Mission Not Accomplished

A little more than a decade ago our nation blundered into one of the biggest foreign policy disasters in its history. In a place where Marcus Licinius Crassus  and Flavius Claudius Julianus Augustus (Julian The Apostate) came to grief the United States of America found out that the waters of Babylon are still just as treacherous as they were in ancient times.

While the Iraqis did not manage to turn George W. Bush into a wall decoration like they did to Publius Licinius Valerianus Augustus (Valerian) they did make The Shrub a by-word for gross incompetence.

But it take a village to make a village idiot. George W. Bush had a lot of help in making the mess in Mesopotamia. The nifty Neocon idea of overthrowing Saddam Hussein and installing “freeeeedom!” had its roots all the way back in the reign of Bubba. It was the Big Dog that made it official U.S. Policy that Saddam be show the door.

President William Jefferson Clinton never did put a “sell by” date on the idea of regime change in Iraq, making the notion more of a wish than a serious consideration. In the wink and nod game that was Oil For Food, Saddam’s family made out like the bandits they were, and the Iraq people got stuck with the bill. The regime did not change, Saddam was still there-- larger than life and twice as ugly.

Still, in the U.S., the damage was already done. The official policy of the U.S. was regime change. The policy laid on the table like a loaded gun in a Chekov play; and wouldn’t you know there was just the political actor more than willing to use that gun.

That man was not Incurious George, the upwardly failing Scion of George H. Bush, but Richard V. Cheney, the other dry drunk in the Administration. A man whose sole purpose in life seems to be to prove the cliche that “Truth is stranger than fiction,” Cheney’s fingerprints can be found all over the Iraq invasion.

Cheney was a NeoCon in good standing and has a huge chip on his shoulder going all the way back to the Nixon Administration. Being a big fan of the Imperial Presidency Cheney was itching to restore the overarching power of the executive and had found his sock puppet in that endeavor; Bush the Younger.

Cheney proceeded to set up WHIG, the White House Iraq Iraq Group, a cabal/conspiracy to find a casus belli for war with Iraq. By cherry picking raw intelligence Cheney was able first convince Bush and then the nation that the Mushroom Cloud was coming to a neighborhood near you if Saddam was not put to bed and pronto.

Thanks to Osama bin Laden and his unhappy campers toasting marshmallows in the mountains of the Hindu Kush, Cheney and Bush had the set up they needed, the 9/11/01  Terrorist Attack on the U.S. In a rush of hyper-patriotism, anger, and desire for revenge the U.S. Public was sold a bill of goods: the Iraq War.

If one can be dispassionate about such things, one can admire the evil genius of Cheney and Bush. Cheney created the policy and Bush sold it. Give The Shrub his due, the man played hardball politics like no other man in office of President since LBJ. He placed the feckless Democratic opposition in a no-win political vice and kept tightening it. Even bright, dedicated Senators who should have know better, yes Hillary Clinton I am talking to you, voted for the war. The dereliction of duty by the Legislative branch was both nauseating and utterly predictable. Bush was riding sky-high polls and the 4th branch of government, the check that was supposed to be the Media, was AWOL or worse a 5th columnist collaborator in the rush for war.

A few words on the press. The abject failure of the press to do its job, to apply even a soupçon of skepticism to the Bush Administration’s talking points was appalling. They also saw those sky-high Bush approval ratings and had no stomach to do their job, to act as a seawall to the jingoistic tsunami that Bush was creating. Instead, for ratings, they decided to join the flag waving and the general blood-lust of the moment. Thus was paper-thin evidence like the aluminum tubes , Yellow-cake uranium from Africa, and mobile Anthrax Labs given a pass. Stories that would not pass muster in a Bond film, that is in fiction, were treated as infallible doctrine handed down by the deity and the host of angles.

But a strange thing happened on the way to be showered with flowers and kissed by a grateful Iraqi people; the whole thing went to hell in hand basket. The unwarranted and reckless rush to war turned sour. Shock and Awe did not turn the natives into pliant supplicants to our Imperial will. The coalition of the Willing was found wanting. There were not enough troops on the ground for a proper occupation, and it only got worse from there.

The outright waste and theft allowed by Paul Brener’s house of horrors, otherwise known as the Coalition Provisional Authority, was a case study in how not to rebuild a nation. Lead by a hodgepodge group of NeoCon goof-balls and Libertarian Wing-nuts, the CPA was Grover Nordquist’s wet-dream of government drowned in a bathtub. It was glorious, right up to point when the IEDs started exploding. To this day Iraqis still fear the things that go boom in the night, and the afternoon, and the morning. To this day the Iraqi still suffer from a lack of government, living in a twilight Mad Max land where the gun and the bomb are law.

The government is still a shambolic mess. The Kurds have gone their way, the Sunni Triangle is still a hot mess, and the Shias are divided amongst themselves. In the middle of the maelstrom is the U.S., still not really gone. The more obvious symbols of U.S. Hegemony gone horrible wrong are gone, the hundreds of thousands of U.S. military are gone, but don’t be fooled, 17,000 diplomats are still hunkered down in the world’s biggest embassy. There also are some 5,000 mercenaries, oops sorry “Security Contractors”, running around, hell for leather, in the land of the two rivers adding to fun and frolics.

So forget all that nonsense about how Obama has ended the war. The withdrawal was negotiated by Bush, with a end date certain. Obama tried to weasel out of that by changing the SOFA, but in a rare display of independence the Iraqi government said “no.” Obama continues to run that Embassy of 17,000 personal, and to hire those, cough, cough, “Contractors.”  We are no longer waist deep in the gore of Iraq, but we are still at least ankle deep if not shin deep. Happy tenth anniversary, mission still not accomplished.

Remembering The Veteran.

As always, this one is for “Uncle Dick.”

Another Veterans day is upon us, the Eleventh day of the eleventh month of the year. This year we celebrate it a day later than usual. And this year, on the Monday set aside for such remembrances, it is again fitting to consider the service our veterans have rendered, and what we own these men and women.

We owe more than poppies or pancakes at Denny’s, we own them our due consideration and support. We owe them the support we promised them when they went off to fight fort our nation. It’s more than just honoring the hallowed fallen. It’s more than marching in a parade.

The dead do need remembrance, but more important is remembering the living. We have to remember that war not only breaks nations, it also breaks people. It breaks them mentally, spiritually, and physically. We have a duty to due our best to heal those wounds.

This is especially true of our wars of choice: of Iraq, of Afghanistan. The nation via the Bush Administration has been derelict in it’s responsibilities. I speak of the horror show that was Walter Reed.

I also speak of other ways we have failed our Veterans and are still failing them. We must remember how we, yes all of us, let the Cowboy in the White House send our men and women ill prepared to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan. We must remember how Bush, and now Obama,  fought those wars on the cheep. We must remember how Bush refused to supply the right kind of helmet to our war-fighters, and how that $800.00 per person “saving” contributed to the signature injury of Iraq-- traumatic brain injury.

For those men and women who suffered that signature injury their lives were altered in ways both significant and tragic. The simplest of tasks became a mountain to climb; cognition was gone, motor skills shot.

And it was not just physical injuries that affected the minds of our service members. Multiple deployments, and the PTSD that attend the reality of war, have caused psychic harm that has yet to be fully understood. Our leaders sent mentally ill men and woman back to the war zone loaded up on ferocious medications; just to fill the manning hole. Those men and woman, scarred multiple times on multiple deployments, are now expected to rejoin society.

Some of them are already not fitting in. They are joining one of the greatest disgraces our nation allows: Veteran Homelessness. Of all the hurts and insults we as a nation inflict on our Veterans, this one, homelessness has got to be the worst. These men, and it is by a large margin men, we used up and then disposed of like so much trash. We see them on our street corners, we see them on subway grates, we see them camped out in public parks, we see them-- but we don’t. We allow them to live their solitary lives, wrestling with their inner demons, and do so little to truly help them.
Only recently has the VA found the funds to help a small section of the homeless veterans. A one hundred million dollar fund has be set aside for the purpose of helping the homeless find real lodging. It’s a good start, but let’s be honest, it’s a drop in the bucket. The DoD probably spends more on office supplies and office furnishings in a year than what we are spending on homeless veterans.

My greatest fear is that with the war in Iraq wound down, and Afghanistan headed the same way, even this small gesture of concern for our wounded warriors will evaporate like dew on a hot August morning. There are hundreds of thousands of men and women wounded in mind and body from the wars of Bush and Obama. There a millions of men and women injured from wars past. Our record of assisting them has been mixed at best.

On this Veteran’s Day let us recommit our selves to our service members. Let us not only remember the fallen, but those who, to a fashion, survive. Let us do what needs doing and insist that our government give them the due consideration their sacrifice entails. We owe our veterans so much, let’s start paying what is owed.

Further Thoughts On Kandahar

In response to this: http://bit.ly/MassacreInKandahar

Cujuo359 Said:

"The problem with the Bush Administration was that they had no respect for the role of government. They didn't see it as important here in America, where they felt that when it was a size we could drown in a bathtub, it was just big enough. They took that attitude into Afghanistan, and did almost nothing to help that government get itself re-established, nor did it try to establish an international caretaker government.

Then they went into Iraq. They were great at destroying the place, but they had no idea what it would take to rebuild it. That's largely because they didn't care.

Obama's failure was to not recognize that our potential for doing good had evaporated in both places. We should have left as soon as we could.

So, yes, failure on both their parts. It wasn't just a dithering response, though. It was truly not caring how things turned out, at least, not caring enough to find out whether anything would make it turn out well, and then telling the appropriate people the bad news when they realized it couldn't."

March 13, 2012"

Cujo359 is correct in many regard on these points. Still I find it necessary to perhaps illuminate some items man's best friend may have missed, or just did not want to delve in at the time.

Cujo359 is spot on about Bush being contemptuous of the role of government. What he did not point out is the ideology that provided cover for W's refusal to do any heavy lifting after invading Iraq. Bush and his cronies really bought into the Libertarian notion that the Market was the solution to everything.

God knows why Conservatives have so bought into the idea that private enterprise has the answer to everything. Thom Hartmann has some ideas about this, but it is still passing strange how the ideology that Hartmann outlines can be accepted as Gospel by thinking human beings. Even the most cursory glance at history shows that you can not have any kind of market, never mind a free one, without government providing some sort of base.

Be that as it may, the Libertarian propeller-heads that manned up the Iraq Occupation Authority were all gung ho to prove the notion that the market would solve all issues of governance in Iraq. A Iraq socialist society and economy was thrown to wolves by incompetents chosen solely for their fealty to Republican Party notions of governance.

Not surprisingly, with no one minding the store, corruption and graft became the order of the day. The vultures swooped in and began picking the place clean. Out-right theft was the order of the day, as Palets of hard currency were handed over without as much as a proper receipt. Bush could ignore the bad news, not only because that was his default, but also because he could always fallback on an ideological excuse. No need to intervene, the Market will sort this out, government intervention will only make things worse. Stay the course; it will all work out.

You can see the mindset of a no government intervention, the Libertarian mindset, even prior to the invasion. Rumsfeld rejected any kind of due diligence or planning for the Iraqi Occupation. Iraq was to be the great Libertarian proof that market driven government, laissez faire ideology on steroids, is best. Iraq was to be the shining beacon on the hill, Gault on earth, where all would bend their knee to the Sainted Ayn Rand, high priestess of Objectivism. It turned out to be a mess.

With all the mental energy going into the Randian project of Iraq, Afghanistan was abandoned to the fates. Bush and Cheney only bothered with Afghanistan because they had to. It was the prerequisite to their jolly little war in Iraq. Iraq got the troopers, and the one thousand support staff for the US Embassy; Afghanistan got Tora Bora.

Bush thoroughly screwed the pooch. It was gross negligence backed up by an ideology that "proved" that gross negligence was the best policy option available. This was the state of affairs when Obama took the helm of the Ship Of State. Here too is where I depart from Cujo359, which is weird, because I am ending up an even harsher critic of Hope On A Rope than Cujo359. This is not exactly and easy thing to do.

Be that as it may, I do have nothing but contempt for Obama's performance as regards to both Iraq and Afghanistan. How can a man with such an obvious intelligence as Barack has, slip into the group think that infests the fetid political swamps of the Potomac, is beyond me. How can you come out of Harvard and become so clueless? Or is that the whole point of Harvard, to inculcate a man or woman in to the mysteries of the Conventional Wisdom, and thus make that person just another mindless Pod Person in good standing with the political class?

If the goal of Harvard is to turn bright men and women into unthinking zombies wedded to the conventional wisdom, well, mission accomplished as far as Barack Obama is concerned. The man lacks an original thought in his head. An entire Winter spent contemplating options in the Graveyard of Empires, just to make the same kind of decision Incurious George would make in two seconds flat; change you can believe in boys and girls!

Obama followed the script laid down to him by grand consensus of the DC elite without even bothering to change an i or a t. He ignored the military as much as he could, without sparking an out-right mutiny, and he ignored the facts on the ground as best as he could as well. He kicked the can down the road to avoid the political repercussions of what really needed to be done: fish or cut bait.

The situation on the ground in Afghanistan was exactly what one would suspect after nearly four years of neglect and low priorities: an utter disaster. The Talaban were back bigger, badder than ever. The government of Hamid Karzai was a corrupt, disheveled, incompetent non-starter. The US troopers where burnt out from multiple deployments, and utterly cynical about the mission. The Afghan police and army were a disorganized, unprofessional collection of louts and layabouts, a menace more than a help to the civilians. In short, the best policy for Afghanistan was to walk to the exits as quickly as decorum would allow. But that would be toxic politics, and Obama is nothing if not a political animal.

Obama doubled down with his own Bushite Surge. True to form, the Surge, not really woking in Iraq, did not work at all in Afghanistan. It was a net loss all around; except to the Taliban, who had a gay old time running circles around the Coalition military.

That Obama did not see this coming, or that he pretended not to see it, are two equally hideous possibilities. Obama's failures frustrate me much more than Bush's. Bush was a man-child, a dry drunk with a mean streak, one can understand, if not approve, his lack of compassion for everyone caught in the meat grinder of Afghanistan. But Obama was supposed to be the smarter one, the intellectual, the cool, rational leader. Obama was supposed to occupy the higher intellectual and moral space. Instead, he carried on, continued the pointless war in Afghanistan. Obama even attempted to renegotiate the withdrawal from Iraq. After the epic mess Bush made, there was no way on God's good green earth that the Iraqi's were going to extend the SOFA with the US. Incredibly, Obama was even more foolhardy than Bush, who saw the writing on the wall and caved to the Iraqis.

To me, Obama is the prime example of what is wrong with our political class. He is a prime example of the intellectual and moral rot; of how the Establishment has corrupted and degenerated. With no real check on its enthusiasms, the political elite had become intellectually and morally flabby. The All Volunteer Military has released them to attempt all manner of hare-brained interventionist schemes. Because so few US citizens have any skin in the game of power politics, there is no accountability. If the troopers in Iraq and Afghanistan were draftees, the Bush and Obama Administrations would have been much more circumspect about how they went about their policies. You sure would not see the multiple deployments, and the traumatic brain injuries that are the signature outcomes of our two wars of choice. You might not have even seen a unthinking rush to war with Iraq if the Draft was in place. But there is no draft, so our clueless, incompetent, unthinking political class gets to charge off into any number of misadventures and then leave the bill for later generations to pay. Yes, war is always a costly and dirty business, but our political elites have found a way to make it even uglier, nastier, more brutal, and more pointless than it needs be.

On The Massacre In Kandahar

In the pre-dawn hours of Sunday, a US soldier stationed at a base in Afghanistan's Kandahar province allegedly launched a single-handed gun attack on nearby Afghan villagers.

BBC News

.....

Not to approve the action of this military member, but this was inevitable. Our military members are at their wits end. More that a few are being redeployed with serious mental health issued barely controlled by powerful psychoactive drugs. When a trooper has to be put on Zoloft to perform routine functions there is a serious issue going on.

The only reason we remain in the Graveyard of Empires is because our utterly corrupt and massively incompetent political class can not admit they screwed the pooch royally. Incurious George rushed into war to check off the required box named Afghanistan before he could engage in his hair-brained obsession of taking on Saddam Hussein.

The war in Afghanistan then degenerated on the back burner until Obama was handed the bag of loose scorpions and venomous snakes that was our military effort in Central Asia.

True to form Obama pondered and dithered and played Hamlet during the winter only to default the common wisdom (and campaign promise) of more of the same. Also true to form, Obama did not actually do what was required to secure the landscape. This is because the political class is unwilling to actually pay the full price of their interventionist mind set. They have learned the lesson of Vietnam but only partially.

Thus our totally inept political class keeps trying to do war on the cheep. They keep looking to quick fixes and technology to save them from the political consequences of their foreign affairs over-reach. Both Bush and Obama knew that what was really required, a call out of the draft, would have cooled the ardor of the American People– even in the high emotional state after 9/11/01. The call up of almost a million men and women would have given even the most ardent war proponents pause.

But we did not call up those one million men and women. We were not asked to for any type of sacrifice. We were asked to go shopping and let Dead Eye Dick Cheney and Incurious George handle the Global War On Terror; which we did like good little children.

So now we are being presented with the end game. We are being presented with the final bill for all the damages wracked up in our name by two utterly cynical Administrations. We are seeing only a small glimpse of the wreckage incurred, that of an utterly ruined and exhausted military. Still being tallied is the blow-back that will be incurred not only in Afghanistan but also in the Muslim World and in the developing world beyond that. Our name is mud.

Beyond that mess is the domestic damage done by the GWOT, now rebranded by Obama. We have allowed our government to degrade into a lawless, unaccountable oligarchy. Our civil rights have been shredded and our chief law enforcement officer, the Attorney General, has become a feckless political hack. The degradation of the AG to the subservient toddies that are Eric Holder and Alberto Gonzales is nauseating to behold. These political flunkies have lead the charge in cashiering our idea of the separation of powers; replacing it with the toxic Yoo-Holder theory of the Unitary Executive who acts as judge, jury and executioner.

I’ll put down the flame-thrower of invective–for now; but this incident reflects everything that is wrong with our nation and the political class that run it. That one soldier may have pulled the trigger for this awful incident, but there are plenty of accomplices that helped him to perform that act.

The Myth Of JFK And The Beginning Of The Cult Of Personality

I’ve been thinking about JFK. It all began as a sidebar conversation with one of my favorite blog buddies Cujo359. He wondered if the present generation of Kennedy generation was living up to the standards set by the Jack, Joe Jr. , and Ted. This progressed, or perhaps degraded, into a conversation about the relative merits of John F. Kennedy vs. Lyndon Baines Johnson.

It is brutally hard to do an honest accounting of the charismatic and martyred JFK vs the man who succeeded him. LBJ had none of JFK’s charisma, was quite the brutal SOB, and had the extra large albatross of the Vietnam War hanging around his neck. There is not much love for LBJ. Johnson’s legacy is also shorted because he exploited the death, and image, of his predecessor to twist the arms of politicians, and others, into supporting a specific agenda that was all LBJ, all the time. LBJ was quite complacent in the construction of the myth of John F Kennedy, as were others. I’m going to try to put down my flame thrower and attempt to deconstruct that myth, and its very real, very political effects.

There is a reason that I have to proceed with caution. There is a small cottage industry with the only object of buffing up JFK’s image to a lustrous shine. Topmost is the Kennedy clan. JFK is very much their holy relic, their entre’e into politics, and their get-out-of-jail-free card.

But they are not the only people out there constructing the myth. The Media loves the image of JFK. They love pulling the heart strings of the ill and uninformed. They love diving into the warm, deep,waters of Kennedy bathos and nostalgia. It is a sure-fire way of getting high ratings.

Then you have all the retainers and hangers on that surround the Kennedy clan. The actual people who were attached to Jack’s presidency are fading and passing away, but their are plenty of people willing and able to pick up the dropped banners and carry on the cause. Each and every one of these professionals has good reason to keep the myth of JFK alive, and at the forefront of people’s mind.

So what is the cottage industry at? What are they constructing? What is the product they are selling? It’s an image, carefully crafted, expertly preserved, and mostly bunk. It is the image of a young, vital president, dashing, brilliant and progressive. It is an image of a man of political courage. It is an image of man who brought about massive political and social change. It is an image of a champion for Civil Rights, and a champion of the poor and dispossessed. Most of all it is an image of a great life cut short, brutally ended by murder most foul.

Like any good myth, there is a small grain of truth, a core to build on. Jack Kennedy was charming, handsome, dashing and photogenic. He was the first politician who really understood the then new media of television, and exploited it to the hilt. He really knew  how to use the image of his family, the image of him as young Pater Familias, to great effect. But like much of the JFK mystique, the image and the truth of the matter are very different. JFK did have the beautiful wife, and the large brood of children, but the family dynamics were a lot worse than advertised.

I am not going to go into the long, sordid tale of JFK’s numerous infidelities, it is subject that is far too long to relate. JFK followed one of the iron laws of history and biography: men with out-sized charisma, and out-sized egos, have out-sized sexual appetites. There was a pretense of happily married man and wife. This type of hypocrisy was tolerated in the 1960’s. Even today, the visual image of JFK as virile and dedicated family man still trumps the reality of JFK’s serial, and sometimes reckless, sexual affairs.

And since we are, in a way, discussing JFK’s image of virility, now is as good a time as any to drill down into the reality of JFK’s health. Be warned it is not a pretty picture. I really feel for the medical professionals that had to deal with JFK. I also really feel for the patient who those professionals attempted to treat.

If there was one true cross JFK did have to bear, it was his bad health. Where to begin? Do I begin with his war injuries? If so, how deeply do I go in to the symptoms of his ruined back? I’m not going to go too deeply because it is a truly awful thing to contemplate. We are dealing with unbelievable pain and suffering; chronic in nature, with no real end in site. The heavy duty meds Jack was given were only palliative, they temporary eased the pain, but never dealt with the underlying medical issue. There were other work-arounds, other palliative measures, a laundry list actually, but they were equally unsatisfactory. For Jack Kennedy, and many others who shared his type of traumatic back injury, you don’t look forward to a cure to the condition, because the only real cure is the grave.

The back was only one of JFK’s problems. He also suffered from Addison’s disease. As this disease affects the bodies hormone balance, it causes a plethora of symptoms in the sufferer.  Unfortunately for JFK, he had to deal with this disease back in the days when the treatment options were just plain awful. Medicine has advanced since that time, and the management of Addison’s is quantum leaps better. In JFK’s time, the treatment for Addison’s had barely advanced from the stone knives and incantations stage. The health care professionals did the best they could with the tools provided, but JFK was often in ill health.

The contrast between the image of a young vital JFK, and the reality of chronically ill, and often debilitated man could not be more stark; yet we cling to the images of youthful vigor, while ignoring the medical reality. As with so much with JFK, image trumps reality.

Having dealt as best and sympathetically as I can with the actual man; let me attempt to deal with the politician as sympathetically as I can. Be warned though, in attempting any such consideration my default is, “results matter.” The one true light I will follow is what JFK achieved in his own lifetime; in his tragically truncated presidency. I am not going to deal with counterfactuals, with could-of, should-of, would-of. The only honest appraisal of any person, but especially a politician, is what they achieved during their time in office; not what was achieved after the fact.

By this measure I must be honest, it really does not look good for the home team. What JFK actually achieved while alive places him, for the most part, in the presidential category of “above average.” He was brilliant in the Cuban Missile Crisis, avoiding nuclear Armageddon, but domestically he was middling.

Granted I have the advantage of hindsight that JFK did not enjoy, but on the core moral issue of Civil Rights, both Jack an Bobby did not cover themselves in glory. They were an improvement over Ike, a step above, they did move the game forward, but not in the way that is now advertised.

Like Ike, the two brothers were mostly dragged into the Civil Rights struggle by other parties. Let us zero in on the Freedom Rides as a prime example. The brothers did everything in there power to make this issue just go away. In this regard they were not alone. Even Martian Luther King Jr. was initially opposed to the idea of the Freedom Rides. But the movement took a life of its own, and as it progressed the awful images of Freedom Riders being beaten, abused and harassed forced Jack and Bobby to do something. It became a matter of protecting US citizens right to life and limb. Jack and Bobby had to act in the face of Southern attempts to nullify Federal protections.

They did the absolute minimum. JFK and RFK negotiated a peaceful extraction of the first set of Freedom Riders from Louisiana and called it a day. But when the second set of Freedom Riders upped the political pressure, Jack and Bobby finally brought out the sledgehammer of Federal Power. This particular sledgehammer happened to be the ICC, but all the same it got the job done. The segregationists of the south howled in pain, but they were not about to challenge the brute application of Federal prerogatives.

JFK dedication to the advancement of Civil Rights is a fraught subject. He did make motions in that area. He did make incremental gains in Civil Rights during his time in office. Unfortunately, it gets really difficult to measure the real amount of political capital he invested, and was willing to invest, because LBJ muddied those waters so thoroughly after JFK was assassinated.

LBJ flogged the image of the holy, sainted, martyr for the last bit of political advantage possible. JFK might have set up the political chess board of Civil Rights, but LBJ and MLK pushed those pieces around to brutal effect. Both LBJ and MLK were grand masters of that political game. King provided the moral force and the outside agitation, wile Johnson provided the inside game of brow-beating and cajoling the Senate into action. Together they steamrolled the recalcitrant Dixiecrats in the Senate.

I just do not see the partnership of JFK and MLK working in the same way. Even if JFK did bring his A game to the effort, how does a second term of JFK match the first term of LBJ in effectiveness? LBJ had a deep knowledge of the Senate, he had a historic mandate after the1964 election, and he had the image of the martyred JFK to use as a holy talisman. Again, I just do not see either the Great Society, nor the Civil Rights happening as they did without that triple threat that LBJ brought to the political table. I sure do not see JFK racing ahead of MLK the way LBJ did.

I’m sorry this took so long. It has been a very long and twisted shaggy dog story; even for me. I’ll try to drive to end of this narrative as best as I can. History matters gentle reader, you can’t discuss were we are without setting up how we got here. I have spent an inordinate amount of time on the history and biography of JFK, on the chasm between that myth and that reality for a reason. I think that it is with Kennedy that our present toxic cult of personality in politics began. It is in the manipulation of image, the choice of surface over substance, that the John F. Kennedy myth began, that our present political woes find their source.

We have made this choice gentle reader, and we have doubled down on our preference for style over substance every time we, as a nation, have been offered the chance. We did it with Nixon, if barely, accepting a very complex and angry man as a moral defender of a mythical silent majority. We did it, in a way, with Jimmy Carter, thinking that somehow an “outsider” could cure all the ills of a post-Watergate USA. We really went in for myth when we voted for Don Renaldo; the sunny, affable cowboy who would make all things bright and shiny again. What Reagan actually did was a whole different matter, best left for a different discussion. With Pappy Bush, we took a bit of a breather before diving back into the calming waters of myth with the man from Hope. After Bill Clinton departed, we wildly gyrated from the faux cowboy presidency of Bush Jr. , who we could have a beer with, to the professorial Obama, who offered Hope and Change.

It is with Obama we have reached an apex of sorts. The myth of Obama, and the reality of his presidency have been at such odds, that to even contemplate such things brings on nose bleeds. As I would rather not bleed over my keyboard at the moment, I will let that discussion pass for now. I will also leave the epic cult of personality his supporters indulge themselves in for other times as well. Obama did not create the present cult of political personality, as much as he has both exploited it and enlarged it. The cult of personality is quite the 800 pound gorilla, is quite the dangerous, lumbering beast.

It is this tendency toward political cultism that I find so toxic. The willingness of voters to  cling to an image, while ignoring the reality beneath, is distressing. It becomes almost farcical when you look at the present election of 2012. The fluffing up of both WIllard “Mitt” Romney and Barack Obama by their partisans is disconcerting, to say the least. Both these men are ethically challenged empty suites, political operators and hacks. But to their supporters, they walk on water; and possess an overarching  competence that is sadly lacking in reality. It is all smoke and mirrors, and we are without Toto to provide the helpful parting of the curtain.

Sorry, to end on such a down note. Sorry, to end the discussion with such a flame-thrower of invective. Our nation is in a bad way, and our refusal to do the hard work of due diligence with our political class is a big part of why our nation is in such a lamentable state. What to do? What to do?

Caught Between Scylla and Charybdis

The news about President Obama's Guantanamo decision is not at all surprising. Yet again we see the price of dawdling and delay. Obama's cool, calm, and measured response to, well damn near everything, is a two-edged sword. Sometimes it is a good thing; it prevents the type of "leadership" that a John McCain or a George W. Bush indulges in. When your default is to think from the gut and/or run around like your hair is on fire, bad decisions will happen. McCain campaign was fatally damaged by the gut decisions of Sarah Palin as V.P. and the attempt by the McCain campaign to postpone the first debate. It looked less than an example of deliberate leadership than an example of a poorly run Chinese Fire Drill.

The reverse side of the coin is that sometimes, actually quite often, Obama has a deer-in-the-headlights moment. While he ponders the possibilities and muses about the best possible outcomes, the opposition runs over him like a big rig rolling over a hapless armadillo on a Texas highway. Gitmo is just one example.

Obama was handed an epic mess on Gitmo. It was a shop of horrors. It was illegal on various different fronts. It was a violation of our obligations as laid down by the Geneva Accords. It was a possible violation of the Fourth Amendment and other portions of the Constitution of the United States. The word "possible" is only used because the U.S. Supreme Court has yet to fully weigh in on Gitmo. The Court has had a few chances to step into the breach but has so far has artfully dodged the invitation. As a violation of common sense and morals Gitmo has few equals.

Gitmo was the Bush-Cheney hair-on-fire response to 9/11. Having been caught napping by Osama Bin Laden's not-so-happy campers, W and friends went on epic hunt for Al Qaeda types in the badlands of Afghanistan. The Bushies vacuumed up any male that vaguely resembled a terrorist. The operating parameters where imprison/snatch first, ask questions later.

The second problem with the operation was that the questions were asked much later. Not only was there a problem with the timing, there was a problem with the method. Charming methods like waterboarding, sleep deprivation, vicious dogs, temperature extremes, and others were used. The intelligence gathered by these methods was less than fabulous.

Even worse, the tactics looked very much like torture; this despite a get-out-of-jail memo written by a hack lawyer in the government's employ. The legal reasoning of John Yoo was straight out of opposite land. http://www.justice.gov/olc/warpowers925.htm . Yoo's memo was an argument that owed more the philosophy of the Divine Right of Kings, than to anything based in the constitution. It was a bad faith document designed to cover epic lawlessness, and set up a legal limbo on the island of Cuba.

That legal limbo was incredibly effective. For almost eight years many detainees rotted in prison, with absolutely no legal recourse to speak of. Bush was able to run out the legal clock, and hand over Gitmo, as is, with no warranty, to Barack Obama. Candidate Obama thought he had the solution to the clunker he was given; President Obama soon discovered that there was no such easy solution.

The major problem for the new President was that some of the detainees were honest-to-goodness bad guys. They were men whose whole reason for being was to harm the government of the United States of America, and its citizens. They could not just be set loose to cause grave harm. Thanks to Bush and Cheney, they could not be tried either. No self-respecting court in the land would hear the case. Unlike John Yoo, real lawyers know what constitutes torture; they know what constituted a perversion of justice. They would have no choice to dismiss the charges, with extreme prejudice. They would have no choice but to release the detainees due to governmental misconduct.

Such a result would be a disaster. It would release some seriously bad actors into the wild. Who knows what death and mayhem they would be able to commit before we could capture them again? Who knows if they could be captured again? There a lot of lawless places in the world where they could go to ground. So there is a legitimate concern for not letting them go—the protection of lives.

The legitimate concern of protection of lives also neatly dove-tails with the political protection of Obama's backside. Cynics may claim that this was the primary consideration of the Administration. If it was a consideration, it could not have been played any worse. Obama managed to enrage his left-wing base, and give the right-wing a treasure-trove of brickbats to toss at his head. His cautious and considered deliberations about the prisoners left the door wide open for Republican fear mongering. Gitmo was held up as the only facility that could possibly hold these nefarious, death-dealing, Islamic terrorists (be afraid, be very, very afraid.) Never mind that the Government has plenty of facilities that could securely hold these men. Never mind that it would be rather hard for these men to just blend in with the local populous, even if they managed to escape. Never mind that they would have an even harder time of getting out of the U.S. to join up with their fellows. No, the only place that could hold them was the P.R. disaster and legal black-hole of Gitmo.

Sad to say, but after a year of cautious plodding by the Obama Administration, and their utter failure to provide any pushback to the Right-Wing noise machine, almost 60% of the electorate now believes that Gitmo should remain open. Thus, once more, is the plodding Armadillo of Obama overtaken and crushed, by the tractor-trailer of the Republican Party. Caution and deliberation where overmatched by nimbyism and fear mongering. It only gets worse from here.

It gets worse because the Obama Administration has come up with an epically awful solution to the Gordian Knot that is the detainee issue. The solution that was worked out was to gather some more line, and add some half-hitches, a passel of tug-boat hitches, a Yosemite bowline or two, and nice hang man's noose to the mass. Such is the legal legerdemain that is the Obama proposal. Some detainees will be "tried" in New York City. It will be a wonderful bit of spectacle, worthy of Joe Stalin's efforts during the purges. It will be quite the gathering of Kangaroos. Other detainees will be delivered into the tender mercies of the Military Justice system, as further amended by a railroading construction known as the Military Tribunals. It is a form of justice so suspect, that Military Prosecutors have deserted the process in protest. No small feat that. But the lowest level of this legal hell will be occupied by forty some detainees. They will continue to be held without charge, without possibility of release, without any recourse whatsoever. So much for habeas corpus, so much for the Fifth, Fourth and Eighth Amendments, so much for the rule of law for these men; and so long to our legal protections as well.

This is the ultimate result of not understanding the difference between pragmatism and prudence. It is the result of not understanding the difference between what can be done, and what should be done. It is what happens when you let a convenient compromise cloud an inconvenient truth. Sometimes there is no "third way;" sometimes there is only the devil and the deep blue sea. The strictures of the exclusionary rule of the U.S. Constitution, and the precedent set by the Geneva Accords lead to only one correct solution to the issue of the detainees—release on their own recognacense. But what the law demands, neither domestic security nor political reality can abide. Thus the creation of a totally bogus process that gives the lie to the words "legal proceedings." As it is now constructed, it is a process that only a small coterie of Washington insiders see any value in. Everyone else holds the process in contempt. The right sees no need for the process in the first place. The accused are utterly evil, and should be left to fester in the hole they now find themselves. The guilt of these people is self evident, no trail is needed. The left sees the process as both pointless and evil. The rest of the unwashed middle wonder why the Administration is making such a fetish of a legal procedure that is obviously designed for the sole purpose of convicting the accused. They sympathize with the right wing mostly, if the end result is going to be conviction. "Why bother?" is the question they ask. It is a good question; what exactly is the point of Obama's fastidious procedure? What is the need for this thin white-wash of legal mumbo-jumbo, if the results are preordained? Is this just some pointless bureaucratic exercise so that some nameless Government drones can place a tick mark on some obscure check list? Are we doing this to provide cover for few functionaries deep in the bowels of the National Security Apparatus? Sure looks like it. Sure looks like a typical D.C. exercise in covering posteriors. It sure looks like a pointless, grubby, amoral and ultimately degrading farce.

Obama to allow the kangaroos to put on a show in the Big Apple

There are times a bleeding heart defender of rule of the law can only weep. This is one of them. Team Obama is going to follow the script laid down by Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney in their numerous movies: they are going to put on a show!

Granted this little bit of theater won’t be as hideous as the ones put up by Joe Stalin but any resemblance to legitimate and fair trial is purely accidental. Exactly where in the Big Apple will they managed to find twelve unbiased jurors?

Oh and let us not forget in times past no self-respecting judge would have allowed this trail to take place at all. The government’s case is poisoned by the massive misconduct of the Bush-Cheney administration. Talk all you please about “aggressive interrogation techniques” the accused were tortured and abused.

That core bit of prosecutorial misconduct can not be ignored. The massive violations of the norms of law have contaminated any and all evidence the government may have gathered. There is no fact that has escaped the taint of the corruption. Any courtroom following the long established norms of our legal system would have no choice but to dismiss the government’s case with extreme prejudice.

Thus the Administration will be forced to create some new “court” that can conveniently ignore the massive violations of basic human rights that were inflicted on the suspects. Call it a tribunal or a court of special purpose or whatever what makes one happy, it is the spiritual heir of the Court of the Star Chamber that our founders despised.

The only reason for this little charade is that Obama and his Administration can not release the defendants on their own recognacense. Not in a month of Sundays can that happen because adhering to the demands of the rule of law would doom Obama’s Presidency. Plus there is also the unfortunate likelihood that the defendants are every inch the evil bastards the government claims to them to be.

But that used to be one of the more impressive bits of our legal system: even evil bastards were accorded the full protection of our Constitution. They were shielded by the Forth and Fifth Amendments. They were guaranteed a speedy trial by a jury of their peers. But 9/11 changed all that didn’t it? Bush-Cheney was blind-sided by OBL’s box-cutter wielding nihilists and went into CYA overdrive. In the rush to prevent another oops-awe-shit failure of the “Bin Laden determined to hit the United States” variety they trampled the protections of the Constitution. In their flop-sweat determination to gather “intelligence” on Al Qaeda they not only violated both Federal and international norms and laws but also common sense and decency.

Thanks to the epic incompetence of Bush-Cheney there is no good end result to this affair. It is a pity that we could not find some shark infested atoll to dump these lads on and be done with it. As it stands there is no way to put this put this legal Humpty Dumpty back together again. Obama and his team are attempting to find the least distasteful end to this situation but that brings little cheer. Let’s be real, there is no way this trail does not do further damage to our standing.

Musings On the "Graveyard Of Empires"

The more one looks at Afghanistan the more the jarring similarities with our effort in South-East Asia occur. Case in point: the farcical election result just voided out in our client state.

Granted Karzai is not yet as hopeless as the Thieu-Ky government that ran the operatically corrupt South Vietnamese government in the last days of that nations existence. But Karzai is starting to look a lot like Ngô Đình Diệm without Madam Nhu. Karzai is so incompetent he can't even properly steal an election.

Granted his opponent had his own special problems starting with his unimaginative parents. One wonders if the twice named Abdulla has the chops to run the epic mess that is Afghanistan.

One wonders if Obama is on a fool’s mission. The Bush Administrations neglect of Afghanistan to pursue its Neoconservative dreams in Iraq may have left the U.S. in a no-win position. It may be too late for any kind of successful operation in Afghanistan.

Our failure in South-East Asia began with a very sensible middle-road approach to the conflict, choosing neither to fully escalate nor get out of Vietnam. Johnson especially died the death of a thousand cuts because he could never decide to fish or cut bait. LBJ proved that the only thing one finds in the middle of the road is squished armadillos.

There is a way to "win" in Afghanistan. It is to really take the ideas of Petraeus to heart and go all in. It means a commitment of five hundred million troops for ten to twenty years to fully pacify Afghanistan. That is the Petraeus math. This is what is required to really and fully do it right. This is the real cost of Nation Building and security in Afghanistan.

We are dealing with the detritus of Bush Jr's attempt to one up his dad. We are dealing with the results of Bush Jr's go-it-alone foreign policy. The comparison to Poppy Bush's Coalition in the First Gulf War to the Son's Coalition in the Second speaks volumes about the Son's recklessness and incompetence. Poppy Bush would have easily gathered the forces required to run down Bin Laden and Mullah Omar. Poppy Bush would have probably scotched the original 9/11 plot before it occurred.

For his own reasons Obama has decided to attempt to salvage the Afghanistan situation. Maybe he really does believe that Afghanistan is still the "good war." Maybe he is pursuing more cynical Realpolitik goals. Maybe he mainly fears the Domestic political blow-back if he pulls the plug on Afghanistan.

Ever since Carter flubbed the Desert One rescue Democrats have been branded as weak on defense. Conventional wisdom has decreed that Democrats have to prove their mettle and must be properly belligerent in their foreign dealings. Hillary Clinton has definitely taken this particular idea to heart. The former first lady's reputation as a hawk may have cost her the nomination during the primaries.

Not to be too dire but we are dealing with an epically failed state that has been in a state of constant war for thirty years and counting. Mullah Omar and his grumpy cast of characters were able to seize the reigns of power because the populous of Afghanistan wanted order imposed in the worst possible way. Little did they know that they would get just that--order imposed in the worst possible way. The Taliban tried to impose a reactionary Islamic theocracy on the land. No need to delineate how badly that worked out for the people of Afghanistan.

Whatever our policy ends up being we must realize two things. One is that the Taliban and other aspects on the ground in Afghanistan are merely symptoms of a people and culture that are profoundly broken. The second thing we must realize is there are limits to what we can do to make the Afghans whole.

Betrayal

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- President Obama on Friday resumed -- with expanded legal protections -- the Bush administration's controversial system of military trials for some Guantanamo Bay detainees.
…

Obama said he supports the idea of the military commissions but opposes the version of the law that had been governing such trials in recent years: the Military Commissions Act put in place under the Bush administration in 2006, but subsequently struck down as unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.

The president said military commissions "are appropriate for trying enemies who violate the laws of war, provided that they are properly structured and administered." But, he said, the 2006 act "failed to establish a legitimate legal framework and undermined our capability to ensure swift and certain justice against those detainees."
He said he plans to enhance due process rights for detainees held at the U.S. facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in order to improve the widely criticized approach created by his predecessor.

More at CNN. (http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/05/14/obama.military.tribunal/index.html)

Snip

How wrong is this? Let us count the ways.

First and foremost these Kangaroo courts are fundamentally contaminated by the use of torture by the U.S. on the detainees. Obama is forced to use the ruse of a Military Court proceeding because no civilian court would deem to hear these cases. The charges would be thrown out of court due to prosecutorial abuse. Given the undisputed facts of the case, the prolonged holding of the suspects without habeas corpus, the refusal of the government for the suspects to know the charges against them, the lack of representation for the accused for large portions of the proceeding, and the total lack of review by Supreme Court of the actual law under which these men are accused the whole process makes a mockery of the rule of law.

The farcical nature of these courts is further illuminated by the fact that they will allow hearsay evidence. Are the President and his Attorney General serious about this? Hearsay evidence has not been allowed into any court of law in the U.S. since the founding. Hearsay has been disallowed in court as a point of common law even longer than that. Now Obama is going to allow the game of telephone to be played out in a supposed court of law? Again , is he serious about this? Is that willing to trash long standing traditions of the rule of law for some will-of-the-wisp? Is he really going to try to unscrew the pooch?

Let’s be clear on what is happening here. People who have sat in a black hole for more than seven years will be subjected to further Kafkaesque persecutions disguised as a legal proceeding held under the color of the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Mind you there is an excellent argument that they should never have been subject to military law in the first place. They sure as hell did not sign up to be members of the U.S. military and there is an honest question whether these men were active combatants at the time of capture. Even if they were mujaheddin fighters battling against U.S. forces it still does not give the U.S. the right to hold them indefinitely or to try them under special procedures that may violate the Constitution in particular and do violate the rules of simple human decency in general.

Even if these men are in Bushite terms “the worst of the worst” it does not excuse their rough-shod treatment at Gitmo and Bagram. The accused may be perfect Visigoths, but that does not give us excuse to act like the Mongol Hoards in retaliation.

So why on God’s good green earth is Barack Obama, Constitutional scholar and law school professor countenancing such a violation of basic democratic principles? Because, Obama is a crass, unprincipled, politician. He is at base a compromiser without set of core values.

Read his books or listen to them via audible. Drill down to the heart of his presentation and you will find nothing there. There is nothing more than facile centrism and pointless middle ground seeking. His “post partisanship” has always been a cop-out. It has been a way to offend as few people as possible and fool as many people as possible that he sympathizes with them. It has always been a “word fog” as Taylor Marsh puts it. It is fog that conceals a man with nothing more than a technocratic mind set.

Obama is continuing the farce of the Commissions because George W. Bush put him in an awful bind. Bush set up a lawless, cruel and self-destructive structure that has been short-handed to “Gitmo.” It was and is nothing more than a recreation of the Soviet Gulag by the United States. The whole sorry mess from “extraordinary rendition” to the “black site prisons” was xeroxed from the Soviet and Chinese Communist system of oppression and control. It was a reverse engineering of the Manchurian Candidate system that was part and parcel of the Communist abuses encountered by US servicemembers in Korea and in Vietnam. Instead of “American Imperialists” being fed into the meat grinder it was Muslim Extremists and Al Qaeda Types. It was the same abuse of human rights right down to the beating to death of people the interrogators knew were innocent of all and any charges.

Now the right thing to do would be to flatly state to the American people “because of the rampant lawlessness of the previous administration there is no legal way to prosecute any of the Gitmo detainees no matter how justly deserving of punishment they may be. I am forced by the Constitution and the founding principle of the rule of law to release all the detainees as soon as practicable.” Of course such a course of action would cause every Republican head in the United States to explode. Then because the Republicans would raise the roof, most Democrats would cave into pressure exerted by the Elephants. The ether would be awash in charges of Democrats being “soft on terror” or “coddling terrorists” or Democrats being “cowards” and “surrender monkeys.” Democrats would be more than willing to prove how spineless they are by refusing to stand up against Republican outrage. Obama would be totally without a friend in Washington, it is coin flip if Bo would remain loyal to him.

Thus doing the right thing is political non-starter. Obama will take the coward’s way out. He will slink behind a politically popular and beltway safe “compromise. He will get kudos for following the beltway's conventional wisdom. He will tinker around the edges of policy and call it change, just like he has done since the beginning. Obama only moves boldly when it is easy to be bold. Lilly Ledbetter was a slam dunk; SCHIP even more so. “Reviewing” Gitmo really took no skin off of anyone’s nose. Actually making a stark rejection of Bush’s illegal, immoral and cruel detainee policy—that would piss off some very powerful beltway players and Obama is all about keeping everyone happy, everyone other than the Progressive base.

The real question now is, what is the Progressive base going to do about this? Obama has already sold out to the Wall Street bankers with the massive transfer of wealth that is the bank bail out program. The top one tenth of one percent will get a massive infusion of money from the rest of the 99.9%. It will be the exact opposite of what happened under the New Deal and a continuation of the Democratic Party’s capitulation to the corporatist elites. Economically Obama is a disciple of the Chicago School and is as doctrinaire a free market believer as Alan Greenspan ever was. He is definitely no friend of the blue collar worker and has done squat for the real victims of Wall Street’s casino mentality. Will the progressive wing of the party give yet another pass to Barak Obama or will it finally stand for something?

The biggest complaint Progressives had against the Republican Party was its lock-step adherence to Bush’s policy. Even when there was the odd protest against King George from conservative principle it never transformed itself into a vote against W.’s legislative agenda. You had the spectacle of Republicans arguing against the broad increase in executive power that the Military Commissions Act represented who then turned right around and voted for that very same bill. The good limited government types in the Elephant Party abandoned their birthright to the Progressive Democrats.

Now the shoe is definitely on the other foot and it is now up to the Progressive Wing of the Democratic Party to stand clearly for the Civil Rights and the Rule of Law it holds so dear. Do the Grass Roots; DFA, Move On, etc. have the courage of their convictions and the honor to oppose Obama’s slide into political convenience? Will the Progressives let him once again take the easy “compromise” that the beltway thinks is pragmatic or will the left once and for all stop being afraid of its own values and its own strength? Will the left for once drop foolish identity politics and stand for the overarching values that bind all forward thinking people of good faith or will it trade its birthright for a pot of beans? Will it surrender its belief in justice and fair play for mumbled promises of Health Care reform or for energy policy reform, or for a lesbian on the Supreme Court or just the fear that it can not oppose the first African American President lest it be seen as racist?

The sooner the Progressive and other Democrats see Obama for what he truly is, just a smart and savvy politician who was able to ride a wave of revulsion and populist anger into office the better it will be for all concerned.

Shelby Steel, curse his conservative soul, was partially correct about Obama. Obama is a bound man, a conciliator, a Black man that White America can feel comfortable with. A major part of his candidacy was the facile promise that his election would magically correct the long troubled history of Race in America; that we could somehow easily put behind us the cruel legacy of slavery and Jim Crow. This was a large part of the “transformative” myth of Barack Obama. In his gene pool and in his life story there is the myth of a man who bridges the divide between black and white, who is the best part of us—African soul and flinty Kansas values leavened with the Aloha spirit and seasoned with Chicago grit. Obama marketed himself as the embodiment of change, as the anti-Bush and the anti-Hillary, as not the same-old,same old. It was bullpucky.

Obama was and is just another Centrist Democrat who must be constantly badgered by the Progressive Movement to do anything closely approximating the right thing to do. He is just another Bill Clinton, an amoral huckster and policy wonk with no philosophical core; just another deeply damaged soul attempting to achieve personal affirmation via high office. Obama rubbed Bill Clinton in the wrong way because Obama was Bill Clinton only more so and in Black Face. It infuriated Bill Clinton that someone could use his moves and improve on them.

In another place and another time Obama’s instinct for compromise and his willingness to go the extra mile to reach a consensus would be laudable. This is not that time. Obama’s failure is not to understand that sometimes the consensus of the best and brightest leads to disaster. His failure is to not understand that some things can not be compromised, that certain principles are inviolate, certain truths are self evident and not up for negotiation. Since Obama is unaware of these salient facts it is up to the Progressive Movement to remind him of those basic truths. Is the movement up to the challenge or is it going to reduce itself to mindless cheer leading and finally become the Obama-bots the right accuses it of being? The betrayal of Progressive Core values by Obama is manifest, does Progressive Movement cave into political “reality” and gamesmanship or does it finally stand up for what believes in?

What did she know, when did she know it, and was she able to do anything about it?

Nancy Pelosi is spinning like a top over the Bush torture program. If it is Tuesday there is yet another “explanation” coming from the Speaker of the House. Was she briefed; if she was briefed how deep dark and dirty was the briefing?

At the time of George W. Bush’s decent into madness of “enhanced interrogation.” Nancy Pelosi was the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee. Thus dead eye Dick Cheney was required to toss a few crumbs of information about his and W’s interrogation policy.

Now Dead Eye Dick Cheney at the time was not the chatty, logorrhea suffering, Republican PR disaster he is today. No this was the Dark Lord of NeoCons, the power behind the throne. This was the tight-lipped, super secretive master of the dark art of bureaucratic power. Cheney kept the information flow to an absolute minimum. Nancy Pelosi would have to been a very persistent person to get much information out of Dick Cheney.

The next consideration for Pelosi had to me how much she really wanted to know in the first place. With knowledge comes responsibility and the default for most beltway denizens is to avoid responsibility like a Hasidic Jew avoids pork products. They want to be in a position where they can take credit for success but not the blame for failure. While it can not be proven that Pelosi cynically positioned herself in such a way it does make generic sense that a politician in her position would do so.

Pelosi knows how the game of power is played in DC. She knows that to get along you have to go along. It was no secret that she was aiming for the very top slot in Congressional hierarchy. To pick a fight with a consummate infighter like Dick Cheney would have ended her run for a leadership position. Pelosi was definitely aware of Bush’s sky-high approval ratings. She was also aware of how the 99.9% of the media were singing W’s praises. Pelosi was also aware that the mood of the country was vengeful. Appeals to the better angels of our nature would not get much support. Most Americans at the time would have tortured Abu Zubeta on general principle never mind getting any useful information on him.

Politically there was no up side to pushing back on Cheney. Even if Pelosi was able to convene a secret oversight committee, no small feat by an opposition party that was supine to Bush’s every whim and with a Republican majority in lock-step against such a move, what then? Remember this is Dead Eye Dick we are talking about.

The Vice President would have gone after Pelosi with every dirty trick in the book and she had to know that. Remember Dick Cheney vaporized the career of an important CIA asset because her husband had the gall to write a Op-Ed in the New York Times. Because of that one article both Joseph Wilson and his wife Valerie Plame Wilson were dragged through the mud and their service to the nation tossed on the ash heap. Both became the targets of rumor, innuendo, and sundry brickbats tossed at them. The Wilson affair is best seen as a warning shot across the bow to anyone who would dare cross Dick Cheney.

This is because Dick Cheney had a very special role in Bush’s Administration. Besides doing most of the heavy lifting for W. Cheney also was Luca Brasi to W’s Don Corleone. Cheney was the enforcer and his very public kneecapping of the Wilsons must have given pause to any member of the legislature who may have had ideas of mounting a challenge to the Bush Administration. Even when the Democrats finally got a majority in congress they were still fearful of the damage Cheney could do. Cheney had long ago signaled that he would stop at nothing to inflict political revenge.

Of course the irony is that the dance that Pelosi did with the devil is now being slowly revealed. The calculations that were made at the zenith of Bushite power are now being exposed to the light of day. Under that harsh light Congresscritters are now skittering about for shelter from that blinding beam. Some like Harry Reid, the amazing spineless man, the acme of milk toast mediocrity, are trying to hide under the supposed efficacy of torture. Others try to distance themselves by pleading cluelessness. Almost none are willing to do their constitutionally mandated responsibility and investigate the Bush torture regime.

This is because an investigation will reveal their supine response to George W. Bush’s demands. It will also reveal the aversion that Congress has to any kind of responsibility or accountability. Congress since the glory days of Watergate has been a willing contributor to its evisceration. If it acted at all it was out of shear partisan spite, as it did in the presidency of Bill Clinton. In the years of the Regan Revolution the only effective opposition was put up by Republicans of a Democratic president. Even then responsibility was never the watchword of Congressional oversight. Instead the Republicans indulged in eight years of pointless political theater aimed at the gutting of a Democratic president and his policies.

But for shear abandonment of responsibilities one really does have to look at the George W. Bush years for the ultimate example. It was especially egregious right after 9/11. Congress gave W all he wanted and a wee bit more by passing the Patriot Act and the FISA “reform”. Even then Cheney was not satisfied and massively violated the few limitations of the Patriot Act. What did Congress do? Even after the 2006 election where the Republican Party in general and George W. Bush in particular were repudiated the Congress gave Cheney and Bush a get out of jail free card with yet another “reform” of FISA. Congress was unable to say no to a massive violation of the fourth amendment perpetrated by the Executive branch of the government.

Like the people they represent most representatives are willing to do almost anything just to see Cheney and Bush just go away. Nancy Pelosi is just a little more willing than most people because she rather not go over that patch of ground again. She knows there is no way she comes up looking good if a through investigation of her actions were made. She dodged her responsibilities; she acquiesced to the executive far too easily. She was unwilling to sacrifice her own personal ambitions for the good of the nation. She is in a bind now because to tell the unvarnished truth, that she did not stand up to Bush because she saw (it is possible correctly) that there was nothing to be gained from a principled stand. A principled stand instead would have probably gotten her kicked off the intelligence committee and the subsequent demonizing of Pelosi by Republicans would have ended her chances for any leadership position for all time. The final kick in the head would be that Bush and Cheney would have continued with their lawless behavior despite Pelosi’s stand.

This is not to excuse Pelosi’s behavior. Pelosi was not a profile in courage then and she is not one now. She failed to uphold the Constitution and laws of the United States. Still she is very typical of deep corruption that afflicts our government these days. It not just about the money even though that is a large contributor to our governmental malfunction; no it is more than just that. It is an obsession with gaining and staying in office. It is the willingness to do anything to get re-elected. It is an unwillingness to do anything that might damage their chances of re-election. It is an absolute aversion to any kind of accountability. If one is accountable for ones actions that means you can be sacked. It means you can loose the perks and prerogatives of office. Thus almost every representative looks for the easy way out. They try to leave as few fingerprints behind as possible. They always build an escape hatch or have some explanation how they did not really support some failed policy or how they supported some wining strategy. They do not hold each other responsible for correct behavior and thus Congressional Ethics has become an oxymoron. Because they can not even hold their fellow legislators liable they certainly can not hold the executive accountable, oversight becomes a joke.

Still the solution to this situation is not so difficult. Pelosi must stand for re-election every two years. If the voters of San Francisco feel that Pelosi failure to uphold the prerogatives of her office was a sufficient breech of her trust they can always throw her out of office. They had a chance in 2008 by voting for Cindy Sheehan in the Democratic Primary. The voters had to know how Pelosi had taken impeachment off the table and how that short-circuited the only means the Congress really had to hold Bush to account. Still the voters re-elected her by comfortable margins. Thus they rewarded Pelosi’s inaction and maybe unwittingly put their stamp of approval on Bush’s lawless rule.

Conservative Conflation. (Or Arlen Specter Pt. II.)

Here is a simple riddle, what is “Conservatism?” It seems an easy enough question until you actually think about it. One could go back to good old Edmund Burk the spiritual father of the movement and plant your flag there. There is a small problem with that as Edmund supported monarchy, the Aristocracy and the Church Of England full stop. Trying to shoe-horn Burkian notions into the American reality of a Secular, Constitutionally limited, Representative, Democratically elected, Federal Republic is a very frustrating exercise. Burk becomes more of a talisman, than a serious philosophy of governance.

Modern Conservatism finds its real roots in the USA with the post-progressive Republican Party that buried Woodrow Wilson. The best exemplars of this brand of Republicanism were Warren G Harding’s vow of returning to “normalcy” and the presidency of Calvin Coolidge. Both were prime examples of a strain of Conservatism that will be labeled “Satus Quo” Conservatism or “Preservationist” Conservatism. In its most progressive form it argues for a go slow approach to change. In its purer more Burkian form it argues for no change at all.

Cool, taciturn Calvin Coolidge term in office was the best example of how this type of philosophy affects governance. Coolidge was a minimalist in all things. He passed no great reforms, he made no great speeches, and he was famous for his taciturn ways. Everything about Coolidge was conservative, from his button-down clothing to his button-down demeanor. The most outrageous thing he did was wear an Indian Chief’s headdress for a photo op. Coolidge was very friendly to big business and to Wall Street letting the good times of the 1920’s roll.

It worked out well for Coolidge and for his small government ideology. The only real blot on his record domestically was the rise of the KKK and rise of the speculative bubble during his term. It was for his successor, Herbert Hoover to get fricasseed by the Wall Street volcano and the subsequent Great Depression.

In a way Conservatism never really recovered from the New Deal and its progeny. The growth of government under the New Deal, WWII and then the Great Society sent shock waves through the political landscape. By the time Eisenhower got into office the Republican Party sent up a white flag on major portions of the New Deal. Eisenhower had no interest in resurrecting Herbert Hoover or in proving him right. Eisenhower accepted the Status Quo as he found it. His was a no sudden moves, preservationist conservatism. He was dragged into action most times. Look at the seminal foreign policy achievement of Ike’s term—Containment.

Containment was a very conservative response to the threat of Soviet Hegemony. It sought to preserve the non-Communist nations as it found them. France, Italy, Spain, West Germany were re-built and joined into a defensive arrangement. When Hungary revolted Ike did nothing to prevent the Soviets from reclaiming their own. Lip service was given to freedom and democracy but the US was more than happy to support any anti-Communist government as it found it. Containment was the prevention of the spread of Communism in the hope that it would eventually collapse of its own weight. As a matter of fact JFK ran against what he claimed was Ike’s pacifism and over cautiousness.

What happened next is legend. JFK was the fuse that set off the Baby Boom of the 1960’s. The new normalcy of the late 40’s and the 50’s gave way to the counterculture. If to prove Hagel correct the New Left of the 1960’s helped to also stir the New Right. Countercultural Leftism gave rise Movement Conservatism.

Movement Conservatism was not Ike’s type of Conservatism, it was active, it was radical, and it was rude. Unlike the more stayed and proper form of Conservatism it was a pitch-fork and torches affair. More to the point it was reactionary and regressive. It wanted to undo what it saw were the excesses of New Left.

Movement Conservatism in essence wanted a return to what is saw was a purer and more wholesome time. Some wanted to go back to the glorious conformity of the 1950’s. Others wanted a return to the small government Shangri-La of Calvin Coolidge. Some even thought that the changes enacted by Teddy Roosevelt needed to be expunged.

Movement Conservatism in its NeoCon form was not satisfied with the temporizing of containment. It wanted a much more robust response to the Soviets. From time to time it found itself in opposition even to its Golden Boy Ronald Regan. The NeoCons never had an adequate response to Gorbachev exactly what do you do when the Soviet Primer follows your advice and tears down the Berlin Wall? More to the point what do you do when one of your central ideological pillars, anti-communism, goes the way of the Dodo?

One of the things you do is try to re-create the Communist menace in a new form. Internationally you cast something called “Islamo-facism” for the roll once occupied by the Soviets. This is a problem because to quote that old Bolshevik so-and-so Joseph Stalin “How many divisions do they have?” Well OBL has exactly squat for divisional strength. On a good day Al Qaeda has some 30,000 people under its sway. They own no tanks, no air force, no navy, no APCs, no rolling stock, no supply chain. OBL and his unhappy collection of thugs is in no shape or form the existential threat to the United States that the old Soviet Empire was. At best OBL can possibly unleash a tactical nuke in a major city. This is not a good thing but it pales in comparison to the former Soviet Union’s ability to vaporize the entire USA hundreds of times over. Yet visit any right-wing site or listen to the “thinkers” on the right and one would believe that OBL was prepared to invade Cleveland with millions of Jihadist warriors.

Domestically with the real Communists dead and buried with Gus Hall one must go on a McCarthyite search for their fellow travelers. Thus we have screams of “socialism” coming from the right. This is a tiresome diatribe because a Socialism, or more appropriately European Social Democracy is not the bugbear that the right portrays it. More importantly the programs of the Democratic Party are pushing for are not equivalent to what bad old Europe is doing. Still this does not prevent the usual fools from proclaiming the Party of Jackson and FDR the “Democrat-Socialist” party. This type of fear mongering is actually counter-productive. The continued pairing of Obama’s policies to Socialism will only improve the unwashed masses opinion of Socialism not bring a halt to Obama’s policy proposals.

Besides Socialism, the government’s control of the heights of economy, no longer exists in Europe. Governments have gotten out of the business of owning business. The only classically socialist governments still in existence are the Communist governments in North Korea, Vietnam and China. Of the three only the pompadoured and jump-suited Elvis wana-be Kim Jong IL still qualifies as the last of the Stalinist true believers. Every one else is running some kind of mixed economy. Socialism is dead; long live the Welfare State and Social Democracy.

While real socialism is rotting in its grave, the pejorative marches on. The straw-man socialist; anti-American, anti-Christian, anti-Life, anti-Capitalist, only concerned with personal aggrandizement and the destruction of the nation has never been healthier. As a scarce tactic it works for a small section of the populace. For the rest of the unwashed masses it has all the believability of Godzilla movie.

If it make people happy to imagine that a man in a rubber suit stomping through a miniaturized model of Tokyo actually represents some kind of real threat go for it, just don’t be surprised when more rational people make jokes behind your back. The
“Socialist, Islamist, Black-Power, Liberal, Fascist, Communist, Obama” is such a man in a rubber suit. It is a object of fancy, a construction that is obviously fraudulent, only a complete fool would believe in or be frightened by it.

Unfortunately for the conservative movement such foolishness abounds. The right has returned to its Eisenhower roots and has retreated into irrational conspiracy theories. The term rational conservative has become an oxymoron. This is many because the right has conflated reactionary conservatism with the movement as a whole. It has conflated discipline with rigidity and worst of all it has conflated leadership with crypto-authoritarianism. It has conflated religiosity with Fundamentalist Christianity. It has conflated liberty with libertarianism. Worst of all it can still not see how the excesses of the Bush Administration grew out the authoritarian streak that always threatens to undermine the Conservative cause.

Bush’s willful idiocy was part and parcel of reactionary right wing movement that was part of Movement Conservatism. The Free-Market absolutism, the shredding of the Constitution, the absolutism, the support of Christianist causes, all had an excellent right wing pedigree. Bush was more than willing to shrink the part of the government that protected the general public: EPA, FDA, SEC, FEMA etc. His corporate cronies had a field day deregulating major portions of the government for their own enrichment. Meanwhile the authoritarian will to power found its expression in warrantless wiretapping and in the whole structure of the “Black Site” prisons where torture was enacted. Remember Bush got elected in the 2000 primaries because conservatives did not trust Johnny Mac to stay true to the cause. Bush was the “real” conservative back in 2000 in opposition to the “maverick” candidacy of McCain.
So if Bush is no longer a Conservative, if he never was a Conservative then what is a Conservative? If there is a gravitational center it is the idea of tradition and the need to preserve the tried and true institutions that have served us from the dawn of civilization. How that plays out in the post-Bush world is anyone’s guess.

Mr. Bush Gets Schooled on History Pt2

Afghanistan is best known as the country where empires go to die. The Imperial Russians, the British, the Soviets (Imperial Russians part II) all saw there expansionist dreams die in the harsh geography of Afghanistan. At the turn of the century a group of fierce fighters had just about established its hegemony over the dissolute and ruined nation. They were at one time religious students called Talibs in one of the local tongues. The rest of the world came to know them as the Taliban. They were ultra-orthodox followers of a Sunni doctrine know properly as Salafism but more commonly and disparagingly know as Whabbism. It was an attempt by some Sunnis to return to the pure Islam practiced by the first Muslims just before the founding of the Caliphate. It was a heady mix of anti-imperialism, anti-modernism, and anti-Western notions mixed liberally with fundamentalist Sunni doctrine and vicious intolerance toward all other Islamic sects no matter what their pedigree. It had a deeply masculine ethos that gloried in jihad and rank misogyny. Still, after almost 25 years of war and disorder most Afghans were more than ready for a little tough love.

The Western nations were also more than happy to let Mullah Omar and others drag Afghanistan back to year zero AH. The only fly in the ointment was a guest of the government by the name of Osama Bin Laden. After Osama pulled off 9/11 the rogue state of Afghanistan became the target of military action. In very short order the USA was launching air strikes against the Taliban. But a very odd thing happened on the way to Kabul; the U.S. committed very little in the way of men and materials. Most of the fighting and dying was done by men of the Northern Alliance. For a country that was trying to get Osama Bin Laden “dead or alive” the USA was acting in oddly dilettante fashion. The USA was not even able to scrape together enough of its own troops to block Bin Laden’s escape from Tora Bora. After Tora Bora Bush publicly admitted that not only did he not know where OBL was but he did not care to find out. Bush had other concerns.

Those concerns centered on the person of Saddam Hussein and the country of Iraq. The invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq is still surrounded by huge cloak of partisan feeling some (and perhaps most) of which was actively stirred up by Carl Rove and Other members of the Bush Political Team. In analyzing the case for and the results of the Iraq war it very difficult to approach the facts in a dispassionate manner. Still let us be fools and rush in where angles dare not tread.

The case for invasion rested almost solely on Weapons Of Mass Destruction—WMD for short. All other rationales were either secondary or mentioned barely in passing. It was only after the invasion that the rational shifted. The Bush administration was very good of sticking with the talking point that Iraq was very close to developing a nuclear weapon and quite possibly deploying it via its terrorist network. As Iraq had kicked out U.N. weapons inspectors a few years before, the U.S. accusation had a thin patina of believability. Iraq did have vast stores of chemical agents prior to the first Gulf War. It also had a very active and very illegal nuclear arms research program. Still the U.N. had for all intents and purposes ripped out the guts of both programs before Saddam tossed them out of the country. The only small chink in the U.N. sanctions régime was the oil-for-food program. Vast sums of monies from the program were siphoned off or otherwise diverted to other priorities; mainly grand and gaudy palaces for Saddam and his brutal progeny. Who could prove that some of that unaccounted for money did not go for a very clandestine WMD program?

Still it was a long way from suspicion to proof. The quest for finding the smoking gun (that could be in form of a mushroom cloud) is rightly regarded as an epic failure of U.S. intelligence. The only argument was where the culpability may lie.

What is not up for debate is that Cheney did set up a parallel intelligence apparatus that by-passed the normal bureaucratic structures of the U.S. government. It is also a fact that this apparatus delivered raw, unfiltered intelligence to the very pinnacle of the executive branch. It is further more a fact that this structure acted like an echo chamber. Time and time again intelligence operatives found themselves beating back the same bogus claims. The yellowcake uranium from Africa to Iraq story kept returning like a bad penny until it finally settled in the President’s State Of The Union Address. Bad intelligence that supported an invasion of Iraq kept getting highlighted while more sober assessments limped off to die in the middle reaches of the CIA bureaucracy. The best case scenario for the Bush Administration can be explained by a confluence of ideological and bureaucratic biases that pushed it into an ill conceived war of Choice in Iraq.

It is no secret that many of the top advisers in the Bush Administration were firm supporters of regime change in Iraq. They had signed their names on a published missive known as the Project For A New American Century. PNAC as it came to be known was well represented by V.P. Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld and others. For a time it occupied a slot in the White House organizational chart as WHIG: the White House Iraq Group. No office in executive branch of the U.S. government was more instrumental in beating the drums of War and coming up with the rationalization later branded “The Bush Doctrine.”

Thus at the very beginning of the Bush Administration there was a built-in bias for the overthrow of the Iraq government by any means available. What the Administration lacked was a justification and the actual means. Donald Rumsfeld was more the willing to provide the physical means. Rumsfeld was an ardent supporter of the notion of the “New Army.” Rumsfeld was sure that breakthroughs in military technology had re-written the iron-clad rules or war. He firmly believed that speed and technology could replace flesh-and-blood servicemembers occupying a patch of ground. He had a grand theory, what he lacked was a proving ground. For Rumsfeld, Iraq was ideal in at least two ways; it satisfied his ideological bias toward overthrowing the Baathist state and it would prove the correctness of his “speed kills” war-fighting notions. As an added bonus Rumsfeld ideas helped lower the bar to invasion. His new Army and its “Shock and Awe” doctrine promised rapid results at a much lower cost in men, material and money than the more prosaic ideas of the “old” Army brass. Rumsfeld was ruthless in sweeping out any dissent in the DoD. Those who did not sing the company song were offered to seek new opportunities in the civilian sphere of employment. Rumsfeld’s DoD was a systemic enabler of the PNAC push for war.

The final piece of the puzzle was the political consideration. Carl Rove and the political shop decided very early on to use both 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq for partisan political gain. Both Bush and Cheney were more than willing to use the hammer of National Security to beat the Democrats Senseless. Republican Party stalwarts and there megaphones in the media were constantly on the attack, branding recalcitrant Democrats as “supporting the terrorists” or “offering therapy” to Osama Bin Laden. The Democratic Party looking at Bush’s sky-high approval rating crumbled before the onslaught. Bush was merciless in turning up the pressure and exploiting his advantage. His loyal Republican soldiers in the Congress forced the Democrats to vote on the use of force before the 2002 midterms. Many Democrats were placed in a damned-if-you-do—damned-if-you-don’t positions. Even when they voted for the authorization Republicans opponents were able to question Democrat’s patriotism. The short-term successes of these tactics lead to a long-term poisoning of the political waters. There is an obvious link between the successes of 2002/2004 and the Republican Gotterdammerung of 2006/2008. These will be fleshed out later.

It has been claimed that Bush and his Administration deliberately lied the nation into war. While there is a very solid prima facie case for such an accusation it may never be proven beyond a reasonable doubt. At the very least though there was a very solid troika of institutional factors that provided a huge push toward the invasion of Iraq. Against this force there was no counter-force worth mentioning. The Congress was supine. The Corporate Media, acting as the fourth estate was at best inert and at worst supported the push for war. The Corporate Media was manifestly unwilling to go against a hugely popular president and was literally more willing to indulge in flag waving.. Only the still-small voice of the left-wing Blogosphere and some progressive talk-radio stations were willing to run interference.

Before visiting the land of the Tigris and the Euphrates we must visit the second Terrorist attack that the Bush Administration failed to prevent that of the Anthrax letters. It is short layovers so do not get too worried. On October 14, 2001 barely a month after the iconic attacks of September 11th, letters contaminated with Anthrax managed to kill various US citizens. The nation, already deeply shocked by the events connected with 9/11 got a fresh infusion of fear. This time the threat was not crashing planes but tiny microorganisms. Bush wasted very little time in linking this case of Domestic Terrorism to the foreign threat and eventually to Saddam.

With his stratospheric approval ratings and with a little help from Colin Powell’s brava performance at the U.N. George W Bush was able to start a war of choice in Iraq. What started out so well for the Administration was to become the death of a thousand cuts.

Part 3 to follow, someday.