Back in Oct. 2002, I asked, in the context of a discussion of the looming Iraq war that still, at that point, seemed like an unimaginable future, “Has anyone in the Bush White House read ‘The Guns of August’?”

The answer then was, “Evidently not.” The same apparently could not be said of the Clinton administration, whose U.N. ambassador, Richard Holbrooke, now writes in the Washington Post about the unsettled chaos spreading from an Iraqi epicenter through the Middle East today. “This combination of combustible elements poses the greatest threat to global stability since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis,” he chillingly declares. Holbrooke explicitly draws the parallel between the one-thing-leads-to-another crisis of August 1914 and the no-one-seems-to-be-on-top-of-things crisis unfolding today.

Barbara Tuchman’s famous and still magnificently readable book is the prototypical description of an international crisis in which, as the saying goes, events “took on a life of their own.” The complex interlocking alliances and mobilization timetables that pushed Europe over the brink, ending a long age of peace and prosperity and ushering in previously unimaginable volumes of slaughter and woe, might not seem on the surface to have much to do with today’s unfolding tragedies. And Holbrooke doesn’t work the parallel through as fully as he might: He sees the prospect of Turkey intervening in Kurdistan and Pakistan and India reigniting their conflict, while America’s colossal mistakes unite its enemies and its Israeli allies sink deeper into the Lebanon swamp. But he doesn’t connect the dots to back up his Cuban missile crisis comparison. It’s hard to see how we get from disastrous regional conflicts to World War-level conflagration.

That doesn’t make today’s situation much less scary, alas. We live in a faster era than our Great War forebears, with their telegrams and trenches, and yet, to me, today’s crisis feels more slow-motion. The disastrous choices compressed into the month of Tuchman’s title have instead in our day played out over the span of years since Bush’s ill-starred invasion of Iraq. How locked into the logic of chaotic confrontation are we? Will the slower pace of this train-wreck make its impact any less destructive? We can only hope and pray.
[tags]iraq, richard holbrooke, guns of august[/tags]

The term “Islamic fascist” has risen to the front of President Bush’s neural queue, it seems. He used it on Monday in reference to Hezbollah, and then Thursday he again applied it to the British plane-bombing ring.

It’s a big, heavy word, freighted with history that seems weirdly inapplicable in these cases. Fascism was all about fusing the power of the state and party with modern mythology cobbled together from odd remnants dug up from the bottom of the nationalist dustbin (Mussolini tried to drag in the grandeur of Rome, and Hitler loved his Valkyries), and it tended to be in conflict with organized religion, whose hold over the popular imagination it sought to supplant. As such, fascism seems a strange label to apply to the enemies we face today, in their statelessness and devotional fervor.

Yes, they share some of the traits we associate with fascism — a yearning for a lost era of glory, an indifference to civilian carnage (a trait that, alas, they hold no monopoly over). But why reach for this ill-fitting word when another “F word” lies so readily at hand and fits the bill so much more snugly?

Is there some reason that President Bush might not want to refer to the enemy as “fundamentalist”?

[tags]president bush, islamic fascism, political rhetoric[/tags]

Some questions based on the news from Britain of the foiled airline-hijacking ring:

• How soon do you think it will be before Dick Cheney tells us that it’s all the fault of Ned Lamont and his “cut-and-run” Democrats?

• How many Americans do you think will react to the news by embracing the Bush administration because of its strong-against-terror rhetoric?

• How many Americans do you think will instead wonder how pouring blood and money into Iraq for the last three years helped us prevent such plots?

• Will voters think, “By God, we’d better win in Iraq or they’ll come after us here at home?” Or, “Why did these guys waste the last three years on a losing battle in Iraq when they should have been fighting the real enemies who attacked us on 9/11?”

• Is it “Thank goodness for tough-talking leaders?” — or “Why didn’t these idiots keep their eye on the ball?”

The Republicans want people to think that only they are strong enough to fight terrorists. The Democrats need to keep reminding people that the Republicans have actually run their “war on terror” as a vast exercise in waste, incompetence, corruption and failure. There’s no strength in their strong talk. Maybe this time the bluster will backfire.

When I called the Lamont victory a “1968 moment” last night, I was thinking specifically of the events early in that year that led to Lyndon Johnson’s withdrawal from the race: Eugene McCarthy’s upset surge in New Hampshire, Bobby Kennedy’s entry into the primaries, and the gradual realization that the Democratic Party had decided it could no longer back its president’s war in Vietnam.

All this was an indication that 1968 was not going to be a business-as-usual year. So far, 2006 looks similar in that regard.

But now we’re hearing a different sort of 1968 analogy from some commentators: Look out, they’re saying, here come the New Left wackos and they’re going to drag the Democrats down to defeat again.

The analogy doesn’t hold at all, but it will be used with brutal effectiveness by camp Bush (Josh Marshall reports that it’s already begun), so it’s strange to hear it spun so effortfully by ostensibly liberal writers like Jacob Weisberg. But here he is in today’s Slate, complaining that “Lamont’s Victory Spells Democratic Disaster.” Why? Lamont and his crew are, Weisberg says in no uncertain terms, soft on terror.

To Weisberg, Lamont’s win means that “Democrats are poised to re-enact a version of the Vietnam-era drama that helped them lose five out six presidential elections between 1968 and the end of the Cold War.” It’s not that Lamont and his supporters aren’t basically right that Iraq is a disaster and the sooner we leave, the better; it’s that, in Weisberg’s view, “many” of “the anti-Lieberman insurgents” ” “appear not to take the wider, global battle against Islamic fanaticism seriously.”

Weisberg is unable to cite a single quotation or other fact that actually might demonstrate Lamont’s failure to take Islamic fanaticism seriously. Instead, he embarks on a lengthy historical analogy: “The party’s Vietnam-era drift away from issues of security and defense — and its association with a radical left hostile to the military and neutral in the fight between liberalism and communism — helped push a lot of Americans who didn’t much like the Vietnam War into the arms of Richard Nixon.” And by opposing Lieberman, apparently, the Democrats are once more going to alienate middle America.

I think Weisberg is simply another example of a Beltway insider who is peeved at Connecticut’s voters for rejecting one of their own. (See Marshall in Time: “Lieberman got in trouble because he let himself live in the bubble of D.C. conventional wisdom and A-list punditry. He flattered them; and they loved him back.”) As the political insiders start to fall, it looks like the journalistic insiders are going to start losing their bearings.

Anyway, Weisberg’s analogy makes little sense: In 1968 the Democrats split because their own president had failed either to win or to disengage from a stalemated war. (If it were really 1968, it’s the Republicans who should be challenging their unpopular and incompetent president today.) And Nixon didn’t win in 1968 because Americans thought the Democrats were soft on communism; he won because the best Democratic candidate was murdered, and the eventual candidate was unable to distance himself from the disastrous war.

Unlike in 1968, Democrats — except for a few Lieberman die-hards — are remarkably united. I don’t hear a lot of Democrats denying the seriousness of the al-Qaeda threat and related challenges; but a lot of us feel that the Bush administration’s failures — the very policies that Lieberman embraces — have set our side in that conflict back so far that the best we can do is clean house and reboot.

Weisberg seems less interested in fathoming the depth of voters’ anger at Lieberman than in dripping condescension upon the head of the winner of the election, who is “callow,” a “novice,” “less a fleshed-out alternative to Lieberman than a stand-in for an anti-war, anti-Bush movement.” It hardly matters that Lamont managed the extraordinary political feat of knocking off a three-term incumbent; he’s a pipsqueak upstart!

I don’t know what’s motivating Weisberg to spout such nonsense, but it’s actively harmful nonsense. In its own snotty way, it’s a bit of neo-McCarthyist baiting: no evidence, just vague charges that the other guy is a little, you know, “soft,” pink. “The 2006 Connecticut primary,” Weisberg writes, “points to the growing influence within the party of leftists unmoved by the fight against global jihad.”

Who are these fifth-column radicals? Where can we find them — in Connecticut, really? Does Weisberg have a list of names? And what do they have to do with the mainstream Democrats who decided they’d had enough of Joe Lieberman telling them not to criticize the president?

POSTSCRIPT Mark Schmitt also takes Weisberg down, notes WSJ editorial arguing that this isn’t like 1968 or even 1972 but rather 1974, when Democrats swept Congress clean.
[tags]Ned Lamont, Joe Lieberman, Democrats, 1968, Jacob Weisberg[/tags]

So Lamont beats Lieberman, but not with as wide a margin as the previous week’s polls suggested, and so… what? We’re supposed to think that the defeat of a three-term senator who carried the party’s banner on the national ticket in 2000 is not significant? Is tomorrow morning’s spin going to be, “Hey, Joe caught up to within 3 points! It wasn’t so bad!” Sorry, that won’t wash.

This is a 1968 moment. By which I mean it is a revolt of the people against a Democratic party leadership that hasn’t quite kept up with the depth of anger felt by voters about a terrible war. In 1968 the final outcome was fragmentation of the party followed by national defeat. The defeat that year was helped along by sundry assassinations and other schisms, like the Wallace candidacy. It doesn’t have to happen again this time around.

In order for it not to happen, the Democratic leadership needs to do something simple: accept the verdict of its own voters. In Connecticut, this means that Ned Lamont is now the Democratic candidate. If Joe Lieberman insists on the divine right to senatorship and runs as an independent spoiler, the party ought to shun him; given the closeness of the battle for the Senate, where every seat counts, a third-party run on his part says to the world, “I don’t care who controls the Senate as long as I get my revenge.”

On the wider national stage, the Connecticut results send a simple message to the Democratic leadership: Bush’s deceptively launched and incompetently prosecuted war is a disaster of such colossal proportions — such unconscionable cost in human lives, dollars, and lost opportunities — that it looms over everything this year. The Democrats must unite around a simple platform — throw out the liars, the war profiteers, the fanatics and the idiots who have led us into this mess. Bipartisanship is folly in today’s climate. The other guys don’t play that game. (See Paul Krugman, “Centrism is for Suckers.”)
[tags]Democratic Party, Joe Lieberman, Ned Lamont[/tags]

From the Sunday Times’ news story on the civil-war-ness of things in Iraq comes this quotation:

“I don’t think we moved too quickly, General [William B.] Caldwell said of putting the Iraqis in charge of Baghdad. “I don’t think anyone could have anticipated the sectarian violence.”

I am no doubt showing my age here, but each time the Bush administration and its related entities (Caldwell is the U.S. military spokesman in Iraq, so technically he’s not part of the administration, but that line is pretty blurry today) trot out this particular line, all I can hear is the mad voice of Monty Python cackling, “No one expects the Spanish Inquisition!”

No one expected the looting in Iraq. No one expected the insurgency. No one expected that we would never find the weapons of mass destruction. No one expected that Iraq would be so hard to rebuild. No one expected the Sunnis and the Shiites to not get along. No one “could have anticipated the sectarian violence.”

It is time for the Bush administration and its people to retire this excuse, which played out so infamously with Hurricane Katrina as well — not simply because it represents a species of buck-passing that ought to be beneath the people who run our government and our military, but also because in every case it is untrue, and, at this late stage in the unfolding Iraq fiasco, it serves as an egregiously self-incriminating lie.

The prospect of Iraq descending into civil war is one that has loomed over Bush’s invasion from well before its start. The “anticipation” of such a conflict has been a constant theme among observers on the scene and armchair commentators alike. For a U.S. general on the ground in Iraq today to claim that nobody anticipated “sectarian violence” is a sign of delusional incompetence — and an indication that reality continues to be alien terrain for the people leading our war effort.
[tags]Iraq[/tags]

Today, Lebanon; yesterday, Iraq; the day before, Afghanistan.

There’s no question to me that the Bush administration has a kind of global attention deficit disorder. Any large organization has difficulty keeping its eye on more than one ball, but the Bush White House is a special case. It’s clear that one reason the U.S. project in Afghanistan is now faltering is that the administration stopped paying much attention to it soon after Bin Laden’s escape from Tora Bora. “On to Baghdad!” was the cry then.

Iraq has held White House attention for a good long time — unsurprisingly given the enormous investment of money and blood and credibility in a misbegotten misadventure. But now, as American goals disappear into the mist of implausibility and Iraq sinks into the confusion of a sputtering civil war, Iraq, too, has become yesterday’s problem — displaced on the front burner by the alarming escalation of Israel’s war with Hezbollah and Hamas.

Watch in coming weeks as the diplomatic energies of the Bush team, such as they are, concentrate on Israel and Lebanon. We don’t talk with Syria or Iran so there isn’t that much diplomacy to do right now. But the potential for wider regional war is dangerous, and the White House’s ability to juggle multiple problems isn’t impressive, and to the extent anyone in Washington has any imagination and energy left to try to nudge the world towards peace, for the moment it will be aimed at the Israeli/Arab conflict.

In the past, each time the Iraq situation has seemed to be deteriorating, Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld have patched together some sort of face-saving event (A turkey for the troops! A government that only took six months to form after the elections!) to maintain an illusion of progress. I think it’s quite likely that Iraq will deteriorate as the Lebanon crisis continues, and I also think this time the U.S. is going to be stuck without a rabbit to pull out of the hat.
[tags]president bush, iraq, lebanon, afghanistan[/tags]