house when I laugh about Clinton's BJ's in the oval office. Looking back 10 years, I think that was the sum total of my knowledge about his presidency. Another example: the 2004 election was not about political experience, effectively fighting terrorism, or domestic initiatives. It was about windsurfing, "flip-flopping", expensive haircuts, and foie gras. I just think that most people vote with their gut, not their head. The secret to winning elections has nothing to do with better ideas for the country; it is to make the opponent seem like an intolerable choice.
Effective Counterterrorism
The public has recently learned of two plots insided the USA that had no capability of doing serious damage to America's survival. The Fort Dix and JFK Airport plotters are some of the most pathetic enemies this country has ever known. My understanding of the Fort Dix plotters is that any attack would have looked less like a horrendous massacre against unarmed poor folks, and more like a quick suicide by cop (against soldiers, tanks, helicopters). Their training amounted to paintball games in the woods. Of their mighty arsenal of 9 guns, 7 were inoperable. The JFK idiots had no weapons, no firm plans, and had been infiltrated by the FBI at least 17 months ago. The engineer at JFK said that if the operation had succeeded, the bombers would have been the only ones killed, and the fuel pipeline would have remained intact. Clear and future danger, maybe, but execution and effectiveness were laughable. The most important point is that both cases were cracked with good old-fashioned police work: infiltration, informants, and legal wiretaps. These guys should appear in the stupid criminals file and spend the rest of their lives in the box. Because the surveillance and interrogation rules were followed, they likely will do just that. Once again, the Law Enforcement strategy worked: 12 foiled plots since 9/11. I'm happy these scumbags are off the street. Law enforcement is to be commended for functioning as it should. I do have to wonder though, why some people are so eager to elevate these foiled plots to a catastrophic threat to western civilization (Giuliani!). There is a huge lack of perspective.
Friday, June 08, 2007
Cost/Benefit of Illegal Immigrants
I finally found a reputable study on net cost, from the Wall Street Journal:
"The President's Council of Economic Advisers added up all these costs and benefits, updating the procedures used by the National Academy of Sciences, and concluded that the value of non-citizen immigrants to the overall economy is a net positive $30 billion a year."
It makes sense to me that the value of US products that illegal immigrants purchase exceeds the value of free US school/medical services they get. Of course this study only examines cost in dollars. There was no consideration of natural resource or infrastructure usage. Also it should be noted that $30 billion is not a large number in terms of percentages of illegal immigrant population, or percentage of US GDP. However, I am convinced that the only remaining valid arguments for tightened immigration control are:
1) rule of law
2) security
3) language/culture preservation
4) possible depressed job/wage market for US citizens
"The President's Council of Economic Advisers added up all these costs and benefits, updating the procedures used by the National Academy of Sciences, and concluded that the value of non-citizen immigrants to the overall economy is a net positive $30 billion a year."
It makes sense to me that the value of US products that illegal immigrants purchase exceeds the value of free US school/medical services they get. Of course this study only examines cost in dollars. There was no consideration of natural resource or infrastructure usage. Also it should be noted that $30 billion is not a large number in terms of percentages of illegal immigrant population, or percentage of US GDP. However, I am convinced that the only remaining valid arguments for tightened immigration control are:
1) rule of law
2) security
3) language/culture preservation
4) possible depressed job/wage market for US citizens
Thursday, May 31, 2007
Helmet Laws
Concerning motorcycle helmet laws, I understand the argument saying higher health insurance costs must be paid by the general citizenry for motorcyclists' stupidity, but I respectfully disagree. Cost reduction arguments are a slippery slope to more government intrusion, like criminalizing fatties or smokers or people who like to eat greasy fried chicken - it's putting a price on freedom. Even well-intentioned safety concern is not a sufficient reason to restrict freedom, and the ultimate effect is to infantilize citizens, and try to protect us from ourselves. Another real-world example of this from last weekend - my dad got a $75 ticket for not having a life jacket in his canoe while paddling the creek in front of his house. Even though he is an excellent swimmer and was in less than 5 feet of water, the government believes it knows better than my 56 year old dad what is safe for him. Any parent worth a damn will raise their child to know about seatbelts and life jackets and helmets - it's none of the government's business. My view is that the government acting as safety police further contributes to the pussification of American men. It angers me that many adults in this country are right now fastening their seatbelts not for their personal safety, but out of fear of the police. I have no doubt that eliminating all these BS "crimes" from the books would result in more death and injury, but the price of freedom is responsibility. A grown man has got to know his limitations, and in the USA he should have the freedom to live or die by his own motherfucking decisions.
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