Category Archives: Politics

Running on Empty

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How the hell does one possibly move yet another book on the Bush administration? I am thinking here of Robert Draper’s newly released Dead Certain (see the Washington Post write-up, Abramowitz, Michael, “Book Tells Of Dissent In Bush’s Inner Circle,” 3 September 2007, p. A1). What more is there possibly to reveal? That the administration is a dysfunctional cage match between a bunch of 800 pound gorillas, that the President is too immature and clueless to exercise any adult-like responsibility over the mess, that the interagency process has been completely trampled under their turf wars, that this or that decision was taken with almost no consideration, or in complete disregard for all of the consideration that had been shunted aside, that yet another swath of officials turns out to be half-wits placed for fealty to some right-wing mania, that yet another critical governmental function is being run into the ground, that the good of the nation has yet again taken a backseat to partisan gain? Sacrebleu! Say it ain’t so!

I suspect that as the archives are opened up and as the perspective of history comes to fruition, rather than the Bush Presidency being vindicated an entirely new level of tawdriness and tragedy will be revealed. But until that day comes, each new gloss on the subject seems to be subject to the diminishing returns of our depleted capacity for another round of outrage.

The metaphor here is so addled that it is hard to believe this is the guy who invented the internets, but as Al Gore said in a recent interview (Born, Kim, “Man on a Mission: Al Gore,” 02138 Magazine, September / October 2007, p. 84), he is feeling it too:

I have a lot of friends who share the following problem with me: Our sense of outrage is so saturated that when a new outrage occurs, we have to download some existing outrage into an external hard drive in order to make room for a new outrage.

On the one hand, it is incumbent upon the left to keep up a relentless focus on the dysfunction of this administration and its master ideology. This is what framing looks like and the moment that it flags, the right-wing revisionism will start in. But on the other hand, instead of another book or expose article, I just which they would hand out a rod to every American to bite-down on for the next year and a half.

Ten More Years in Iraq

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As the September date for the report on the effects of the surge in Iraq approaches, the right has been ginning up the rhetoric over what happens if the United States withdraws from the country. But almost no symmetrical consideration is given to the scenario of what happens if the United States stays. “The surge is working; we need to give it more time,” or “The United States is making progress in Iraq; our soldiers need to be given the opportunity to finish their mission there,” or some such thing is what one hears. But that’s more or less the extent of the scenario for staying. So we stay. But what then? The way the dialog around the issue is happening it’s as if deciding to continue in Iraq means the surge will get another four or five months and then … and then … and then thoughts trail off.

But war opponents should point out that the calculation isn’t withdraw, genocidal civil war ensues versus stay, no further conclusion. Some people are thinking about what staying in Iraq means and it’s not what anyone signed up for back in 2003.

For instance, the Washington Post reports on the findings that Representative Jan Schakowsky (Democrat-Illinois) brought back from her recent visit to Iraq (“ After Iraq Trip, Unshaken Resolve,” The Washington Post, 26 August 2007):

Rep. Jan Schakowsky made her first trip to Iraq this month, the outspoken antiwar liberal resolved to keep her opinions to herself. “I would listen and learn,” she decided.

At times that proved a challenge, as when Deputy Prime Minister Barham Salih told her congressional delegation, “There’s not going to be political reconciliation by this September; there’s not going to be political reconciliation by next September.” Schakowsky gulped — wasn’t that the whole idea of President Bush’s troop increase, to buy time for that political progress?

…

But the military presentations left her stunned. Schakowsky said she jotted down Petraeus’s words in a small white notebook she had brought along to record her impressions. Her neat, looping handwriting filled page after page, and she flipped through to find the Petraeus section. “‘We will be in Iraq in some way for nine to 10 years,’ ” Schakowsky read carefully. She had added her own translation: “Keep the train running for a few months, and then stretch it out. Just enough progress to justify more time.”

“I felt that was a stretch and really part of a PR strategy — just like the PR strategy that initially led up to the war in the first place,” Schakowsky said. Petraeus, she said, “acknowledged that if the policymakers decide that we need to withdraw, that, you know, that’s what he would have to do. But he felt that in order to win, we’d have to be there nine or 10 years.”

And Ted Koppel relates a private conversation in which Senator Clinton relates some of her thoughts about staying on in Iraq (“A Duty to Mislead: Politics and the Iraq War,” National Public Radio, 11 June 2007):

I ran into an old source the other day who held a senior position at the Pentagon until his retirement. He occasionally briefs Senator Clinton on the situation in the Gulf. She told him that if she were elected president and then re-elected four years later she would still expect U.S. troops to be in Iraq at the end of her second term.

Ten years. Is anyone prepared for another ten years in Iraq?

If the United states were to stay in Iraq for the next ten years, that would make it by far the longest war in U.S. history, nearly twice as long as the Vietnam war (168 versus 90 months). Say we simply project forward the current casualty rate. There are all sorts of problems with this, but also some reasons that this is probably a pretty good basis for such a calculation. Today the confirmed total U.S. killed is 3,724. So if the United States stays in Iraq for the next ten years the total by then will be 13,000 Americans killed. The cost of the war to date has been $450 billion. A simple linear projection puts the cost at the end of the next ten years at $1.5 trillion, which would be not bad considering some have been projecting $2 trillion.

Those are the costs to the United States of staying. Iraq Body Count puts total Iraqi deaths since the onset of the war at 70 to 77 thousand. In another ten years that would amount to between 245 and 270 thousand Iraqis killed. But Iraq Body Count only tallies directly reported deaths in the English language media and requires two independent sources before counting a death, so this is a very conservative number.

A quarter of a million Iraqis may be killed even if the United States stays in Iraq. War supporters talk of a bloodbath that will ensue if the U.S. withdraws. Do they think that it will be worse than a quarter of a million? And if they do think that it will be a worse number, can they really argue that by reducing the death toll from their hypothetical number to a hypothetical quarter-million, the U.S. will have prevented a tragedy?

But who knows what could happen. The insurgency might radically accelerate. The U.S. could be drawn into a war with Iran; that could spread to Afghanistan. Pakistan might be destabilized by all this. The Saudis could intervene in Iraq. Turkey could go to war with a Kurdistan hiding under the skirt of the United States. Or things might improve. Judgment about the future is difficult. But the debate should cease to be between the options of withdrawing and terrible consequences versus staying and don’t think any further about it.

Update: Kevin Drum (“Nine or Ten Years,” Political Animal, The Washington Monthly, 26 August 2007) has been reading Michael O’Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack ‘s Iraq visit report (“Iraq Trip Report,” Brookings, August 2007) and Messrs. O’Hanlon and Pollack’s prediction for the surge is,

Over the long term, the United States must be looking to draw down its force levels in Iraq overall — probably to 100,000 or fewer troops — by about 2010/2011.

That’s two and a half more years at current force levels. Then we can go back to what was, prior to the surge, merely a heightened troop presence for an indeterminate period of time. Mr. Drum points out, “that suggests he doesn’t think total withdrawal will happen until, say, 2016/17 or so. In other words, nine or ten years.” Mr. Drum also points out that historically prolonged counterinsurgency wars have had negative consequences for nations prosecuting them.

2008: Even the Worst Case Scenario is Rosy!

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Clinton vs. Giuliani, Hillary Clinton wins 335 to 203

I’m going to post an electoral map and some bean counting because I know this is one of Kyle’s favorite subjects and I am hoping to tempt him out of his quietude with a delicious helping of red and blue.

Chris Bowers at Open Left has crawled the recent polling data and — all appropriate qualifiers about people not tuned in yet and a lot can happen between now and then — compiled the current outcome of what he thinks is a strong Republican-weak Democrat match-up. In Clinton vs. Giuliani, Hillary Clinton wins 335 to 203. In Clinton vs. Romney it is a Hillary Clinton electoral landslide at 430 to 108.

As Mr. Bowers puts it (“Two General Election Maps,” 23 August 2007),

… it is important to keep in mind that Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani are the two frontrunners for the Republican nomination right now, and that Hillary Clinton is supposedly the least electable Democrat of the four early state candidates in double digits. To put it another way, this is supposedly the worst-case scenario for Democrats right now. On top of this, what do you think will happen to either Giuliani or Romney’s numbers when, for nine consecutive months next year (February 6th through Election Day), they are on every media possible, every day, arguing that we don’t need to withdraw any troops from Iraq?

Call me permanently bearish on the Democrats, but it is not only the Republicans who are going to have to endure nine consecutive months of media coverage. What’s going to happen over those nine months is that, nomination in hand, the Republican will tack back towards the center and dissemble and equivocate on the Iraq issue while the Democratic candidate offers elaborate justifications of policy positions, long-winded explanations on the difficulty of carrying out a withdrawal, et cetera until the average voter cannot tell the difference between the two policy positions. Meanwhile, as the above depicted outcome becomes more clearly fixed in the mind of the right-wing machine, they will be driven to ever greater acts of desperation. For instance just yesterday we were reminded that Democrats were at fault for the Cambodian genocide.

State Resource Acquisition

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As long as I am kicking Thomas Barnett, I should mention his article on the creation of AfriCom in the July issue of Esquire (“The Americans Have Landed,” Esquire, vol. 148, no. 1, July 2007, pp. 113-117, 134-137). It generated a bit of attention when it first came out (e.g. Plumer, Brad, “Surging Into Africa” and “More on Africa Command,” both 24 July 2007; Farley, Robert, “Africom,” TAPPED, The American Prospect, 24 July 2007; Yglesias, Matthew, “Africa Command,” The Atlantic.com, 24 July 2007).

Mr. Barnett pushes around a few theories about why AfriCom, but dismisses my own (“AfriCom: The New Scramble for Africa,” smarties, 1 May 2007) with some hand-waving:

There’s oil here, but the United States would get its share whether Africa burns or not, and it’s actually fairly quiet right now.

The Chinese are here en masse, typically embedded with regimes we can’t stand or can’t stand us, like Sudan and Zimbabwe. But the Chinese aren’t particularly liked in Africa and seem to have no designs for empire here. Beijing just wants its energy and minerals, and that penetration, such as it is, doesn’t warrant Africa Command, either.

The theory by which Mr. Barnett dismisses the idea that AfriCom is an economic-strategic countermove against China is that it’s unnecessary because we can all get access to the recourses we demand through the market. The problem with too facile a dismissal of this theory is that states have never wholly committed themselves to one theory of resource acquisition.

Throughout most of history governing institutions have been mercantilist and have lived by beggar-thy-neighbor. The way that a state and its clients acquired resources was by seizing them. It was only with the advent of modern liberalism that a firm division between the state and the economy emerged, but it was a slow process and up through the Second World War many a state pursued a policy of economic expansion through conquest. It was widely believed by many liberals that imperialist and economic competition was the cause of the First and Second World Wars. Hence at the end of the Second World War the United States decided to root out imperialism and replace it with a global system of open markets. Henceforth states would get out of the business of resource acquisition and it would be an entirely private activity conducted through the peaceful means of the market, not conquest. Roosevelt hated imperialism and sought to smash the European and Japanese colonial empires and made decolonization a central mission of the United Nations. Also GATT and the belated WTO were to be integral parts of this new liberal international system on par with the United Nations, the IMF and the World Bank, to prevent war and ensure smooth, open economic access — missions perceived as integral to one another by Roosevelt and his men.

But this liberal vision was a utopian fantasy of a sort in that states were never about to wholly abandon the economic foundation of their strength — and hence their survival — to the vagaries of the market. So states have wavered between theories of resource acquisition: open markets versus conquest.

The United States has been the most advanced liberal state and in the Twentieth Century became the guarantor of system of open markets. The majority of the military actions of the United States have been in support of this global system of markets. Nearly all of its interventions in Central America have been over worries that some critical resource was about to be removed from apolitical market access by a populist socialist. The U.S. intervened in Second World War Europe — among other reasons — to prevent Hitler from doing to the United States what Napoleon attempted to do to England with his continental system. The U.S. tempted Japan to war because it was unthinkable to the U.S. and other interested parties that Japan should monopolize the resources of half the Pacific rim and half of Asia. For nearly inverse reasons the United States went to war in Vietnam because it recognized — as demonstrated by Japan’s behavior leading up to the Second World War — that Japan’s economic interest in Southeast Asia was too significant for the resources of that region to fall behind the iron curtain (there were two contending world systems at that time). The First Gulf War was to prevent the emergence of too powerful an oil monopoly — sort of the Pentagon doing to greater Iraq what the FCC did to Ma Bell in 1982.

The United States is not about to trust its economic wellbeing to serendipity: it’s going to manage it — and that means a lot of things, but one thing that it means is the military. But the United States is acting — in part — on behalf of the liberal international order. That the U.S. is required to intervene as much as it does — or perceives that it has to — suggests that a lot of states the world over still want to lapse from the open market back to conquest as a means for laying hand on their necessities. On the other hand, perhaps the U.S. is a player, only posing as the referee the better to play (Calvinball?).

In Africa it may be the case that the liberal order can provide everyone what they want — or at least everyone doing the divvying up; whether the parceling of Africa’s resources will have any benefit for the Africans themselves remains to be seen. But no state — not even the primary advocate and guarantor of the liberal international order — is about to stake its future on the hope that unfettered market access is going to play out in a straightforward way (I’ve written about this before; see “China’s Strategy for Resource Competition,” smarties, 30 March 2005, bullet two). Even in this world of open markets — or especially in this world of open markets — sanctions and economic exclusion have always played a role. So states make nice and play the diplomatic game of tit-for-tat, preparing to clamp down should the time come. Favors are proffered and chits collected — for a rainy day. A few military bargains will be struck and maybe some men and hardware will be put in place so that everyone knows how things stand. No state is going to idle while a positive sum game plays out against its favor. In the event of a crisis, states are either the quick or the dead. In Africa what we are seeing is the laying out of the pieces on the board and the early maneuvers.

Where Your Boots Go, There Your Mind Will Be As Well

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I think the proper way to think about our situation in Iraq is this. It may be true that many vile consequences may ensue in Iraq should the United States withdraw. But the options aren’t that the U.S. armed forces save Iraq from itself versus U.S. soldiers go back to sipping cool lemonade in the backyard. It’s entirely possible that the choice is between staying in Iraq or preventing the next September 11th.

Al Qaeda and their ilk have a grand strategy. They are not going to match their weakness against our strength. This is not the Fedayeen Saddam. They are not about to try to engage the Fourth Mechanized Infantry in Toyota pickup trucks. The Liliputian terrorists will bind Gulliver, overwhelm us with distractions, mire us in a series of diversions. Having no commitments, no obligations of their own, they will then match the nimbleness of al Qaeda against the encumberment of the United States. As Osama bin Laden himself has said, “All that we have to do is to send two Mujahideen to the furthest point East to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al-Qaida, in order to make the generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic, and political losses without their achieving for it anything of note …”

My ever so slight sampling of the zeitgeist says that we are working our way toward a condition — material and of mind — not unlike that in the late 1990s and early 2000s as the country slouched toward September 11th. Dangerous and anarchic regions of the world are spreading, extremists are gathering strength, plots — one can imagine — are unfolding. Nothing less than the most recent NIE has suggested that the terrorist threat is growing, not waning, and that al Qaeda is gaining strength. Just as after the Cold War the United States was unable to heed the warning of both events and the prognostications of certain elites, so George Bush has the put the country into a trance of Iraq focus. Despite a changing threat profile, we can’t think about anything else. Already al Qaeda and Co. have pivoted. New threats are in the making, but mired in the thought of post-September 11th and Iraq — the irony here is too much — we are incapable of conceptualizing or doing anything to prevent the next September 11th.

The right has argued that in the post September 11th world, the old Cold War system of long-term alliances like NATO is obsolete, that the United States needs to remain nimble, to rely on ad hoc coalitions of the willing. And yet in Iraq the United States has permanently bound itself in a coalition of the compulsory. That broken statue of Hussein was the signing ceremony and there is no nullification clause in the treaty. In Iraq the United States stepped into a bear trap and it closed on our foot. It’s going to hurt and it’s going to be bloody, but its time to gnaw that foot off and hobble free — before the trapper comes to claim our pelt.

Neocons Love Hillary

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As if it weren’t enough that business loves Hillary, she’s William Kristol’s top Dem as well. As he tells the Washington Post (Kornblut, Anne E., “Clinton’s Foreign Policy Balancing Act,” 7 August 2007, p. A4):

Obama is becoming the antiwar candidate, and Hillary Clinton is becoming the responsible Democrat who could become commander in chief in a post-9/11 world.

It’s not exactly an endorsement, but as Matthew Yglesias points out (“Clinton Wins Coveted Bill Kristol Endorsement,” The Atlantic OnLine, 7 August 2007), when Bill Kristol says you’re the war candidate, you’re the war candidate.

And if you need still more, at today’s debate she lambasted her opponents for being too open with the electorate and the world about their foreign policy objectives:

Well, I do not believe people running for president should engage in hypotheticals and it may well be that the strategy that we have to pursue on the basis of actionable intelligence — but, remember, we’ve had some real difficult experiences with actionable intelligence — might lead to a certain action. But I think it is a very big mistake to telegraph that, and to destabilize the Musharraf regime which is fighting for its life against the Islamist extremists who are in bed with Al Qaeda and Taliban. And remember: Pakistan has nuclear weapons. The last thing we want is to have Al Qaeda-like followers in charge of Pakistan and having access to nuclear weapons. You can think big, but remember you shouldn’t always say everything you think if you’re running for president, because it has consequences across the world. And we don’t need that right now.

Of course, this sentiment won’t stop Senator Clinton from posturing on trade issues at the expense of Chinese sensitivities — the Chinese being an economically precarious leadership similarly likely to react poorly to too loose a U.S. tongue. And despite the fact that once in office a Hillary Clinton administration — or any other Democratic administration — will immediately revert to the same policy of economic liberalization that the U.S. has pursued toward China for the last 35 years, the campaign will discount future foreign policy damage for a few populist points at home with a clear conscience.

Bread and Circus Versus Nuts and Bolts

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The New York correspondent for the U.K Independent opines on the latest symbol of the decline of the United States and the means by which voters are kept distracted (Usborne, David, “Baseball and Bombs Get the Cash — Bridges Are Just Dull,” 6 August 2007):

You don’t have to visit this country for long to see how its transport infrastructure has deteriorated since the interstate system was built by Eisenhower in the Fifties.

Never taken that pot-holed ride from JFK to Manhattan? Fasten your seatbelts for more turbulence. Or covered your ears in the screeching tunnels of the city’s antiquated subways? As for a cross-country ride on Amtrak, good luck.

Money here tends to flow towards items that make the pulse race. That would be elections, wars and that other national passion, sports. If there was a World Cup for baseball – rather than the so-called World Series in October which involves only the US and Canada – then finding decent venues would barely be a problem. Name a big city that doesn’t have a brand new, state of the art stadium it wants to show off.

Actually, that would be New York. But that is about to change. Its two major baseball teams, the Yankees and the Mets, are in deadly competition right now and not just to land places in the World Series play-off games this autumn. It’s about which of them can get their spanking new stadium finished first.

That’s right, while the Brooklyn Bridge gathers rust (yes, it is on the critical care list), somehow this city is building not one but two baseball stadiums barely six miles from each other, one in the Bronx, the other in Queens. It doesn’t matter that the teams have perfectly good places to play for their fans already. They are not flashy enough.

Increasingly circus is not merely some free-standing distraction, but conjoined to the very decline it serves to dissemble.

Airport Security

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The last time I traveled was to Thailand in November-December 2006, shortly after the binary liquid explosive scare and new screening procedures for carrying on liquids, gels, etc. had gone into effect. Prior to that, a number of work related recruiting trips were instructive. We always brought two fingerprinting kits that use a heat-sensative red ink that turns black when you stick the fingerprint cards in a panini-grill like heating element. The units are rather expensive and were critical to our events, so we always carried them on the plane. The person who carried the unit was always pulled aside to the special extra procedures area and questioned by security. They always inspected the units and on more than one occasion swabbed them for any traces of explosive materials. While I think the whole airport security routine is a farce and studies indicate that people can still pretty effectively sneak banned items onto planes, I have hitherto thought that I had been given a pretty thorough going-over.

My impression from my most recent experience is that airport security has seriously lapsed. On this trip I was somewhat careless about metal and liquids when I packed and was carrying a router, its power adapter and thirty feet of coiled ethernet cable. I thought that surely I would be required at least to take a few things out of my bag, but no. We all went through screening extremely quickly and I was just rushed right along with nary a question. The special screening section behind the partition wall seemed like it may be growing spider webs.

After I got through, I was sufficiently struck by it that I asked S., a gargoyle always heavy-laden with personal electronics. She had gone through a separate screening station and concurred that it seemed that things had gotten pretty lax. At Sea-Tac there was a person putting out a little effort to make sure that personal electronics and liquids were out of their bags and in separate bins, but things didn’t seem much better there.

America’s Revolutionary Guard

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J.K. Rowling suggests a difference between the Christianists in the United States and those of other countries (“J.K. Rowling Reflects on Fame, Fans and Harry Potter,” The Associated Press, 19 July 2007):

I had one letter from a vicar in England — this is the difference — saying would I please not put Christmas trees at Hogwarts as it was clearly a pagan society. Meanwhile, I’m having death threats when I’m on tour in America.

Of course, even the letter from the vicar is preposterous as European Christians appropriated the decorated pine tree as part of the symbolry of Christmas from early European pagans in an attempt to compete with preexisting celebrations long before — fictional, mind you — pagans reappropriated the tree to themselves.

Money is always a compelling issue — witness our China policy just for starters — and we’ve got a lot of it so people have to deal, but I wonder at what point the rest of the word declares the U.S. a bunch of incorrigible kooks and throws up their hands? Will the day come when a foreign author simply avoids the United States market, when an author is subject to the Salman Rushdie treatment in the United States? One can already almost see the analogy between the United States and Iran. A young, costal, cosmopolitan elite committed to freedom and secularism oppressed by a self-appointed and semi-officially condoned bunch of religious thugs. I can almost hear the first report of a Christian enforcer throwing acid in the face of a feminist on a book tour.