Even before the bombs fell on Baghdad, a group of senior Pentagon officials were plotting to invade another country. Their covert campaign once again relied on false intelligence and shady allies. But this time, the target was Iran.MUST READ.
Some states have signed on, including two that have Super Tuesday primaries.
A Stanford University computer science professor has come up with an idea to circumvent the more than 200-year-old Electoral College system and institute a national popular vote to elect the president of the United States.
The proposal by John Koza, who also invented the scratch-off lottery ticket, is receiving serious consideration by lawmakers in several states. Legislators in California, New York, Colorado, Illinois and Missouri have sponsored bills to enact such a plan.
Koza's scheme calls for an interstate compact that would require states to throw all of their electoral votes behind the winner of the national popular vote, regardless of which candidate wins in each state. The plan doesn't require all 50 states to join, but a combination of states that represent a majority (at least 270) of the electoral votes. If the largest states join in the agreement, only 11 would be needed....
... Proponents say Koza's proposal is ingenious because it would avoid the immensely difficult task of trying to get rid of the Electoral College system by amending the U.S. Constitution.
Koza, who co-wrote a 620-page book detailing why it's time to change the system and how his plan would work, said his goal for this year was to let his ideas germinate with hopes of catching the attention of some state lawmakers. But the proposal caught on faster than expected.
"When will the Arab-Muslim world stop getting its 'pride' from fighting Israel and start getting it from constructing a society that others would envy, an economy others would respect, and inventions and medical breakthroughs from which others would benefit?"I'll answer his question with a question:
When will the United States stop getting its "pride" from fighting the world, bullying other nations, and inciting wars and start getting it from constructing a society that others would envy, a society that lives by its stated altruistic values instead of hypocrisy and lies, a society that promotes peace and human rights around the world--instead of war, greed, corruption, and torture?
Damascus, Syria
Over Turkish coffee the other morning, I picked up a copy of The Syria Times, the local English-language paper, and my eye immediately went to a small box at the top of the front page. It said, “The Middle East on the Eve of Modernity ... P. 5.”
I thought: What a perfect way to describe the Middle East today — going back to some pre-modern era? Alas, The Syria Times was not trying to be ironic. It turned out the headline was the title of a book about Aleppo in the 18th century. But had it been a news headline it would have been apt.
Condoleezza Rice must have been severely jet-lagged when she said that what’s going on in Lebanon and Iraq today were the “birth pangs of a new Middle East.” Oh, I wish it were so. What we are actually seeing are the rebirth pangs of the old Middle East, only fueled now by oil and more destructive weaponry.
Some of the most primordial, tribal passions, which always lurk beneath the surface here — Sunnis versus Shiites, Jews versus Muslims, Lebanese versus Syrians — but are usually held in check by modern states or bonds of civilization, are exploding to the top.
There is nothing that you can’t do to someone in the Middle East today, and there is no leader or movement — no Nelson Mandela and no million-mom march — coming out of this region, or into this region, to put a stop to the madness.
And I mean madness. We’ve seen Sunni Muslims in Iraq suicide-bomb a Shiite mosque on Ramadan; we’ve seen Shiite militiamen torture Sunnis in Iraq by drilling holes in their heads with power tools; we’ve seen Jordanian Islamist parliamentarians mourning the terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, even though he once blew up a Jordanian wedding; we’ve seen hundreds of Palestinian suicide bombings of Israeli cafes and buses; and we’ve seen Israel retaliating by, at times, leveling whole buildings, with the guilty and the innocent inside.
Now we’ve seen the Hezbollah leader, Hasan Nasrallah, take all of Lebanon into a devastating, unprovoked war with Israel, just to improve his political standing and take pressure off Iran.
America should be galvanizing the forces of order — Europe, Russia, China and India — into a coalition against these trends. But we can’t. Why? In part, it’s because our president and secretary of state, although they speak with great moral clarity, have no moral authority. That’s been shattered by their performance in Iraq.
The world hates George Bush more than any U.S. president in my lifetime. He is radioactive — and so caught up in his own ideological bubble that he is incapable of imagining or forging alternative strategies.
In part, it is also because China, Europe and Russia have become freeloaders off U.S. power. They reap enormous profits from the post-cold-war order that America has shaped, but rather than become real stakeholders in that order, helping to draw and defend redlines, they duck, mumble, waffle or cut their own deals.
This does not bode well for global stability. A religious militia that calls itself “the party of God” takes over a state and drags it into war, using high-tech rockets — mullahs with drones — and the world is paralyzed. Those who ignore this madness will one day see it come to a theater near them.
In part, though, this madness is home-grown. I sat at a swank rooftop restaurant the other night with some young Syrian writers and listened to a discussion between a young woman dressed in trendy clothes, talking about how she would prefer to see Israel disappear, an Arab journalist who described the “pride” and “dignity” every Arab felt at seeing Hezbollah fight Israel to a standstill, and another writer who argued that Nasrallah was an Arab disaster.
When will the Arab-Muslim world stop getting its “pride” from fighting Israel and start getting it from constructing a society that others would envy, an economy others would respect, and inventions and medical breakthroughs from which others would benefit?
There will be no new Middle East — not as long as the New Middle Easterners, like Rafik Hariri, the former Lebanese prime minister, get gunned down; not as long as Old Middle Easterners, like Nasrallah, use all their wits and resources to start a new Arab-Israeli war rather than build a new Arab university; and not as long as Arab media and intellectuals refuse to speak out clearly against those who encourage their youth to embrace martyrdom with religious zeal rather than meld modernity with Arab culture.
Without that, we are wasting our time and the Arab world is wasting its future. It will forever be “on the eve of modernity.”
Photo credit: Thomas Friedman. (Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times)
By Paul KrugmanAmid everything else that’s going wrong in the world, here’s one more piece of depressing news: a few days ago the Harris Poll reported that 50 percent of Americans now believe that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction when we invaded, up from 36 percent in February 2005. Meanwhile, 64 percent still believe that Saddam had strong links with Al Qaeda.
At one level, this shouldn’t be all that surprising. The people now running America never accept inconvenient truths. Long after facts they don’t like have been established, whether it’s the absence of any wrongdoing by the Clintons in the Whitewater affair or the absence of W.M.D. in Iraq, the propaganda machine that supports the current administration is still at work, seeking to flush those facts down the memory hole.
But it’s dismaying to realize that the machine remains so effective.
Here’s how the process works.
First, if the facts fail to support the administration position on an issue — stem cells, global warming, tax cuts, income inequality, Iraq — officials refuse to acknowledge the facts.
Sometimes the officials simply lie. “The tax cuts have made the tax code more progressive and reduced income inequality,” Edward Lazear, the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, declared a couple of months ago. More often, however, they bob and weave.
Consider, for example, Condoleezza Rice’s response a few months ago, when pressed to explain why the administration always links the Iraq war to 9/11. She admitted that Saddam, “as far as we know, did not order Sept. 11, may not have even known of Sept. 11.” (Notice how her statement, while literally true, nonetheless seems to imply both that it’s still possible that Saddam ordered 9/11, and that he probably did know about it.) “But,” she went on, “that’s a very narrow definition of what caused Sept. 11.”
Meanwhile, apparatchiks in the media spread disinformation. It’s hard to imagine what the world looks like to the large number of Americans who get their news by watching Fox and listening to Rush Limbaugh, but I get a pretty good sense from my mailbag.
Many of my correspondents are living in a world in which the economy is better than it ever was under Bill Clinton, newly released documents show that Saddam really was in cahoots with Osama, and the discovery of some decayed 1980’s-vintage chemical munitions vindicates everything the administration said about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. (Hyping of the munitions find may partly explain why public belief that Saddam had W.M.D. has made a comeback.)
Some of my correspondents have even picked up on claims, mostly disseminated on right-wing blogs, that the Bush administration actually did a heck of a job after Katrina.
And what about the perceptions of those who get their news from sources that aren’t de facto branches of the Republican National Committee?
The climate of media intimidation that prevailed for several years after 9/11, which made news organizations very cautious about reporting facts that put the administration in a bad light, has abated. But it’s not entirely gone. Just a few months ago major news organizations were under fierce attack from the right over their supposed failure to report the “good news” from Iraq — and my sense is that this attack did lead to a temporary softening of news coverage, until the extent of the carnage became undeniable. And the conventions of he-said-she-said reporting, under which lies and truth get equal billing, continue to work in the administration’s favor.
Whatever the reason, the fact is that the Bush administration continues to be remarkably successful at rewriting history. For example, Mr. Bush has repeatedly suggested that the United States had to invade Iraq because Saddam wouldn’t let U.N. inspectors in. His most recent statement to that effect was only a few weeks ago. And he gets away with it. If there have been reports by major news organizations pointing out that that’s not at all what happened, I’ve missed them.
It’s all very Orwellian, of course. But when Orwell wrote of “a nightmare world in which the Leader, or some ruling clique, controls not only the future but the past,” he was thinking of totalitarian states. Who would have imagined that history would prove so easy to rewrite in a democratic nation with a free press?
Photo credit: Paul Krugman. (The New York Times)
Imagine a surgeon who is completely clueless, who has no idea what he or she is doing.
Imagine a pilot who is equally incompetent.
Now imagine a president.
The Middle East is in flames. Iraq has become a charnel house, a crucible of horror with no end to the agony in sight. Lebanon is in danger of going down for the count. And the crazies in Iran, empowered by the actions of their enemies, are salivating like vultures. They can’t wait to feast on the remains of U.S. policies and tactics spawned by a sophomoric neoconservative fantasy — that democracy imposed at gunpoint in Iraq would spread peace and freedom, like the flowers of spring, throughout the Middle East.
If a Democratic president had pursued exactly the same policies, and achieved exactly the same tragic results as George W. Bush, that president would have been the target of a ferocious drive for impeachment by the G.O.P.
Mr. Bush spent a fair amount of time this week with the Iraqi prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki. There was plenty to talk about, nearly all of it hideous. Over the past couple of months Iraqi civilians have been getting blown away at the stunning rate of four or five an hour. Even Karl Rove had a tough time drawing a smiley face on that picture.
“Obviously the violence in Baghdad is still terrible,” said Mr. Bush, “and therefore there needs to be more troops.”
One did not get the sense, listening to this assessment from the commander in chief, that things would soon be well in hand. There was, instead, a disturbing sense of déjà vu. A sense of the president at a complete loss, not really knowing what to do. I recalled the image of Mr. Bush sitting in a Sarasota, Fla., classroom after being informed of the Sept. 11 attacks. Instead of reacting instantly, commandingly, he just sat there for long wasted moments, with a bewildered look on his face, holding a second-grade story called “The Pet Goat.”
And then there was the famous picture of Mr. Bush, on his way back from a monthlong vacation, looking out the window of Air Force One as it flew low over the destruction wrought by Hurricane Katrina. “It’s devastating,” Mr. Bush was quoted as saying. “It’s got to be doubly devastating on the ground.”
I’ll tell you what’s devastating. The monumental and mind-numbing toll of Mr. Bush’s war in Iraq, which is being documented in a series of important books, the latest being Thomas Ricks’s “Fiasco.” Mr. Ricks gives us more disturbing details about the administration’s “flawed plan for war” and “worse approach to occupation.”
Near the end of his book, he writes:
“In January 2005, the C.I.A.’s internal think tank, the National Intelligence Council, concluded that Iraq had replaced Afghanistan as the training ground for a new generation of jihadist terrorists. The country had become ‘a magnet for international terrorist activity,’ said the council’s chairman, Robert Hutchings.”
Saddled with one failure after another, the administration seems paralyzed, completely unable to shape the big issues facing the U.S. and the world today. Condoleezza Rice is in charge of the diplomatic effort regarding Lebanon. She’s been about as effective at that as the president was in his response to Katrina.
But Dr. Rice is still quick with the scary imagery. Her comment, “I have no doubt there are those who wish to strangle a democratic and sovereign Lebanon in its crib,” recalls her famous, “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.”
It might help if she spent less time giving us provocative metaphors and more time on the very difficult nuts and bolts of trying to maintain or bring about peace.
It may be that a hamstrung Bush administration is a better bet than the same crew being free to act as it pleases. Imagine how much better off we’d have been if Congress had found the wisdom and the courage to prevent the president from invading Iraq.
In two years and a few months Americans will vote again for president. I hope the long list of tragic failures by Bush & Co. prompts people to take that election more seriously than some in the past. If you were about to be lifted onto an operating table, you’d be more interested in the competence of the surgeon than in his or her personality.
Mr. Bush’s record reminds us that similarly careful consideration should be given to those who would be president.
Photo credit: Bob Herbert. (The New York Times)
As usual, Brooksie misses the point. He doesn't believe the federal government should give tax credits for college tuition or grants to those who need them because, according to him, such actions in the past have not increased the number of students attending college. He then lists the reasons many don't attend or finish college--issues which are not presently addressed by Congress that he feels should be considered. "You have to promote two-parent stable homes so children can develop the self-control they need for school success. You have to fundamentally reform schools. You have to expand church- and university-sponsored mentoring programs and support groups. As Caroline Hoxby of Harvard notes, you have to surround students with people who will help them make informed decisions so they can attend a college they find useful."Assuming one could do all of this, and assuming it did indeed motivate and enable kids to succeed in College, there would still be one glaring problem: now that they are ready, they may not be able to afford to go -- and you just took away their meal ticket!
The Relationship Blend In the world of public policy, there are ecologists and engineers. The ecologists believe human beings are formed amid a web of relationships. Behavior is shaped by the weave of expectations and motivations that we pick up from the people around us every day.
The engineers believe all this relationship talk is so much mush. They believe behavior is shaped by incentives. You give people the resources they need and socially productive, rational behavior will usually follow.
Most politicians are ecologists who turn into engineers once in office. They know how much relationships mattered to their own success. But in government, the major tool they have is a budget appropriation. So suddenly every problem turns into a question of resources.
This transition, unfortunately, leads to a misleading view of human nature and often, policy failure.
A case in point: Over the past three decades there has been a gigantic effort to increase the share of Americans who graduate from college. The federal government has spent roughly $750 billion on financial aid. Yet the percentage of Americans who graduate has barely budged. The number of Americans who drop out of college leaps from year to year.
The reasons for dropping out are as numerous as the people who do it. Many students are academically unprepared for college work. Many suffer personal or family crises. Many are bored in the classroom and disengaged on campus. Many suffer from a strange cognitive dissonance. They have high aspirations. They know what they have to do to succeed. Yet when it comes time to, say, show up for a math test, they blow it off. And yet they still seem confident they will achieve their goals.
Some students, a relatively small slice, drop out because they can’t afford college. Perhaps 8 percent are driven away purely for financial reasons, according to a growing pile of research. William G. Bowen, Martin Kurzweil and Eugene Tobin summarized what we know in their book “Equity and Excellence”: “It seems that family finances have a fairly minor direct impact on a student’s ability to attend a college,” though family background has a large impact on whether students are academically and socially prepared.
Yet when politicians address this problem, they inevitably ignore the core issues — lack of preparedness, personal crises, disengagement, cognitive dissonance. They flee to the issue of tuition costs. They think like engineers.
Recent administrations have increased tax credits and grants to help make college affordable. This week, Hillary Clinton and the folks at the Democratic Leadership Council unveiled the centerpiece of a plan to restore the American Dream. They called for creating performance-based higher-education block grants worth $150 billion over 10 years and $3,000 tuition tax credits. They believe the programs will lead to one million more college graduates by 2015.
These are some of the smartest and best people in politics today. And yet their proposals won’t work. Tuition tax credits and grants have not produced more graduates in the past and they will not do so in the future. Bridget Terry Long of Harvard meticulously studied the Clinton administration’s education tax credits and concluded that they did not increase enrollment. Sarah E. Turner of the University of Virginia concludes, “Very broad-based programs such as tuition subsidies or across-the-board grants to low-income students are likely to have minimal effects on college completion while imposing large costs.”
It’s easy to see why politicians would want to propose tax credits as a way to bribe middle-class parents into voting for them. But if you actually want to increase the share of college graduates, you have to get into the ecology of relationships.
You have to promote two-parent stable homes so children can develop the self-control they need for school success. You have to fundamentally reform schools. You have to expand church- and university-sponsored mentoring programs and support groups. As Caroline Hoxby of Harvard notes, you have to surround students with people who will help them make informed decisions so they can attend a college they find useful.
None of these programs pack the policy wallop of a great big appropriation. But the fact is, when it comes to helping people flourish, the ecologists are usually right.
Hillary Clinton has forgotten more about early childhood development than most of us will ever know. Why she needs to be reminded about the importance of relationships is beyond me.
Photo credit: David Brooks (The New York Times)
Damascus, Syria
One wonders what planet Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice landed from, thinking she can build an international force to take charge in south Lebanon without going to Damascus and trying to bring the Syrians on board.
Two Syrian officials made no bones about it when I asked their reaction to deploying such a force, without Syrian backing: Do you remember what happened in 1983, each asked, when the Reagan administration tried to impose an Israeli-designed treaty on Lebanon against Syria’s will?
I was there, I remember quite well: Hezbollah, no doubt backed by Syria or Iran, debuted its skills for the world by blowing up the U.S. Embassy in Beirut and the U.S. Marine and French peacekeeping battalions. This is not a knitting circle here.
Can we get the Syrians on board? Can we split Damascus from Tehran? My conversations here suggest it would be very hard, but worth a shot. It is the most important strategic play we could make, because Syria is the bridge between Iran and Hezbollah. But it would take a high-level, rational dialogue. Dr. Rice says we can deal with Syria through normal diplomatic channels. Really?
We’ve withdrawn our ambassador from Damascus, and the U.S. diplomats left here are allowed to meet only the Foreign Ministry’s director of protocol, whose main job is to ask how you like your Turkish coffee. Syria’s ambassador in Washington is similarly isolated.
Is this Syrian regime brutal and ruthless? You bet it is. If the Bush team wants to go to war with Syria, I get that. But the U.S. boycott of Syria is not intimidating Damascus. (Its economy is still growing, thanks to high oil prices.) So we’re left with the worst of all worlds — a hostile Syria that is not afraid of us.
We need to get real on Lebanon. Hezbollah made a reckless mistake in provoking Israel. Shame on Hezbollah for bringing this disaster upon Lebanon by embedding its “heroic” forces amid civilians. I understand Israel’s vital need to degrade Hezbollah’s rocket network. But Hezbollah’s militia, which represents 40 percent of Lebanon, the Shiites, can’t be wiped out at a price that Israel, or America’s Arab allies, can sustain — if at all.
You can’t go into an office in the Arab world today without finding an Arab TV station featuring the daily carnage in Lebanon. It’s now the Muzak of the Arab world, and it is toxic for us and our Arab friends.
Despite Hezbollah’s bravado, Israel has hurt it and its supporters badly, in a way they will never forget. Point made. It is now time to wind down this war and pull together a deal — a cease-fire, a prisoner exchange, a resumption of the peace effort and an international force to help the Lebanese Army secure the border with Israel — before things spin out of control. Whoever goes for a knockout blow will knock themselves out instead.
Will Syria play? Syrians will tell you that their alliance with Tehran is “a marriage of convenience.” Syria is a largely secular country, with a Sunni majority. Its leadership is not comfortable with Iranian Shiite ayatollahs. The Iranians know that, which is why “they keep sending high officials here every few weeks to check on the relationship,” a diplomat said.
So uncomfortable are many Syrian Sunnis with the Iran relationship that President Bashar al-Assad has had to allow a surge of Sunni religiosity; last April, a bigger public display was made of Muhammad’s birthday than the Syrian Baath Party’s anniversary, which had never happened before.
Syrian officials stress that they formed their alliance with Iran because they felt they had no other option. One top Syrian official said the door with the U.S. was “not closed from Damascus. [But] when you have only one friend, you stay with him all the time. When you have 10 friends, you stay with each one of them.”
What do the Syrians want? They say: respect for their security interests in Lebanon and a resumption of negotiations over the Golan. Syria is also providing support for the Sunni Baathists in Iraq. Much as the Bush team wants to, it can’t fight everyone at once and get where it needs to go. There will not be a peace force in south Lebanon unless it’s backed by Syria. No one will send troops.
I repeat: I don’t know if Syria can be brought around, and we certainly can’t do it at Lebanon’s expense. But you have to try, with real sticks and real carrots. Syria is not going to calm things in Lebanon, or Iraq, just so the Bush team can then focus on regime change in Damascus. As one diplomat here put it to me, “Turkeys don’t vote for Thanksgiving.”
Thomas Friedman. (Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times)
"American officials are very good at vernacular descriptions, but lousy at history and political reality in the Middle East," writes Rami Khouri. "Condoleezza Rice ... has described the massive destruction, dislocation and human suffering in Lebanon as an inevitable part of the 'birth pangs of a new Middle East.' From my perspective here in Beirut, what she describes as 'birth pangs' look much more like a wicked hangover from a decades-old American orgy of diplomatic intoxication with the enticements of pro-Israeli politics."
Iran said Sunday that Western incentives aimed at persuading the country to halt its nuclear program were an "acceptable basis" for talks and that it was ready for detailed negotiations.
In the last few days, I learned from a credible and informed source that a former senior Labour government Minister, who continues to be well-connected to British military and security officials, confirms that Britain and the United States. - "... will go to war with Iran before the end of the year."
By Maureen DowdIt’s too bad President Bush spurns evolution — both in his view of the universe and his view of himself.
Scientists see more and more evidence that human evolution not only exists but is ongoing, as people adapt to changing circumstances with shifts in everything from skin color to the protein structure of sperm.
But with W., it’s more a matter of survival of the stubbornist.
If you turn on TV, you see missiles flying, bodies lying, nuclear missiles unleashed and a slaughterhouse in Iraq. But don’t despair, because yesterday President Bush announced the establishment of “a joint committee to achieve Iraqi self-reliance.” He called it a “new partnership,” as if it were some small business.
Isn’t it a little late, in July 2006, to be launching a new partnership for such an old mess? Isn’t it a little late to realize that Baghdad, a city where 300 garbage collectors have been killed in the last six months, according to press reports, has spun out of control?
In a press conference at the White House with his rogue puppet, the Iraqi prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, Mr. Bush explained that “our strategy is to remain on the offense, including in Baghdad.” Then why, after three and a half years, does our offense look so much like a defense?
The president sounded like a Jon Stewart imitation of himself when he assured reporters that Mr. Maliki had “a comprehensive plan” to pacify Iraq. “That’s what leaders do,” W. lectured, in a familiar refrain. “They see problems, they address problems, and they lay out a plan to solve the problems.”
If only the plan were a little less robbing-Peter-to-pay-Paul, and a little more road-to-Damascus epiphany. Taking troops out of Anbar Province, where the insurgency is thriving, to quell violence in Baghdad doesn’t inspire confidence that the plan is truly “comprehensive.”
And despite W.’s praise of Mr. Maliki’s leadership, the plan to start from scratch, in essence, stabilizing neighborhood by neighborhood in Baghdad is, as The Times’s Michael Gordon writes, “an implicit acknowledgment of what every Iraqi in Baghdad already knows”: the prime minister’s “original Baghdad security plan has failed. In the past two weeks, more Iraqi civilians have been killed than have died in Lebanon and Israel.”
Mr. Bush also sent Condi Rice to lay out a plan to the Arabs and Europeans about the destruction and refugee flight in Lebanon, but the plan turns out to be a plan to do nothing until Israel has more time to kick the Hezb out of Hezbollah.
W. says he supports more diplomacy, but it’s the diplomacy of sanctimony. He now grudgingly notes that “the violence in Baghdad is still terrible,” but doesn’t seem to grasp the tragic enormity of an occupation that is sliding into civil war and constricting his leverage to deal with all the other crises crackling around the world. The U.N. reported last week that in May and June no less than 5,818 Iraqi civilians were killed.
Although he talked about whether America could be “facile” and “nimble” enough to change with the circumstances in the Middle East, in fundamental ways, he has not changed his attitude at all.
Newsweek’s Richard Wolffe says he conducted four “freewheeling” interviews with the president last week, and concluded: “Bush thinks the new war vindicates his early vision of the region’s struggle: of good versus evil, civilization versus terrorism, freedom versus Islamic fascism. He still believes that when it comes to war and terror, leaders need to decide whose side they are on.”
The president sees Lebanon as a test of macho mettle rather than the latest chapter in a fratricidal free-for-all that’s been going on for centuries. “I view this as the forces of instability probing weakness,” he said. “I think they’re testing resolve.”
The more things get complicated, the more W. feels vindicated in his own simplified vision. The more people try to tell him that it’s not easy, that this is a region of shifting alliances and interests, the less he seems inclined to develop an adroit policy to win people over to our side instead of trying to annihilate them.
Bill Clinton, the Mutable Man par excellence, evolved four times a day; he had a tactical and even recreational attitude toward personal change. But W. prides himself on his changelessness and regards his immutability as the surest sign of his virtue. Facing a map on fire, he sees any inkling of change as the slippery slope to failure.
That’s what’s so frustrating about watching him deal — or not deal — with Iraq and Lebanon. There’s almost nothing to watch.
It’s not even like watching paint dry, since that, too, is a passage from one state to another. It’s like watching dry paint.
Photo credit: Maureen Dowd. (Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times)
"The people don't matter to this gang. They pay no attention. They think in totalitarian terms. They've got the Army. They've got Congress. They've got the judiciary. Why should they worry? Bush is a thug. I think there is something really wrong with him."Read more.
Gore Vidal also ridiculed the whole idea of a war against terrorism. "You can't have a war against bad temper or a war against paranoids," he says. "This is an eternal war against terrorism. It's like a war against dandruff."
"I have a very hard time with this word 'non-violence', because I don't believe that I am non-violent," said Ms Williams, 64.
"Right now, I would love to kill George Bush." Her young audience at the Brisbane City Hall clapped and cheered.
"I don't know how I ever got a Nobel Peace Prize, because when I see children die the anger in me is just beyond belief. It's our duty as human beings, whatever age we are, to become the protectors of human life."
Yesterday, a bipartisan American Bar Association task force released its report challenging George Bush's flagrant misuse of signing statements to circumvent the constitutional separation of powers. Bush has issued more than 800 challenges to provisions of passed laws.
Among the areas of laws Bush has threatened through this "shortcut veto" are the ban on torture, affirmative action, whistleblower protection, and limits on use of "illegally collected intelligence."
Read Katrina vanden Heuvel's Editor's Cut for more.
Confidants like grandparents or ministers who help pregnant teens should be protected from prosecution under a bill headed for Senate passage that would punish anyone who takes girls across state lines to end their pregnancies, Democrats said Tuesday.
"Today the Senate will vote on a dangerous and divisive proposal backed by Senator Bill Frist that would do nothing to protect our young people or promote conversation between teens and their parents," writes Nancy Keenan. "Known as the Child Custody Protection Act, the bill would prohibit anyone other than a parent from accompanying a young woman across state lines for an abortion if the home state's parental-involvement law has not been met."
"Each provocation and counter-provocation is contested and preached over. But the subsequent arguments, accusations and vows, all serve as a distraction in order to divert world attention from a long-term military, economic and geographic practice whose political aim is nothing less than the liquidation of the Palestinian nation."MUST READ.
Independent journalist Dahr Jamail, who exposed how the U.S. used white phosphorus bombs in Iraq, says Israel is using the same tactic in Lebanon. We speak to him in Beirut.
To Hezbollah, there is no such thing as “collateral damage” from its missiles. Israel keeps telling the world that its army aims only at military targets, but Hezbollah doesn’t even pretend to. Its soldiers proudly fire away at civilians.
These terrorists consider themselves men of honor, and unfortunately they are — by their own definition. We in the West can call them barbaric, which they also are, but they’re following an ancient social code, even if we can’t recognize it anymore.
The best guide to this code is James Bowman’s new book, “Honor: A History,” which is not a quaint collection of stories about dueling noblemen in Heidelberg. If the obsession with defending one’s honor seems remote now, it’s not because the urge has disappeared. We’ve just forgotten how powerful it is.
In the West we’ve redefined “honorable” as being virtuous, fair, truthful and sincere, but that’s not the traditional meaning. Honor meant simply the respect of the local “honor group” — the family, the extended clan, the tribe, the religious sect. It meant maintaining a reputation for courage and loyalty, not being charitable to enemy civilians. Telling the truth was secondary to saving face.
This “tyranny of the face” continually frustrates Westerners trying to understand the Middle East. When I interviewed villagers in Iraq, I discovered we usually had separate agendas: I wanted the facts, but the villager wanted to avoid embarrassing either of us. So he would tactfully search for the answer that would both please me and not dishonor his family.
When American tanks rolled into Baghdad, Western television viewers were astonished at the sight of the Iraqi information minister steadfastly denying that anything was going wrong. But it made sense from a traditional honor system. The only thing worse than being defeated is the shame of admitting defeat.
He was just following the strategy of Sir Lancelot when the knight was accused of adultery with Guinevere, King Arthur’s wife. Everyone, including Lancelot, knew the accusation was true, but Lancelot insisted on fighting his accusers — and after he defeated them, he proclaimed that his victories proved his innocence. He had saved face; therefore he must be honorable.
Lancelot’s strategy, as Bowman explains, ultimately didn’t work because his traditional view of honor was going out of fashion, made obsolete by the influence of Christianity. Instead of might-makes-right, Christianity preached turning the other cheek. Instead of according special honors to an elite class of men, it preached egalitarianism and love toward strangers. It emphasized inner virtue, not outward glory.
The result was a new honor system in the West, chivalry, that was an uneasy combination of Christian virtues and knightly violence. Eventually, with the decline of the aristocracy and the rise of the bourgeois and democracy, the system evolved into what Bowman calls honor-by-merit, epitomized by the Victorian ideal of the gentleman who earns his reputation by working hard, playing fair, defending the weak and fighting for his country.
The problem today, as Bowman sees it, is that the whole concept of defending one’s honor has been devalued in the West — mocked as an archaic bit of male vanity or childish macho chest-thumping. But if you don’t create a civilized honor culture, you risk ending up with the primitive variety.
“The honor system in Arab culture is the default honor system, the one you see in street gangs in America — you dis me, I shoot you,” says Bowman, a scholar at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. “We need a better system that makes it honorable to be protective of those who are weaker instead of lording it over them.”
When you’re confronted with an honor culture like the one in the Middle East, there are two rules to keep in mind. One is that you are not going to placate the enemy with the kind of concessions that appeal to Western diplomats. “Hezbollah is fighting for honor, to humiliate the enemy, not for any particular objective,” Bowman says. “Israel has no choice in what it’s doing. Nothing short of victory by either side will change anything.”
The other rule is that you’re not going to quickly transform an honor culture. The Iraq war was predicated on the assumption that democracy would turn Iraqis into loyal citizens with new civic virtues. But for now the old loyalties to tribes and sects still matter more than any universal concept of justice. The men would rather have honor than peace.
Photo credit: John Tierney. (Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times)
By Nicholas D. KristofThe U.S. position on the fighting in the Middle East is essentially: “Stop the killing. But not yet.”
Washington is resisting an immediate cease-fire so as to give Israeli forces more of a chance to destroy Hezbollah. But more time isn’t likely to accomplish much militarily, while every day of grisly photos on Arab television strengthens hard-liners — and Iranian and Shiite influence — throughout the region.
The Israeli offensive and the American support for it seem to reflect the same misguided thinking that led to our Iraq war. It’s a utopian notion that every outrage must have a solution, and that armed intervention is a useful way to reshuffle the Arab political stage.
Israelis are brimming with moral clarity, as we Americans were after 9/11. And they’re right: the Hezbollah attacks on Israel were particularly contemptible because they followed Israeli withdrawals from both Lebanon and Gaza. Israel should have been rewarded for those withdrawals, not subjected to rocket attacks and cross-border incursions.
But one of the oldest lessons in international affairs is that not every problem has a neat solution. The first rule in foreign policy, as in medicine, should be “Do no harm.” Unfortunately, the legacy of today’s Lebanese adventure, like the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon and our invasion of Iraq, may be plenty of strategic damage.
Granted, there’s a counterargument that fills my mailbox and goes like this: What else can a country do when it is subjected to rocket attacks and cross-border raids by a terrorist organization committed to its destruction? If that terror group finds a safe haven just across an international border, and the government and the army there cannot control it, then what other option is there but to destroy that menace?
Uprooting Hezbollah may inadvertently cause some civilian casualties, so the argument goes, but the number would be unnoticed if the victims had died at the hands of an Arab government (so far, 1,000 times as many Muslims have died in Darfur as in Lebanon). In the end, sitting ducks have to fight back.
The problem with that argument is that it’s wrong.
One day before the Hezbollah incursion that provoked this war, terrorists bombed train lines in Mumbai, India, killing nearly 200 people (about 10 times as many as had been killed in all the Hezbollah attacks on Israel since the withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000, until this month). The Mumbai bombings were the latest in a string of attacks against India that have gone on for years, at the hands of terrorists operating with support from across the border in Pakistan.
Many Indians complain that their prime minister, Manmohan Singh, has been too wimpish in responding (a previous prime minister threatened war with Pakistan after a major terror attack in 2001). Yet Mr. Singh has wisely recognized that military action would only make the problem worse.
And there’s another example: Israel itself, in the past. Under both Ariel Sharon and Ehud Barak, Israel responded with restraint to attacks by Hezbollah. That’s one reason Hezbollah was on the defensive politically, and one reason Sunni Arab governments have criticized it.
For now Israel’s Lebanon adventure is playing out a bit like America’s Iraq adventure. It is bolstering hard-liners (like Bashar al-Assad of Syria) and undermining moderates (like King Abdullah of Jordan), while handing propaganda victories to Iran and Shiite militants.
Arab television channels have shown an unending stream of pictures of dead Lebanese children. We put our Arab allies in an impossible position when militants ask how they can work with a U.S. government that supplies the munitions that kill those children.
“Those of us who had welcomed Bush’s vision of democracy in the Middle East still believe in the promise of a free Iraq and a free Lebanon,” The Daily Star of Lebanon wrote in an editorial on Monday. “What a pity to see Bush’s vision engulfed in the flames of the current shortsighted American foreign policy. What was once a dream of democracy is fast becoming a nightmare of unstoppable civil war and terror.”
President Bush never became minutely engaged in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations or oversaw shuttle diplomacy to Damascus the way Bill Clinton did. It’s true that the Clinton efforts in the end didn’t achieve much. Nor did the dovish efforts of Barak.
But we may end up nostalgic for American and Israeli diplomatic efforts that never accomplished much, for they work out far better than military interventions that leave us worse off than before.
Photo credit: Nicholas D. Kristof. (Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times)
On a recent appearance that I made on MSNBC's "Hardball," which was being guest-hosted by Norah O' Donnell, she introduced me as someone who has been photographed with "dictator" Hugo Chavez. After the introduction and in a very short subsequent break, I looked at her and said: "You know, President Chavez is not a dictator. He has been democratically elected to his office 8 times."Give her Hell, Cindy! Woo Hoo!
To which she replied: "We had a big discussion about that and we decided that he ruled like a dictator." That statement really shocked, yet irritated me, because I can't believe that MSNBC and Norah O'Donnell would perpetuate the myth that President Chavez is a dictator and mislead and misinform their viewers, because contrary to facts, they "decided that he ruled like a dictator."
"Then you should call George Bush a dictator," I said, right before we were given the signal that the interview was beginning.
"Peace, Propaganda & the Promised Land provides a striking comparison of U.S. and international media coverage of the crisis in the Middle East, zeroing in on how structural distortions in U.S. coverage have reinforced false perceptions of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This pivotal documentary exposes how the foreign policy interests of American political elites--oil, and a need to have a secure military base in the region, among others--work in combination with Israeli public relations strategies to exercise a powerful influence over how news from the region is reported. Through the voices of scholars, media critics, peace activists, religious figures, and Middle East experts, Peace, Propaganda & the Promised Land carefully analyzes and explains how--through the use of language, framing and context--the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza remains hidden in the news media, and Israeli colonization of the occupied terrorities appears to be a defensive move rather than an offensive one. The documentary also explores the ways that U.S. journalists, for reasons ranging from intimidation to a lack of thorough investigation, have become complicit in carrying out Israel's PR campaign. At its core, the documentary raises questions about the ethics and role of journalism, and the relationship between media and politics." (07/17/06 Runtime 79 Minutes)
"The people of the Middle East are suffering again as militarists on all sides, and cheerleading journalists, send forth missiles, bombs and endless words of self-justification for yet another pointless round of violence between Israel and her neighbors," writes Rabbi Michael Lerner. This most recent episode of irrationality "evokes tears of sadness, incredulity at the lack of empathy on all sides, anger at how little anyone seems to have learned from the past, and moments of despair as we once again see the religious and democratic ideals subordinated to the cynical realism of militarism."
"[The] Five-year campaign plan [includes]... a total of seven countries, beginning with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Somalia and Sudan" (Pentagon official quoted by General Wesley Clark)"Winning Modern Wars" (page 130) General Clark states the following:
According to General Wesley Clark--the Pentagon, by late 2001, was Planning to Attack Lebanon
"As I went back through the Pentagon in November 2001, one of the senior military staff officers had time for a chat. Yes, we were still on track for going against Iraq, he said. But there was more. This was being discussed as part of a five-year campaign plan, he said, and there were a total of seven countries, beginning with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Somalia and Sudan.Of course, this [is] wholly consistent with the US Neocons' master plan, "Rebuilding America's Defenses," published in August 2000 by the Project for the New American Century (PNAC)
...He said it with reproach--with disbelief, almost--at the breadth of the vision. I moved the conversation away, for this was not something I wanted to hear. And it was not something I wanted to see moving forward, either. ...I left the Pentagon that afternoon deeply concerned."
BAGHDAD, Iraq, July 22 — The speaker of the Iraqi Parliament criticized the American government’s involvement in Iraq on Saturday, likening the invasion and its consequences to “the work of butchers” and demanding that the American authorities disentangle themselves from Iraq’s political affairs.
Joshua Holland writes, "Iraq's reconstruction has been a crude taxpayer rip-off - and while $30 billion has been spent, only 30 percent of Iraqis are even aware of the rebuilding effort."
Guess who will benefit from this agreement more?
IN AN UNUSUAL BUT WELCOME intervention, the U.S. Supreme Court has decided to wade into the global warming debate. In its next term, the court will hear a lawsuit brought by California and other states against the federal government for failing to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. Courts usually defer to the discretion of administrative agencies to implement the law, but in this case such deference is outweighed by the administration's glaring dereliction of duty....
Over the past several weeks, the tense equilibrium between Israel and her neighbors has disintegrated at a frightening pace, with no sign of abating. Israeli soldiers remain kidnapped, rockets continue to fall on northern Israel, Israeli military actions in Gaza and Lebanon have caused incredible loss of civilians lives and damage to infrastructure, and Israeli ground forces have recently begun crossing the border into southern Lebanon.Read Brit Tzedek v'Shalom (Jewish Alliance for Peace & Justice) TALKING POINTS here.
In order to stem the rising tide of violence in the Middle East, Brit Tzedek calls for an immediate ceasefire and the return of Israeli soldiers in the ongoing conflicts in Lebanon and Gaza. We believe this is in the best interests of Israel.
President Bush has made aggressive use of presidential signing statements to interpret acts of Congress, prompting serious questions. What are the implications for the constitutional doctrine of separation of powers? Do presidential signing statements conflict with congressional intent? Has the role of presidential signing statements changed in recent years? An American Bar Association Task Force on Presidential Signing Statements and the Separation of Powers Doctrine, formed by ABA President Michael S. Greco, has been studying these issues....The task force released its findings and recommendations in a press conference earlier this week. During that press conference, the task force, in response to a journalist question, urged reporters to re-read the Constitution in order to better understand how the President is using signing statements to ignore the law, upset the balance of powers, and undermine the Constitution.
George W. Bush did not invent the document known as the presidential signing statement; he inherited it. Franklin Roosevelt, Bill Clinton, and even James Monroe, in 1830, authored the statements, which spell out the president's sometimes controversial interpretation of the very law he's signing. But no president has used signing statements quite like Bush.Read more.
Although the president has not issued more statements in total than any other president, he has challenged more than 750 laws in more than 100 signing statements. And he has used them to, in effect, challenge parts of laws, and challenge them more aggressively, than any president before him. Bush's liberal use of those statements first attracted attention in December 2005, when he signed a torture ban—but then added a statement reserving the right not to enforce the ban, alongside his signature. Since then, Congress has held a hearing to investigate Bush's use of the statements, a bipartisan advocacy group has condemned their use, and Democratic Rep. Barney Frank has introduced a bill that would allow Congress to override content in them that contradicts signed legislation.
Now, U.S. News has learned, an American Bar Association task force is set to suggest even stronger action. In a report to be released Monday, the task force will recommend that Congress pass legislation providing for some sort of judicial review of the signing statements. Some task force members want to simply give Congress the right to sue over the signing statements; other task force members will not characterize what sort of judicial review might ultimately emerge.
It’s too late now, but Israel could have used a friend in the early stages of its war with Hezbollah — a friend who could have tugged at its sleeve and said: “O.K. We understand. But enough.”
That friend should have been the United States.
It is not difficult to understand both Israel’s obligation to lash back at the unprovoked attacks of Hezbollah, and the longstanding rage and frustration that have led the Israelis to attempt to obliterate, once and for all, this unrelenting terrorist threat. Israelis are always targets for terror — whether they are minding their own business in their homes, or shopping at the mall, or taking a bus to work, or celebrating the wedding of loved ones.
(A quick example from a seemingly endless list: An Israeli security guard prevented a Palestinian suicide bomber from entering a mall in the seaside town of Netanya last December. The bomber detonated his explosives anyway, killing himself, the guard and four others.)
But the unnecessary slaughter of innocents, whether by Hezbollah, Hamas, Al Qaeda, American forces in Iraq or the Israeli defense forces, is always wrong, and should never be tolerated. So civilized people cannot in good conscience stand by and silently watch as hundreds of innocents are killed and thousands more threatened by the spasm of destruction unleashed by Israel in Lebanon.
Going after Hezbollah is one thing. The murderous rocket attacks into Israel must be stopped. But the wanton killing of innocent civilians, including babies and children, who had no connection at all to Hezbollah is something else.
The United States should have whispered into Israel’s ear, the message being: “The carnage has to cease. We’ll find a better way.”
Instead, the Bush crowd nodded in acquiescence as Israel plowed headlong into a situation that can’t possibly end any other way than badly. Lebanon, which had been one of the few bright spots in the Middle East, is now a mess. Even if Hezbollah is brought to its knees, the circumstances will ensure that there will be legions of newly radicalized young men anxious to take up arms and step into the vacuum.
(When Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982, its strongest resistance enemy was the Palestinian guerrilla group Fatah. When it withdrew 18 years later, it left behind a stronger, more extreme guerrilla movement in Hezbollah, a force that didn’t exist at the time of the invasion.)
Joseph Cirincione, an expert on national security matters (and a supporter of Israel) at the Center for American Progress in Washington, said last week: “There is no question that Hezbollah provoked this current crisis, and that it was right for Israel to respond, even if that meant crossing the Lebanon border to strike back at those who had attacked it. But this operation has gone too far. It’s striking back at those who had nothing to do with Hezbollah.”
As a true friend of Israel, the task of the United States is to work as strenuously as possible to find real solutions to Israel’s security. The first step in that process, as far as the current crisis is concerned, would logically have been to try and broker a cease-fire.
But the compulsive muscle-flexers in the Bush crowd were contemptuous of that idea. Always hot for war, and astonishingly indifferent to its consequences, they egged Israel on.
That was not the behavior of a friend.
Neither Israel nor the United States can kill enough Muslims to win the struggle against terror. What Israel needs are stable, moderate governments in the region. (This is one of the reasons why it made no sense to cripple the Lebanese government.) What the United States needs is as much serious diplomatic engagement on all fronts as possible, and an end to the Bush administration’s insane addiction to war — ever more war — as the answer to the world’s ills.
The U.S. especially needs to be deeply involved in the effort to establish peace between Israel and its neighbors.
There is no grand solution to the centuries-old problems of the Middle East. As with the cold war between the United States and the Soviet Union, you try to keep things as cool as possible, step by sometimes agonizing step. It may not be pretty, and it will surely be frustrating. But if the conflict, however aggravating, can be kept cold, as opposed to hot, you’re ahead of the game.
Photo credit: Bob Herbert. (The New York Times)
