WTF: Obama Wins The Nobel Peace Prize?

I thought it was an article from the Onion at first. And then... "What?!"

The Norwegian Nobel Committee said it gave the prize to Obama for his "efforts to strengthen international diplomacy," his "vision of and work for a world without nuclear weapons" and for inspiring hope and creating "a new climate in international politics."

Emphasizing diplomacy ahead of force is a big improvement, but at this point it's mostly just rhetoric. He's only just started to accomplish something in Iran with diplomacy. Elsewhere, we're still fighting TWO wars and he's considering escalating one of them. He's effectively covered up and excused much of the previous administrations' torture and gross human rights violations and Guantanamo Bay remains open and running. He increased the size of the "defense" budget. He has spoken about ridding the world of nuclear weapons but not indicated how that could happen nor done anything about it. He has made no appreciable progress in Israel and Palestine.

Obama does not deserve this award. I hope that knowing he doesn't deserve it makes him feel obligated to earn it retroactively.

This War Has Nothing To Do With Religion, Part II

Tony Blair believed God wanted him to go to war to fight evil, claims his mentor:

John Burton, Mr Blair's political agent in his Sedgefield constituency for 24 years, says that Labour's most successful ever leader – in terms of elections won – was driven by the belief that "good should triumph over evil".

"It's very simple to explain the idea of Blair the Warrior," he says. "It was part of Tony living out his faith."

Mr Blair has previously admitted that he was influenced by his Christian faith, but Mr Burton reveals for the first time the strength of his religious zeal...

"But Tony's Christian faith is part of him, down to his cotton socks. He believed strongly at the time, that intervention in Kosovo, Sierra Leone – Iraq too – was all part of the Christian battle; good should triumph over evil, making lives better."

Mr Burton, who was often described as Mr Blair's mentor, says that his religion gave him a "total belief in what's right and what's wrong", leading him to see the so-called War on Terror as "a moral cause".

Funny, that's exactly what Random said in response to my claim that religiosity and hawkishness are linked:

Well, if we're going to blunt about it, we could say that the real overlap is between religiosity and a clear and firm sense of right and wrong, and in particular the idea that evil should be fought and not relativised into something acceptable.

Yes, exactly.

And this is an interesting difference between the U.S. and Britain:

Mr Burton makes the comments in a book he has written, and which is published this week, called "We Don't Do God".

In it he portrays a prime minister determined to follow a Christian agenda despite attempts to silence him from talking about his faith.

"While he was at Number 10, Tony was virtually gagged on the whole question of religion," says Mr Burton.

"Alastair [Campbell] was convinced it would get him into trouble with the voters...

Tony Blair complained in 2007 that he had been unable to talk about his faith while in office as he would have been perceived as "a nutter".

"It's difficult if you talk about religious faith in our political system," he said. "If you are in the American political system or others then you can talk about religious faith and people say 'yes, that's fair enough' and it is something they respond to quite naturally. You talk about it in our system and, frankly, people do think you're a nutter."

In Britain being a religious nut is a liability while in America it's a requirement. Either way, we ended up with religious nuts in both countries at the same time and, as a result, over a hundred thousand people are dead. Yaaay God!

This War Has Nothing To Do With Religion!

Right-wing bloggers mocked me and everybody else who threw around words like "theocons" and "religious nuts" with regard to the Bush administration. They roundly dismissed claims that Bush said that God told him to invade Iraq. They said we were overreacing when Bush referred to the war as a "crusade." They scoffed at the notion that there's any connection between religiosity and hawkishness in America. (I guess the immense overlap between Iraq War supporters and the religious right is a coincidence. And the only reason Orthodox Jews are the only Jews who vote Republican is that they are the most rational. Uh-huh.)

And yet: Donald Rumsfeld put insane Bible verses (and chickenhawk war-porn) on the cover sheets of his top-secret intelligence briefings in the days surrounding the U.S. invasion of Iraq:












These are not powerpoint presentations put together by bored 12 year olds at Bible camp. These were the covers of intelligence briefings by the Secretary of Defense given to the President of the United States of America.

This country is so topsy-turvy. Americans say they'd never vote for an atheist, and being a religious fanatic is a plus. Gays in the military are required by law to hide their orientation (and consequently their families and loved ones) because homosexuality is something shameful and dangerous, but being a religious wacko will help you get promoted. Supposed followers of Jesus -- the Prince of Peace who was tortured to death in a "stress position" -- mindlessly support torture and atheists are called immoral or worse.

Obama Is Wrong On Afghanistan

I've long been skeptical of Obama's support for escalating the war in Afghanistan. What can we possibly achieve there that would be worth the cost? I just don't get it.

Last week, Obama gave a rationale for the war which seems to be, frankly, dumb.

Here's Juan Cole:

President Barack Obama may or may not be doing the right thing in Afghanistan, but the rationale he gave for it on Friday is almost certainly wrong. Obama has presented us with a 21st century version of the domino theory. The U.S. is not, contrary to what the president said, mainly fighting "al-Qaida" in Afghanistan. In blaming everything on al-Qaida, Obama broke with his pledge of straight talk to the public and fell back on Bush-style boogeymen and implausible conspiracy theories.

Obama realizes that after seven years, Afghanistan war fatigue has begun to set in with the American people. Some 51 percent of Americans now oppose the Afghanistan war, and 64 percent of Democrats do. The president is therefore escalating in the teeth of substantial domestic opposition, especially from his own party, as voters worry about spending billions more dollars abroad while the U.S. economy is in serious trouble.

He acknowledged that we deserve a "straightforward answer" as to why the U.S. and NATO are still fighting there. "So let me be clear," he said, "Al-Qaida and its allies -- the terrorists who planned and supported the 9/11 attacks -- are in Pakistan and Afghanistan." But his characterization of what is going on now in Afghanistan, almost eight years after 9/11, was simply not true, and was, indeed, positively misleading. "And if the Afghan government falls to the Taliban," he said, "or allows al-Qaida to go unchallenged -- that country will again be a base for terrorists who want to kill as many of our people as they possibly can."

Obama described the same sort of domino effect that Washington elites used to ascribe to international communism. In the updated, al-Qaida version, the Taliban might take Kunar Province, and then all of Afghanistan, and might again host al-Qaida, and might then threaten the shores of the United States. He even managed to add an analog to Cambodia to the scenario, saying, "The future of Afghanistan is inextricably linked to the future of its neighbor, Pakistan," and warned, "Make no mistake: Al-Qaida and its extremist allies are a cancer that risks killing Pakistan from within."

This latter-day domino theory of al-Qaida takeovers in South Asia is just as implausible as its earlier iteration in Southeast Asia (ask Thailand or the Philippines). Most of the allegations are not true or are vastly exaggerated. There are very few al-Qaida fighters based in Afghanistan proper. What is being called the "Taliban" is mostly not Taliban at all (in the sense of seminary graduates loyal to Mullah Omar). The groups being branded "Taliban" only have substantial influence in 8 to 10 percent of Afghanistan, and only 4 percent of Afghans say they support them. Some 58 percent of Afghans say that a return of the Taliban is the biggest threat to their country, but almost no one expects it to happen. Moreover, with regard to Pakistan, there is no danger of militants based in the remote Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) taking over that country or "killing" it.

The Kabul government is not on the verge of falling to the Taliban. The Afghan government has 80,000 troops, who benefit from close U.S. air support, and the total number of Taliban fighters in the Pashtun provinces is estimated at 10,000 to 15,000. Kabul is in danger of losing control of some villages in the provinces to dissident Pashtun warlords styled "Taliban," though it is not clear why the new Afghan army could not expel them if they did so. A smaller, poorly equipped Northern Alliance army defeated 60,000 Taliban with U.S. air support in 2001. And there is no prospect of "al-Qaida" reestablishing bases in Afghanistan from which it could attack the United States. If al-Qaida did come back to Afghanistan, it could simply be bombed and would be attacked by the new Afghan army.

I started supporting Obama in early 2007 because of his outspoken and correct speech against the war in Iraq. I do not understand his position on Afghanistan.

Americans who aren't directly touched by the wars seem to have almost forgotten them in the wake of the economic crisis, but this issue is too important to stay on the back burner. How many more lives and billions of dollars must we lose in Afghanistan before we admit that there's really no reason for us to be over there?

President Bush Lied About the Surge

Shunted to the last few paragraphs of this article by Bob Woodward:

The president announced the surge decision Jan. 10, 2007. Five more brigades would go to Baghdad; 4,000 Marines would head to Anbar province.

The next morning, he went to Fort Benning, Ga., to address military personnel and their families. His decision had been opposed by Casey and Abizaid, his military commanders in Iraq. Pace and the Joint Chiefs, his top military advisers, had suggested a smaller increase, if any at all. Schoomaker, the Army chief, had made it clear that the five brigades didn't really exist under the Army's current policy of 12-month rotations. But on this morning, the president delivered his own version of history.

"The commanders on the ground in Iraq, people who I listen to -- by the way, that's what you want your commander-in-chief to do. You don't want decisions being made based upon politics or focus groups or political polls. You want your military decisions being made by military experts. They analyzed the plan, and they said to me and to the Iraqi government: 'This won't work unless we help them. There needs to be a bigger presence.' "

Bush went on, "And so our commanders looked at the plan and said, 'Mr. President, it's not going to work until -- unless we support -- provide more troops.' "

I wish the media were more straightforward. Why wasn't their headline the one I used? They called it "Outmaneuvered And Outranked, Military Chiefs Became Outsiders." Sure, that's a big story, but what about President Bush out-and-out LYING to get his surge? Let's bury that part at the end of the article.

Damn liberal media.

Random Thoughts on Politics, the War, and the Olympics

No, not Jack, just some random thoughts on the topics of the day.

Georgia

• Putin's a bad guy. This should surprise nobody but George Bush, who looked into his eyes and saw his soul.
• When there are no plausible military options, talking tough just makes you look stupid.
• The new domino theory about Russia is just as wrongheaded as the old one.
  
• According to the neo-cons, every war is World War II and all diplomacy is appeasement. The argument from analogy is perhaps the most dangerous of all logical fallacies.
• They also seem to be excited about the prospect of a new cold war.
  

Olympics

• I hope and tentatively believe that more good will be done by letting China have the Olympics than would have been done by refusing them or by boycotts.
• The opening ceremony was just gorgeous, an unbelievable spectacle. It was also kind of creepy and disturbing on several levels.
• Some of the Chinese gymnasts look 8 or 9 years old, and I don't believe their claims that all are 16. I also believe that every country 's gymnasts have had their growth artificially stunted.
• I love that basketball is becoming so popular around the world.
• George Bush is, as ever, an embarrassment. (n.b. I do not necessarily endorse the claim that these pictures are evidence Bush was drunk.)
  
• LeBron James's greeting to former President George H.W. Bush was hilariously inappropriate: "What's up, pops?"
• The men's 4x100 m swim relay was incredible. Track down the video if you can.
  
• I hate having to think that world records keep falling because the drugs are getting better, but that seems like the most reasonable conclusion.
  

Domestic politics

• I find Suskind's claims that the White House ordered the CIA to forge a letter alleging a connection between Saddam and Al-Qaeda and that "a high-level American intelligence agent" admits the U.S. "knew" there were no WMDs before the invasion to be somewhat credible.
• Those allegations dovetail with Sy Hersh's report of a meeting in Cheney's office discussing ways to trigger a war with Iran:

  HERSH: There was a meeting. Among the items considered and rejected — which is why the New Yorker did not publish it, on grounds that it wasn’t accepted — one of the items was why not…
  
  There was a dozen ideas proffered about how to trigger a war. The one that interested me the most was why don’t we build — we in our shipyard — build four or five boats that look like Iranian PT boats. Put Navy seals on them with a lot of arms. And next time one of our boats goes to the Straits of Hormuz, start a shoot-up. Might cost some lives.
  
  And it was rejected because you can’t have Americans killing Americans. That’s the kind of — that’s the level of stuff we’re talking about. Provocation. But that was rejected.

• Looks like we Democrats (and Americans) dodged two bullets in the primaries. One, John Edwards turning out to be a douchebag and the other, Hillary turning out to be just as bad as some of us feared.
• Why hasn't McCain's extramarital affair been a bigger story? (I'm talking about the one with his now-wife during his first marriage, not the unsubstantiated, more recent claims.) Is it the liberal media?
• Speaking of the "liberal" media, I've been watching more cable news than usual lately to follow the war in Georgia, and, well, it really sucks. Lou Dobbs is out there on CNN giving his opinions as fact, while CNN coyly pretends that its viewers carefully differentiate between journalists and know-nothing blowhards opinion columnists.
• It's funny watching the McCain camp trying to find an attack that will stick, ranging from the lies (Obama will raise middle class taxes!) to the bizarre (Obama's really popular!)
  

Israel and Iraq: Cognitive Dissonance

There was recently an astounding poll of Palestinians which showed that 84% of them support the recent terrorist attack at a yeshiva in Israel. (Previously.) (The poll also found, although right-wing sources conveniently omit this, "66 percent favoring normalized relations with Israel if it returned all land won in 1967 and a Palestinian state was established.")

I've more or less given up hope on any significant improvement in Israel in the near future. Pretty much anything Israel does just makes the situation worse, and the Palestinians certainly aren't showing any signs of working towards peace.

This sounds a bit like what's going on in Iraq, doesn't it? (I'm speaking tactically/strategically, not morally.) But for some reason, with respect to Iraq, the American hawks get all starry-eyed and think that if we just stay a few more years, the Iraqi factions will suddenly renounce their violent and hateful ways and decide to live in peace and harmony, blossoming into a democracy that will transform the entire middle east. Suggest that relative peace is possible in Israel/Palestine via tough negotiations and an eventual two-state solution, and they'll laugh bitterly. Suggest that peace is possible in Iraq even without a multiple-state solution and they'll call you a genius. Something does not compute.

Bush 41 on Torture and the American Ideal

He doesn't come out and say it, but I suspect, as does Andrew Sullivan, that his tears are for what his son has done to America's honor:

Chris Wallace: “The President remembered the courage and humanity of American soldiers and he grew emotional.”

Bush: “My favorite picture is a picture of American soldiers surrounding a guy who's been in a foxhole, Iraqi soldier, and the American guy says, we’re not going to harm you, we’re American soldiers.” (fights back tears)

...

Bush: “You see, that side of the war never got — the fact that we treated those people with respect in spite of the fact they were the enemy, it’s really good.

Watch the video. (Ignore the comments.)

Andrew Sullivan on Obama in The Atlantic Monthly

Of the viable national candidates, only Obama and possibly McCain have the potential to bridge this widening partisan gulf. Polling reveals Obama to be the favored Democrat among Republicans. McCain’s bipartisan appeal has receded in recent years, especially with his enthusiastic embrace of the latest phase of the Iraq War. And his personal history can only reinforce the Vietnam divide. But Obama’s reach outside his own ranks remains striking. Why? It’s a good question: How has a black, urban liberal gained far stronger support among Republicans than the made-over moderate Clinton or the southern charmer Edwards? Perhaps because the Republicans and independents who are open to an Obama candidacy see his primary advantage in prosecuting the war on Islamist terrorism. It isn’t about his policies as such; it is about his person. They are prepared to set their own ideological preferences to one side in favor of what Obama offers America in a critical moment in our dealings with the rest of the world. The war today matters enormously. The war of the last generation? Not so much. If you are an American who yearns to finally get beyond the symbolic battles of the Boomer generation and face today’s actual problems, Obama may be your man.

What does he offer? First and foremost: his face. Think of it as the most effective potential re-branding of the United States since Reagan. Such a re-branding is not trivial—it’s central to an effective war strategy. The war on Islamist terror, after all, is two-pronged: a function of both hard power and soft power. We have seen the potential of hard power in removing the Taliban and Saddam Hussein. We have also seen its inherent weaknesses in Iraq, and its profound limitations in winning a long war against radical Islam. The next president has to create a sophisticated and supple blend of soft and hard power to isolate the enemy, to fight where necessary, but also to create an ideological template that works to the West’s advantage over the long haul. There is simply no other candidate with the potential of Obama to do this. Which is where his face comes in.

Consider this hypothetical. It’s November 2008. A young Pakistani Muslim is watching television and sees that this man—Barack Hussein Obama—is the new face of America. In one simple image, America’s soft power has been ratcheted up not a notch, but a logarithm. A brown-skinned man whose father was an African, who grew up in Indonesia and Hawaii, who attended a majority-Muslim school as a boy, is now the alleged enemy. If you wanted the crudest but most effective weapon against the demonization of America that fuels Islamist ideology, Obama’s face gets close. It proves them wrong about what America is in ways no words can.

The other obvious advantage that Obama has in facing the world and our enemies is his record on the Iraq War. He is the only major candidate to have clearly opposed it from the start. Whoever is in office in January 2009 will be tasked with redeploying forces in and out of Iraq, negotiating with neighboring states, engaging America’s estranged allies, tamping down regional violence. Obama’s interlocutors in Iraq and the Middle East would know that he never had suspicious motives toward Iraq, has no interest in occupying it indefinitely, and foresaw more clearly than most Americans the baleful consequences of long-term occupation.

This latter point is the most salient. The act of picking the next president will be in some ways a statement of America’s view of Iraq. Clinton is running as a centrist Democrat—voting for war, accepting the need for an occupation at least through her first term, while attempting to do triage as practically as possible. Obama is running as the clearer antiwar candidate. At the same time, Obama’s candidacy cannot fairly be cast as a McGovernite revival in tone or substance. He is not opposed to war as such. He is not opposed to the use of unilateral force, either—as demonstrated by his willingness to target al-Qaeda in Pakistan over the objections of the Pakistani government. He does not oppose the idea of democratization in the Muslim world as a general principle or the concept of nation building as such. He is not an isolationist, as his support for the campaign in Afghanistan proves. It is worth recalling the key passages of the speech Obama gave in Chicago on October 2, 2002, five months before the war:

I don’t oppose all wars. And I know that in this crowd today, there is no shortage of patriots, or of patriotism. What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war … I know that even a successful war against Iraq will require a U.S. occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences. I know that an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without strong international support will only fan the flames of the Middle East, and encourage the worst, rather than best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of al-Qaeda. I am not opposed to all wars. I’m opposed to dumb wars.

The man who opposed the war for the right reasons is for that reason the potential president with the most flexibility in dealing with it. Clinton is hemmed in by her past and her generation. If she pulls out too quickly, she will fall prey to the usual browbeating from the right—the same theme that has played relentlessly since 1968. If she stays in too long, the antiwar base of her own party, already suspicious of her, will pounce. The Boomer legacy imprisons her—and so it may continue to imprison us. The debate about the war in the next four years needs to be about the practical and difficult choices ahead of us—not about the symbolism or whether it’s a second Vietnam.

It's the cover story. Read the whole thing.

Personally, I'm not so sure his face matters as much as Sullivan argues. His reasoned opposition to the war and ability to bridge the cultural divide? That matters.

Update: Troops donate more to Obama than to any other candidate, Democratic or Republican

In the previous post, I pointed out that people "affiliated with the military" donated most to the two leading anti-war candidates, Paul and Obama. As it turns out, when you narrow the people "affiliated with the military" to actual "uniformed service members," Obama is the clear winner, with $27,000! A distant second is Paul, with $19,250, followed closely by McCain, with $18,600.

These must be Rush Limbaugh's "phony soldiers." Why do the troops hate our troops so much??

What do our troops know that Bush's 30% does not?

The few people who continue to support the Iraq war and claim that we're finally turning things around ("this time we mean it!") point frequently to anecdotes from soldiers over there who are privy to more information than we are. Blog-neighbor Mark has pointed to troop reenlistment rates as a proxy for troop morale as a proxy for evidence that things are going well, presumably because less indirect evidence is difficult to find.

I wonder what they'll make of this?

From January through September, donors affiliated with the military gave more contributions to Republican antiwar candidate Ron Paul than to anyone else. Coming in second place? Democratic antiwar candidate Barack Obama. Coming in third is John McCain, defender of the status quo.

When I said "I wonder..." above, I was just kidding, of course. This isn't going to change anybody's mind. All the Bush 30% have left is ad hoc reasoning. I'm sure that they'll find evidence that the war is going well in the number of bottles of water shipped to Iraq every week or something.*



* I recognize that violence has declined somewhat, at least by certain metrics. It's whether the surge is working politically that I'm referring to, i.e. whether we are getting any closer to leaving behind a successful state.

Hillary a Neocon?

Libertarian Radley Balko makes the case that Hillary Clinton is "essentially a neocon who digs abortion:"

For seven years, the left has been up in arms about President Bush's aggressive foreign policy, his secrecy, his partisanship, and his expansive claims on executive power. It's odd, then, that they're prepared to nominate Hillary Clinton to carry the party into the 2008 elections.
...
Cato Institute President Ed Crane recently wrote a piece for the Financial Times pointing out that when you strip away the partisan coating, Mrs. Clinton's grandiose, big-government vision is really no different than that envisioned by the neoconservatives so loathed by the left. Clinton, remember, not only voted for the Iraq war, she still hasn't conceded she was wrong to do so, and has made no promise to end it any time soon.
...
Hillary Clinton voted for both the Patriot Act and its reauthorization. She voted for building a wall on the U.S.-Mexican border. She voted to loosen restrictions limiting the federal government's ability to wiretap cell phones. In the past, she has supported a robust role for the federal government in enforcing "decency" standards in television and music. She teamed up with former Sen. Rick Santorum on a bill calling for the federal government to restrict the sale of violent video games.

Leftists concerned about the entertainment industry's increasingly imperial stand on copyright might take a cue from copyright guru Lawrence Lessig, who wrote on his blog for Wired magazine: "Of all the Dems, I would have bet she was closest to the copyright extremists. So far, she's done nothing to suggest to the contrary."

What about secrecy and executive power? It's difficult to see Hillary Clinton voluntarily handing back all of those extra-constitutional executive powers claimed by President Bush. Her husband's administration, for example, copiously invoked dubious "executive privilege" claims to keep from complying with congressional subpoenas and open records requests — claims the left now (correctly, in my view) regularly criticizes the Bush administration for invoking.

Hillary Clinton herself went to court to keep meetings of her Health Care Task Force secret from the public, something conservatives were quick to point out when leftists criticize Vice President Cheney's similar efforts to keep meetings of his Energy Task Force secret.

"I'm a strong believer in executive authority," Clinton said in a 2003 speech, recently quoted in The New Republic. "I wish that, when my husband was president, people in Congress had been more willing to recognize presidential authority."
...
Activists on the left need to recognize that Hillary Clinton winning the Democratic primary is the GOP's last best hope to elect a Republican to continue pursuing President Bush's pursuit of these unfortunate policies. And judging by her political career and recent voting record, they should also realize that even if they succeed in electing Hillary Clinton to the White House, it's likely that the only real resulting change in Washington will be that come 2009, we'll merely have a Democrat pursuing the same misguided policies.

Balko's claim that Senator Clinton is a neocon is certainly closer to the truth than the hysterical right's belief that she's a liberal commie. Everybody on the left seems to recognize that she's the right-most candidate running on the Democratic ticket, but exactly how far to the right is she? Is Balko right that she would simply continue Bush's policies? It's a scary thought.

I don't put too much stock in that much-ballyhooed moment when the top three Dems said they couldn't guarantee that no American troops would remain in Iraq by the end of their first term. It was a bad question, making no distinction between maintaining a few thousand troops in advisory roles and continuing a full-scale occupation. Nobody can predict the future and asking candidates to make those sorts of pledges is asinine*.

There continues to be no doubt in my mind that any of the first-tier Democrats would be better than any of the Republicans. Hillary might be a neocon in spirit, but I believe that she would follow her husband's model of "triangulation" and not support those policies that a majority of Americans disapprove of. That would mean that she doesn't accomplish any of the left's unpopular objectives like gay marriage or scaling back the war on drugs, but it would also mean that she doesn't accomplish any of the neocons' unpopular objectives like invading Iran or, as Mitt Romney idiotically proposed, "doubling Guantanamo." And on the plus side, she probably would improve the United States's image abroad, get universal (not single-payer!) health care through, and have fiscally AND socially responsible economic policies similar to her husband's. She would also install left-leaning Supreme Court justices, which is as important as ever, considering the "conservative" (i.e. authoritarian) direction the Court has taken lately.

I continue to support Obama and the clean break with the neocons that he (or Edwards) would represent, but I wouldn't see a Hillary presidency as a tragedy and I would certainly vote for her over any Republican now running. My biggest fear about her remains the effect the right's irrational hatred for her would have on the country. Wouldn't it be ironic if the Hillary haters got Obama or Edwards elected instead and ended up with a "real" Democratic president? One can only hope.



* Incidentally, Giuliani had the best answer I've ever heard to that kind of request at the GOP debate in New Hampshire when asked to make the same mistake George H.W. Bush made when he pledged "no new taxes" -- "I only think a man or woman running for president ought to take one pledge and that is a pledge to uphold the United States Constitution." Ironic, coming from Giuliani, who I suspect would revoke the entire Bill of Rights if he could, but a great response.

Obama as Outsider

Every election we are inundated with candidates who attempt to portray themselves as Washington outsiders. Most of them are just play-acting. Obama is not. He has the facts behind him. Obviously, he's not a complete outsider -- he is a Senator, after all and a member of a major political party -- but compared to all other major candidates, he's a breath of fresh air. Four years after we invaded Iraq -- four years -- the Democrats have only managed to field a single candidate who both has the potential to be elected and was correct to oppose the war?

You didn't have to be a genius to see what was coming in 2003. I saw it. My family saw it and most of my friends saw it as well. The talk of the mushroom cloud was bullshit. The switch to "weapons of mass destruction" was ridiculous -- Saddam had chemical weapons in the 80s with our blessing. They weren't a threat to us then and they weren't a threat to us in 2003 -- even if he'd had them.

Even now, supporters of the president like to point out that the Democratic establishment was also wrong about the war. As if that's an excuse. The Democrats were spineless and feckless. I can't believe more than 10 of the Democratic senators who voted to give Bush the authorization believed Saddam was a legitimate threat to us.

The knock on Obama that he is "inexperienced" is laughable. If you're the general manager of an NBA team on draft day, given the choice between a star high-school player with an NBA body and an NBA mind or a four-year NCAA veteran of smaller stature and questionable judgment who has done nothing but lose, who are you going to go with? The one with "experience?" Or the one who can ball?

Excerpt from his speech at DePaul:

Five years ago today, I was asked to speak at a rally against going to war in Iraq. The vote to authorize the war in Congress was less than ten days away and I was a candidate for the United States Senate. Some friends of mine advised me to keep quiet. Going to war in Iraq, they pointed out, was popular. All the other major candidates were supporting the war at the time. If the war goes well, they said, you'll have thrown your political career away.

But I didn't see how Saddam Hussein posed an imminent threat. I was convinced that a war would distract us from Afghanistan and the real threat from al Qaeda. I worried that Iraq's history of sectarian rivalry could leave us bogged down in a bloody conflict. And I believed the war would fan the flames of extremism and lead to new terrorism. So I went to the rally. And I argued against a "rash war" - a "war based not on reason, but on politics" - "an occupation of undetermined length, with undetermined costs, and undetermined consequences."

I was not alone. Though not a majority, millions of Americans opposed giving the President the authority to wage war in Iraq. Twenty-three Senators, including the leader of the Senate Intelligence Committee, shared my concerns and resisted the march to war. For us, the war defied common sense. After all, the people who hit us on 9/11 were in Afghanistan, not Iraq.

But the conventional thinking in Washington has a way of buying into stories that make political sense even if they don't make practical sense. We were told that the only way to prevent Iraq from getting nuclear weapons was with military force. Some leading Democrats echoed the Administration's erroneous line that there was a connection between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda. We were counseled by some of the most experienced voices in Washington that the only way for Democrats to look tough was to talk, act and vote like a Republican.

As Ted Sorensen's old boss President Kennedy once said "the pursuit of peace is not as dramatic as the pursuit of war" and frequently the words of the pursuer fall on deaf ears." In the fall of 2002, those deaf ears were in Washington. They belonged to a President who didn't tell the whole truth to the American people; who disdained diplomacy and bullied allies; and who squandered our unity and the support of the world after 9/11.

But it doesn't end there. Because the American people weren't just failed by a President - they were failed by much of Washington. By a media that too often reported spin instead of facts. By a foreign policy elite that largely boarded the bandwagon for war. And most of all by the majority of a Congress - "a coequal branch of government" - that voted to give the President the open-ended authority to wage war that he uses to this day. Let's be clear: without that vote, there would be no war.

Some seek to rewrite history. They argue that they weren't really voting for war, they were voting for inspectors, or for diplomacy. But the Congress, the Administration, the media, and the American people all understood what we were debating in the fall of 2002. This was a vote about whether or not to go to war. That's the truth as we all understood it then, and as we need to understand it now. And we need to ask those who voted for the war: how can you give the President a blank check and then act surprised when he cashes it?

With all that we know about what's gone wrong in Iraq, even today's debate is divorced from reality. We've got a surge that is somehow declared a success even though it has failed to enable the political reconciliation that was its stated purpose. The fact that violence today is only as horrific as in 2006 is held up as progress. Washington politicians and pundits trip over each other to debate a newspaper advertisement while our troops fight and die in Iraq.

And the conventional thinking today is just as entrenched as it was in 2002. This is the conventional thinking that measures experience only by the years you've been in Washington, not by your time spent serving in the wider world. This is the conventional thinking that has turned against the war, but not against the habits that got us into the war in the first place -- the outdated assumptions and the refusal to talk openly to the American people.

Oh, and by the way, Obama isn't too shabby with a basketball, either.

Morning Links: Petraeus, Iran, and Belief

• I wonder whether the new issue of The American Conservative will ignite the same kind of controversy with its "Sycophant Savior" article as the MoveOn.org ad did:
  

  David Petraeus is a political general. Yet in presenting his recent assessment of the Iraq War and in describing the “way forward,” Petraeus demonstrated that he is a political general of the worst kind—one who indulges in the politics of accommodation that is Washington’s bread and butter but has thereby deferred a far more urgent political imperative, namely, bringing our military policies into harmony with our political purposes...
  
  Politically, it qualifies as a brilliant maneuver. The general’s relationships with official Washington remain intact. Yet he has broken faith with the soldiers he commands and the Army to which he has devoted his life. He has failed his country. History will not judge him kindly.

  
  Yowtch. I'm kidding, of course. There's no chance the media or the Senate responds to The American Conservative as they did to MoveOn.org. Because of liberal bias, you see.
  


• Glenn Greenwald points to some "extraordinary reports about what appears to be the virtual refusal of senior military officials to permit a war with Iran."


• Eliezer Yudowsky writes about belief and evidence and what it would take to convince him that 2 + 2 = 3.

GOP Plays the Media and Dems Like a Fiddle

This is the most ridiculous thing I've ever seen.

The Senate voted Thursday to condemn an advertisement by the liberal anti-war group MoveOn.org that accused the top military commander in Iraq of betrayal.

The 72-25 vote condemned the full-page ad that appeared in The New York Times last week as Gen. David Petraeus, the top military commander in Iraq, testified on Capitol Hill. The ad was headlined: "General Petraeus or General Betray Us? Cooking the books for the White House."

The ad became a life raft for the Republican party as the war debate kicked into high gear. With several Republicans opposed to President Bush's war strategy, GOP members were able to put aside their differences and rally around their disapproval of the ad.

Holy freaking hell. Here's what matters: whether or not the freaking surge is working. Here's what we're talking about: a newspaper ad by MoveOn.org.

There is no liberal media. If there were a liberal media, we'd be talking about, you know, how the surge isn't freaking working. The GAO says so. The National Intelligence Estimate says so. 90% of the Iraqi people say so. George Will says so. 70% of the American people say so. Virtually the only people left who don't say so report directly to George Bush.

Petraeus was given an impossible task and of course he's going to put the best possible spin on it. What's he going to say? "No, sir. The job's too hard? I can't do it?"

And it's not like he has an unimpeachable nonpartisan history of speaking the truth. Here's what he said in 2004 on Charlie Rose:

But what I would say is that there has been enormous progress just in the seven or eight months that we've actually been recruiting, training, equipping and employing Iraqi security forces. Huge progress.

And see this op-ed by former Reagan defense official Lawrence J. Korb:

On Sept. 26, 2004, about six weeks before the presidential election, in which the deteriorating situation in Iraq was an increasingly important issue, then Lt. Gen. Petraeus published a misleading commentary in the Washington Post. In that article, Petraeus, who was then in charge of training Iraqi security forces, spoke glowingly about the tangible progress that those forces were making under his tutelage. According to Petraeus, more than 200,000 Iraqis were performing a wide variety of security missions; training was on track and increasing in capacity; 45 Iraqi National Guard battalions and six regular Army battalions were conducting operations on a daily basis; and by the end of November 2004, six more regular Army battalions and six additional Intervention Force battalions would become operational.

Because Bush administration policy at that time was that "we will stand down when they stand up," this article, in effect, conveyed to the American electorate that the Iraqis were, indeed, standing up, and, therefore, there was light at the end of the tunnel for the Iraqi quagmire.

If Petraeus wrote on his own initiative, he was injecting himself improperly into a political campaign. If he was encouraged or even allowed to do this by his civilian superiors, he was allowing himself to be used for partisan political purposes.

...

Was Gen. William Westmoreland ever objective about the attrition strategy in Vietnam or Gen. Douglas MacArthur about the Chinese intervention in Korea?

Sure calling him "General Betray Us" is out of line. But how did that become the whole freaking story? What in the world were the Democrats thinking going along with this idiotic Senate condemnation? (Clinton and Dodd voted against it; Obama didn't vote.)

Was there a whole media firestorm when Ann Coulter wrote a book that basically called every liberal who ever lived a traitor? (The book was called Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism.) Did the Senate vote to condemn Sean Hannity's book Deliver Us from Evil : Defeating Terrorism, Despotism, and Liberalism?

What a freaking crock. Go to hell, media.

Is the Surge Working?

Survey of Iraqis says... "NO."

Ezra Klein points to this BBC/ABC poll:

"The United States has increased the number of its forces in Baghdad and surrounding provinces in the past six months. Please tell me if you think this increase of forces has made it better, worse, or had no effect?"

Almost half of those polled want us to leave immediately, while the rest want us to remain for at least a little while:

"How long do you think US and other Coalition forces should remain in Iraq?"

Methodology:

The poll was conducted by D3 Systems and KA Research Ltd for the BBC, ABC News, and NHK of Japan. Some 2,112 Iraqis were questioned in more than 450 neighbourhoods across all the 18 provinces of Iraq between August 17 and August 24, 2007. The margin of error is + or - 2.5%.

Why go by survey data (or trust the GAO assessment or the intelligence assessments) when we can cherry-pick indicators that can kind of make the surge look like it's working, if we really squint? Or better yet, trust Gen Petraeus's attempt to put the best possible face on reality? Or that one blogger, who's in Iraq, and says things are all flowers and apple pie?

9/11

I wasn't able to write about 9/11 this morning for reasons I wasn't quite able to decipher. Then I read this piece by Ezra Klein:

I felt a bit conflicted about writing this post. What you want to do is remember an awful crime. What you end up doing is invoking a Republican talking point. That is all that remains of the term "9/11." As Gary Kamiya correctly points out, 9/11 need hardly be remembered: The President won't stop bringing it up. "President Bush used the attacks to justify his 2003 invasion of Iraq," writes Kamiya. "And he has been using 9/11 ever since to scare Americans into supporting his 'war on terror.' He has incessantly linked the words 'al-Qaida' and 'Iraq,' a Pavlovian device to make us whimper with fear at the mere idea of withdrawing. In a recent speech about Iraq, he mentioned al-Qaida 95 times. No matter that jihadists in Iraq are not the same group that attacked the U.S., or that their numbers and effectiveness have been greatly exaggerated. It's no surprise that Gen. David Petraeus' 'anxiously awaited' evaluation of the war is to be given on the 10th and 11th of September."

9/11 has been robbed of its significance. It no longer lights up the neurons recalling an American tragedy, but instead activates that understand political strategy. I hate them for that. So this isn't a 9/11 remembrance. We've never been allowed to forget 9/11. Not for an instant. What we have been allowed to forget is 2,974 individuals who perished in that attack, who didn't die because they wanted to invade Iraq or because they thought Republicans were insufficiently competitive in elections, but because they were murdered. Remember them.

I remember talking to my father on 9/11, shell-shocked by what I had seen, but also worried by what I feared was coming. "I hope Saddam isn't behind this." That's what I said, because I knew that if he was, that if the atrocity were the doing of a country rather than a stateless terrorist organization, there was going to be a real war.

I guess I wasn't cynical enough, because it didn't occur to me that our government would use 9/11 to go to war with Saddam even if he had nothing to do with 9/11. I didn't realize that they would use 9/11 to stifle dissent. I didn't realize that six years later, Rudy Giuliani, who did nothing on 9/11 but run around aimlessly, would shamelessly attempt to cash in on it by mentioning it every ten seconds during a run for president. (President!)

Have they no decency?

I also didn't know that six years after 9/11, six years after discovering that it was Osama bin Laden and not Saddam Hussein who orchestrated the attacks, that the hijackers were overwhelmingly Saudi and not Iraqi, that one third of all Americans and 40% of all Republicans would believe that Saddam Hussein was "personally involved" in the 9/11 attacks. (NY Times/CBS poll.)

Let us remember this tragedy for what it was, but also for what it was not. Let us stop allowing politicians to manipulate its memory for personal and political gain.

George Will: The Surge Has Failed

Conservative columnist George Will, A War Still Seeking a Mission:

Before Gen. David Petraeus's report, and to give it a context of optimism, the president visited Iraq's Anbar province to underscore the success of the surge in making some hitherto anarchic areas less so. More significant, however, was that the president did not visit Baghdad. This underscored the fact that the surge has failed, as measured by the president's and Petraeus's standards of success.

...

The purpose of the surge, they said, is to buy time -- "breathing space," the president says -- for Iraqi political reconciliation. Because progress toward that has been negligible, there is no satisfactory answer to this question: What is the U.S. military mission in Iraq?

Many of those who insist that the surge is a harbinger of U.S. victory in Iraq are making the same mistake they made in 1991 when they urged an advance on Baghdad, and in 2003 when they underestimated the challenge of building democracy there. The mistake is exaggerating the relevance of U.S. military power to achieve political progress in a society riven by ethnic and sectarian hatreds. America's military leaders, who are professional realists, do not make this mistake.

...

A democracy, wrote the diplomat and scholar George Kennan, "fights for the very reason that it was forced to go to war. It fights to punish the power that was rash enough and hostile enough to provoke it -- to teach that power a lesson it will not forget, to prevent the thing from happening again. Such a war must be carried to the bitter end." Which is why "unconditional surrender" was a natural U.S. goal in World War II and why Americans were so uncomfortable with three "wars of choice" since then -- in Korea, Vietnam and Iraq.

What "forced" America to go to war in 2003 -- the "gathering danger" of weapons of mass destruction -- was fictitious. That is one reason this war will not be fought, at least not by Americans, to the bitter end. The end of the war will, however, be bitter for Americans, partly because the president's decision to visit Iraq without visiting its capital confirmed the flimsiness of the fallback rationale for the war -- the creation of a unified, pluralist Iraq.

Emphasis added.

On the Consequences of Withdrawing from Iraq

It's become a popular argument among those who are against withdrawal that pulling our troops out of Iraq would lead to a bloodbath. It's a good argument in that it appeals to the compassion of those who are advocating withdrawal for mostly compassionate reasons, but it's a bad argument because it misses the point.

Mark Kleiman sums it up well:

More Iraqis will probably die of violence just after a U.S. withdrawal than are dying violently now. That will hand the pro-war forces a rhetorical "I told you so." Anyone who can blame what happened in Cambodia on U.S. doves is clearly shameless enough to blame the civil war in Iraq on the people who opposed the invasion rather than those who carried it out and then bungled the occupation.

But that's not a good enough reason to hang around, unless at some point it stops being true: that six months, or a year, or two years, or five years from now we would be able to withdraw and not have civil war and massacre follow. If we're spending blood and treasure only to postpone a catastrophe we can't prevent, the "humanitarian" argument against a fairly rapid withdrawal collapses.

Unless we are making progress towards an Iraqi government capable of preventing a civil war -- and it appears that we are not -- then there will be a civil war and probably ethnic cleansing whenever we leave. The question then is not whether leaving will lead to a bloodbath, but whether staying is simply putting off the inevitable -- but at immense cost to us, militarily, politically, and fiscally.

That a bloodbath would eventually follow the removal of Saddam Hussein has always been obvious. Dick Cheney himself said so in the 1990s and those who opposed this war from the beginning said it in 2002. To blame the inevitable on the people who have been right all along is disgraceful.

Unfortunately, this looks like it's playing out exactly as I predicted at the end of last year:

The administration will smear anyone who suggests we might have to cut our losses and leave. (The dreaded "cut and run.") They'll do so right until there is absolutely no other option. Then it will be an unplanned, "chaotic bugout with huge, avoidable losses of men and materiel." Then they'll blame the Democrats.

If they're responsible, we can minimize the damage we do by leaving. We can set a timetable and do our best to prepare the Iraqi army. We can take other diplomatic and military options to make our inevitable withdrawal less harmful. But they're not responsible. They're going to wait and wait and soldiers are going to keep dying until finally the truth is absolutely undeniable, and then they'll bug out in an awful mess and blame the Democrats.

If the right is so concerned about the results of our withdrawal, the time to start planning for it is right freaking now. We should be talking about the way to withdraw with the least possible damage to Iraq, but instead the Bush administration is forcing us to continue arguing about whether the damn surge is working.

Before the invasion, the administration failed to plan adequately for the occupation and reconstruction. Now they are failing to plan for the inevitable withdrawal. And you just know they're going to blame the results on the Democrats.

What chutzpah.

Lots o' Links

• Congrats to super-blogger and columnist Andrew Sullivan and new J-blogger Skeptodox, who are getting married! (Not to each other.)
• According to the AP, Americans blowing the whistle on corruption in Iraq are vilified, fired, demoted, and jailed.
• Ted Nugent (video) brandishes machine guns on stage, tells Obama and Hillary to "suck on this." Calls him a "piece of shit," her a "worthless bitch." Crowd goes wild.
• Chutzpah, n. Teg Haggard, disgraced hypocritical self-hating homophobe, who will receive $138,000 this year from the settlement with his church, who owns a house that's worth over $700,000 dollars, is requesting donations so that he and his wife can go to school full-time and provide counseling at a half-way house.
• It's been 50 years since one student opened a Quran during his public high school's mandatory Bible study time, leading to the landmark Supreme Court case banning school-sponsored prayer.
• The Friendly Atheist asks how atheist parents should approach their religious children.