Bush and the Photos

To his credit, President Bush spoke out Friday about the photos depicting abuse of Iraqi prisoners by American and British troops/intelligence officers.

"Their treatment does not reflect the nature of the American people. That's not the way we do things in America. I didn't like it one bit," Bush said. "I share a deep disgust that those prisoners were treated the way they were treated," he said.

Will he go further in his condemnation?

The AP said he's been mum all weekend:

Over the weekend, however, he kept silent on the matter, although he made an indirect reference to it on Saturday night.

"We count ourselves lucky that this new generation of Americans is as brave and decent as any before it," Bush told the White House Correspondents' Association dinner.

In the AP story, Senator Joe Biden is quoted saying the President should go further. And Tristero points out that (a) Bush's comments can be read in a less favorable light; and (b) Tony Blair's condemnation was much stronger and more direct. Other bloggers criticize Bush's words as well.

Why the silence?

I have a theory.

These photos completely screw up the "attack Kerry" plan. Remember what Karen Hughes said just last weekend (on CNN) about John Kerry's old testimony that US soldiers committed war crimes in Vietnam?

"I remember watching Senator Kerry, back when he was against the war, when he came home, and I was very troubled by the kind of allegations that he hurled against his fellow veterans, saying that they were guilty of all kinds of atrocities," said Hughes, the daughter of a retired Army officer who served in three wars, including Vietnam.

"As someone whose father was over there fighting, I don't appreciate that. I resent that. I know my father was not guilty of any atrocities, and I really find that that's an irresponsible kind of charge to make."

The White House spin doctors must be hard at work trying to get out of this dilemma.

Condemn the troops in Iraq?

Or, condemn the guy who used to condemn the troops in Vietnam?


Update about the abuses: This is apparently not just a few bad apples at the prison -- and there seems to be at least one dead (murdered?) Iraqi prisoner. Thanks to Lambert at corrente for the link.

Somebody Alert the President

Yesterday, in the President's weekly Radio Address, George W. Bush said:

One year later, despite many challenges, life for the Iraqi people is a world away from the cruelty and corruption of Saddam's regime. At the most basic level of justice, people are no longer disappearing into political prisons, torture chambers, and mass graves...

However, based on photographs released just this week, the Arab world is getting a different message -- and American citizens should be disgusted.

In case readers here missed it, "60 Minutes II" reported earlier this week that US soldiers and contractors are torturing Iraqi captives -- and photographing their alleged crimes. The Memory Hole has a group of the photographs. Some of the Americans shown in the photographs are smiling. It's quite despicable, really.

One of the mostly widely circulated photos provides an image of this scene:

"According to the U.S. Army, one Iraqi prisoner was told to stand on a box with his head covered, wires attached to his hands. He was told that if he fell off the box, he would be electrocuted.

The SF Chronicle has a story in today's paper with many more details, including the involvement of US Army intelligence personnel and British soldiers:

...images of American soldiers smiling, laughing and signaling "thumbs-up" as Iraqi detainees were forced into sexually humiliating positions...

Iraqi detainees allegedly were beaten and sexually abused, officials announced Saturday.

Also Saturday, the New Yorker magazine said it had obtained a U.S. Army report that Iraqi detainees were subjected to "sadistic, blatant and wanton criminal abuses" at the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad.

The abuses included threats of rape and the pouring of cold water and liquid from chemical lights on detainees, said the internal report by Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba. According to the report, detainees were beaten with a broom handle, and one was sodomized with "a chemical light and perhaps a broomstick," the New Yorker reports in its May 10 issue.

The scandal broadened Saturday after Britain's Daily Mirror published new photographs of a hooded Iraqi prisoner who reportedly was beaten by British troops. The newspaper's front-page picture showed a soldier apparently urinating on the prisoner, who was sitting on the floor.

The newspaper quoted unidentified soldiers as saying the unarmed captive had been threatened with execution during eight hours of abuse and was left bleeding and vomiting. They said the captive was driven away and dumped from the back of a moving vehicle, and it was not known whether he survived.

The war for "hearts and minds" is over and the US and its coalition partners have lost.

And al-Jazeerah and other worldwide outlets are showing these images.

The photos appeared in newspapers across the Middle East, angering Arabs who accused the United States of caring only about the rights of Americans.

Egypt's Akhbar el-Yom newspaper splashed photographs of U.S. soldiers posing by naked, hooded inmates on Saturday's front page, with the banner headline "The Scandal." Al-Wafd, an opposition paper, displayed similar photos beneath the headline, "The Shame!"

Although the pictures have not been published widely by Iraqi newspapers, many Iraqis have seen them on Arabic-language satellite television stations, such as Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya.

This doesn't quite match the President's words, do they?

Where is the outrage?

Zinni on Iraq

Brad Delong sent me to this SD Union-Tribune interview with General Zinni. Read it.

Maybe in a day or so I'll have time to comment on his remarks -- though the General's remarks are pretty clear.

Here is some of the best of what he said:

I know the area, I know the people, I know the culture, I know the situation. I knew the intelligence right up until the day of the war and I knew it wasn't there, the threat.

Do you think Saddam had any stocks of banned weapons?

I believe there probably might have been some laying around that he wasn't aware of. They would have been obsolete, even dangerous to move around. There might have been some that were destroyed, there just wasn't proper accounting. But he wasn't even focused on that; they (the U.N. arms inspectors) were. So my belief of what was there was the possible, the potential that you had to plan for, of old stocks, artillery shells, rocket rounds. There was probably about two dozen Scuds (ballistic missiles) that were unaccounted for at the outside that could have possibly been weaponized. But as time went on, these things would have been much more difficult to move, much more difficult to upload. If he possessed those tactical weapons, these things would have had maybe marginal tactical effect on the battlefield in the short term. But certainly nothing of a great threat to the United States. So I really did not think this was a major or imminent or grave and gathering or potential threat.

The worst-kept secret in Washington is that as soon as this administration came in there was talk about taking down Iraq from day one. It's the worst-kept secret in Washington. There were Cabinet meetings where the deputy secretary of defense and others were pushing this. And certainly after 9/11 it was even more intense.

So what they did militarily and politically in Iraq, none of what you recommended happened?

Well, I'll give you my hopeful formula to get out of this. But every day and every decision makes it worse. The first thing you do when you find yourself in a hole is stop digging. They seem to continue to dig. This 'stay the course' idea is wonderful except the course is leading us over Niagara Falls.

What would you recommend doing?

I would go to the members of the Security Council; France, Russia, China and others and ask what will it take to get a U.N. resolution that we need that will give cover, that will give the countries that might be willing to participate at least what they need back home to contribute in some way, to help share the burden on the ground.

Secretary of State, January, 2005?

Zinni, just to refresh everyone's memory, was sent to the Middle East in November 2001 -- by the current Bush administration. He supported Afghanistan.

I think someone needs to assemble all these credible critics (James Webb, Brent Scowcroft, Lawrence Eagleburger, David Kay, and get them to tell the full story on national TV.

Title: Republicans and Generals against the War.

Weekend update

Expect light blogging for a couple of days.

It is Kentucky Derby weekend and that's a big deal in Louisville. Basically, it's a great excuse to have a party -- and not to work. Don't look for any betting tips here. I pick my "winners" out of a hat in a blind draw. The method is not infallible, so I don't recommend it.

Unfortunately, I've also got a big pile of papers to grade this weekend...a lawn to mow...and a solicited textbook chapter on Kyoto in US Foreign Policy to zip off ASAP.

So, with all this work, I naturally spent this evening watching Jack Black in "School of Rock." I was dubious, but found the video very entertaining. It reminded me of college, sitting around talking about music with my friends, joking, eating pizza, drinking beer...you get the picture.

The good old days.

Years ago, when I watched "A Few Good Men" with Jack Nicholson and Tom Cruise, I had the same sort of reaction. That flick really reminded me of all the late nights from college working on debate cases -- and then using that work to beat other teams into oblivion. Sure, it was a different part of college, but still a good time.

Since this is nearly a content-free post, let me mention again the comments. The tech seems to be working, and I haven't faced any spam yet. Feel free to start a thread about movies that remind you of good times in your life -- or something like that.

Or give me a Derby winner.

Webb Jumps Ship

Hey, I get to link to my old college town paper, the Lawrence Journal World. Former Navy Secretary to Ronald Reagan, James Webb, gave a talk earlier this week at the University of Kansas and sounded off on Iraq.

He's a pretty strong critic of the war -- like Generals Zinni and Clark.

The Vietnam War was "more justifiable and more defensible" than the war in Iraq, Webb said Wednesday night.

He called the ongoing war "a palpable strategic error" and "a strategic mousetrap" that arose from "a breakdown in group ethics."

It's disingenuous, Webb said, for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to say that problems in Iraq weren't foreseeable. Webb alleged the Pentagon ignored or brushed aside qualified aides who painted a realistic picture of the problems of occupation.

"There is literally nothing happening in Iraq that was not fully predictable," Webb said.

Webb cited two main problems with the war. One, he said, was that instead of focusing separately after Sept. 11 on three important issues facing the country -- terrorism, weapons of mass destruction and the Palestinian/Israeli conflict -- the Bush administration mingled them in the public mind with the war against Iraq.

Another problem, he said, was that the invasion put the military into a weaker position. Too many U.S. soldiers are either in Iraq, preparing to go there or coming back from there, he said.

"This endangers our posture elsewhere," he said.

Webb refers to Dick Cheney as "The Godfather" and says the neocon "minds were programmed" to attack Iraq before 9/11.

There's really nothing new here, but the message may seem more credible to the average Joe coming from the mouth of a Republican. Webb is quite concerned that the administration has no idea of how troops could be withdrawn -- no "exit strategy," as the Powell/Weinberger Doctrine used to call it.

"What are the conditions?" Webb asked a crowd of more than 300 people in Woodruff Auditorium in the Kansas Union. "If you can't answer the question, then you shouldn't have been there in the first place."

Too bad we can't have a mulligan and move on.

Record book

Salon.com has a lengthy excerpt from Jeffrey Record's new book, Dark victory. Record, some may recall, was the visiting research professor at the Army War College's Strategic Studies Institute who attracted a lot of attention for his study "Bounding the Global War on Terrorism."

In that piece, Record argued that the Bush administration had erred by attacking Iraq -- diverting resources from the war in Afghanistan, blurring distinctions between rogue states and Al Qaeda, setting dangerous precedents, etc.

Since SSI is the Army's think tank, Record's criticisms attracted a lot of attention. While his views did not reflect the views of the Army, Record is a long-time defense analyst. He used to work for Senator Sam Nunn and has tours at both the Brookings and Hudson Institutions. Presumably, he'll be returning to his regular job soon at the Air Force's Air War College, where he is a professor of strategy and international security.

The excerpt provides 7 lessons from the Iraq war. I recommend reading the whole piece as a prelude to buying the book. Salon also has an interview with the author that is worth checking out too.

Here are some things Record says in the interview about security and political legitimacy in Iraq versus security and political legitimacy in Vietnam decades ago:

More troops generally will provide you with more security. It allows you to do more things, such as buy time so you can get the Iraqis sufficiently trained. I've been working on a study comparing Iraq and Vietnam. In Vietnam, in addition to half a million American troops, we had a South Vietnamese military establishment numbering anywhere from about 800,000 to over a million, depending on what year you're talking about. And even though they weren't crack, elite troops, they did provide a lot of static defense and soldiers and things like that that allowed some American forces to do the other operations. We don't have anything like that in Iraq, so in some respects we are worse off now than we were in Vietnam, even though the scale of fighting and the number of people killed in Iraq are much lower.

...in Vietnam we failed to create a legitimate government in South Vietnam, and I think we face the same challenge today in Iraq under circumstances that are much more difficult.

As Billmon wrote yesterday, Iraq is starting to look in some respects like Vietnam on crack.

Record, however, generally doesn't think Iraq and Vietnam are military comparable -- there are important differences strategically and militarily. Politically, he sees parallels:

From a strategic and military standpoint, there are no meaningful comparisons between the situation in Iraq and the situation in Vietnam in the '60s and the '70s. The nature of the war, the scale of the fighting, the scale of the losses, the size of the contending forces, the quality of the enemy that we faced....

I see only two dimensions of the Vietnam conflict that ought to be looked at to provide some instruction for what we face in Iraq. One is our failure to create a legitimate, indigenous government in South Vietnam despite an enormous effort over a long period of time.

The other is the issue of the domestic sustainability of this entire enterprise. We ultimately got out of Vietnam because it became domestically unsupportable from a political standpoint. We're not there yet with Iraq for sure -- it took us seven years to get out of Vietnam. Reasoning by historical analogy is generally dangerous, and these wars are very remote from each other in time, place and strategic circumstances. So you can easily say, "This is not Vietnam." But are there dimensions of the Vietnam conflict that may have some parallels to the problems we face? Yeah, I think there are.

Of course, Record doesn't think the reconstruction of Japan and Germany provide good analogies either.

Like me, Record says we are over-extended thanks to Iraq and may be hurting our security. But instead of summarizing all of it -- let me recommend you read the interview too.

My Baby Thinks She's French

Anyone watch "Hardball" yesterday? After being questioned about the accusation from Commerce Secretary Don Evans that he looks French, John Kerry told Chris Matthews that Karen Hughes was born in Paris.

I wonder if W has ever sang this song to her:

...My Baby Thinks She's French

Well its Paris this
And its Paris that, it makes me cringe
She thinks she's French she likes to kiss and kiss
Her Flame is hard to quench!

My Baby Thinks She's French
My Baby Thinks She's French
She reads Madamoselle
and when the clock strikes twelve
she wants to give me a pinch.....
My Baby Thinks She's French

She's a Texas doll
She likes shopping malls where the mood is French
With a southern drawl
They say come back y'all
and they never even flench!

My Baby Thinks She's French
My Baby Thinks She's French
She wants to start a fire
In the Eifel Tower
She's lost all common sense!!
My Baby Thinks She's French

Note: These lyrics are excerpted from Joe Ely's song, "My Baby Thinks She's French."

Legitimacy of resistance

‘‘Look, it can’t be fun to be occupied.’’

-- Paul Bremer, quoted on October 27, 2003

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,

--That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

-- The Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776

Reuters is reporting an interview Al Jazeera television broadcast today with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. In the interview, Assad said the Iraqi resistance is legitimate:

"Certainly, what has happened on the popular level gives legitimacy to the resistance and shows that the major part of what is happening is resistance," Assad said in comments aired on Arabic satellite channel Al Jazeera.

"You are talking now about resistance which is against the occupation forces," Assad said. Asked if the resistance was legitimate, he said: "Well, of course, it's understood that way."

Assad is not alone. University of Illinois Law Professor Francis Boyle has been making this argument for awhile:

The Iraqi people have a right to use military force to resist US occupation consistent with the laws of war. I mean, they can’t target civilians but other than that they can certainly use military force to this illegal, criminal invasion.

Boyle has served as an attorney for the Palestinians in their legal struggle with Israel. Former Defense Policy Board member Richard Perle has previously agreed with Boyle that "international law ... would have required us to leave Saddam Hussein alone."

There are echoes, of course, of this "right to resistance" in the US Declaration of Independence:

Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

Personally, though I recognize that self determination is a powerful motivating political force, I would strongly prefer that the various parties in Iraq work towards a non-violent solution to the civil and political breakdown.

President Bush seems to think that the Iraqi resistance is a perfectly natural response to their situation. Bush, recall, made a comment not all that different from Assad's in his April 13, 2004, prime time press conference:

they're not happy they're occupied. I wouldn't be happy if I were occupied either.

Right now, no one is happy.

To summarize: thousands of Iraqi innocents are losing their lives, they have no true liberty under occupation, and the President agrees they are not happy.

Steal this post

Dammit. Blogger just ate my post. I have a lot to do today (and this week), so this will have to be the condensed version:

Kevin Drum agrees with my post from yesterday.

John Kerry is having trouble wounding George Bush on foreign policy because their positions are starting to sound alike. Drum refers to:

an article by Farah Stockman in the Boston Globe today that highlights a key Kerry problem: as Kerry moves rightward after the primaries, and as Bush becomes more receptive to ideas that Kerry has long championed — giving the United Nations a far greater role in Iraq, emphasizing the importance of welcoming NATO to Iraq, and beefing up the number of US troops in Iraq — Kerry loses any chance of distinguishing himself from Bush over foreign policy.

This strikes me as a serious problem. National security is almost certain to be the defining issue of the campaign, and there's just no way for Kerry to get any traction there if his positions aren't clearly distinguishable from Bush's. And despite the pro-war partisans' continuing fantasy that George Bush is dedicated to the same kind of vast war of civilizations they are, the fact is that Bush has adopted an awful lot of Democratic positions in the past year. Aside from rhetorical tone, it's getting harder and harder for Kerry to find points of disagreement that are more than just nitpicking.

So what can Kerry do?

Drum says that "if John Kerry wants to win, he has to figure out some genuinely bold and popular foreign policy initiative."

I'd recommend Kerry look into "borrowing" from the so-called "Blair Doctrine."

The UK Prime Minister has often spoken of a "doctrine of international community" that emphasizes genuinely multilateral approaches to shared global problems. This includes not only fairly traditional security threats like WMD and terror, but "human security" problems like global warming and humanitarian emergencies.

Kerry is a strong environmentalist and multilateralist. He's neither a hawk nor a dove. While owls may be wise, they can nonetheless have a hard time explaining their positions in short TV commercials.

Who knows, maybe Kerry could even arrange a meeting with Blair sometime during the hottest part of the summer to call for action on Kyoto.

Of course, calling attention to multilateral processes and climate change is going to be difficult if the US starts losing 100 troops per month in Iraq on a regular basis.

Under those circumstances, however, Kerry could credibly (and boldly) turn further away from Bush's war. If the US loses 3 to 400 soldiers between now and the convention, even as it fails to find WMD, the Democrats can more prominently challenge the wisdom of the entire enterprise.

Kerry will need help from people like Wesley Clark (potential Secretary of State or Defense?) to craft the message carefully for the national stage.

Think bold.

Update: See also Pandagon, Priorities & Frivolities, and Speedkill.

Another image

David Weinberger pointed me to an image that I'd forgotten about when I blogged the other day about the casket photos from Iraq:


That image is from George Bush's early March TV advertisement.

Yes, the President used an image of a fallen firefighter from 9/11 in his own political ads.

Weinberger said this about the hypocrisy:

I don't have a problem with using images of fallen heroes in campaign ads. I do have a little problem with censorship for rank political aims.

Bingo.

Kerry's Plan for the Purple States

"Liberal media" polling analyst William (Bill) Schneider of CNN is actually a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, which is home mostly to conservatives and neoconservatives.

Lately, Schneider has been explaining why the Bush campaign is doing fairly well -- despite just having had a horrible several weeks in the news. Leah at corrente excerpts some of his recent analytical dialogue with Wolf Blitzer at CNN. She quotes (and highlights in yellow) this key passage:

SCHNEIDER: Despite the losses, what Americans think two words, Bush in Iraq, they remember something the United States won. They went in with overwhelming force, they got rid of Saddam Hussein regime and Saddam Hussein is now in captivity. So, the view is if you want someone that can handling a situation like that, a man of strength and decisiveness and resolve, Bush is your man.

Leah goes on to quote some other Washington talking heads who are openly criticizing Kerry for a number of campaign blunders, including the vote against the $87 billion.

I found another interesting Schneider piece, apparently from the National Journal last week, but published on the AEI website. In this piece, Schneider explains why Kerry isn't able to wound Bush's candidacy on the issue of Iraq.

Essentially, Kerry is overtly trying to reach swing voters. Good idea, right? Well, as Schneider says, "They're the ones who think that the United States was right to go to war with Iraq but that the Bush administration isn't conducting the war properly."

Kerry and Bush seem to be saying similar things about fixing the problems in Iraq -- more troops and a greater role for the UN. Thus, Kerry cannot easily distinguish his arguments when Bush is making the same ones. It reminds me of an off-color slogan involving Nixon's re-election campaign in '72. You can find it in the first comment here.

Anyway, for Kerry's base, this "pro-war" approach is potentially disastrous. True blue Democrats don't really want to fix Bush's mistake in Iraq and might be tempted by an anti-war candidate (like Nader) if Kerry persists in advancing a defense wonk's agenda for addressing the Iraq problem.

One more Nixon reference: In 1968, he let it be known that he had a "secret plan to end the war" in Vietnam.

Maybe Kerry should try that instead.


Update: I've been doing a little reading and can point everyone to a piece in the SF Chronicle from April 25 (yesterday) arguing that Bush and Kerry are "notable as much for agreement as differences" on foreign policy. Ouch.

The piece quotes Rand Beers, who left the Bush White House to work as Kerry's chief foreign policy advisor is quoted as saying,

"Bush is the wrong messenger. We will go to the European powers at a higher level to get cooperation from NATO. We will get cooperation to share the burden because we take a different approach than this administration."

The Europeans may be ready to shoot the messenger, but I'd guess they also want a different message.

Fantasy Ad

[October 19, 2022 -- this April 2004 post was flagged by Google for violating its Malware and Viruses policy. 

In response, I've removed all links. They were already dead, but may have been the source of the risk. I've provided sources that might be available on a web archive. The remainder is merely text so it should be safe.]

None of the blogs I regularly read has yet mentioned the latest column from Matt Miller. As anyone who watches TV knows (and it is probably repeated every couple of minutes on talk radio, but I don't listen), the Bush campaign has tried to make an issue of John Kerry's vote against the $87 billion supplemental request for Iraq. For comic "waffling" effect, they also note that Kerry also voted for the $87 billion. Hmmm. 

Matt Miller Online (dead link from mattmilleronline.com removed in 2022) has the syndicated columnist's "fantasy ad" for Kerry, explaining these votes -- and using them to define the difference between the President and the challenger. "If I were Kerry," opines Miller, "I'd use this fight over the funding for Iraq to showcase the difference between his values and the president's on a choice where the vast majority of Americans would side with Kerry." 

It's good:

"Here are the facts: George Bush is having our children pay for Iraq. He has put $160 billion so far on our kids' credit card to pay for a war we chose to wage. We are running record budget deficits of over half a trillion dollars a year because George Bush says our children should pay for their parents' war. "My plan was different. My plan was to pay to finish the job in Iraq by repealing some of the tax cuts that George Bush gave to the best-off Americans. "Every well-off American I've asked has told me they would have gladly supported such a plan. They feel, as I do, that it is un-American to stick our children with debts for today's wars in order to preserve big tax cuts for people at the top. It's just wrong. "So I voted for my plan to pay for our own choices today, and against President Bush's plan to slip our children the bill so that he could give tax cuts to the wealthiest. I can't think of a clearer way to show you how my values differ from those of this White House. You'll be choosing between these values come November.

Miller then imagines Kerry challenging Bush to abandon the "hit-and-run" sound bites to explain why his administration's approach is better than Kerry's would be. 

 A pro-Bush blogger named Oberon (link to the rjwest archive removed because of possible violation of Google malware policy) says "No way dude," but I think he (or she?) underestimates the American people's intellect. 

Was Kerry voting against the troops? No, he voted for the troops -- right? Even the Bush people say so. The vote against one version of the $87 billion was precisely the kind of gamesmanship that Congress engages in all the time. Bills are forwarded from committees and amendments are typically offered on the floor. This pits two or more versions of a bill against one another. Usually, the alternatives address the same issues, but are different in some important way. 

It's a basic truth of Congress. With the Republicans in power, the Democratic-preferred bills virtually never pass, but that doesn't mean they haven't proposed better ideas. In 2002, the Republicans used the Homeland Security Department bill as a weapon against Democrats like Max Cleland. Dems had pushed the agency, but wanted a bill that assured union rights. The administration actually originally opposed the new department, but worked to frame a bill that Democrats would have to oppose because it spit in the face of one of their core constituencies (labor). Republicans play these games too. 

As Kerry said the other day (dead link to a Guardian article removed), the President threatened to veto the $87 billion for Iraq "if it included money to pay for health care for reservists and required Iraq to pay back some of the money set aside for its reconstruction." Neither Oberon nor I quote the last line from Miller's fantasy ad:

"I'm John Kerry and I approved this message because one of the choices you face this fall is whether you want a leader who will finally trust you with the truth - or one who can only achieve his goals by misleading you or insulting your intelligence."

Surely what Miller and I argue here is readily understood. Elections are about choices, but the "drive by" false choices are a poor way of thinking about them.

Yesterday, I wasted 90 minutes watching Chris Rock's movie "Head of State" on HBO. The southern white candidate for President runs an ad pointing out that his black opponent (Rock) didn't speak at an anti-cancer forum. Conclusion: his opponent is for cancer. Idiocy.

I think the American public can figure it out, especially if Kerry did something like what Miller suggests.

Purple states

Ruy Teixeira's blog, The Emerging Democratic Majority WebLog - DonkeyRising, has some interesting news about the so-called "purple" states (the swing states, which are neither red nor blue).

Kerry is ahead of Bush by 4 points in the battleground states (50-46). He's even ahead of Bush by 2 points in these states with Nader thrown into the mix and drawing a ridiculous 7 percent.

Note also that Bush's approval rating in the battleground states is 49 percent, 2 points under his national rating and that his approval rating on the economy in these states is just 41 percent, 3 points under his national rating.

Teixeira also points out that the most recent Gallup poll shows Bush down by 6 points in the battleground states since the March 26-28 survey. Gallup finds Bush and Kerry tied in those purple states, though Bush leads by 5% overall nationally.

Since the election is going to be won or lost in the swing states, the national lead really doesn't matter that much. Al Gore could tell Bush that.

Here's Teixeira's conclusion:

Instead of getting more votes where he [Bush] needs them--in the battleground states--his posturing is mostly driving up his support in the hardcore red states, where he doesn't need them. If that's true, Democrats should definitely not be intimidated by recent poll results. Bush is preaching to the converted--which can make him look better in a national poll--but he's not winning many new converts where it counts.

Hopefully, this interpretation is on point.

Note: As another blogger recently wrote in regard to all these polls, "I'm too lazy to link to them."

As usual, Billmon (at the Whiskey Bar) has an interesting take on Kerry, Bush, and the polls. He really is required daily reading.

The caskets

Some time ago, I vowed to blog about images -- especially involving US foreign policy, Iraq, the war on terror, etc.

By now, I presume most readers know about the front page photo in last Sunday's Seattle Times:


Today, according to a story in the Chicago Tribune, the woman who took the picture in Kuwait, Tami Silicio, has been fired from her job loading cargo planes . Silicio's husband was also canned by the defense contractor that employed them, though I do not see anything in the story that would justify his dismissal per se.

Not that I think she should have been fired either. Orville Schell, dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, pointed out the obvious:

Silicio's photograph "was not a breach of national security," he said. "This was a breach of the Bush administration's notion of public relations."

The DoD, of course, has denied resposibility for Silicio's firing.

Her only "crime" was violating DoD's censorship of these photos.

Meanwhile, additional photos are surfacing. Anti-war activist Russ Kick filed a Freedom of Information Act request for photographs and he has apparently published them on the internet. These photos come from the military's stateside mortuary:



This month, more than 100 soldiers have died in Iraq, bringing the war's total to over 700.

Obviously, the photographs of soldier caskets potentially makes the war more real for Americans. For supporters of the war, these images are a reminder of the sacrifices made by real human beings. At the same time, war opponents will undoubtedly be galvanized by these images.

Test: Comments?

I'm back from my trip. The talk went fine, I thought.

Hopefully, this post marks the beginning of comments on this blog. I don't know how it will influence the traffic -- but it certainly makes this space something more closely approximating a public sphere.

Please, no spamming -- and try to be civil with one another.
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Public diplomacy talk

I'm heading east later today in order to give a talk on "Public Diplomacy and the Bush Doctrine" tomorrow.

Basically, I will be arguing that the US cannot view "public diplomacy" as linear communication. Treating it like advertizing may work in the short term to "sell" foreign policy -- but it will not be successful in the long term either for winning "hearts and minds" around the world or for maintaining domestic political support for policy.

Ordinarily, political legitimacy cannot be garnered via repeated communication of a simple political slogan.

So what does the US need to do instead?

Well, given that political communication always occurs in a wider context, the US must account for that context. Given globalization, the 24 hour news cycle, the internet, and the increased democratization of states and international organizations (via inclusion of NGOs and transparency norms), the US must treat the public sphere almost as if there's a worldwide need for democratic accountability in its foreign relations.

Domestic opponents are going to raise objections, even on "high politics" questions like security. Even friends and allies may have concerns that they are willing to voice in a global public arena.

Thus, the US has little choice but to act as if it communicates in a global public sphere. This means embracing something akin to a discourse ethic. It must be willing to listen to the voices of others, respond to their concerns with empathy, and perhaps most importantly, show a willingness to be convinced to think and behave differently.

That is the secret to meaningful communicative action. Dialogue is not one sided.

To those who would say, "but we cannot undercut our own security by giving in to the demands of others," I would say (a) the US must provide a genuinely convincing argument that the security stakes are high; and (b) the US must think about formulating truly collective security to address shared concerns. This means making the concerns of others our own, and vice versa.

In the case of Iraq, the US failed to convince some of its closest friends (Germany) and neighbors (Canada) that war was necessary. As a consequence, the US still finds collective security options elusive.

That is the price of acting without legitimacy.

The Terror

The Bush administration is conducting a "war on terror," but policymakers and scholars do not have a simple consensus definition of terrorism.

Nonetheless, a few dimensions of terrorism are widely agreed, including the intentional use of violence against "noncombatant targets."

While the US State Department views terrorism as an act committed by non-state actors, the term originally referred to violence by states -- terrorizing their own polities:

Interestingly, the American definition of terrorism is a reversal of the word's original meaning, given in the Oxford English Dictionary as "government by intimidation". Today it usually refers to intimidation of governments.

The first recorded use of "terrorism" and "terrorist" was in 1795, relating to the Reign of Terror instituted by the French government.

September 11, 2001, was tragic, in large part, because of the death of nearly 3000 innocent noncombatants.

Why am I bringing this up?

Well, in the US, there has been surprisingly little public discussion of the innocent civilians killed in Iraq. They are quite significant, however. The Iraq Body Count project estimates that, as of today, at least 8900 civilian Iraqis have died as a direct result of the US military campaign. The same source gives a maximum number of 10,740.

The recent attacks on Fallujah (a city of 250,000), which some call reprisals for the deaths of four American contractors, apparently resulted in the deaths of hundreds of civilians. The Christian Science Monitor reported "a US assault left 600 dead last week. The victims include hundreds of women and children, according to hospital and clinic records in Fallujah."

In any case, approximately three times as many innocent civilians are dead as a direct result of this part of the President's "war on terror" as occurred on September 11, 2001.

I know, these deaths, while unfortunate, are not always the result of targeted action. Many are "collateral damage."

Still, the main purpose of the "war on terror" is to protect innocent civilians and the perverse outcome is that it is killing innocent civilians.

Moreover, media reports are starting to suggest that the US military may be using disproportionate force that results in indiscriminant targeting. Last week, in a report originally appearing in the British newspaper The Telegraph, a "Senior British commander" was quoted anonymously from Iraq:

Speaking from his base in southern Iraq, the officer said: "My view and the view of the British chain of command is that the Americans' use of violence is not proportionate and is over-responsive to the threat they are facing. They don't see the Iraqi people the way we see them. They view them as untermenschen. They are not concerned about the Iraqi loss of life in the way the British are."

The officer explained that, under British military rules of war, British troops would never be given clearance to carry out attacks similar to those being conducted by the US military, in which helicopter gunships have been used on targets in urban areas.

British rules of engagement only allow troops to open fire when attacked, using the minimum force necessary and only at identified targets. The American approach was markedly different, the officer said.

"When US troops are attacked with mortars in Baghdad, they use mortar-locating radar to find the firing point and then attack the general area with artillery, even though the area they are attacking may be in the middle of a densely populated residential area.

"They may well kill the terrorists in the barrage, but they will also kill and maim innocent civilians. That has been their response on a number of occasions. It is trite, but American troops do shoot first and ask questions later."

The article notes that "The phrase untermenschen - literally 'under-people' - was brought to prominence by Adolf Hitler in his book Mein Kampf, published in 1925. He used the term to describe those he regarded as racially inferior: Jews, Slavs and gypsies."

As I've blogged before, this is not the first time the US military has been accused of using excessive force in Iraq -- perhaps as a result of counterinsurgency lessons learned from Israel.

Question: How many innocent noncombatants must die from brutal violence in the name of protecting innocent civilians from terror?

I think this echoes John Kerry's questions from his famous testimony, April 22, 1971:

"We are asking Americans to think about that because how do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake? But we are trying to do that, and we are doing it with thousands of rationalizations..."

Before anyone tries to change the subject to alleged Iraqi WMD, keep in mind that the US isn't even guarding Iraqi nuclear facilities. Maybe I'll consider that soon.

Another Critical Army War College Study

In December 2003, a study "Bounding the Global War on Terrorism," by Jeffrey Record, a Visiting Research Professor at the Army War College, received a great deal of press attention because it was fairly critical of the Bush administration's war on terror. Record was at the Army's Strategic Studies Institute when he released his report -- and this is essentially the US Army's think tank.

Record concluded that "the war on terrorism--as opposed to the campaign against al-Qaeda--lacks strategic clarity, embraces unrealistic objectives, and may not be sustainable over the long haul." He called "for downsizing the scope of the war on terrorism to reflect concrete U.S. security interests and the limits of American military power."

Potent stuff. The blog world noticed, of course.

Last week, another study "Toward an American Way of War," by Antulio J. Echevarria II gained a great deal of international publicity. While Echevarria's tone seems more measured, at least in its summary form, his study too is being framed by the global media as quite critical of the administration's war on terror.

And it is fairly critical. The author calls for some "fundamental rethinking" of "the practical resources necessary to translate military victory into strategic success." Echevarria criticizes the US for trying to change Iraq's regime "quickly and on the cheap."

Here's how Reuter's covered the study, which reflects the author's views and not those of the War College or the Department of Defense:

The Bush administration went to war in Iraq with a flawed strategy that sought victory "on the cheap" and is now paying the price in the form of a growing insurgency and doubts about its goal of building a democracy, a top U.S. Army analyst says in a recent report.

Lieutenant Colonel Antulio Echevarria, director of national security affairs at the Army War College's Strategic Studies Institute, said Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other administration officials rejected as "old think" early calls for more troops from senior commanders.

Instead, the administration hoped to address any military and financial shortfalls in Iraq through anticipated support from NATO and the United Nations.

"It low-balled the total number of U.S. troops and other personnel that might have to be put in harm's way to get the job done, and how long they might have to remain," Echevarria said in the report titled, "Toward an American Way of War."

Echevarria said the administration's Iraq strategy was flawed because its goal of regime change in Iraq required a labour- and time-intensive effort. But the administration instead wanted "to win the war quickly and on the cheap."

"While this emerging way of war looked to employ new concepts, such as shock and awe and effects-based operations, designed to win battles quickly, it had no new concept for accomplishing the time-intensive and labour-intensive tasks of regime change more quickly and with less labour," his report concluded.

Funny, I thought Rumsfeld recognized the war would be a "long, hard slog."

This study is getting a lot of attention around the world. I used google.news and discovered hits in Pakistan, Bahrain, Iran, South Africa, India, Canada, and the UK. Aljazeerah.info covered it too. Most seem to use the Reuters story I quoted.