We ended up in the bustling downtown of PR, and came across the Paso Robles Inn. It sits across the street from the main square and park. Lucky for us, there was a room available for the night. What was even luckier for us was the Inn sat over an historic mineral hot spring. Even more lucky, our room was in the last remaining part of the original Inn, so we got a gorgeous room. Yes, that is a picture of the Titanic over the bed. The ceilings were very high, the AC a bit anemic, and there was a fireplace in the corner we didn't try out.
What was even better was the huge tub with hot mineral water. Three taps, one for the mineral water, and then regular hot and cold. Just the thing for two exhausted and aching road warriors. Being conservation minded, we shared the tub to save on both water and electricity. The picture over the tub is a painting of the original Inn. By the time I was done soaking, I smelled like a rotten egg and nearly fell on the floor when I was getting out, I was so relaxed. Oh, and as an FYI, the Thai restaurant on the square, Basil, is a great place for dinner. Good service and great food.
I arrived in Baghdad on April 14, 2003, as a news consultant to the ABC investigative team led by veteran correspondent Brian Ross. Before the war, Brian had broadcast a profile of Uday and one of his first stops in Baghdad was at Uday's riverside residence. In the basement of the partially looted house, Bob Baer, another ABC news consultant, made an astounding discovery, the personnel files of the Saddam Fedayeen. We were amazed that the military had not inspected or secured such an obvious location and Ross made that point in his exclusive ABC news report. ABC had no further use for the files; but they had obvious value for the US military, containing as they did the names and addresses of the main resistance to the American occupation. I had thought Ross's story would arouse some interest from the Pentagon but there was no reaction. I then called Paul Wolfowitz's office to see if I could discreetly hand them over to the military. (I was still a professor at the National War College—and therefore an employee of the Defense Department—and wanted to help.) Although we were staying in the Ishtar Sheraton, a hotel guarded by US troops, the deputy secretary of defense could not arrange to pick up these documents before I had to leave the city.
In the three weeks that followed Baghdad's fall, I was able to go unchallenged into sites of enormous intelligence value, including the Foreign Ministry, Uday's house, and a wiretap center right across Firdos Square from the Sheraton. All three had many sensitive documents but even weeks after the takeover, the only people to take an interest in these document caches were looters, squatters (who burned wiretap transcripts for lighting), journalists, Baathists, Iraqi factions looking for dirt on political rivals, and (possibly) agents of countries hostile to the United States. Neither the Pentagon nor the CIA had a workable plan to safeguard and exploit the vast quantities of intelligence that were available for the taking in Iraq's capital. That information might have provided insight into terrorism—the Foreign Ministry documents included names of jihadists who had come into Iraq before the war—and the incipient insurgency.
As we now know, Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon had no plan to secure any part of Baghdad. It allowed looters to destroy Iraq's governmental infrastructure and to steal thousands of tons of high explosives, weapons, and radioactive materials. And it had no coherent plan for Iraq's postwar governance. Gordon and Trainor retell very clearly the now familiar story (at least to readers of The New York Review) of the Bush administration's cavalier approach to postwar issues, but they also provide stunning insights into one key aspect of the postwar failure: the decision to invade Iraq with too few troops.
Reading this, I was struck by a thought, not terribly profound, but perhaps true, nevertheless. The Cheneyites treated Iraq and specifically Iraqi governance with the contempt they have for the US government, but are unable to fully exercise because the institutions here are still (barely) withstanding their attempts to break them down. Why should these bullies and braggarts have given a single moment of thought to the dull, mundane needs of ordinary state bureaucracy - water bills, street sanitation, records keeping - when they don't give a fig about such things at home? They only want the root 'em-toot 'em, rip-roaring, guns-a-blazin' fun stuff.
The parts of the US government that they want to destroy or neglect a la Grover Norquist (Be honest, do *you* think Grover Norquist is a hysterical blue furry man with really long floppy arms? I knew you did...) are what they turned their backs on in Iraq, too. They do not believe that ordinary bureaucracy can offer them anything of worth, so they pointedly ignored the very things that might have allowed something resembling normalcy to persist in the country.
It was replacing the rule of a dictator with the whims of a pack of bullies:
Trainor and Gordon [in their book Cobra II] present a devastating picture of Rumsfeld as a bully. Convinced of his own brilliance, Rumsfeld freely substituted his often hastily formed opinions for the considered judgments of his military professionals. He placed in the most senior positions compliant yes-men, like Myers, and punished those who questioned his casually formed judgments. He enjoyed belittling his subordinates.Cheney, Rumsfeld and Bush - the stories about them and their own behavior in front of the cameras betray their essentially thuggish attitude towards the world. It isn't even incompetence, really, as they aren't trying to govern in the first place. They want what they want, and they will do whatever it takes to get what they want.
It is with this in mind that I read Josh Marshall's post about the Cheneyites attempt to push Israel into attacking Syria as proxy for the US doing so itself:
But there do appear to be forces in Washington -- seemingly the stronger ones, with Rice just a facade -- who see this whole thing as an opportunity for a grand call of double or nothing to get out of the disaster they've created in the region. Go into Syria, maybe Iran. Try to roll the table once and for all. No failed war that a new war can't solve. Condi's mindless 'birth pangs' remark wasn't just a gaffe -- or perhaps it was a gaffe in the Kinsleyan sense of inopportunely saying what you really think. That seems to be the thinking -- transformation through destabilization.If you just hit hard enough, eventually you will get what you want. In another TPM post (this by guest poster DK) we are reminded that this is not something being foisted off on a clueless preznit - he's fully committed to governance by beating:
If you can't "fix" it with violence, it isn't worth doing. The mishandling of Iraq after the intial invasion wasn't a bug, as far as the adminsitration was concerned. It was a feature.Time for some context on the current turmoil in and around Israel. This passage from Ron Suskind's The Price of Loyalty has special resonance given current events. The scene is the White House Situation Room in January 2001, where Bush is meeting for the first time with his National Security Council, 10 days after taking the oath of office. Bush has just asked who in the room has met Ariel Sharon:
He'd met Sharon briefly, Bush said, when they had flown over Israel in a helicopter on a visit in December 1998. "Just saw him that one time. We flew over the Palestinian camps," Bush said sourly. "Looked real bad down there. I don't see much we can do over there at this point. I think it's time to pull out of that situation."And that was it, according to [Paul] O'Neill and several other people in the room. The Arab-Israeli conflict was a mess, and the United States would disengage. The combatants would have to work it out on their own.
[Colin] Powell said such a move might be hasty. He remarked on the violence on the West Bank and Gaza and on its roots. He stressed that a pullback by the United States would unleash Sharon and Israeli army. "The consequences of that could be dire," he said, "especially for the Palestinians."
Bush shrugged. "Maybe that's the best way to get some things back in balance."
Powell seemed startled.
"Sometimes a show of strength by one side can really clarify things," Bush said.
With that, the rest of the meeting was devoted to Iraq.
Yeah, right, global warming is a figment of Al Gore's imagination. Read the whole article. The Dakotas make up a major agricultural zone for the US, leading the nation in production of key crops, as well as provididing a lot of cattle for market. It's where my family is from and where a lot of my relatives still live. What happens if that area becomes too arid to farm?By JAMES MacPHERSON Associated Press Writer
July 29,2006 | STEELE, N.D. -- More than 60 percent of the United States now has abnormally dry or drought conditions, stretching from Georgia to Arizona and across the north through the Dakotas, Minnesota, Montana and Wisconsin, said Mark Svoboda, a climatologist for the National Drought Mitigation Center at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln.
An area stretching from south central North Dakota to central South Dakota is the most drought-stricken region in the nation, Svoboda said.
"It's the epicenter," he said. "It's just like a wasteland in north central South Dakota."
Just to follow up on yesterday's item, CNN's interest in characterizing recent world events as some kind of Biblical apocalypse is quickly becoming ridiculous. As Media Matters noted, the network's coverage is enough to wonder if it's CNN or CBN.
For the second time in three days, CNN featured a segment on the potential coming of the Apocalypse, as indicated by current conflicts in the Middle East. The July 26 edition of CNN's Live From … featured a nine-minute segment in which anchor Kyra Phillips discussed the Apocalypse and the Middle East with Christian authors Jerry Jenkins and Joel C. Rosenberg — who share the view that the Rapture is nigh. At one point in the discussion, Phillips asked Rosenberg whether she needed "to start taking care of unfinished business and telling people that I love them and I'm sorry for all the evil things I've done," to which Rosenberg replied: "Well, that would be a good start." Throughout the segment, the onscreen text read: "Apocalypse Now?"
This must be some kind of major ratings booster because there's no sensible reason for CNN to devote nine minutes to the subject twice in three days. Of course, it's also worth noting that the network's discussion featured two "experts" on the subject — both of whom agree that we may be witnessing some kind of end-times prophecy. We're still waiting for the nine-minute segment from two skeptics who explain that this is total nonsense.
But as it turns out, that's not the part of the CNN interview that bothered me most.
This was:Rosenberg claimed that he had been invited to the White House, Capitol Hill, and the CIA to discuss the Rapture and the Middle East, and noted — several times — that the apocalyptic events described in his novels keep coming true.
In fact, Rosenberg said he'd been invited to speak with officials at the highest levels of the federal government — as well as Middle East officials — all of whom "want to understand the Middle East through the lens of biblical prophecies."
Now, it's possible that Rosenberg just wanted to exaggerate his significance. It's likely his only access to the White House and Congress is from public tours. But if Rosenberg's telling the truth, and public officials really have invited him to share his "ideas" about current events, then the problem is far worse than what's become of CNN's absurd standards for what constitutes news.
One of the commenters (MNProgressive, #11) points out
"How incredible is it that this biblical novelist can capture th einterest of the MSM and government leaders because of a war in the Middle East (because that is such a rare event) but Al Gore has been talking about global warming for decades and we are now inundated with hurricanes, drought, floods, heat waves etc. etc. and the MSM and government leaders are making a concerted effort to confuse and obfuscate the issue."What this observation points out is the root of the profound appeal of the neocon and theocon arguments - they are for lazy people. God's behind it all and everything will work out OK in the end as long as you're right with God. Ta-dah. The difficulty that living in reality poses is that you need to have true faith in your ability to do something meaningful. Al Gore embodies this belief. It has none of the self-satisfied triumphalism of the guys mentioned above. It has at its heart the acknowledgement that what you do may not be enough. Most of all, it calls upon individuals to make common cause against things too large for the individual to deal with.
Not unlike true faith in God.
Not a god of deals and exchanges (I'll be good and you'll let me into Heaven), nor one of country club mores (Only the elect beyond this point, riff-raff can go to Hell), and most particularly not one of vengeance (I'm smiting the enemies of Heaven), but one of humility, hope and hard work.
In apocalyptic thinking, whether or not a deity is involved, there is a glorious struggle between the demons and the angels, and good wins out. This is the foundation (indeed, the entire substance) of the Bush White House policy, particularly the foreign policy. We're right, we need to destroy the evil-doers, and everything will be perfect on the far side.
The engine of apocalypticism is fear of individual failure. Bush is the embodiment of this as surely as Al embodies the opposite. Bush does not risk the misery and want the way a poor or even middle-class failure would feel, which perhaps makes his failures all the worse - he truly has no excuse. But if he can blame it all on terrorists, liberals and the coming end times, then he need not directly confront the miserable failure that he is, thus the need to forge on into greater folly - anything else means acknowledging he failed.
Better to wish the destruction of entire civilizations, even the entire world, rather than live with the gnawing fear of failure. Thus, inviting the End Timers to the White House is less letting them have influence than reinforcing existing patterns.
We need leaders with ethical courage who do not hide in fantasies that the world will go away before it all gets unbearable.
Anglachel
Clark: A Symbol Of Success In Regional Conflict Resolution
A while back I wrote a Frameshop article arguing that there are currently 3 competing frames in the Democratic party to define what the United States is doing in the Middle East. Of these three, the 'regional conflict' frame associated with General Wesley Clark is perhaps the most overlooked and undervalued.But as the Middle East begins to look more and more like a regional conflict, the need for a strong Democratic voice that speaks to that dynamic is every more pressing.
The moral and pragmatic strength of diplomacy. Simply packing up and going home, as Gore, Clark, me and several million other Americans understand, is not an acceptable option. It is one of the deepest, most dearly held American fantasies - that we can retreat behind our ocean walls and leave the screwed up world to its own devices. 9/11 darnwell changed that.
The world is a set of interlocking regions and the US is a part of it. Trying to either stand astride the world (the neocon wet dream) or not be part of it (shared by both left and right fantacists) is not possible, and can only lead to harmful diminishment of the US. This will in turn diminish our shared world because the US plays such a large role in the global give and take of humanity.
We have obligations and cannot act as a self-centered super power, even as we must act as a self-interested one. We are ravaged by weather and by war. For the first time in history, we are the makers of both maelstroms. We need leaders unafraid to deal with other nations as partners in our struggle with both.
Anglachel
"Facts need testimony to be remembered and trustworthy witnesses to be established in order to find a secure dwelling place in the domain of human affairs."The blogosphere is getting near to unreadable with the Lamont-Lieberman contest sucking up almost all available column inches. And, yes, I know I'm guilty of it too. My own theory is because it is a much easier issue to deal with than just about any other - an (obscenely rich and privileged) underdog, an unsympathetic "villain", and nothing personally at stake for people blogging from hundreds or thousands of miles away. Better that than the pictures of the butchered children Billmon has posted.
Hannah Arendt, Lying in Politics
When American humanitarian Marla Ruzicka was killed in Baghdad last year I wrote about her, as did many others, and she was known. When an American or European journalist is killed, the system works and they are known as well. Similarly, when a Soldier or Marine is killed, they merit ink and public eulogy once their names are released. But in this war the news comes in every day, displaying a sameness which confuses. It is “59 Iraqis killed by bomb” today, and on another day, “fourteen bodies discovered in Baghdad.” See here or here for example. Sadly, unless they are high government officials, at most all that is known of these victims is their town and, sometimes, their profession. They are anonymous, and with their anonymity, easier to deal with. Few accounts let you know an average Iraqi.I cannot change this. I have no magic wand to wave and change the rules of the game of journalism and the market so that the corporations which constitute the news industry forgo some of their (generally double-digit) profit in favor of tripling their coverage in bad places around the world. I cannot remove Adam Smith’s damned-near-visible hand from this process. But I can tell you about one Iraqi, just one, and leave it to you to extrapolate.
Mayada Salihi: Red hair, raised in Baghdad, divorced mother of two adorable kids, herself the daughter of a divorced Shia mother and Sunni father. A scrapper. A Baghdadi through and through. Not always factual, but usually a truthteller. Devout fan of cheesy 1980’s American music, particularly Air Supply. Mayada was my translator through much of last year. You knew her too, albeit indirectly. It was because of May, and through her, that we found the schools which you so generously supplied and supported last year. Those who sent donations usually received a letter and pictures from me of the deliveries. May is in some of those photos. She was my friend.
Please look up the date and read all of his post.
It is possible to quantify the things of Bush's War - the bombs dropped, the vehicles destroyed, the dollars spent, the schools supplied by people like LTC Bateman, Mayada Sahili, and others. Good as well as bad can be added up this way, though good seems in short supply. We can even count the sheer numbers of dead, tortured, maimed. What Bob's account does is make us aware of a miracle that was ended - this woman's life and all that came into being because of her actions. I am left to wonder about Ishtar of Iraqi Screen, who has not posted in nearly a month. Is she all right? Has she simply sickened of documenting the atrocities? I think of how that term is used so blithely by Atrios in relation to Sunday punditry on TV, and then I go to her blog and find no new accounts of true atrocities. Is Ishtar alive? I hope so. It is with women like this in mind that I wrote of our Days of Obligation, a moral charge not to allow women like May and Ishtar to perish in anonymity because we have tired of our excellent imperial adventure. Read all of Bob's post and understand why we are obligated to this woman.
Bob's second post was from today, and it offers up his version of Hannah Arendt's famous injunction to "think what we are doing":
We have a problem in the United States. Well, we have a lot of problems of course, but one in particular I can help alleviate. We have a problem of knowledge. More specifically, we have a problem with a lack of knowledge about one particular topic: War...
So I enjoin you to read. Not just Altercation (though, of course, continue to do that), and not just the news about war, but I think that I must ask you to read about war, become educated in war, so that, in the end, you can discuss war with reason, facts, understanding of theories, and hard-nosed comprehension...
I have realized that almost nobody has actually read Clausewitz, and even fewer have read the thought-pieces which resulted in the idiotic theory of “Shock and Awe.” But you need to read a lot of history, and at least some military theory, to really understand how damned stupid the idea of Shock and Awe really was, and how it has been tried (under different names) over and over again since the late 1920s, and it never works! Perhaps, just perhaps, if some people in the right places had read more military history, well, things might have turned out different. So, here are some recommendations. I am not smart enough to say, “Here is my top 10”…other wiser people have done that aplenty. But you can go here and see one list, here and see another, or if you’re in more of an academic mood, try this list here. (Oh, and I also recommend Professor Grimsley’s blog itself, where thoughts on war run deep. That’s here. These are starting points, only.
I have read Clausewitz, though it was back in my grad school days, and I admit I have no background in the "Shock and Awe" theory of warfare, though I am shocked and sickened by much of its results. I will try to educate myself more about war and give facts another place in the world in which they may be secure. And if they may be secured, perhaps living people can be sheltered, too.
Anglachel
WASHINGTON - In a policy reversal, President Bush has agreed to sign legislation allowing a secret federal court to assess the constitutionality of his warrantless domestic eavesdropping program, a senior Republican senator announced Thursday.
By having the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court conduct the review instead of a regular federal court, the Bush administration would ensure the secrecy of details of the highly classified program. The administration has argued that making details of the program public would compromise national security.
However, such details could include politically explosive disclosures that the government has kept tabs on people it shouldn't have been monitoring.
Spying on political enemies, no doubt. Who else would it be monitoring?
No tragedy/farce dichotomy here, as there is (in the most bleak way) with BushWar I and BushWarII. The Israelis and the Cheneyites both forget the biggest rule of international diplomacy - ya gotta have someone to talk to, who is strong enough on their side to do some local enforcing. The lack of a center leads to the Palestinian Authority or Iraq because there is no power who can lay down the law internally, the structures of authority having been fractured through war and sanctions. The presence of a hostile center gives you North Korea, Iran and (to a lesser extent) Syria, where there is someone in charge, but they see no advantage to dealing with the US (or Israel), and so will sit out negotiations. (For some excellent comaprison/contrast between successful and self-destructive relations, check out Kevin Drum on Clinton vs. Bush II on North Korea)Is there a way out for the Israelis? None that I can see. Humpty Dumpty can’t be put back together again. Fatah and Abbas can’t be restored to their pre-election positions – not without looking like complete Israeli stooges. Hamas (or at least its moderate wing) can’t be brought back in from the cold, not without a loss of Israeli face and credibility so enormous it would probably cause the Omert government to fall and bring the Likud back to power. The Israelis can’t afford to negotiate for the return of their captured soldiers and they can’t afford to forsake them. They can’t stay in Gaza and they can’t leave Gaza. They can’t invade Lebanon and they can’t not invade Lebanon.
In the past, no matter how bad things got in territories, Israeli governments always have had the option of backing off and leaving bad enough alone – relying on the Army or, post-Oslo, the PA to keep a lid on the situation. That was fine as long as the objective was to grow the settlements and quietly tighten Israel’s control over the land and all its resources. But now that the goal is essentially a second partition, Israeli politicians are finding out the hard way that they no longer have the luxury of malign neglect. After six years of pretending they don’t need a Palestinian negotiating partner, they’ve suddenly discovered, much to their horror, that they need one desperately – but have managed to eliminate all the possible candidates.
As Congress opened hearings yesterday on the treatment of terrorism detainees, the Bush administration's view was neatly summarized by Steven Bradbury, the Justice Department lawyer serving as lead witness. "The president," Bradbury said, "is always right."
...
"Only the president has the decision to introduce legislation," Bradbury reminded Specter. "I cannot commit as I sit here now that the administration will submit a particular bill."
Think about that. Bush does not accept that the Congress has a right to make laws, nor that the Supreme Court has the right to interpret laws. Only he can declare what is law, and that is equivalent to his will.
This is simply, utterly obscene. And the Rethuglicans are sucking up to this petulant, amoral, man-child, enabling him to deconstruct the very core of American government and society. Every "moderate" Republican (I think that's Olympia Snowe and occasionally Chafee) are worse than Bush, because they have demonstrated that they know better. To stay in that party now is to actively support the ruin of your nation.
Three more years of this. Will there be a country left?
Anglachel
The pity I once had for foreign troops in Iraq is gone. It's been eradicated by the atrocities in Abu Ghraib, the deaths in Haditha and the latest news of rapes and killings. I look at them in their armored vehicles and to be honest- I can't bring myself to care whether they are 19 or 39. I can't bring myself to care if they make it back home alive. I can't bring myself to care anymore about the wife or parents or children they left behind. I can't bring myself to care because it's difficult to see beyond the horrors. I look at them and wonder just how many innocents they killed and how many more they'll kill before they go home. How many more young Iraqi girls will they rape?Bush has killed so many for so little cause. This was his war of choice. It is not just the murdered and the mutilated. It is the wholesale destruction of normalcy. The eradication of hope. A determination to bring about an end to things because he can. This is Bush's War, and all of humanity needs to hang this around his neck until his dying day.
Why don't the Americans just go home? They've done enough damage and we hear talk of how things will fall apart in Iraq if they 'cut and run', but the fact is that they aren't doing anything right now. How much worse can it get? People are being killed in the streets and in their own homes- what's being done about it? Nothing. It's convenient for them- Iraqis can kill each other and they can sit by and watch the bloodshed- unless they want to join in with murder and rape.
Buses, planes and taxis leaving the country for Syria and Jordan are booked solid until the end of the summer. People are picking up and leaving en masse and most of them are planning to remain outside of the country. Life here has become unbearable because it's no longer a 'life' like people live abroad. It's simply a matter of survival, making it from one day to the next in one piece and coping with the loss of loved ones and friends- friends like T.
It's difficult to believe T. is really gone… I was checking my email today and I saw three unopened emails from him in my inbox. For one wild, heart-stopping moment I thought he was alive. T. was alive and it was all some horrific mistake! I let myself ride the wave of giddy disbelief for a few precious seconds before I came crashing down as my eyes caught the date on the emails- he had sent them the night before he was killed. One email was a collection of jokes, the other was an assortment of cat pictures, and the third was a poem in Arabic about Iraq under American occupation. He had highlighted a few lines describing the beauty of Baghdad in spite of the war… And while I always thought Baghdad was one of the more marvelous cities in the world, I'm finding it very difficult this moment to see any beauty in a city stained with the blood of T. and so many other innocents…
But there is something tragic, even a little pathetic, about Gore's stubborn faith in the ability of facts and reasoned argument to save the world. The scenes of him schlepping through airports – alone, laptop in hand, on his way to yet another city to show his slides to another room full of college students or environmental activists – hit the edge of bathos. They make Al look too much like Willy Loman. "Attention must be paid to this man."
This is the Al Gore the Washington political press corps never seemed to grow tired of mocking: The earnest wonk who takes serious ideas seriously, and assumes his audience does, too. Up on stage, in front of such an audience, Al is clearly in his element. He’s articulate, funny, even endearing – as when he rides an accordion lift to the top of the viewing screen to illustrate the soaring rate of increase in atmospheric CO2. It’s a reminder that Al’s at his best when he’s being himself, instead of imitating Bill Clinton’s folksiness (which only made him look like Salieri next to Clinton's Mozart) or playing the know-it-all bully of his first presidential debate with Bush....
In my darker moments, it sometimes seems as if the entire world is in the middle of a fierce backlash against the Age of Enlightenment, the Scientific Revolution and the ideological challenges they posed to the old belief systems. The forces of fundamentalism and obscurantism appear to be on the march everywhere – even as the moral and technological challenges posed by a global industrial civilization grow steadily more complex.
Climate change is only one of those challenges, and maybe not even the most urgent one – at the rate we’re going, civilization could collapse long before the Antarctic ice shelves do. Maybe as a species we really have reached the same evolutionary dead end as Australopithecus robustus – intelligent enough as a species to create problems we're not bright enough, or adaptable enough, to solve. I don’t know. But if extinction, or a return to the dark ages, is indeed our fate – or our grandchildren’s fate, anyway – I think it will be a Hobson’s choice as to which cultural tendency will bear the largest share of the blame: the arrogant empiricism that has made human society into an instrument of technological progress instead of the other way around, the ignorant prejudices of the masses, who are happy to consume the material benefits of the Enlightenment but unwilling to assume intellectual responsibility for them, or the cynical nihilism of corporate and political elites who are willing to play upon the latter in order to perpetuate the former, which is, after all is said and done, their ultimate claim to power.
None of this seems to faze Gore – or if it does, he and his cinema Boswells manage to keep it well hidden in An Inconvenient Truth. I don’t know if that’s because Al simply doesn’t see the situation in the same bleak terms that I do (he seems like a smart guy, but you never know) or whether, like the doctor protagonist in Camus’s The Plague , he’s decided that work – all that schlepping from airport to airport – is the only sane alternative to despair.
I’d hate to think that Gore, who has better contacts and knows more about the science and the politics of climate change than I do, is as pessimistic as I am. But I like the image of him out there on the speaking trail, completely without illusions about the ultimate outcome of the battle, but determined that it won’t be lost because he gave up. It would make Gore a politician, maybe the only establishment politician, that I can relate to – as one Edwardian plant to another.
As with anything by Billmon, you need to read the whole thing. Yes, it's long. Yes, it's worth it. Billmon has captured what is perhaps the core of Al Gore's appeal - he means what he says. Now, one could argue that Bush also means what he says, but the difference is that Al's statements are said for the sake of the entire world, not for himself and his cronies.
Al's truths, like Al himself, are inconvenient because they are not intended for advantage. He gains nothing by being right, particularly if he is Cassandra, wandering through the corridors of power, speaking what is as plain as the melting snows of Kilimanjaro, but which the various factions of greed and obscuranturism cannot bear to hear.
I click open the home pages of newspapers and see the bodies of the dead - in India, in Gaza, in Iraq - and read the mendacious spin of the Bush White House claiming economic success when it is misery for people outside his case. Employment down, unions being busted, the middle sinking lower. Who can bear this reality? I read this and I understand the appeal of apocalypticism, because at least it promises an end to the madness.
Except that it is the madness. Al offers such a profound and scary hope. If we care for the earth beneath our feet, the air above our heads, the water that moves in our veins, then we will commit to it. He asks us to renounce our fascination with endings and concentrate on being. One stubborn fact at a time. Reality may be the most radical fantasy we can embark upon, after all.
Anglachel
No duh, indeed. The defining characteristic of neocon policy, be it foreign or domestic, is a breathtaking gap between the facts on the ground and their fantasy of how the world should be. Josh has a sobering follow on observation:Put simply, do we not detect a pattern in which the foreign policy neoconservatives strike out boldly on some foreign policy adventure, flop right down on their faces and then present the cause of their undoing as a novel insight wrestled from the maw of history when in fact, to everyone else except for them, this 'insight' was completely obvious and predictable from the start?
Kaplan says that America can't contain the Iraqi's "sectarian rage" nor "reprogram [the Iraqi's] coarsened and brittle cultures." As Louis Menand put it in The New Yorker, quite relatedly, when reviewing Francis Fukuyama's richly articulated discovery that regime change and preemption might not have been such a royal road to peace and democracy, "No duh!"
I mean, this was the whole premise of pretty much everyone who said that Iraq might be a hard place to 'democratize' by invading. Non-diversified economy based on natural resource extraction, lethal sectarian divisions in a country bundled together by the British. It was pretty much the conventional wisdom going in that it was only brutal dictatorship that held the place together.This brings us back to what we can call the Heart of Darkness/Apocalypse Now tragedy at the center of Bush's War. The operation was not done for the sake of the people who occupied the physical and political landscape of Iraq. It was conducted according to the plan concocted in a capitol far away, and it has foundered precisely because it had nothing solid to offer the people who suffered under its onslaught. It was a pressure cooker, and the Cheneyites turned up the heat. Is it any wonder that it exploded? Is it any surprise that the neocon reaction to the insurgency is "Exterminate the brutes!"?
Coming later, How is this all different from the Balkans? They don't get along there either, do they?No, they don't. Szrebrenica. Sarajevo. Kosovo. These were places of atrocities in the same brutal class as what gets reported from Iraq, yet it was kept from spreading beyond the region and it was, eventually, cooled. How and why?
... the Western world, notably the United States, was doomed unless it reclaimed “the moral high ground.” By the end of the Cold War, he said, there was no dispute world wide about which side held the moral high ground. As a professional spy master, he said that reality made it so much easier for him to recruit operatives – they would volunteer to come to him, because they believed in the cause. Therefore, as a matter of pure strategic necessity, the United States needed to behave according to its best traditions, not the exigencies of an open-ended wartime emergency. (I’m paraphrasing a little, but not taking too many liberties.)This may be the single most important loss of the neocon war - the loss of moral high ground. With the invasion of Iraq, they can't even claim self-defense as Iraq was no threat to us. Invasion of a country for no reason except to demonstrate military might, continual assaults on international conventions to defend human dignity, casual use of methods and practices that were (and are) the favorite tools of dictatorial regimes (kidnapping, torture, surveillance of general populations, use of military for police functions, etc.) ; all of these serve to undermine what may be the most effective weapon in the US arsenal, the knowledge that we are dedicated to doing the right thing. Mistakes can be forgiven. Deliberate policy cannot.
TICK TICK TICK....I just realized today that the Connecticut primary isn't until August 8. That means we're in for another full month of 24/7 screeching in the liberal blogosphere about the myriad personal deficiencies of Joe Lieberman, Ned Lamont, and every last one of their friends and supporters.
Just shoot me. Can't President Bush nuke some small third-world country that he's annoyed at so we have something else to talk about? Please?
It's a funny thing. When I post about religion, I usually get two kinds of comments. The first is people telling me that I'm falling into a conservative trap by even entertaining the idea that some liberals are contemptuous toward religion. The second is snarky liberal secularists telling everyone else to take their stupid myths and shove 'em where the sun don't shine. Do you think both sides will show up in this thread as well?And darn if he wasn't right. Most comments walked right into that one and didn't have enough self-awareness to know they'd just tripped the "doh!" meter. And "some" posters even disparaged religion. Imagine that... NEWS FLASH - The left has a small but vocal minority of anti-religious zealots, committed beyond reason to assaulting not just idiocy like Intelligent Design, but every expression of faith. Major bloggers like PZ Meyers, for example, who enjoy wide readerships. Mind you, some of the take downs can be fun to read, but the "You Are Stupid Bozos" theme gets real old, real fast.
Obama was fighting something of a three-front battle in this speech:This post took on particular resonance as I was reading it immediately after having read the Salon piece. The point that Kilgore (and Obama) make about the danger of "prophetic" activism is both subtle and unsettling, because it is a two edged sword. It warns against the prophetic mode of rule, which is not always a religious stance. If you are a humanist, you understand that the structures of religion are human patterns of thought and interaction, and that secular instiutions and movements too can be afflicted by this mode of power.
(1) against conservative claims that God's Will is easy to understand, dictates culturally conservative positions, and requires nothing more than obedience;
(2) against Christian Left claims that progressives of faith should simply counter their Law with our Gospel; their sexual moralism with our social-justice moralism; their scriptural authorities with our scriptural authorities;
(3) against secularists of the Left or the Right (encompassing, BTW, most of the political chattering classes) who reduce religious faith to entirely secular political and cultural positions, without having any clue of the ambiguities involved in believing in a transcendent God who reveals Himself in history and human action as well as in scripture.
The political import of Obama's speech is that he is engaging in an intra-Christian debate that is already undermining the Christian Right every day. In essence, the James Dobsons of the religious world have sought to lead their flocks into a prophetic stance that stakes their spiritual lives to a series of specific and highly questionable political commitments. More and more, even the most conservative evangelical Christians are chafing against this bondage, while the less conservative faithful, including the largely apolitical attendees of rapidly growing non-denominational megachurches, never bought into it much to begin with.
This is an enormous potential political constituency that is waiting to hear from Our Side, not with Conservative Lite policy prescriptions; not with Christian Left counter-prophetic-absolutism; but with credible and authentic appeals to the holy fear that the faithful should respect when confronting those who make exclusive claims to represent God's Will on Earth.
ALBANY, N.Y. -- Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, a longtime supporter of Sen. Joseph Lieberman, said Tuesday she will not back the Connecticut Democrat's bid for re-election if he loses their party's primary.This is as it should be. State your personal preference, then be clear you support the will of the voters. How hard is that?
"I've known Joe Lieberman for more than thirty years. I have been pleased to support him in his campaign for re-election, and hope that he is our party's nominee," the former first lady said in a statement issued by aides.
"But I want to be clear that I will support the nominee chosen by Connecticut Democrats in their primary," the New York Democrat added. "I believe in the Democratic Party, and I believe we must honor the decisions made by Democratic primary voters."
The affidavit, by an F.B.I. special agent, Gregor J. Ahlers, said details of the crime emerged during a "combat stress debriefing" on June 20. Private Green and at least three others planned the rape and told another soldier to monitor the radio while they went to the house near Mahmudiya, south of Baghdad, according to the affidavit. Some of the participants changed out of their uniforms before going to the house and had blood on their clothes when they returned, the affidavit said.
After the murder-and-rape rampage, the affidavit states, the soldiers burned their clothes and told the comrade who had been left to monitor the radio that "this is never to be discussed again."
The F.B.I. affidavit portrays a crime at once chilling and calculated. Before raping one woman, Private Green confined her relatives to a bedroom, the document states. Shots were heard inside, after which Private Green came to the door and said, "I just killed them, all are dead," the affidavit goes on. Then Private Green and another "known participant" were seen raping the woman before Private Green shot her in the head "two to three times," the document states.
This was premeditated. They murdered the family members, including a child, first, then raped the teenager, then murdered her. There is no room for accident.
Who were these soldiers? Were they they ones who committed the crime? or were these other soldiers who knew the real story behind the crime?Janabi [a neighbor of the murdered family] said U.S. soldiers controlled the scene of the killings for several hours on March 11, telling neighbors that insurgents were responsible. The bodies of the victims were taken to Mahmudiyah hospital by March 12, according to Janabi and an official at the hospital, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
On March 13, a man identifying himself as a relative claimed the bodies for burial, the hospital official said. An hour after the man left with the bodies, U.S. soldiers came to the hospital and asked about the bodies, the hospital official said.
The next day, the hospital official said, soldiers scoured the area, trying to find the funeral for the family.