Here It Is

The article that's been causing all the hubbub over the last couple of days: Sy Hersh's Offense and Defense in the New Yorker. Basically, everyone in a position to take action to produce a realistic and more winnable war plan, didn't. Rumsfeld was clearly driving this train, he arrogantly drove it into the ground, and none of the generals was willing to put his stars on the line to stop him. (Thanks to Ish for the link.)

Fight Amongst Yourselves…

You know things must not be going exactly as planned when top Republicans start bitching about the White House, and senior administration officials start taking swipes at each other. Yet this is exactly what's happening.

As you might expect, the ongoing battle between State and the Pentagon is the source of a lot of the tension. Rumsfeld doesn't think Powell knows how to fight a "modern" war:

"Rumsfeld wants to put the 'Powell Doctrine' into obsolescence," the Bush adviser said, referring to the military strategy outlined by Powell when he was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In its broadest sense, the doctrine — which guided Pentagon thinking during the Gulf War 12 years ago — calls for decisive force, clear goals and popular support to ensure success.

Of course, strict adherence to the "Powell Doctrine" would have precluded the current operation in Iraq on at least two of three counts, which is probably why the Pentagon and the rest of the neocon hawks don't like it.

And Powell doesn't have a lot of respect for Rumsfeld's deputy, Paul Wolfowitz:

Powell also made a comment that was widely interpreted in official Washington as a jab at Wolfowitz, a frequent nemesis who did not serve in the military.

"When war comes, that's [casualties] the price that has to be paid," Powell said on NPR. "And it's paid not by intellectuals but by wonderful young Americans who serve their country and believe in the cause for which they are serving."

Something tells me it's going to be a long spring for all the president's men.

For Future Reference

Josh Marshall has published the text of an email he received "from a former career diplomat who served as U.S. ambassador to a Muslim country." This email discusses the current situation on the ground, and puts forward three different scenarios as to how it will all play out. I'm not sure any of these scenarios will come to pass (there would seem to be a lot more than three), but this is definitely something to come back to later in a few weeks or months, just to see.

Iraq and Lebanon

Ethan Bronner points out some of the more disturbing similarities between the current US invasion of Iraq with the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon:

The central aim of the military operation was to smash the looming terrorist threat, but it was also a stab at refashioning the Middle East by installing a pro-Western government. The first troops in the south took Shiite Muslim towns, where locals were relieved to be rid of an oppressive regime. Some cheered the foreign invaders.

That may sound like a description of the current war in Iraq, but the military in question was Israel's, the invaded country was Lebanon and the date was 1982. It would be 18 years before the last weary, despised Israeli soldier left. And while there are never exact historical parallels, Israel's experience in Lebanon — an ambitious invasion that turned into a draining quagmire — is a cautionary tale for the American war in Iraq.

Another interesting data point: Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon used a terrorist act not connected with the PLO in Lebanon to justify the invasion of Lebanon to take out the PLO. Hmmm… sounds familiar.

Cowboy Bush

Lots of folks are fond of calling Bush a "cowboy". The label is meant to reference Bush's preference for going it alone, shooting first and asking questions later. But as Susan Faludi points out in today's New York Times, it's not that Bush is a cowboy, but that Bush killed the cowboy.

Two Must-Reads

The Bush White House has never been overly concerned with the truth, much less telling the truth to the American people. Two new articles by two top-rate journalists drive that point home regarding the war with Iraq.

Sy Hersh: Who Lied to Whom? Hersh, writing in the New Yorker, looks into the case of the supposed attempts by Iraq to purchase a large amount of uranium oxide from Nigeria. The Bush administration used this "evidence" of Iraqi nuclear ambitions to help convince Congress to grant authority to the President to go to war in Iraq, and to mobilize public support for that war. But as discussed here a few weeks ago, the documents that supported this claim turned out to be rather crude forgeries. So who lied? Apparently, almost everyone, and certainly the CIA.

The former high-level intelligence official told me that some senior C.I.A. officials were aware that the documents weren’t trustworthy. “It’s not a question as to whether they were marginal. They can’t be 'sort of' bad, or 'sort of' ambiguous. They knew it was a fraud—it was useless. Everybody bit their tongue and said, 'Wouldn’t it be great if the Secretary of State said this?'" …

“Somebody deliberately let something false get in there,” the former high-level intelligence official added. “It could not have gotten into the system without the agency being involved. Therefore it was an internal intention. Someone set someone up.”

Josh Marshall: Practice to Deceive. Marshall gives us something new to think about regarding the Bush administration's ultimate aims in the war with Iraq. It's not pretty:

In short, the administration is trying to roll the table—to use U.S. military force, or the threat of it, to reform or topple virtually every regime in the region, from foes like Syria to friends like Egypt, on the theory that it is the undemocratic nature of these regimes that ultimately breeds terrorism. So events that may seem negative—Hezbollah for the first time targeting American civilians; U.S. soldiers preparing for war with Syria—while unfortunate in themselves, are actually part of the hawks' broader agenda. Each crisis will draw U.S. forces further into the region and each countermove in turn will create problems that can only be fixed by still further American involvement, until democratic governments—or, failing that, U.S. troops—rule the entire Middle East.

Of course, Marshall argues, Bush doesn't tell us all this up front; instead, war is justified on a shifting terrain of links to terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, and brutal dictatorship. If most people did know what the administration was up to, they'd never support it. So Bush and Company decide they don't really need to know.

Cheney's Manipulations

Paul Krugman's new column today, Delusions of Power, gives us yet another reason why Dick Cheney doesn't deserve the reputation for quiet competence that has somehow become his trademark. Focusing on the 2001 California "energy crisis", Krugman notes that Cheney was sure the problem was due to excessive government regulation; the manipulation of the energy markets by companies like Enron had nothing to do with it. But "everything Mr. Cheney said was wrong."

In fact, the California energy crisis had nothing to do with environmental restrictions, and a lot to do with market manipulation. In 2001 the evidence for manipulation was basically circumstantial. But now we have a new report from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which until now has discounted claims of market manipulation. No more: the new report concludes that market manipulation was pervasive, and offers a mountain of direct evidence, including phone conversations, e-mail and memos. There's no longer any doubt: California's power shortages were largely artificial, created by energy companies to drive up prices and profits.

The important thing to take away from Krugman's piece, though, isn't just that Cheney blew it; rather, the key is why he blew it, and why he will continue to blow it.

One answer is that Mr. Cheney made sure that his task force included only like-minded men: as far as we can tell, he didn't consult with anyone except energy executives. So the task force was subject to what military types call "incestuous amplification," defined by Jane's Defense Weekly as "a condition in warfare where one only listens to those who are already in lock-step agreement, reinforcing set beliefs and creating a situation ripe for miscalculation."

Another answer is that Mr. Cheney basically drew his advice about how to end the energy crisis from the very companies creating the crisis, for fun and profit. But was he in on the joke?

I don't see anything in Cheney's makeup that would indicate that there won't be a lot more "incestuous amplification" in his future. And I'd like to have an answer to that last question, please.

War Blogging

Appropriately named Cynthia Webb has a new "Filter" piece in the Washington Post called Blogging the War: A Guide. Not much new here, but there is a good list of pro-war and anti-insane-foreign-policy blogs for your reading enjoyment. I've been taking peeks at The Agonist for the last few days — good stuff.

Down and Out

Well, it looks like I was down for about 6 hours this morning due to a "regional outage" on Speakeasy's network. Funny that they didn't seem to know about the outage until I reported it 4 hours in. I wonder how "regional" it was?

Social Software

Always a good read, Clay Shirky has a new piece out entitled, Social Software and the Politics of Groups. As someone who spends no small amount of time working on developing online political communities, this is definitely food for my thought.

A Good Geek

Eariler today, when doing a little web development work on my laptop, I accidentally typed "locahost" instead of "localhost". So instead of accessing the website that sits locally on my machine, I zoomed off to www.locahost.com. And surprise, surprise, there is indeed a website there. And a helpful one at that. Thank you, Sam-I-Am.

Nothing Better to Do?

You'd think that with a war on the horizon and the economy in shambles, Congress would have plenty to keep it busy. But apparently the House has managed to find time to address another vitally important issue: revising the cafeteria menu.

The cafeteria menus in the three House office buildings changed the name of "french fries" to "freedom fries," in a culinary rebuke of France stemming from anger over the country's refusal to support the U.S. position on Iraq.

Ditto for "french toast," which will be known as "freedom toast."

The name changes were spearheaded by two Republican lawmakers who held a news conference Tuesday to make the name changes official on the menus.

Incroyable.

Democracy, Saudi Style

In Saudi Arabia today, there is a fledgling reform movement that is urging the government to adopt a series of reforms aimed at democratizing the political process. Based on what Bush has said recently about the importance of democracy in the Middle East, you would think the US would be supporting this movement. And you'd be wrong.

As it turns out, US backing for democracy only goes so far. In the end, a regime's support for the US is more important to us than our support for that liberty which is "God's gift to humanity", as Bush put it in his State of the Union address. And the current Saudi regime is kinda-sorta aligned with the west (sponsorning international terrorism aside), while a democratically elected government could be expected to be a lot less friendly.

And so now we come to the punchline of this sad little joke:

Although the Bush administration has called for democratic reforms throughout the Middle East, there has been a gap between rhetoric and practice. Last week, at the same time that Bush was outlining his vision of a liberated Iraq inspiring forces of democracy throughout the region, U.S. diplomats here were assuring Saudi intellectuals that they do not see a postwar Iraq as a model for Saudi Arabia.

If the United States really wants to adopt a foreign policy which is based on respect for basic human rights, there will be times when we will be forced to make tough choices that might hurt our short-term tactical position. The moral authority that we would gain from such an approach, however, would make us a much more influential player in the world and do much to repair the alliances that Bush has put on life-support. However, if we do what the Bush administration is doing now — talk the talk of human rights and freedom, but walk the walk of supporting despotic regimes when it suits our purposes — we lose a lot of our moral standing and global influence. And if we use liberty to justify pre-emptive wars against regimes we don't like, then we might just lose it all.

Pointer

A new find (via Dave Winer): Eric Muller, a law professer at UNC who has been writing a lot about Rep. Howard Coble's reprehensible comments about the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. He actually got a phone call from the Rep. himself.

WTF?

I'm not sure what to say about this story in the Boston Globe. What could the Bush administration and Westinghouse have been thinking?

The Bush administration has not suspended or revoked the authority of Westinghouse Co. to transfer documents related to nuclear technology to North Korea, despite the fact that the Asian nation has admitted that it violated terms of a nonproliferation agreement it signed with Washington in 1994, US Department of Energy documents show.

Gary Hart for President?

Now, I'm a Howard Dean guy, but reading this piece by Gary Hart, A Detour From the War on Terrorism, I think that Hart would make a good addition to the Democratic field.

The urgent necessity to disband terrorist networks abroad and to secure the American homeland has been replaced by the Bush administration's puzzling preoccupation with Saddam Hussein. He has become George Bush's White Whale, an obsession that has cost us international solidarity in eradicating terrorism, the goodwill of tens of millions of people worldwide and the role of benign democratic world leader.

While deploying divisions to the Middle East our government has not been training and equipping police, fire and emergency health responders in the United States. While splitting the United Nations and NATO, our government has not made our vulnerable ports safer. While paying tens of billions of (deficit) tax dollars to Turkey, Yemen and other countries for basing rights in the Middle East, our president is not preparing the United States to respond to the terrorist attacks the CIA has predicted will most probably occur as a response to our preemptive invasion of a sovereign Arab nation. It is difficult to imagine that the president seriously believes an invasion of Iraq will reduce the terrorist threat to the United States.

Right on.

CBO Blasts Bush Budget

Washington Post: Chronic Budget Deficits Forecast. It's worse than it appears:

If Bush's proposals were enacted, the CBO said, the deficit would rise to $287 billion this year and $338 billion in 2004, and the government would remain in deficit through 2013, just as the vanguard of the baby boom generation begins to retire. Altogether, the CBO concluded, the president's policies would leave the government with $2.7 trillion in debt through 2013, which the government would not realize if Bush's proposals were rejected.

Oh, and that's not counting the cost of war with Iraq.

As the evidence of the momumental stupidity of the Bush budget keeps mounting, many Congressionals that could normally be counted on to vote for a tax cut are beginning to have second thoughts.

"We're at war on terrorism. We're apparently about to go to war on a second front. We have a major problem on the horizon with North Korea. And yet the budget debates all seem to be around a supply-side tax cut that will reduce the revenues of this country at exactly the wrong time," said Rep. Charles W. Stenholm (Tex.), a conservative Democrat often on Bush's side. "It's out of control."

Can't we just declare this budget DOA already, and try something else?

Busted

For months, the Bush administration has been pushing the idea that Iraq is aggressively pursuing a nuclear weapons program. In order to justify going to war against Iraq, this is a critical argument to be able to make. First, in the triumvirate of weapons of mass destruction, nuclear weapons are clearly the most dangerous and the most feared. Second, evidence of a home-grown nuclear weapons program takes attention away from the fact that the US actively aided Iraq in the 1980s in developing chemical and biological weapons, and then looked the other way when Iraq actually used chemical weapons against the Kurds.

Bush routinely presents two key pieces of evidence to support his claim of Iraqi nuclear ambitions. First, there are the anodized aluminum tubes that are asserted to have been purchased for use in building a centrifuge to enrich uranium. Second, there are documents which purport to show Iraqi efforts to purchase uranium in Africa. Even if no one really believes Iraqi is close to being able to build a nuclear bomb now, this evidence, if true, would certainly support the claim that Iraq is trying very hard to build one, and thus is a long-term threat to regional and global stability.

The problem for Bush, though, is that this evidence isn't real. According to a rather stunning story in today's Washington Post:

A key piece of evidence linking Iraq to a nuclear weapons program appears to have been fabricated, the United Nations' chief nuclear inspector said yesterday in a report that called into question U.S. and British claims about Iraq's secret nuclear ambitions.

Documents that purportedly showed Iraqi officials shopping for uranium in Africa two years ago were deemed "not authentic" after careful scrutiny by U.N. and independent experts, Mohamed ElBaradei, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), told the U.N. Security Council.

ElBaradei also rejected a key Bush administration claim — made twice by the president in major speeches and repeated by Secretary of State Colin L. Powell yesterday — that Iraq had tried to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes to use in centrifuges for uranium enrichment. Also, ElBaradei reported finding no evidence of banned weapons or nuclear material in an extensive sweep of Iraq using advanced radiation detectors.

"There is no indication of resumed nuclear activities," ElBaradei said.

The issue, however, is not just that the Bush administration got the facts wrong. The question that needs to be asked is: what did Bush know and when did he know it? The documentation for the Iraq-Africa connection "had been given to the U.N. inspectors by Britain and reviewed extensively by U.S. intelligence." Either our intelligence services are incompetent, or they covered up the fact that the documents were forged. Given what we know about the CIA & Co., I figure it's about a 50-50 chance either way. As for the aluminum tubes:

A number of independent experts on uranium enrichment have sided with IAEA's conclusion that the tubes were at best ill suited for centrifuges. Several have said that the "anodized" features mentioned by Powell are actually a strong argument for use in rockets, not centrifuges, contrary to the administration's statement.

The Institute for Science and International Security, a Washington-based research organization that specializes in nuclear issues, reported yesterday that Powell's staff had been briefed about the implications of the anodized coatings before Powell's address to the Security Council last month. "Despite being presented with the falseness of this claim, the administration persists in making misleading arguments about the significance of the tubes," the institute's president, David Albright, wrote in the report.

We've all known for quite a while that President Bush has no special affection for the truth. And now it appears that even Colin Powell, regarded by many as the straightest shooter in the admininstration, can recklessly disregard the facts when it serves a purpose. This is just outrageous.

Deficit of Support

Bush is having a surprisingly hard time selling his "Jobs and Growth Package". Or maybe not so surprisingly, given that it is a complete crock. In David Broder's column today, we find out that even the business community is growing a bit worried over Bush's economic irresponsibility:

Along with the criticism of the administration plan leveled last month by Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan, the report being issued today by the Committee for Economic Development, a blue-ribbon organization of corporate CEOs and civic leaders, is a warning that President Bush's policies risk long-term damage to Americans' prosperity and the government's fiscal stability.

Now, I don't imagine that any of this criticism will change Bush's mind or cause him to back off from his precious tax cuts; Bush is far too arrogant and simple single-minded. But hopefully this news will help empower those Democrats who still fear to criticize the President, even when he is dead wrong.

Bush on Drugs

Yesterday, Bush announced his "plan" to reform Medicare and offer greater access to prescription drugs to seniors. But headline in the Washington Post sums up what the plan is really about quite nicely: Bush Plan a Boon to Drug Companies.

Bruce C. Vladeck, who was President Clinton's head of the federal agency that runs Medicare, said Bush's plan "strikes me as the kind of proposal the pharmaceutical companies would write if they were writing their own bill."

The Bush administration always seems to prioritize political payback over substantive policy, so no suprises here.

My New Niece

My cousin Martha just had a baby girl, and today I got the first set of pictures. Extremely cute.

…Then The Terrorists Have Won

Folley.net and the Wage-Slave Journal, in our first unofficial collaboration, are pleased to announce:

ThenTheTerroristsHaveWon.com.

Dreaming of Democracy

President Bush is now saying that the real reason we are going to bomb the crap out of Iraq is that the democracy that will emerge from the ashes will inspire the region and help end all of our problems. A pleasant picture, to be sure, but as George Packer points out in today's Times, it is a picture that is unlikely to be drawn accurately.

The longer you try to look at Iraq on the morning after Saddam, the more you see the truth of what many people told me: getting rid of him will be the easy part. After that, the United States will find itself caught in a series of conundrums that will require supreme finesse: to liberate without appearing to dominate, to ensure order without overstaying, to secure its interests without trampling on Iraq's, to oversee democratization without picking winners, to push for reforms in the neighborhood without unleashing demons. It's hard to know whether to be more worried by the State Department's complacency or by the Pentagon civilians' zealotry.

And for all the complexity of the situation, the administration has no coherent plan: it continually discredits the concept of nation-building even as it prepares to engage in the largest nation-building project in half a century; it talks about democracy while planning for military rule for at least two years; it makes promises to the Kurds and the Iraqi exiles even as it undermines their efforts; and it still can't force itself to talk honestly about the total cost of this enterprise, which could cost trillions (yes — trillions) of dollars.

Beltway Must-Read

The Washington Post has done all us beltway insiders a huge favor today by posting a fairly comprehensive evaluation of the area's coffee offerings. On the downside, Old Town doesn't seem to have any coffee places worthy of note. Oh well.