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Archive: POLITICS

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Brzezinski: attack on iran would warrant impeachment

Zbigniew Brzezinski, writing in the International Herald Tribune, lays out in devastatingly clear terms why an attack on Iran would prove disastrous for the U.S.

...there are four compelling reasons against a preventive air attack on Iranian nuclear facilities:

1. In the absence of an imminent threat (with the Iranians at least several years away from having a nuclear arsenal), the attack would be a unilateral act of war.

If undertaken without formal Congressional declaration, it would be unconstitutional and merit the impeachment of the president. Similarly, if undertaken without the sanction of the UN Security Council either alone by the United States or in complicity with Israel, it would stamp the perpetrator(s) as an international outlaw(s).

2. Likely Iranian reactions would significantly compound ongoing U.S. difficulties in Iraq and in Afghanistan, perhaps precipitate new violence by Hezbollah in Lebanon, and in all probability cause the United States to become bogged down in regional violence for a decade or more to come. Iran is a country of some 70 million people and a conflict with it would make the misadventure in Iraq look trivial.

3. Oil prices would climb steeply, especially if the Iranians cut their production and seek to disrupt the flow of oil from the nearby Saudi oil fields. The world economy would be severely impacted, with America blamed for it. Note that oil prices have already shot above $70 per barrel, in part because of fears of a U.S./Iran clash.

4. America would become an even more likely target of terrorism, with much of the world concluding that America's support for Israel is itself a major cause of the rise in terrorism. America would become more isolated and thus more vulnerable while prospects for an eventual regional accommodation between Israel and its neighbors would be ever more remote.

It follows that an attack on Iran would be an act of political folly, setting in motion a progressive upheaval in world affairs. With America increasingly the object of widespread hostility, the era of American preponderance could come to a premature end.

Read the full op-ed piece here

straight talk

From Larry Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, in Sunday's Baltimore Sun:

As Alexis de Tocqueville once said: "America is great because she is good. If America ever ceases to be good, America will cease to be great."

In January 2001, with the inauguration of George W. Bush as president, America set on a path to cease being good; America became a revolutionary nation, a radical republic. If our country continues on this path, it will cease to be great - as happened to all great powers before it, without exception.

From the Kyoto accords to the International Criminal Court, from torture and cruel and unusual treatment of prisoners to rendition of innocent civilians, from illegal domestic surveillance to lies about leaking, from energy ineptitude to denial of global warming, from cherry-picking intelligence to appointing a martinet and a tyrant to run the Defense Department, the Bush administration, in the name of fighting terrorism, has put America on the radical path to ruin.

Unprecedented interpretations of the Constitution that holds the president as commander in chief to be all-powerful and without checks and balances marks the hubris and unparalleled radicalism of this administration.

Moreover, fiscal profligacy of an order never seen before has brought America trade deficits that boggle the mind and a federal deficit that, when stripped of the gimmickry used to make it appear more tolerable, will leave every child and grandchild in this nation a debt that will weigh upon their generations like a ball and chain around every neck. Imagine owing $150,000 from the cradle. That is radical irresponsibility.

Full editorial here

good news from nepal

In a follow-up to a recent post (below) on violent suppression of demonstrations in Nepal, the King has reinstated the dissolved parliament. From the NY Times:

The parties, speaking as thousands of people cheered and danced on the streets, named former Prime Minister Girija Prasad Koirala as the new head of government and said the first job would be to ensure Maoist insurgents fighting a decade-long rebellion joined the political mainstream.

A huge protest rally called for Tuesday has been converted into a victory parade, and hundreds of thousands of people were expected on the streets of the capital Kathmandu later in the day.

``We have called off the general strike and protest,'' said Krishna Prasad Sitaula, spokesman for the Nepali Congress, the largest party in the alliance.

``Today's planned protest has been converted into a victory rally. This will go down in history as a new example of how peaceful protests are held. This will determine the future of the country.''

Read the full article

please get involved!

I referenced this issue in a recent post, but it's so important that I'm urging all of you to get involved in the effort to block this potentially disastrous bill which is making its way through Congress. Contact your local Congressman/woman, sign petitions, spread the word, whatever you can do–do it! From Josh Marshall:

We tend to take for granted how the Internet evolved. For all its shortcomings, it is a remarkably level playing field where all sorts of voices -- the strong and the weak, the popular and the despised -- can all make their voices heard. Yes, Viacom's voice is louder than TPM's or Atrios's or Newsmax's. But if you want to read TPM, we're right here, just as easy to visit as the media giants.

But it won't necessarily stay that way.

The Internet could have evolved very, very differently. It could have turned in to one or two big proprietary networks -- maybe AOL and Compuserve, or AOL and MSN, each closed, each controlled by one company, without the dynamism, freedom and entrepreneurial magic we associate with the web. The big media offerings would be easy to get to and easy to download while the blogs and other moderately funded alternatives, right and left, had to make do with second or third tier access. Or maybe Verizon decides that anti-Verizon content just won't run on their network.

Think of it like Cable TV. Anybody can start a cable channel. But if you can't get on TimeWarner Cable here in Manhattan, for me you might as well not even exist. The Internet could work like that.

Read Josh's full post at TPM

Link to the activist group Save The Internet

Energy policy: the norwegian model

Raymond J. Learsy, author of the book Over a Barrel: Breaking the Middle East Oil Cartel, has an interesting post up at Huffpost.

Norway is now the world's third largest oil exporter, behind only Saudi Arabia and Russia. The oil that it struck in 1969 was offshore, on continental shelf owned by the government. With a tradition of state development of natural resources, Norway rapidly created an oil ministry, a national oil company to develop the oilfields, and a Petroleum Directorate, which would hire the necessary experts and manage the companies invited to join the project. Significantly, after the early oil boom turned to bust and the profits were frittered away in inflationary spending, Norway set up a Government Petroleum Fund to keep the money in trust for future generations.

The fund is run on strict Norwegian principles by Knut Kjaer, a soft-spoken former central banker who rides the tram to work and lives on a civil servant's salary. But he gets top-notch returns -- "much better than the big pension funds," says an admiring economist -- and the fund had mounted to $198 billion nearly a year ago, in June 2005. Since then, added dividends have been running between $2 billion and $3 billion a month.

The fund is conservatively invested, with 59 percent in bonds and just 41 percent in equities. Though total returns have been running at 8 percent annually, the government draws down no more than 4 percent, leaving the rest to compound.

Crucially and wisely, the fund is also barred from investing in the local economy. Norway learned from its early excesses and also from the lessons of such countries as Mexico, Nigeria, Venezuela, and 16th-century Spain, all of which fell victim to the "resource curse" that produces inflation, plummeting currencies, and economic decay. Countries rich in commodities rarely do as well as nations that live by their wits, so Norway has resolved to keep most of its wealth safely offshore, with teams of professional money managers advising on investments in their countries. (Among the American teams: T. Rowe Price and Wellington Management.)

The payoff: Norway is the only large oil exporter with a solid industrial economy. Its productivity rivals that of the United States, and its high-tech startups include TOMRA, a recycling pioneer, the Web browser OPRA, and FAST, an Internet search engine. Best of all, Norway's future is secure. The national debt has been paid off. And even if the wells ran dry tomorrow, Norway would have enough in its petroleum fund to pay the entire cost of its armed forces (not by way of comparison, thank you), police, and ambulance service in perpetuity.

Read the full post here

Nepal update

I've done a fair bit of travelling, but if forced to pick one, outstanding experience, I would probably choose the six weeks or so which I spent in Nepal around 1980. I spent much of that time trekking in the Annapurna region of the Himalayas, but also spent some time in an around Kathmandu, which is the one major city, and heart of the small mountain kingdom.

My fond memories range from the extraordinary beauty of (arguably) the world's greatest mountain range, to the remarkable kindness of the Nepalese people. I remember one incident which vividly illustrates the latter. I was trekking with a man from New Zealand named Jeremy, and, on our route we would occasionally come across other Westerners. One day we met someone who was lamenting that he had lost a valuable watch somewhere along the trail. Not long after that, a local Nepalese arrived at the same spot, and produced the watch, which he had apparently found. He returned it to the overjoyed owner, and refused to accept a reward. Now, bear in mind that the watch was probably worth the equivalent of two or three years wages to this incredibly poor man, yet he didn't even think about keeping it.

That sort of genuine, unspoiled behavior was common at the time of my visit. Sadly, though, Nepal has, in recent years, gone through, and continues to go through a difficult period of change. And while most of these changes have revolved around an admirable, and increasingly popular effort to substitute Democracy for the Monarchy, the friction between the two factions all too often results in violence.

From todays NY Times:

KATMANDU, Nepal, April 22 — Neither a curfew and tear gas nor King Gyanendra's offer to give up control of the state stemmed the fury of his subjects on Saturday, as protesters, for the first time in 17 days of demonstrations, broke through police lines to pierce the ancient heart of the city, reaching within a few blocks of Narayanhiti Palace.

Riot police beat demonstrators near Katmandu's royal palace Saturday. The clampdown began after marchers reached the heart of the old city.

Police officers pushed the pro-democracy protesters back through the warren of narrow, sunless alleys, firing tear gas, whipping with cane batons and infuriating them even more. "Dogs!" they screamed, eyes red from the tear gas, as paramedics rushed in to pick up the injured.

[snip]

For the second day in a row, more than 100,000 protesters flooded the streets as police officers, backed by the Royal Nepalese Army, for the most part stood by and let them pass through what was, even a day before, the heavily fortified Ring Road encircling the city center. Only around the palace did the police say that they were under strict orders to keep protesters at bay.

By midafternoon, the coalition of Nepal's seven largest political parties, which began the demonstrations more than two weeks ago, formally rejected the king's offer, made in a televised address on Friday night, to return control of the government to a prime minister of the parties' choosing. In a statement, the seven-party alliance vowed to carry on with the agitation.

"It has undermined the sentiments of the people," the statement said of the king's proposal.

Read the full Times article here

A BBC report can be accessed here

what's the most important, underreported story?

This:

The telephone companies, which carried all of the Web traffic until relatively recently, had to treat all of their calls alike without giving any Web site or service favored treatment over another.

The result was today’s Internet, which developed as a result of billions of dollars of investments, from the largest Internet company that spent millions on software and networking, to the one person with a blog who spent a few hundred dollars on a laptop. The Internet grew into a universal public resource because the telephone and cable companies simply transported the bits.

Last fall, however, the Federal Communications Commission, backed by the U.S. Supreme Court, decided that the high-speed Internet services offered by the cable and telephone companies didn’t fall under that law, the Communications Act. Out the window went the law that treated everyone equally. Now, with broadband, we are in a new game without rules.

Read the full story at the TPM Cafe

'official a'

Karl Rove is 'Official A' in Patrick Fitzerald's indictment of Scooter Libby, and, judged by past performances, that is decidedly not a good sign for Mr. Rove. From an MSNBC report:

[W]e've known for months that in the Scooter Libby indictment when they refer to Official A, Official A is Karl Rove. ... But we've looked at prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's record as far as designating people as Official A or Official B, and in every single case we have found, Keith, that prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald when he designates somebody as Official A in an indictment, that person eventually does get indicted themselves.

Read more, thanks to Talk Left

"unbelievable chaos"

Retired General John Batiste has written a scathing assessment of the Iraq war in the Washington Post.

The national embarrassment of Abu Ghraib can be traced right back to strategic policy decisions. We provided young and often untrained and poorly led soldiers with ambiguous rules for prisoner treatment and interrogation. We challenged commanders with insufficient troop levels, which put them in the position of managing shortages rather than leading, planning and anticipating mission requirements. The tragedy of Abu Ghraib should have been no surprise to any of us.

We disbanded the Iraqi military. This created unbelievable chaos, which we were in no position to control, and gave the insurgency a huge source of manpower, weapons and military experience. Previous thinking associated with war planning depended on the Iraqi military to help build the peace. Retaining functioning institutions is critical in the rebuilding process. We failed to do this.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld claims to be the man who started the Army's transformation. This is not true. Army transformation started years before this administration came into office. The secretary's definition of transformation was to reduce the Army to between five and seven divisions to fund programs in missile defense, space defense and high-tech weapons. The war on terrorism disrupted his work, and the Army remains under-resourced at a time when it is shouldering most of the war effort. Boots on the ground and high-tech weapons are important, and one cannot come at the expense of the other.

Read the full WAPO article here

politics trumps science, again

This time, the FDA rejects the best available science on medical marijuana.

The Food and Drug Administration statement directly contradicts a 1999 review by the Institute of Medicine, a part of the National Academy of Sciences, the nation's most prestigious scientific advisory agency. That review found marijuana to be "moderately well suited for particular conditions, such as chemotherapy-induced nausea and vomiting and AIDS wasting."

Dr. John Benson, co-chairman of the Institute of Medicine committee that examined the research into marijuana's effects, said in an interview that the statement on Thursday and the combined review by other agencies were wrong.

The federal government "loves to ignore our report," said Dr. Benson, a professor of internal medicine at the University of Nebraska Medical Center. "They would rather it never happened."

Some scientists and legislators said the agency's statement about marijuana demonstrated that politics had trumped science.

"Unfortunately, this is yet another example of the F.D.A. making pronouncements that seem to be driven more by ideology than by science," said Dr. Jerry Avorn, a medical professor at Harvard Medical School.

Read the full NY Times article here

bush: give peace a chance

caltv has created a remarkable mashup (see this wikipedia entry if you're unfamiar with the term) of George Bush singing the John Lennon classic, Imagine.

Link

terrorist marketing 101?

Michael Shaw, who has a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology, brings up some interesting questions in the wake of the recent suicide bombing in Tel Aviv.

Why do I know Sami Salim Hamad's name, and why was his picture all over the newspapers?

After carrying out a suicide bombing in Tel Aviv Monday, images of this young man appeared widely, including on the NYT front page, inside the LAT and on the Jerusalem Post website. Of all the criteria for a successful suicide mission, I'm not sure where media attention ranks. Given the large perceptual and public relations stakes in the Arab-Israeli conflict, however, it would seems somebody today must be congratulating themselves for all the page views.

In my mind, the fact this image got around like it did was not arbitrary. Just like attack planners consider casualties (in this case, the highest toll since August '04); calendar (reminiscent of the last Passover attack four years ago in Netanya); domestic politics (coming hours after the swearing in of the new Israeli parliament); and site (The Tel Aviv sandwich shop had been targeted just three months before), it is not unusual to assume similar consideration was also given to the bomber.

As the Arab world and various insurrection movements come to utilize satellite broadcasting in a bigger way, is it any surprise someone would take a talent agency, or a casting director's eye to suicide recruitment? And so I ask the question, why do I know Sami Salim Hamad's name?

Read the full post at Shaw's BagNewsNotes

Cheney's office: behind closed doors

Vice President Dick Cheney's vast power within the current Administration has been well reported. And while we've gotten a tantalizing glimpse at the machinations which have gone on his office (thanks to Patrick Fitzgerald), the inner workings have remained murky at best. Robert Dreyfuss now has an article up on The American Prospect site which illuminates the topic.

Devoid of well-known names and faces, the OVP was nearly invisible to the public until last fall. That’s when “Scooter” Libby was indicted for lying to federal investigators in the Valerie Plame case, focusing the media spotlight on the vice president’s chief of staff and top national security adviser, who resigned immediately. Aside from Libby, however, virtually none of Cheney’s current aides has endured any scrutiny. Outside the Washington cognoscenti, it’s a safe bet that not one in a hundred Americans could name a single Cheney aide. Since 2001, the list has included David Addington, who replaced Libby; top national security advisers such as Eric Edelman and Victoria Nuland; radical-right Middle East specialists such as Hannah, William J. Luti, and David Wurmser; anti-China, geopolitical Asia hands like Stephen Yates and Samantha Ravich; an assortment of conservative apparatchiks and technocrats, often neoconservative-connected, including C. Dean McGrath, Aaron Friedberg, Karen Knutson, and Carol Kuntz; lobbyists and domestic policy gurus, such as Nancy Dorn, Jonathan Burks, Nina Shokraiil Rees, Cesar Conda, and Candida Wolf -- and a host of communications directors, flacks, and spokespeople over the years, notably “Cheney’s angels”: Mary Matalin, Juleanna Glover Weiss, Jennifer Millerwise, Catherine Martin, and Lee Anne McBride.

It is the latter, especially Cheney’s press secretaries -- he has run through seven of them -- whose job is saying nothing, and saying it often. His press people seem shocked that a reporter would even ask for an interview with the staff. The blanket answer is no -- nobody is available. Amazingly, the vice president’s office flatly refuses to even disclose who works there, or what their titles are. “We just don’t give out that kind of information,” says Jennifer Mayfield, another of Cheney’s “angels.” She won’t say who is on staff, or what they do? No, she insists. “It’s just not something we talk about.” The notoriously silent OVP staff rebuffs not just pesky reporters but even innocuous database researchers from companies like Carroll Publishing, which puts out the quarterly Federal Directory. “They’re tight-lipped about the kind of information they put out,” says Albert Ruffin, senior editor at Carroll, who fumes that Cheney’s office doesn’t bother returning his calls when he’s updating the limited information he manages to collect.

The OVP’s enduring obsession with absolute secrecy first became obvious during the long court battle early in Bush’s first term over the energy task force chaired by Cheney. Neither the coalition of watchdog and environmental groups that sued the ovp nor members of Congress and the Government Accountability Office discovered much about the workings of the task force. Addington, then Cheney’s general counsel, enforced the say-nothing policy ultimately upheld by federal courts. “He engineered an extraordinary expansion of government power at the expense of accountability,” says Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, the conservative gadfly group that sued Cheney. “We got a terse letter back from Addington saying essentially, ‘Go jump in the lake.’”

Read the full article here

What privacy concerns?

You think that the situation is not so bad, and, well, at the very least not getting worse? Think again. Recently deceased investigative journalist Jack Anderson left 200 boxes of archival material, which his family currently controls. They want to give the material to the George Washington University library. A small problem has arisen, though. The FBI wants to go through the material first.

His archive, some 200 boxes now being held by George Washington University's library, could be a trove of information about state secrets, dirty dealings, political maneuverings, and old-fashioned investigative journalism, open for historians and up-and-coming reporters to see.

But the government wants to see the documents before anyone else.

Agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation have told university officials and members of the Anderson family that they want to go through the archive, and that agents will remove any item they deem confidential or top secret.

The Andersons, who have not yet transferred ownership of the archive to George Washington University, are outraged. They plan to fight the FBI's request.

Were he alive today, Jack Anderson "would probably come out of his skin at the thought of the FBI going through his papers," said Kevin N. Anderson, the journalist's son. If papers were taken -- even if some were stamped "declassified" and returned -- that would "destroy any academic, scholarly, and historic value" of the archive, Kevin Anderson adds.

Read the full report here

Billmon on the iran problem

What we are witnessing (through rips in the curtain of official secrecy) may be an example of what the Germans call the flucht nach vorne – the "flight forward." This refers to a situation in which an individual or institution seeks a way out of a crisis by becoming ever more daring and aggressive (or, as the White House propaganda department might put it: "bold") A familar analogy is the gambler in Vegas, who tries to get out of a hole by doubling down on each successive bet.

Classic historical examples of the flucht nach vornes include Napoleon's attempt to break the long stalemate with Britain by invading Russia,the decision of the Deep South slaveholding states to secede from the Union after Lincoln's election, and Milosevic's bid to create a "greater Serbia" after Yugoslavia fell apart.

As these examples suggest, flights forward usually don't end well – just as relatively few gamblers emerge from a doubling-down spree with their shirts still on their backs.

But of course, most gamblers don't have the ability to call in an air strike on the casino. For Bush, or the neocons, or both, regime change in Iran not only may appear doable, it may also look like the only way out of the spectacular mess they have created in Iraq.

Read the full post here

Lewis and George

George Orwell's prescience has been jarringly apparent for some time now. But, thanks to a commentator on a thread I was reading recently, I now know that, even earlier, Lewis Carroll also anticipated the current state of American politics.

`When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, `it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less.'

`The question is,' said Alice, `whether you can make words mean so many different things.'

`The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, `which is to be master - - that's all.'

–Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

Car bombs: a history

Mike Davis has written a very illuminating history of car bombs, and has done it for good reason. The two-part article is posted at Tom Dispatch, and here is how Tom begins his introduction to the piece:

In a column on March 23 (A Vision, Bruised and Dented), David Brooks of the New York Times' wrote about "the rise of what Richard Lowry of the National Review calls the ‘To Hell With Them' Hawks." In part, Brooks characterized these hawks as being conservatives who "look at car bombs and cartoon riots and wonder whether Islam is really a religion of peace." One of the advantages of history is that you have to check such thoughts at the door. If Islam can't be considered a "religion of peace," thanks to what Mike Davis calls "the quotidian workhorse of urban terrorism," then at least its jihadists join a roiling crowd of less-than-peaceful car-bombers that has included Jews, Christians, Hindus, anarchists, French colonials, Mafiosos, members of the Irish Republican Army, and CIA operatives among others.

The article itself begins with this:

"You have shown no pity to us! We will do likewise. We will dynamite you!

– Anarchist warning (1919)

On a warm September day in 1920, a few months after the arrest of his comrades Sacco and Vanzetti, a vengeful Italian anarchist named Mario Buda parked his horse-drawn wagon near the corner of Wall and Broad Streets, directly across from J. P. Morgan Company. He nonchalantly climbed down and disappeared, unnoticed, into the lunchtime crowd. A few blocks away, a startled postal worker found strange leaflets warning: "Free the Political Prisoners or it will be Sure Death for All of You!" They were signed: "American Anarchist Fighters." The bells of nearby Trinity Church began to toll at noon. When they stopped, the wagon -- packed with dynamite and iron slugs -- exploded in a fireball of shrapnel.

Read both parts of the article: Part 1 ⁄ Part 2

The Ahmadinejad/Hitler comparison

This comparison is now being made with increasing frequency, as the Administration and its supporters heat up the rhetoric in an effort to demonize Iran. Billmon, whose knowledge (and use) of history has impressed me on a number of occasions, gives the comparison interesting context in a long, recent essay.

Because while the by-now stock comparison between Ahmadinejad and Hitler is absurd militarily, politically it's not nearly as far fetched as the normal run of Orwellian newspeak.

I don't say this because of Ahmadinejad's Holocaust denials or his public fantasies about Israel being wiped off the map. I certainly don't dismiss those remarks. I'm keenly aware that all too many "sensible" observers (most of them on the political right) dismissed Hitler's Mein Kampf ravings as merely a carny act to bring in the rubes. But I also know that firebreathing rhetoric about destroying the "Zionist entity" has been a staple of Middle Eastern political hate speech since Nasser's time if not before – just as talk about nuking Mecca has become an occasional feature of American political hate speech. I take such talk seriously, and I think everybody should, but I don't automatically assume that those who say such things are actually planning to commit genocide.

No, Ahmadinejad's resemblance to Hitler – and the reason why I find him a legitimately scary guy – is more a function of his role in the decay of the Iranian revolution, which is starting to take on some definite Weimer overtones.

Read the whole essay at Billmon's Whiskey Bar

No shame

I imagine that this site does not attract many Republicans, but I have a request for those of you who are, in any way, affiliated with the party. Please research, digest and act on (e.g. contact the RNC to complain about) this current story which Josh Marshall is all over.

The RNC is now running a Spanish ad campaign which is almost incomprehensibly despicable and dishonest. In essence, the ad blames Democrats for the radioactive House bill which would make illegal aliens felons. In fact, the bill was created and passed by Republicans, and was opposed by Democrats.

From Josh:

The scope of the lying from Ken Mehlman's RNC on this immigration stuff really almost defies belief. I'm genuinely curious if any talking heads are going to call them on it. We'll be bringing you a bit more info on this shortly. But basically you have a bill that a Republican chairman introduced and one that was passed overwhelmingly by Republicans. Now the GOP is trying to find a way out from under their screw-up which they're afraid is going to damage them greivously at the polls among Latinos. So they're saying the Democrats are for making illegal aliens felons when they were the ones against making it even a misdemeanor. Mehlman's committee is running these ads. He was on CNN last night preening about how everyone knows how ethical he is and today he's caught in a flat out lie.

Note to Ken: If you run the ads in Spanish, it's still a lie.

Further insights at TPM

Iran, Iraq, and Afghanistan: a few reminders

Courtesy of Michael Kinsley:

So, after more than half a century of active meddling—protecting our interests, promoting our values, encouraging democracy, fighting terrorism, seeking stability, defending human rights, pushing peace—it's come to this. In Iraq we find ourselves unwilling regents of a society splitting into a gangland of warring militias and death squads, with our side (labeled "the government") outperforming the other side (labeled "the terrorists") in both the quantity and gruesome quality of its daily atrocities. In Iran, an irrational government that hates us with special passion is closer to getting the bomb than Iraq—the country we went to war with to keep from getting the bomb—ever was.

And in Afghanistan—site of the Iraq war prequel that actually followed the script (invade, topple brutal regime, wipe out terrorists, establish democracy, accept grateful thanks, get out)—the good guys we put in power came close, a couple weeks ago, to executing a man for the crime of converting to Christianity. Meanwhile, the bad guys (the Taliban and al-Qaida) keep a low news profile by concentrating on killing children and other Afghan civilians rather than too many American soldiers.

When the United States should use its military strength to achieve worthy goals abroad is an important question. But based on this record, it seems a bit theoretical. It's like asking whether Donald Trump should use his superpowers to cure AIDS. Or what George W. Bush should say when he wins the Nobel Prize in physics. A more pressing question is: Can't anyone here play this game?

Read Kinsley's full article at Slate

Anonymous Liberal comments on Kinsley's piece:

...sometimes an interventionalist foreign policy is necessary. But Kinsley reminds us that in the realm of geopolitics, the law of unintended consequences reigns supreme. As our hawkish friends go off half-cocked about the need to do this and that right now, without any real planning or forethought, remember that these are the same kind of guys who thought all these previous acts of intervention were great ideas too.

Fallows on Iran

James Fallows has written a brief, excellent article on the Iranian problem in the current issue of The Atlantic Monthly.

The biggest change has been in what Soviet strategists used to call the “correlation of forces.” Every tool at Iran’s disposal is now more powerful, and every complication for the United States worse, than when our war-gamers determined that a pre-emptive strike could not succeed. Iran has used the passing time to disperse, diversify, conceal, and protect its nuclear centers. Instead of a dozen or so potential sites that would have to be destroyed, it now has at least twice that many. The Shiite dominance of Iraq’s new government and military has consolidated, and the ties between the Shiites of Iran and those of Iraq have grown more intense. Early this year, the Iraqi Shiite warlord Muqtada al-Sadr suggested that he would turn his Mahdi Army against Americans if they attacked Iran.

[snip]

By giving public warnings, the United States and Israel “create ‘excess demand’ for military action,” as our war-game leader Sam Gardiner recently put it, and constrain their own negotiating choices. The inconvenient truth of American foreign policy is that the last five years have left us with a series of choices—and all of them are bad.

The article can be found here

Quote of the day

"President Bush's dimwit megalomania seems to have survived the disaster of his Iraq adventure wholly intact."

–Josh Marshall

Josh wrote that after having read Sy Hersh's recent article. Here's more from Josh.

More evidence of brazen lies

Much like the public's numbed reaction to a serial killer's scorecard –it doesn't really matter whether there were 11 or 14 victims– few people will pay specific attention to yet another illustration of the Bush administration's mendacity. But if you want the criminals who run our country to be held accountable, and if you recognize the urgent need to change the diseased nature of U.S. politics, then each terrible lie becomes important.

On May 29, 2003, 50 days after the fall of Baghdad, President Bush proclaimed a fresh victory for his administration in Iraq: Two small trailers captured by U.S. and Kurdish troops had turned out to be long-sought mobile "biological laboratories." He declared, "We have found the weapons of mass destruction."

A secret fact-finding mission to Iraq -- not made public until now -- had already concluded that the trailers had nothing to do with biological weapons. Leaders of the Pentagon-sponsored mission transmitted their unanimous findings to Washington in a field report on May 27, 2003, two days before the president's statement.

The three-page field report and a 122-page final report three weeks later were stamped "secret" and shelved. Meanwhile, for nearly a year, administration and intelligence officials continued to publicly assert that the trailers were weapons factories.

[snip]

...interviews reveal that the technical team was unequivocal in its conclusion that the trailers were not intended to manufacture biological weapons. Those interviewed took care not to discuss the classified portions of their work.

"There was no connection to anything biological," said one expert who studied the trailers.

Read the full article by Joby Warrick of the Washington Post

"They didn't even listen"

John Simpson of the BBC interviewed the Saudi Foreign Minister, Prince Saud al-Faisal, in Cairo, a few weeks before the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Here's Simpson's first recollection:

Shrewd, amusing, bulky in his superb white robes, he described to me all the disasters he was certain would follow the invasion.

The US and British troops would be bogged down in Iraq for years. There would be civil war between Sunnis and Shias. The real beneficiary would be the government in Iran.

"And what do the Americans say when you tell them this," I asked? "They don't even listen," he said.

Damning, and unsurprising. Here's the rest

God forbid

If we've learned anything during the past six years, it's that the Bush administration's capacity for making appallingly bad decisions is unlimited. It would, therefore, be a big mistake to assume that obvious lessons have been learned from the Iraq debacle, and that a more circumspect approach to foreign policy has, or will be adopted.

Along those lines, Seymor Hersh has a new article in the New Yorker which suggests that Bush and his (apparently insane) advisors are very seriously considering attacking Iran. Now, as if that weren't bad enough, there is even the suggestion that nuclear weapons could be used. To be fair, there is a possibility that this is part of a bluff in an unbelievably high-stakes poker game, but given the Administration's past performances, we certainly can't assume that to be the case.

Let me make a couple of other quick points before taking you to the article. Hersh is one of the best investigative journalists working in America today. He has broken numerous, crucially important stories over the years, with the Abu Ghraib torture scandal being the most recent. So the implications of his current article should be taken very seriously. Secondly, if our government launches a premature attack against Iran (and given that they pose no imminent threat to the U.S., any attack launched in the near future would fall into that category), disastrous results would (for many, many reasons) almost certainly follow. I'll revisit the issue soon, but please do read Hersh's article, which is linked below the following excerpts.

The Bush Administration, while publicly advocating diplomacy in order to stop Iran from pursuing a nuclear weapon, has increased clandestine activities inside Iran and intensified planning for a possible major air attack. Current and former American military and intelligence officials said that Air Force planning groups are drawing up lists of targets, and teams of American combat troops have been ordered into Iran, under cover, to collect targeting data and to establish contact with anti-government ethnic-minority groups. The officials say that President Bush is determined to deny the Iranian regime the opportunity to begin a pilot program, planned for this spring, to enrich uranium.

[snip]

A government consultant with close ties to the civilian leadership in the Pentagon said that Bush was “absolutely convinced that Iran is going to get the bomb” if it is not stopped. He said that the President believes that he must do “what no Democrat or Republican, if elected in the future, would have the courage to do,” and “that saving Iran is going to be his legacy.”

One former defense official, who still deals with sensitive issues for the Bush Administration, told me that the military planning was premised on a belief that “a sustained bombing campaign in Iran will humiliate the religious leadership and lead the public to rise up and overthrow the government.” He added, “I was shocked when I heard it, and asked myself, ‘What are they smoking?’ ”

[snip]

The Pentagon adviser on the war on terror confirmed that some in the Administration were looking seriously at this option, which he linked to a resurgence of interest in tactical nuclear weapons among Pentagon civilians and in policy circles. He called it “a juggernaut that has to be stopped.” He also confirmed that some senior officers and officials were considering resigning over the issue. “There are very strong sentiments within the military against brandishing nuclear weapons against other countries,” the adviser told me. “This goes to high levels.” The matter may soon reach a decisive point, he said, because the Joint Chiefs had agreed to give President Bush a formal recommendation stating that they are strongly opposed to considering the nuclear option for Iran. “The internal debate on this has hardened in recent weeks,” the adviser said. “And, if senior Pentagon officers express their opposition to the use of offensive nuclear weapons, then it will never happen.”

The adviser added, however, that the idea of using tactical nuclear weapons in such situations has gained support from the Defense Science Board, an advisory panel whose members are selected by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. “They’re telling the Pentagon that we can build the B61 with more blast and less radiation,” he said.

The full, must-read article, can be found here

UPDATE: The official reaction this (Sunday) morning from the Pentagon was a series of disparaging remarks about Hersh, without a single specific denial of the information contained in his article. Also, the quote of the day (though I'm paraphrasing) is from Britain's Foreign Secretary Jack Straw:

The idea of using nuclear weapons on Iran is completely nuts.

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