The Illegal War as Reckless Gamble

Kofi Annan, Secretary-General of the UN, told the BBC today:

When pressed on whether he viewed the invasion of Iraq as illegal, he said: "Yes, if you wish. I have indicated it was not in conformity with the UN charter from our point of view, from the charter point of view, it was illegal."

It is interesting that Annan is saying this now, with the latest UN session about to begin -- and George W. Bush slated to speak in the next week or so.

Plus, Bush, Australia's John Howard, and Britain's Tony Blair all face elections in the near future.

It was three years ago this week that Bush spoke to the UN about Iraq. His speech was filled with one distortion after another. Remember this "highlight"?

In 1991, the Iraqi regime agreed to destroy and stop developing all weapons of mass destruction and long-range missiles, and to prove to the world it has done so by complying with rigorous inspections. Iraq has broken every aspect of this fundamental pledge.

Here are a few more of Bush's claims:

Right now, Iraq is expanding and improving facilities that were used for the production of biological weapons.

Saddam Hussein's regime is a grave and gathering danger. To suggest otherwise is to hope against the evidence. To assume this regime's good faith is to bet the lives of millions and the peace of the world in a reckless gamble.

Saddam Hussein has defied all these efforts and continues to develop weapons of mass destruction. The first time we may be completely certain he has a -- nuclear weapons is when, God forbids, he uses one.

Free societies do not intimidate through cruelty and conquest, and open societies do not threaten the world with mass murder.

And some say George W. Bush isn't smart. It is quite clear that he long ago mastered the double entendre.

What's an angry Republican to do in 2004?

In my series of posts about Republicans jumping off a sinking ship, I missed noting that former Republican icon and Senator Jesse Helms now strongly criticizes the Bush tax cuts:

"I would not have voted for [President Bush's] tax cut, based on what I know. . . . There is no doubt that the people at the top who need a tax break the least will get the most benefit. . . . Too often presidents do things that don't end up helping the people they should be helping, and their staffs won't tell them their actions stink on ice."

I know that Erskine Bowles is comfortably ahead in his attempt to capture John Edwards Senate seat (and keep it in Democratic hands), but I think this would make for one interesting TV commercial -- especially since his opponent is apparently ready to launch a massive negative ad campaign.

Heck, perhaps even Kerry-Edwards could run such a commercial in North Carolina.

I also forgot to note that long-time National Review editor William F. Buckley spoke out against the Iraq war this summer:

"Saddam Hussein wasn't the kind of extra-territorial menace that was assumed by the administration one year ago," Mr. Buckley said. "If I knew then what I know now about what kind of situation we would be in, I would have opposed the war."

Perhaps Buckley was following the lead of bow-tied conservative analyst Tucker Carlson, who challenged the Bush administration's efforts to use force to democratize the Middle East:

"I supported the war, and now I feel foolish," Carlson admitted. "I'm just struck by how many people like me -- who were instinctively distrustful of government -- forgot to be humble in our expectations. The idea that the federal government can quickly transform the Middle East seems odd to me for a conservative."

As John Tierney further noted in that mid-May piece quoting Carlson, "David Brooks, a New York Times columnist, wrote that America entered Iraq with a 'childish fantasy' and is now 'a shellshocked hegemon.'"

With all this dissent among the right's cognoscenti, you'd really think Bush would be having trouble with significant portions of his base. Take a moment and consider the title of Pat Buchanan's latest book: Where the Right Went Wrong: How Neoconservatives Subverted the Reagan Revolution and Hijacked the Bush Presidency.

Three decades ago, Buchanan was right there, with Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld, working in the Nixon White House. When he was on The Daily Show earlier this week, Buchanan clearly signalled his worries about Bush, but didn't want to vote for John Kerry largely because Kerry isn't sufficiently anti-war.

Bush is very lucky that this election doesn't yet have a viable third-party candidate to handle the potential Republican defectors.

To all the uneasy Republicans out there, may I strongly suggest that you consider Libertarian candidate Michael Badnarik, who is going to be on nearly every state ballot (all but New Hampshire and Oklahoma, apparently)?

Libertarians, like unhappy Republicans, are quite upset about the Iraq War, the Patriot Act, and Bush's new Medicare spending and his sea of red ink.

Psssssssst, Democrats, Badnarik is about to run ads in Nevada (!) and it would be great if he could afford to run ads in Arizona too, and maybe even Wisconsin and Minnesota.

The coin flip

Probably the most common metaphor for the US presidential election is "the horse race." The media, all-too-often, focus on which candidate has the lead, the size of that lead, and the likelihood that a challenger will overtake the leader. The rise of extensive use of public opinion polling by media since 1976 has fostered this approach to covering campaigns. Over the same period, television has devoted less-and-less time to covering the content of candidate speeches.

Bottom line: Segments are shorter and they tend to focus on the horse race.

Some horse race coverage is inevitable, given the way competitive political races are run (see how the metaphor is so deeply embedded?), but the persistence of this kind of coverage strongly suggests that the media has forgotten that elections are supposed to be about political ideas, not merely winning and losing races.

One reason I launched this blog was to discuss ideas. Presumably, the proliferation of blogs, whether left or right, has something to do with the desire by a lot of smart people to discuss ideas.

Granted, some blogs focus a great deal on political strategy, which means they are like bull sessions for wannabe election jockeys. I'm guilty of some of that myself.

Anyone who reads even a handful of political blogs already likely knows that even the best bloggers often grant lots of attention to the horse race. It is happening in 2004, even though the two major candidates are just barely out of the starting gate -- at least as measured by the traditional post-Labor Day beginning to the campaigns, after the party conventions.

On the left lately, there's been a great deal of concern about the large lead George W. Bush has apparently opened up in this campaign -- at least as measured by some polls. Functional Ambivalent, for example, says it is time to give up:

Kerry's now 11 points back in the polls....John Kerry is going to lose to a President that has botched things so badly it's going to take a generation to straighten it out.

Ouch.

I think this is far too pessimistic, however, and the alleged 11% lead in the polls doesn't really exist. As has been widely discussed in the blogosphere, at least two polls that gave Bush large leads asked uncertain respondents ("leaners") to make a choice. They were "pushed" not to select "undecided" or "no opinion." There are some other good reasons relating to sampling errors that cause one to believe that the reported 11 point lead is baloney.

John Kerry faces only one meaningful poll in 2004: the one conducted nationally on the first Tuesday in November. Meanwhile, plenty of polls have this as a 1 or 2 point race. Personally, I check the Rasmussen daily tracking Poll....well, daily. Right now, as of yesterday's polling, the race is Bush 47.3%, Kerry 46.4%.

From the "horse race" perspective, plenty of good and bad things could happen to either candidate from this point forward. There are still going to be 2 or 3 debates and a swing of a few points after a debate is nothing.

At best, the current odds of Bush winning are probably something like 52-48. They may be more like 51-49. It may be even.

Given that this race is virtually tied, the horse race metaphor really doesn't work too well, especially as we head "down the stretch."

I suggest a new metaphor: the coin flip. Given what happened in 2000, and what seems to be happening in 2004, this is likely the appropriate way to look at the election.

It is a tossup.

Pakistan

Recently, India and Pakistan have been negotiating about the fate of Kashmir. The long-disputed territory, of course, was the trigger for a couple of wars between these states. The material conditions have changed since both states are now nuclear armed.

On September 22, Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh are slated to meet in conjunction with a UN General Assembly session. Glancing through the regional press reports, it does not appear as if anyone is particularly optimistic about the various meetings.

The US, of course, has a keen interest in the future of Pakistan, which means it should be very interested in the resolution of the dispute about Kashmir.

After all, Pakistan relies upon militants to put pressure on India in the negotiations about Kashmir -- and the Pakistanis holding the most militant views towards Kashmir are also the most likely to be anti-western (and potential al-Qaeda members or sympathizers).

Consider this from Ahmed Rashid, in a July 2004 Smithsonian story (warning: pdf) on Pakistan:

“Musharraf has promised to clamp down on all militants operating in Pakistan. But in reality, two different things are going on. The army is trying to eliminate Al Qaeda, foreign militants who are in Pakistan to fight a global jihad against America. But the army is not trying to eliminate Pakistani militants who want to fight India in Kashmir. The army wants these domestic Kashmiri militant groups to pause their activities, but it doesn’t want to dismantle them yet in case negotiations with India fail. Unfortunately, Al Qaeda and our domestic militant groups are deeply embedded in each other. So the army’s policies are pushing in two opposite directions at the same time.”

Rashid continued:

“The [Pakistani] army is trying to distinguish these sectarian groups from the ones fighting for Kashmir and go after them. But because all these groups—Al Qaeda, the sectarian groups and the groups fighting in Kashmir—are interrelated, it’s hard to do."

Jessica Stern of Harvard emphasizes the critical importance of Pakistan in US foreign policy:

"What happens in Pakistan in the coming months and years will have an enormous impact on the lives of ordinary Americans. If it chooses, Pakistan can greatly facilitate the war on terrorism but it can also facilitate the growth of al Qaeda worldwide."

It sounds like Hassan Abbas' book, Pakistan's Drift into Extremism: Allah, the Army and America's War on Terror is worth reading.

The Smart Meme

"In these times, do you really want a President who wasn't smart enough to get out of going to Vietnam?"

Rob Corddry, The Daily Show, 9/13/04

I think I got it word-for-word.

Colin Powell speaks

Colin Powell emerged from wherever he was during the Republican National Convention and said the following recently:

1. About Iraqi WMD:

US Secretary of State Colin Powell, who made the case to the world that pre-war Iraq had stocks of chemical and biological weapons, says he now thinks these will probably never be found.

"I think it's unlikely that we will find any stockpiles," Mr Powell told US lawmakers....

As early as January Mr Powell had said it was an "open question" whether or not such arms would be found.

He conceded the possibility Iraq might not have had any when the war began.

2. On Kerry and the "war on terror":

On NBC's "Meet the Press," Mr. Powell said he could not predict how Mr. Kerry would respond to a terrorist incident were he president but said he did not think the Massachusetts Democrat would react nonchalantly.

"As commander in chief, I think he'd respond to it in a robust way," said Mr. Powell, who later added: "No commander in chief, no president of the United States, would not respond to terrorism. Now, how he would respond, what strategies that individual would use - I can't predict the future."

3. On the Saddam-al Qaeda link:

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, appearing on NBC's "Meet the Press," said he had "seen nothing that makes a direct connection between Saddam Hussein and that awful regime and what happened on 9/11."

I'm still angry about the UN briefing, but it is good to see that Powell is trying to recover his image.



Notes: Hesiod of Counterspin Central is back! Like a lot of other bloggers, he's been focusing on the Bush Guard memos revealed last week by CBS News.

I miss Billmon.

Kerry Needs This Commercial Message

The President, surprising as it might sound, wants to play the game "what if..."

Specifically, Bush asks, "What if John Kerry had been President instead of me?"

As anyone knows, this has implications for US policy toward Iraq. Indeed, this was the main theme of the President's recent campaign stops, as chronicled by the Washington Post:

President Bush charged on Friday that Saddam Hussein would still be ruling Iraq if John F. Kerry's view had prevailed, as the Bush campaign continued to press its case that Americans should not trust the Democratic presidential nominee to keep them safe...

"If he had his way, Saddam Hussein would still be in power and would still be a threat to the security and to the world," Bush said.

You want more, right?

How about four more?

IAEA and other UN inspectors would have determined that Saddam Hussein was disarmed.

1000 mostly young Americans would be alive today.

American credibility on the world stage would not be devastated.

Al Qaeda might be in deep trouble, as resources would not have been diverted from Afghanistan/Pakistan to Iraq.

Psssssssst: Kerry campaign, this is a frame you can use, with a little effort.

What we cannot have is this, also from the Post story:

Kerry, who voted to authorize force in Iraq but now calls it the "wrong war" and has had difficulty clarifying his view, has "more different positions than all his colleagues in the Senate combined," Bush added.

It's time to run a commercial directly on-point to this argument. Here's my suggestion:

"I'm John Kerry and I approved this ad.

I want to take two minutes to explain my position on the war in Iraq because the President is doing his best to distort it.

In October 2002, I did vote to authorize the President to use force.

The intelligence community had produced what many saw as dramatic new evidence that Iraq was pursuing weapons of mass destruction. Most members of Congress thought the President should have the authority to use force against Saddam Hussein's regime -- if necessary.

However, as that resolution made clear, the Congress wanted the President to work with US friends and allies to build a large coalition to take on Saddam Hussein. Congress called on the President to work with the United Nations Security Council promptly and decisively to ensure that Iraq promptly complied with its past promises to disarm.

And that diplomatic approach was working. By March 19, 2003, when the President initiated the Iraq war, international weapons inspectors had already reported their free reign to inspect any suspicious facilities in Iraq. Inspectors accurately reported that Iraq had no nuclear weapons program.

Yet, the White House decided to ignore this new evidence.

In the war resolution, Congress authorized the President to use his judgment to determine if the US must use force against Iraq to protect the national security of the United States. Before going to war, the President was supposed to determine that diplomacy had failed.

The truth is that diplomacy had not failed by March 19, 2003, and I agreed with most diplomats at the UN and throughout the world that the unimpeded inspections should continue.

Inspectors were beginning to make it clear that Iraq did not pose an immediate threat to American security. In fact, to start this war, invaluable intelligence assets and special forces were withdrawn from Afghanistan and Pakistan where they were critically needed. Worse, it turns out that virtually all the intelligence the administration had trumpeted over the previous months was almost completely wrong.

It is obvious President Bush made a horrible error in judgment by invading a country that posed no immediate threat to America. He started the wrong war, at the wrong time, in the wrong place.

I do not claim that I knew all this in October 2002, when I voted at the President's request to give him the authority to use force if necessary.

However, I do claim that I would have known better than to leap into a regrettable war in March 2003.

The war on terror is going to be a long and difficult fight. It is critical that your President makes the right choices along the way. President Bush has already committed one tremendous error in judgment. Do we want to give him the chance to make another?

Granted, it would take 2 minutes, but it would be cash well spent.

The Chicken, or the Egg?

The past few weeks, I've been completing my paper for the October meeting of the Working Group on Preemptive and Preventive Military Intervention, which is under the auspices of the University of Pittsburgh's Ridgway Center for International Security Studies.

My paper directly examines the important question the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence decided to avoid: Did the Bush administration misuse the Iraq WMD intelligence available to them?

Supposedly, the Senate Intell Committee, along with the presidentially appointed bipartisan Robb-Silberman panel, will be reporting on this question in 2005.

I'm tentatively ready to report some results now.

Even though I focused on the nuclear intelligence (it's only a 30 page paper), it is fairly clear that the administration ignored caveats in the Iraq WMD data, distorted the meaning of some of the most critical intelligence, and outright lied (misspoke?) about several very specific points.

My paper should be available soon as a Working Paper at the Ridgway website.

In any event, while writing, I spent a lot of time thinking about a point made in the end material to the Senate Intell Report, by Democratic Senators John D. Rockefeller IV (Vice Chairman of the Senate Committee), Senator Carl Levin and Senator Richard Durbin.

Vice President Cheney was saying worrisome things about Iraq's WMD program in August 2002, Condi Rice warned about smoking gun mushroom clouds in early September, and President Bush spoke to the UN on the 12th of September -- but the intelligence community didn't start producing a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) until requested by members of Congress in mid-September 2002 and did not complete it until October 1, 2002. Moreover, if you really look, you can find some members of the Bush administration hyping Iraqi WMD throughout 2002.

The December 2001 NIE, which should have been dispositive at the time the political figures were speaking, was consistent with prior NIEs, which did not much worry about Iraqi WMD. This is why Colin Powell, for example, could dismiss Iraq WMD threats in 2001, before 9/11.

From 1998 through October 1, 2002, the intelligence community simply did not produce a comprehensive assessment saying that Iraq had reconstituted its nuclear program. However, look at the dates on these quotes, all of which are cited by Rockefeller, Levin and Durbin:

“[Saddam Hussein] is a dangerous man who possesses the world’s most dangerous weapons.” (President Bush, Press Conference, March 22, 2002)

“But we know that Saddam has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons…Many of us are convinced that Saddam will acquire nuclear weapons fairly soon.” (Vice President Cheney, Speech to the VFW’s 103 rd National Convention, August 26, 2002)

“We do know that there have been shipments going… into Iraq, for instance, of aluminum tubes that really are only suited to – high-quality aluminum tools that are only really suited for nuclear weapons programs, centrifuge programs.” (National Security Advisor Rice, Late Edition, September 8, 2002)

“Very likely all they need to complete a weapon is fissile material – and they are, at this moment, seeking that material – both from foreign sources and the capability to produce it indigenously.” (Secretary Rumsfeld, Testimony Before the Senate Armed Services Committee, September 19, 2002)

“[Iraq] has weapons of mass destruction. And the battlefield has now shifted to America…” (President Bush, Remarks at OHS Complex, September 19, 2002)

"We know they have weapons of mass destruction. We know they have active programs. There isn’t any debate about it.” (Secretary Rumsfeld, DoD News Briefing, September 26, 2002)

Here's the Rockefeller, Levin and Durbin claim:

In the months before the production of the Intelligence Community’s October 2002 Estimate, Administration officials undertook a relentless public campaign which repeatedly characterized the Iraq weapons of mass destruction program in more ominous and threatening terms than the Intelligence Community analysis substantiated....

These high-profile statements in support of the Administration’s policy of regime change were made in advance of any meaningful intelligence analysis and created pressure on the Intelligence Community to conform to the certainty contained in the pronouncements.

Worse, it now seems apparent that the intelligence about the WMD programs really wasn't new, justifying a change. Instead, at the very moment the Bush administration was hyping intelligence that had not yet been collected into a NIE, the NIE in preparation was changing to reflect the overblown rhetoric:

As the Bush Administration prepared for war against Iraq in the fall of 2002, the Intelligence Community judgments on Iraq shifted significantly from many of the corresponding assessments contained in earlier analytical products.

The Senators conclude that intelligence analysts were both directly and indirectly pressured to produce a report that hyped the dubious intelligence.

I ignored the question of pressure and simply pointed out that the claims did not reflect the intelligence judgment at the time they were made -- and were also far more certain and misleading than the NIE that was produced.

It's a very good reason to dump Bush. Remind your skeptical friends. BTW, Sundance is running the documentary "Uncovered: The Whole Truth About the Iraq War." It'll be on TV Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, then again near the end of the month.

It is happening again

As reported in the Christian Science Monitor, Colin Powell said something today that no member of the Bush administration has said before:

US Secretary of State Colin Powell, testifying in front of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Thursday, said the situation in Darfur [Sudan]...qualified as "genocide." It was the first such declaration by a member of the Bush administration

Is it happening again?

And by that, I mean is the US (and the rest of the world) sitting back and watching a genocide, without doing much of anything to stop it?

The UN set Aug. 30 as a deadline to get the Sudanese government to disarm the Janjaweed and bring them to justice, but so far the international community has not levied any sanctions. Thursday, Powell upped the ante.

"The US will propose that the next UN Security Council resolution on Sudan request a UN investigation into all violations of international humanitarian law and human rights law that have occurred in Darfur, with a view to ensuring accountability," he said.

The State Department said in a report released Thursday that the 1,136 interviews by US officials with Darfur refugees revealed a "consistent and widespread pattern of atrocities committed against non-Arab villagers." He said the evidence corroborates the specific intent of perpetrators to destroy a "group in whole or part" - using language from the 1948 genocide text.

Short version: we know enough to call it genocide, but we are still only going to recommend more study rather than action to stop it.

"Accountability" means paying for crimes after they are committed. Dick Cheney just argued that Bush administration foreign policy was pro-active, and wouldn't rely upon dated legalistic approaches regarding "criminal attacks." Of course, he was talking about terrorists striking the US, but really, what's the difference?

Innocent civilians in the Sudan are being brutally terrorized.

In the Presidential debates in 2000, Al Gore said that he regretted that the US didn't send more US troops in faster to provide "humanitarian relief measures" while hundreds of thousands of people were killed in Rwanda.

Asked the same question, George Bush said he would not have intervened to save even 600,000 people because no vital American interest was at stake. Sadly, the Clinton/Gore administration seemed to agree with this perspective at the time of the killings -- but Clinton apologized for the tardy action in March 1998.

In March 2004, Kofi Annan also apologized for the international community's "sins of omission."

As the neocons in the Bush administration have long argued, the US is the most powerful state in the world. If it says genocide is occurring, then it has a moral obligation to do something with that power to stop the crimes against humanity, even if the international law is too weak to force such action.

Visit the Amnesty International website for more information about the scope of the problem:

The reality in Darfur is that war crimes and crimes against humanity are committed with impunity and attacks by government-supported militias and government troops have led to the displacement of at least 1.2 million civilians within Darfur and an additional 200,000 refugees in Chad.

While humanitarian workers struggle to save the lives of the displaced, men, women and children remain at risk of attacks, including killings, rape and torture, by the very militia and government troops that forcibly displaced them.

The International Crisis Group provides an outline of what must be done:

History has shown that Khartoum will respond constructively to direct pressure, but this pressure must be concerted, consistent and genuine. Its sixteen-month ethnic cleansing campaign has elicited a slow-motion reaction, which is having a negligible positive impact and in some ways has made matters worse. Despite a series of high level visitors to Khartoum and Darfur, including UN Secretary General Kofi Annan and U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell, the Sudanese government has yet to fulfil its repeated commitments to neutralise the Janjaweed militias responsible for much of the violence. The international community has yet to make clear, as it must, that there will be a decisive cost to Sudan for that failure.

At minimum, tens of thousands of lives are at stake.

It is truly a global emergency of the first-order.

The Human Rights Watch webpage has a collection of very troubling photos.

Public Accountability

Act I, The Dark Lord talks out of the side of his mouth:

During a question-and-answer session with about 200 supporters at a Des Moines hotel, the vice president said that it was imperative that the nation made the "right choice" in November, adding that decisions made by the next administration would affect the next 30 or 40 years.

"If we make the wrong choice, then the danger is we'll get hit again and we'll be hit in a way that'll be devastating from the standpoint of the United States, and we'll fall back into the pre-9/11 mind set that these terrorist attacks are criminal attacks and we're not really at war," the vice president said.

"I think that would be a terrible mistake for us," Cheney told the supporters.

Act II, the young master faces the fiefdom's scribes:

Bush refused to answer questions from reporters. He simply stared at a reporter who asked if he agreed with Vice President Dick Cheney's assertion that if Democrat John Kerry is elected, "the danger is that we'll get hit again" by terrorists.

Close: The multitudes gasp -- and then snicker.


Anyone know how to find an Air Guard unit in Boston?

Thanks to Campaign Extra! for the Yahoo! link and to Brad DeLong for the Globe pointer.

Pakistan denounces US disinformation

From the disinfopedia on-line encyclopedia:

Disinformation is deliberately misleading information announced publicly or leaked by a government, intelligence agency, corporation or other entity for the purpose of influencing opinions or perceptions.

Why am I bringing this up? Well, I think I found a textbook example.

Yahoo! News has a Reuters story today with this headline: "Pakistan: U.S. Official's Osama Claim Was 'Political.'"The latest story references news reports from a few days ago quoting a US counterterrorism official who claimed that the capture of Osama bin Laden might be near.

This was total disinformation, according to Pakistan:

Pakistani media Sunday quoted Cofer Black, State Department coordinator for counter-terrorism, as saying that the United States and its allies have put the al Qaeda leader on the defensive, increasing chances of his capture soon.

But Pakistani Information Minister Sheikh Rashid Ahmed said Black's remarks were a "political statement."

"We don't have any information about that," Ahmed told Reuters by telephone from Saudi Arabia where he is accompanying Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz on an official visit.

The remarks, as Reuters points out, came just a couple of days after President Bush "said that three-quarters of known al Qaeda leaders have been captured or killed."

Oh, did the US media covering the story provide this detail, which I found by a simple google search?

Ambassador Black has had a distinguished 28-year career in the Directorate of Operations at the Central Intelligence Agency.

That's from Black's official bio on his State Department webpage.

This is about to get ugly

The leftcoaster has some detail about the "Clinton takeover" of Kerry's campaign.

Personally, I think it is a good idea to make this election a referendum on Bush. However, I'm not sure it's a good idea to focus, laser-like, on the economy. Iraq and security matter a great deal in the post-9/11 world and Kerry needs to make this election a referendum on Iraq too.

Sometime soon, the 1000th US soldier will die in Iraq. I'm guessing the media is going to say something about that.

Then again, they might be completely muddied from the crap that's about to start flying. Only click this link if you want to see the ugly future.


Updates: Sadly, 8 US soldiers died in Iraq Tuesday and the 1000 threshold was crossed.

Re: the Mud. If you want to watch some video and read some venom, Digby has it.

The Hurricanes

Hopefully, everyone in Florida survived the storm and can soon start putting their homes and lives back together.

With two serious storms already in the books this season and more potentially on the way...is it OK to talk about the "big picture?"

What do I mean by that?

Well, in the big picture, scientists have been saying that global climate change (espcially warming) caused by human activity (from burning fossil fuels) significantly intensifies the strength of storms -- and increases precipitation.

Seriously.

I'm certainly not alone in thinking about Hurricane Frances and global warming. The British newspaper, The Independent, reported Sunday:

...experts are getting increasingly worried. Last month beat all previous US records for big hurricanes and tornadoes, and equalled them for tropical storms. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), part of the US government's Department of Commerce, said that this was partly due to a warmer Atlantic Ocean.

One of the world's leading authorities predicted two more big hurricanes before November's presidential election. And things are expected to get worse as global warming takes hold.

NOAA's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, based at Princeton University, says on its website: "The strongest hurricanes in the present climate may be upstaged by even more intense hurricanes over the next century as the Earth's climate is warmed by increasing levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere."

Floridians, in other words, are apparently suffering much the burden of the harm caused by more than a century's worth of industrialization.

At least one American paper has picked up this thread as well. The Wilmington Star, which is a North Carolina paper, editorialized Friday:

As ferocious Frances bears down on the East Coast, it's hard to dismiss the fear that gloomy scientists have been right: global warming is making hurricanes worse.

Perhaps John Kerry's advisors can start inserting more language about global warming and the need for the US to return to the international negotiations about this issue.

The Wilmington Star again:

If that's so [the idea that global warming is causing hurricans to be worse], we can't do anything about it at the moment. But we could do something about it in the future. We could take effective steps to reduce the burning of fossil fuels, which sends heat-trapping gases soaring into the atmosphere.

President Bush has opposed such steps in the past. He's ignored the Kyoto treaty, opposed higher fuel-efficiency standards for automobiles, and encouraged the burning of more oil and coal. He's not likely to change his mind.

Maybe this is just on my mind as I spent many hours last week editing my coauthored book chapter on US foreign policy and the Kyoto Protocol. It'll be in the next edition of Ralph Carter's text.

Blog anniversary

Friday was the first anniversary of this blog.

About 25,800 visitors have checked in since September 3, 2003.

Thanks!

Do the math and that works out to about 70 readers per day.

However, a substantial number of the total visits came when a few high profile bloggers linked to one of my posts (especially the one on the forged Niger documents).

Moreover, for the first few months, I rarely had more than 30 readers per day.

These days, I am genuinely averaging close to 70 readers/day, Monday through Friday. Weekends, about 40 of you check in daily.

Thanks again, loyal readers (and random visitors). It has been a good year and I intend to keep doing this for the foreseeable future.

With the home stretch of the presidential election coming up, to be followed by Iraqi elections, an official "independent" report about whether the WMD intelligence was inflated by the administration...and my own sabbatical, it should be an exciting next few months.

Media: Ask Bush/Kerry this Question

John Kerry made it clear a couple of weeks ago that he would have voted for the October 2002 Iraq resolution even if he knew what we all seem to know now (I hedged because of Dick Cheney and others with great delusions): Iraq had no WMD and no link to al Qaeda.

Many on the left hated his rationale, but I think it makes sense (for Kerry). The resolution gave the President greater authority at the UN. With the threat of force looming, Iraq was highly motivated to open itself to international weapons inspections.

The inspectors were learning a great deal, but had not finished their job when Bush and Blair went to war. Despite what Bush has claimed on a couple of occasions, they were not seriously impeding the inspections.

So, here's the question of the day for both candidates: Would you have started war on March 19, 2003, had you known then what you know now?

Kerry's answer is clearly "no." In fact, he said months ago he wouldn't have gone to war. Kerry would have allowed the inspectors to continue their work, sought greater cooperation with US allies, etc. Thus, even with ambiguity about Iraqi WMD, Kerry would not have gone to war so hastily.

I think Bush would still say "yes," even knowing there was no WMD or link to al Qaeda. That's why he keeps emphasizing how important it was to topple Saddam Hussein.

Yet, even Paul Wolfowitz says that the human rights rationale was insufficient.

Can't this be reframed as one ENORMOUS disagreement between Kerry and Iraq that helps explain their positions in a nutshell?

Bush was reckless and wrong.

Kerry wanted to be cautious and right.

That's a $200 billion difference in perspective, costing also 1000 American lives, 1000s of Iraqi lives, American credibility around the world, and who-knows-what in terms of the diversion of resources from the real war on terror.


Note: minor edits for clarity on 9/6/04

The Reckless CEO

In addition to being an expert on the Middle East, University of Michigan historian Juan Cole is also a talented election strategist and blogger. Here's part of his excellent post about the 2004 incumbent candidate for President:

If you think about George W. Bush as CEO of America, Inc., it becomes clearer why his poll numbers have been so low (low to mid forties) in the run up to the election. No president with those kinds of poll numbers in the spring before the election has ever won.

Bush's basic characteristic is not steadfastness, as the convention attempted to argue, but rashness. He is a gambler who goes for the big bang. He loses his temper easily, and makes hasty and uninformed decisions about important matters. No corporation would keep on a CEO that took risks the way Bush has, if the gambles so often resulted in huge losses.

Let us imagine you had a corporation with annual gross revenues of about $2 trillion. And let's say that in 2000, it had profits of $150 billion. So you bring in a new CEO, and within four years, the profit falls to zero and then the company goes into the red to the tune of over $400 billion per year. You're on the Board of Directors and the CEO's term is up for renewal. Do you vote to keep him in? That's what Bush did to the US government. He took it from surpluses to deep in the red. We are all paying interest on the unprecedented $400 billion per year in deficits (a deficit is just a loan), and our grandchildren will be paying the interest in all likelihood.

This is an excellent metaphor and could be put to great use by the factions opposed to CEO Bush.

Unfortunately, I think there is a major flaw in Professor Cole's analysis.

What if the members of the Board of Directors personally profited from the $400 billion debt? That is, company profits were shifted in an unprecedented way from the company coffers directly to the pockets of the major shareholders represented on the Board?

So far, the media hasn't much noticed, the SEC isn't on the company's back, and the coast may well be clear for another round of debt-related profiteering.

In that circumstance, the Board might well vote to renew the CEO's contract.

Which is why this company really needs shareholder initiative. Of course, many of the shareholders also received small checks over the past 4 years too -- and many of them have no intention of cashing in their investment. Company stock may be down, but the dividend checks keep coming.

So what, these shareholders might think, if they are passing along a worthless investment to their grandchildren? The $400 dividend check from the company helped buy a new sofa last year, and a similar one next year might even pay for a new home theater system.

Cole goes on to extend the analogy to Iraq, and I think it works, but the alternative candidate for CEO surely needs to emphasize more clearly that his agenda is more than just "not-Bush." The "ABB" approach may garner strong support from the rank-and-file base, but could well fall short for the shareholders who don't pay much attention to company politics and don't really follow the news about Mesopotamia all that much either.

Can American Handle the Truth?

I've seen one of the new Swift Boat Vet ads and I'm not sure they're worried too much about "the truth" anymore. John Kerry's voice could be heard throughout the ad, detailing allegations about atrocities by American troops in Vietnam.

Then, one-after-another, Veterans appeared quickly on screen to point out that Kerry was saying things that they refused to say in Vietnam, even when they spent years as POWs inside Vietnamese prisons. Kerry's words, they allege, helped the enemy and undermined the American soldiers fighting in Vietnam. Ann Coulter would probably call it treason.

Nobody, in the part I heard, said that Kerry was lying.

In fact, Kerry wasn't even making the allegations himself. He was talking about statements he had heard other veterans make at some of the anti-war events he had attended, including one large meeting in Michigan that included lots of unhappy Vietnam Vets:

...I am not here as John Kerry. I am here as one member of the group of 1,000 which is a small representation of a very much larger group of veterans in this country, and were it possible for all of them to sit at this table they would be here and have the same kind of testimony....

Here's the part of the testimony that the Swifties are quoting selectively:

I would like to talk, representing all those veterans, and say that several months ago in Detroit, we had an investigation at which over 150 honorably discharged and many very highly decorated veterans testified to war crimes committed in Southeast Asia, not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command....

They told the stories at times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war, and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.

We call this investigation the "Winter Soldier Investigation." The term "Winter Soldier" is a play on words of Thomas Paine in 1776 when he spoke of the Sunshine Patriot and summertime soldiers who deserted at Valley Forge because the going was rough.

Aren't some of those 150 soldiers around to defend Kerry?

Yes, they are.

If I were a journalist, I'd ask Colin Powell and other Americans who served in Vietnam if the charges Kerry relayed are true. Isn't that what these ads are supposed to be about?

The truth.

The SBVT, however, cannot ask these questions because they already know the answers.

American troops did commit war crimes in Vietnam. Very serious war crimes. And much of it was official policy.

Here's a bit about My Lai, from the PBS website:

On March 16, 1968 the angry and frustrated men of Charlie Company, 11th Brigade, Americal Division entered the village of My Lai. "This is what you've been waiting for -- search and destroy -- and you've got it," said their superior officers. A short time later the killing began....

As the "search and destroy" mission unfolded it soon degenerated into the massacre of over 300 apparently unarmed civilians including women, children, and the elderly. Calley ordered his men to enter the village firing, though there had been no report of opposing fire. According to eyewitness reports offered after the event, several old men were bayoneted, praying women and children were shot in the back of the head, and at least one girl was raped, and then killed. For his part, Calley was said to have rounded up a group of the villagers, ordered them into a ditch, and mowed them down in a fury of machine gun fire.

Like Abu Ghraib, the army wasn't too eager to report this atrocity to the world:

Word of the massacre did not reach the American public until November of 1969, when journalist Seymour Hersh published a story...

One isolated case, you say? Well, what do you know about the Phoenix Program? Former CIA Director William Colby revealed that US political and leaders ordered Americans to do some very nasty stuff in Vietnam:

In 1967 the CIA's Far East Division of Clandestine Services developed a program that came to be known as Phoenix. The program entailed a coordinated attack by all South Vietnamese and American military, police and intelligence units against the infrastructure of the Viet Cong. CIA funds served as the catalyst for the project. William E. Colby played the key supervisory role in its implementation. In 1971, Colby revealed that between 1968 and May 1971, the Phoenix program led to the death of 20, 587 persons in Vietnam.

Here's what Senator John Kerry told Tim Russert about this program on "Meet the Press" in 2001:

we, the government of our country, ran an assassination program. I mean, Bill Colby has acknowledged it. We had the Phoenix Program, where they actually went into villages to eliminate the civilian infrastructure of the Vietcong. Now, you couldn't tell the difference in many cases who they were. And countless veterans testified 30 years ago to that reality. And I think--look, there's no excusing shooting children in cold blood, or women, and killing them in cold blood. There isn't, under any circumstances.

Kerry said something in this interview that I think his advisors need to take to heart NOW. If the Swifties want to make this election about Vietnam, then the Democrats need to make it about what the lessons of Vietnam mean for today:

People made decisions based on their perceptions of the world at that time. They were in error. They were judgments of error. But I think no purpose is served now by going down that road. I think, you know, the rhetoric of youth and of anger can be redeemed by the acts that we put in place after time to try to move us beyond that. And I think there are great lessons to learn from it. But we would serve no purpose with that now. But we have to be honest about the mistakes we made. We don't have legitimacy in the world, Tim, if we go to other countries, in Bosnia or China or anywhere else, and not say, "You know, we made some terrible mistakes."

And that honesty, that lack of a sense of honesty is part of what is driving people's anger toward the United States today.

This interview was from spring 2001, long before the Iraq war, and the world is much more pissed now.

Remember what Karl Rove said about Abu Ghraib?

Karl Rove, the president's chief political adviser, has told one Bush adviser that he believes that it will take a generation for the United States to live this scandal down in the Arab world

Geez, the Republicans have practically handed Kerry this issue on a silver platter.

Kerry is a smart guy and he's been through these attacks in virtually every election he's ever ran. I think he's a strong closer because voters ultimately connect with what he's saying about these issues once the other side has thrown the mud.

Personally, I hope a talking head asks Kerry and Bush about this stuff in the forthcoming presidential debates. Ask Bush to talk about Abu Ghraib and Kerry to talk about atrocities in Vietnam. I wonder if Bush even knows about the Phoenix Program?


Note: If you have a lot of time, go read some of the Church Committee documents from 1975 and 1976. Senator Frank Church investigated the illegal actions of America and it wasn't a pretty picture. The US did some very nasty things, assassinating leaders, attempting to topple democratically elected governments (Iran, Guatemala, Chile), experimented on Americans with drugs, illegally monitored political enemies inside the US, etc.

A lot of original documents about Phoenix have been declassified as well and are available on the web.

Kerry at the VFW

John Kerry gave a speech to the VFW today.

Rhetorically, I think Kerry started strong by pointing out his congressional commitment to veterans issues -- and the failures of the current White House to assure adequate pensions and health care. Kerry also talked about his work with Senator John McCain on the MIA question in regard to Vietnam.

Then, Kerry moved to a powerful critique of the US military strategy in Iraq:

The Army Chief of Staff General Shinseki told Congress we would need several hundred thousand American troops to win the peace and do the job properly. His candor was rewarded with early retirement and his advice ignored, sending a chilling message through the ranks of the professional military.

By dismissing the State Department’s plan for post-war Iraq and proceeding unilaterally, the civilian leadership simply did not put the mechanism in place to secure the country. They were unprepared for the looting, insecurity, and insurgency that burst out with the fall of Saddam’s regime.

They failed to secure Iraq’s borders, and so allowed thousands of foreign terrorists, Islamist militants, and intelligence agents to penetrate and destabilize post-war Iraq.

Amazingly, they had no real plan for post-war political transition. All of this happened despite clear and precise, bipartisan, warnings from Congress, and regional experts.

Kerry next pointed out that this was followed by a series of terrible decisions by the civilian leadership.

I'm sure this will be the most quoted part of the speech:

...when the president says we have the same position on Iraq, I have to respectfully disagree. Our differences couldn’t be plainer. And I have set them out consistently. When it comes to Iraq, it’s not that I would have done one thing differently, I would’ve done almost everything differently.

Here's the list of things Kerry said he would have done differently. It's a powerful critique:

I would have relied on American troops in Tora Bora when we had Bin Laden in our sights. I never would have diverted resources so quickly from Afghanistan before finishing the job.

I would’ve given the inspectors the time they needed to do the job.

I wouldn’t have ignored my senior military advisors.

I would’ve made sure that every soldier put in harm’s way had the equipment and body armor they needed.

I would have built a strong, broad coalition of our allies around the world.

And, if there’s one thing I learned from my service, I would never have gone to war without a plan to win the peace.

The bottom line is that if I don’t believe we had to be shouldering nearly the entire financial cost of this war – more than $200 billion – and shortchanging investments in education, health care, and our safety at home.

Finally, before turning briefly to some domestic issues, Kerry explained what he would do differently from this point forward:

We need to bring our allies to our side, share the burdens, reduce the cost to American taxpayers, and reduce the risk to American soldiers. And together, we need to more rapidly train Iraqi police and military to take over the job of protecting their country. That's what I’ll do as Commander-in-Chief – because that’s the right way to get the job done and bring our troops home.

In an interview two days ago, the President said we can’t win the war on terror. I absolutely disagree.

Note: Kerry mentioned McCain a second time late in the speech, in the context of passing the Arizona Senator's reforms to end corporate welfare.

Also note, the RNC press release lamely says Kerry "flip flopped" on the VFW by writing this in 1971:

"We will not quickly join those who march on Veterans Day waving small flags, calling to memory those thousands who died for the 'greater glory of the United States.' ... We will not readily join the American Legion and the Veterans of Foreign Wars."

Do you think they know the meaning of "quickly"? It's been 30 years, Kerry is actually a veteran of a foreign war. As an American he was free to protest that war in 1971. And now he's free to put the past behind him (as McCain has urged) and try to improve the world.

Is Kerry the only person who opposed the Vietnam war, opposed the way the Iraq adventure was bungled, but still wants to see Iraq made secure?

Meanwhile, in response to criticism of his saying earlier this week that the US cannot win the "war on terror," Bush "clarified" and is back to saying the US can win after all.

A clear flip flop, in just a few days!