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Good morning, Fallujah

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Well — with several dozen Americans dead, many more American wounded, and who knows how many Iraqi casualties that we’ll never be able to count — we now control Fallujah again. I heard an American official quoted on NPR this morning saying that we’ve “broken the back” of the resistance.

When we invaded Iraq a year and a half ago, we broke the back of the resistance pretty quickly, too. Only it turned out that the resistance had simply dissolved into the countryside to regroup. Similarly, today, most of the Iraqis from Fallujah seemed to have moved on before we moved in. Mosul is awash with Iraqi rebels now. Samarra, which the U.S. made a lot of noise about clearing out a few weeks before Fallujah, became a center of unrest again once the U.S. troops moved on and turned it over to shaky Iraqi government forces.

So now we own a bombed-out Iraqi city, one that, having strewn with rubble, we will pay to rebuild. But the Iraqi rebellion doesn’t appear any weaker. At what point will our leaders get their heads around the simple fact that our enemies here have no back to break? Isn’t this the starting point in fighting a guerrilla war? Didn’t we learn anything from Vietnam?

Our idiocy is not just wasting American lives and money; it is telegraphing to our enemies that we are clueless. Because the same lesson from Fallujah — that we are fighting an unconventional enemy with no “back” to break — applies to the larger war on terrorism. And until we learn it we have no hope of winning.

The corrections

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I was traveling a lot during the past week, then returned to my backlogged domestic duties, and both kept me from this blog for far too long — apologies for the hiatus. Now for some catching up!

Soon, reports from Bloggercon and some other comments from my trip. But first, an amazing cavalcade of corrections.

Every news organization has to deal with a difficult or embarrassing correction every now and then; since everyone makes mistakes, the only alternative (pretend you never goofed) is unthinkable. But surely this season has been extraordinary.

We started shortly before the election with the Wall Street Journal’s act of postmodern performance-art journalism, in which the leading national conservative newspaper absolved the leading national conservative TV network of leaning Bush-ward: “NEWS CORP.’S Fox News was incorrectly described in a page-one article Monday as being sympathetic to the Bush cause.” Oh, right, thanks — you know, without the tip we just might have gotten that one wrong…

But the strange corrections keep coming. Here’s a couple of recent ones from the New York Times.

At the end of the most recent column by David Brooks came this timid confession: “Not that it will do him much good at this point, but I owe John Kerry an apology. I recently mischaracterized some comments he made to Larry King in December 2001. I said he had embraced the decision to use Afghans to hunt down Al Qaeda at Tora Bora. He did not. I regret the error.”

Unfortunately, the quote Brooks is now retracting formed the centerpiece of the columnist’s Oct. 30 piece; it was the key piece of evidence he cited as to “why Kerry is not cleaning Bush’s clock in this election.” Yeah, I guess it won’t do Kerry much good at this point. In this little craven act Brooks is simply working in line with the administration he supports, whose modus operandi routinely involves lying when it matters and letting the truth mop up when it no longer makes any difference.

But as we Bush opponents rightly push back on the distortions and outright lies that the crew in Washington have been peddling for four years, we need to take care that, in our anger and frustration, we don’t fall into some of the same practices.

For instance, take the matter of President Bush’s chief legal adviser, Alberto Gonzales, whose nomination to be Attorney General has raised hackles because of a memo (PDF) Gonzales wrote suggesting that the war on terrorism meant we could ignore aspects of the Geneva Conventions. Now, Gonzales wrote that memo, and no matter how you cut it it’s a fairly appalling document — one that can accurately be linked to the abuses and torture committed by American troops at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere, crimes that Bush administration officials have amorally and shamefully refused to take any responsibility for. (In the Bush White House, the buck stops nowhere.)

Gonzales has plenty to answer for. But some critics (including Salon’s Joe Conason) have latched onto a single word that his memo uses to describe aspects of the Geneva Convention: “quaint.” Unfortunately, tarring Gonzales with that particular adjective appears to be unfair. If you read this correction from Friday’s Times, it’s clear that Gonzales used “quaint” only in the fairly narrow and reasonably defensible context of several trivial provisions that are not at the heart of this controversy:

  “A front-page article yesterday about the nomination of Alberto R. Gonzales to be attorney general included an incomplete version of a quotation from a memo by Mr. Gonzales or his aides that his critics contend opened the door to the mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib. (Excerpts from Mr. Gonzales’s legal writings, published with the continuation of the article, included the complete quotation.) The passage, discussing the war on terrorism, read in full: “In my judgment, this new paradigm renders obsolete Geneva’s strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions requiring that captured enemy be afforded such things as commissary privileges, scrip (i.e., advances of monthly pay), athletic uniforms and scientific instruments.” The version in the article yesterday was truncated after “some of its provisions.”

Oppose Gonzales? Sure. But let’s leave the selective quotation, the context-free criticism and the misquotational smears to the GOP. They’re better at it, anyway.

BONUS LINKS: For those of you who are still burning the midnight oil with nightmares of electoral fraud and recount fever, I can only recommend the yeoman work of Salon’s Farhad Manjoo (here and here). Every potential election problem is worth looking into, and Salon will keep at it, but let’s face it, it is hugely unlikely that this election was stolen. (Guess what? The exit polls were off because exit polls are lousy. And this entire election was within the margin of error at all times.) The more energy we spend focusing vainly on pursuing the chimera of fraud, the less we have to fight real battles.

And to keep up one’s spirits in this dark hour, there’s always The Onion’s deadpan realism: “Nation’s Poor Win Election For Nation’s Rich.”

Correspondence course

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For the past couple of days an intense, almost feverish conversation has busted out on the Net. Salon’s editorial inbox is overflowing. (Some highlights are here. And here. And here.) There’s, uh, a lot to talk about.

Here’s an exchange I had earlier today with one letter writer:

  Dear Scott,
On Wednesday, 11/03/04, you said, “So let’s remember that we’ve just lost a big battle, and that hurts, but it’s not the end.” Yes, it is. By the end of this 4 years the cartel will have sold our national patrimony to their fellow-travelers (note I did not say friends, they have no friends) and any civil rights will be tightly constrained by a court that KNOWS we are Xtian and nobody else counts. I will be long dead before any even get their rights back, though to be honest I think future generations have no hope of this whatsoever. Once the last national lands are sold, there will never be enough money to buy them back, so kiss wild lands and even the national parks goodbye…

Here’s what I wrote back:

 

I think I understand your despair, and at times I’m tempted to share it. But I’ve also lived long enough to know that there’s really no alternative to persevering. When Reagan was elected, twice, I was sometimes quite certain that we would wind up obliterated in a nuclear showdown. I still think Reagan was a lousy president, but the worst didn’t happen — in part because people didn’t just accept his policies, they fought back. I intend to keep doing my own tiny part of fighting back, which, since I’m a writer, means continuing to write. I hope you find your way back to playing whatever your part may be.

And here is a very powerful letter that one of the wiser people I know, the writer Sue Halpern, sent to some friends:

  Yesterday, looking at the map of the United States, the visual metaphor was hard to miss: those of us who voted Democratic, who oppose the war, who support gay marriage, who value civil liberties, who believe in due process, who are concerned about jobs and health care and education and the environment, were relegated to the margins of our country. If we didn’t already understand that our point of view was marginal, that map showed us.

But the map is deceptive, and reading it that way is the equivalent to Dick Cheney’s arrogant declaration that the people of this country had delivered a resounding mandate to George Bush. We did no such thing. Even in states like Wyoming and Idaho and Georgia and Tennessee there are tens of thousands of people who did not stand with the majority, just as there were plenty of people in our own home states who stood with George Bush. Such is the nature of democracy, even a democracy as broken as ours.

So the other metaphor from the election is the one about the glass being half-empty or half-full. About half the people in this country appear to support the politics of George Bush, and about half are with and among us. For the purposes of the election, the glass was half-empty and we lost. For the purposes of going forward it is half-full, and it is from that that we must take our solace, and from there begin. The solace, such that it is, is that despite the lies, the willful deceptions, the cheating, the abject meanness, the subversion of reality, half the people heard the truth. And many of them live in places where the noise machine is a lot louder than it is here in Vermont, or in New York or Berkeley or Cambridge.

The solace is that we know each other and that we found each other — that friends urged friends to send checks to ACT or Run Against Bush or Band of Sisters and they did; that neighbors called upon neighbors to sign petitions and visit legislators and they did; that strangers from Duluth, Minnesota and Spokane, Washington met on the streets of Cleveland, Ohio going door-to-door to turn out the vote. True, it didn’t exactly work as we wanted it to work, and as we thought that it would work, but it did work. We raised a lot of money, we raised our voices, we raised a ruckus, we raised consciousness, and we learned that our point of view does not consign us to loneliness. This may have been the most divisive campaign ever, and the country may be divided, but we are not alone. This is important, because the agenda of the other side works best if we think we are.

I am not simply suggesting that if we think we are alone we will be less likely to stand up and be counted, though that no doubt is true. Rather, that if we think we are alone, we might start to believe that the only way to regroup is to embrace the ideas and rhetoric of the other side. The Democratic party has already done that, of course, in many areas, which is why its economic platform sounded remarkably conservative, why it articulated no serious opposition to the war in Iraq, why both John Kerry and Howard Dean were quick to state that marriage should be reserved for the union of a man and a woman. This last is crucial, because it represents the beginning of the values “creep” that some believe will allow us to cast our net wider — wide enough perhaps to capture that crucial three percent of voters who, next time, will send us over the top. It’s a brilliant strategy — but it’s not our brilliant strategy. It’s theirs.

How best to advance the faith-based theocracy that underlies the current discussion of “values” than by having us believe that the only way to “win” next time is by changing the language of the debate to make “our” side more palatable to some of “them?” But once you start changing the language, you start changing the content, and who wins then? We have to be clear: There is no such thing as a faith-based democracy. Democratic values are purposefully agnostic so that democracies can embrace people of all faiths.

It is possible that as soon as the Supreme Court changes hands, this point will be moot. We have to be prepared for this. That is why the lesson of the past year or two — the lessons we learned from Moveon and the blogs and the Deaniacs and National Voice and ACT, and from our friends and neighbors, and from people all over the country whom we now consider our friends and neighbors — must be this: That while we can act we will act; that while we can speak out, we will speak out; that while we can organize, we will organize; and that while we can stand, we will stand together.

Don’t it make your red state blue?

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Both Kevin Marks and Marijo Cook point out, in comments below, that there are lots of “blue” voters in red states and vice versa. Kevin writes: “If you look at CNN’s county by county maps, you see that each state is intermingled red and blue blotches, with lots of pallid mixed counties. Most states were close.”

Well, yes. But our system, until it is reformed, remains a state-by-state, winner-take-all model. So that recurring election-to-election patterns of majorities, even when they are small majorities, have significant and persistent political meaning. “Red states” are effectively “red,” even if they have very substantial “blue” minorities, as long as they consistently hand their electoral votes over to a “red” candidate. From the candidate’s point of view, that’s all that matters.

Sure, it’s unfair to make assumptions about individuals within the particular states — each of whom is, in any case, a complex bundle of beliefs and thoughts despite the simplicity of an “either/or” ballot choice. We’re divided across the nation; we’re divided within our states; we’re divided in our cities and counties and our neighborhoods; and often we’re divided within ourselves.

That’s all interesting, but the only level of division that matters in presidential elections, the only unit whose behavior matters, is the state — that’s how the Constitution’s written. And so generalizing about the behavior of states, and seeing patterns across the map that recur from election to election, is what the art of political alignments is all about. There were Republicans in the old Democratic “Solid South,” too. But it took the divisions of the civil rights movement and Nixon’s “southern strategy” to build a Republican majority in the south. That’s called realignment.

Karl Rove took the fruit of that realignment, wedded it to the burgeoning numbers of Bible-Belt style fundamentalist voters, and forged a majority. That was smart. Democrats need to be equally smart and think creatively about how to shift a few states into their column by turning their minorities in those states into majorities. Until and unless the Electoral College is reformed or abolished, this is the fundamental mechanism of presidential politics in America — and that’s why the whole “red vs. blue” map, however over-simplified it might be in terms of the panorama of human individuals, remains a powerful model for presidential politics.

Bleary morning after

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I’m sitting here waiting to watch Kerry’s concession speech. I’m going to jot down some thoughts before wandering out onto the Net and checking the pulse of the rest of the universe.

First thought: On NPR this morning they were talking about Bush now claiming a “mandate,” though it was unclear for what. It seems to me that this sort of result for an incumbent — a squeaker of an electoral college win based on a thin margin in Ohio, and a 51-49 popular vote win — is only viewable as a “mandate” if you apply the same scale that judged the even thinner Bush win in 2000 as a mandate. That scale, of course, is exactly what Bush and Cheney applied.

Bush did better this time around, and those of us who dislike him and his policies have to deal with that. But there is still just about half of this country that opposes him and what he stands for. We’re Americans, too. We have jobs and kids and beliefs and values, and we’re not going away.

What’s disturbing is how clearly split the country is geographically. The red/blue split first noticed in 2000 looks less like an anomaly of a tight election and more like a long-term alignment of the American people: The coasts, the Northeast, the Midwest — almost anywhere that people are gathered in big cities — for the Democrats; the West and the South for the Republicans. The last time the nation faced this kind of split, in the mid-19th century, we ended up shooting one another. I don’t think we face an actual civil war this time around, thankfully, but we do face something like its cultural and political equivalent.

So let’s remember that we’ve just lost a big battle, and that hurts, but it’s not the end. Richard Nixon won a gigantic landslide in 1972 and was out of office two years later. Ronald Reagan swept the board in 1984 but we survived and regrouped and recaptured the White House in the 90s.

The good news is that the country’s split still leaves the Democrats within a stone’s throw of winning an election. The bad news is, we couldn’t win it — even with a stagnant economy and Americans dying abroad in an ill-conceived war. Now the important thing to do is figure out why, and learn from our mistakes.

Bonus link: Sid Blumenthal’s reflections on the dark fears that fueled the Bush victory.

To bed

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Well, it’s been a disappointing night so far, and it appears that the electoral vote is simply going to hang on Ohio, and the Ohio Secretary of State has said, on several different networks, that those votes aren’t going to be counted for 11 days.

So it seems like a reasonable time to go to bed.

Voting

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I voted this morning with a big crowd of my fellow citizens of Berkeley. Tonight, I’ll be working in the newsroom, as I have on each election night from 1980 on (with the exception of 1984, when I worked for a weekly). (We’re citizens! We’re journalists! There’s no conflict — imagine that!)

None of those contests has remotely compared to this year’s — not just in the level of partisan emotion, something that has caused so much tsk-tsking from the punditry, but in the sheer level of involvement. (My Berkeley neighbor and colleague Andrew Leonard feels the same way.)

And it’s not just that an unusual number of my friends and colleagues are out volunteering in get-out-the-vote efforts; it’s that everyone I talk to says the same thing — they’re amazed at the number of their friends and acquaintances who are out volunteering.

“Getting out the vote” has always been a bipartisan goal in theory but, sadly, a highly partisan issue in fact. You’ll note that nearly all of the election-day disputes center on Democrats trying to boost turnout and Republicans trying to reduce participation. You can draw your own conclusions.

The Net is, of course, one big element in this election’s high level of involvement. Here on this little blog I’m quite pleased and proud that, though my own strong preferences in this election have long been clear, those of you who’ve chosen to participate in the comments have for the most part presented honest and vigorous arguments from both sides. When I hear people complain about the blogosphere promoting a one-sided echo chamber, this debate stands as a simple counterargument. Thanks to all who have tossed in their words — particularly, thanks to those who’ve challenged my views.

War president? Achilles’ heel

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Hubris and chutzpah. Chutzpah and hubris. These are the words that keep looping through my brain as I try to answer, for myself, the question so many Americans find themselves asking today: How could the presidency of George W. Bush have gone so radically wrong?

We know that Bush ignored the peculiar circumstances of the 2000 election — losing the popular vote, winning the Florida electoral votes only after an unprecedented and still violently controversial Supreme Court decision — and betrayed his own promise of being a “uniter not a divider”: From the start, he chose to govern from the right, not the center.

But it was only after 9/11 that the characteristic traits of Bush’s presidency came into full flush. At this potentially transformative moment the nation, stricken by outrage and tragedy, setting aside party labels, stood behind its president. It gave him everything he asked for, and waited to be asked for far more.

We stood behind Bush, but he did not stand up for us. Instead of capitalizing on good will from his opposition and from abroad — instead of inviting in Democrats, pulling together a national-unity style government and assembling a grand global alliance to face the threats of a post 9/11 world — President Bush executed one of history’s most shameful bait-and-switch maneuvers. He took the political and emotional capital 9/11 bequeathed him and squandered it in a foolish, unnecessary and tragic war in Iraq. That war has left the U.S. in greater danger than before, depleted our financial and military resources and robbed us of our options in the struggle against Islamic terrorism. It is a terrible, and terrifying, legacy for whichever candidate wins tomorrow’s election.

But at least John Kerry starts the trip without the luggage. Iraq is Bush’s war, and both his words and his actions have demonstrated that he is incompetent to prosecute it.

One of the first books of contemporary political history I read while growing up was David Halberstam’s “The Best and the Brightest” — the definitive story of how a handful of brilliant and mostly well-intentioned Ivy League intellectuals drove America into the Vietnam quagmire and then closed their eyes to, or covered up, the consequences of their error.

It was a story of hubris — of impudent ambition and self-willed blindness laid low. I remember thinking, reading Halberstam’s account as an adolescent, that however awful the price of the Vietnam mistake was, at least we’d learned from it. We’d lost a lot in Vietnam — but we also left our hubris there. Let a small cadre of true-believers take control of the nation’s foreign policy? Destroy villages in order to save them? Introduce democracy at riflepoint? We’d make lots of mistakes, but we’d never make those mistakes again.

So here we are in 2004, and it’s plain that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and company not only never served in Vietnam itself, but never took its awful lessons to heart. The outcome of their failures is now splayed across each day’s news. They scorned Vietnam’s most pragmatic teaching of all — that you can’t make good decisions if your government is telling lies to itself.

This is the Bush team’s chutzpah: Their apparent belief that the only real mistake their Vietnam-era predecessors made was in not deceiving well enough. Unlike the leak-prone, division-riven Johnson Democrats, Bush’s Republicans would march to the same spin, deliver the same rosy scenarios, present the same united front. All is well. Never mind the mess in the field. Don’t send bad news up the chain of command or you’ll get in trouble. And there is no such thing as a photo of a coffin.

Everyone makes mistakes, and many people are incapable of learning from them. But it takes a special kind of arrogance to hold one’s biggest mistakes aloft like trophies. The Bush campaign has adopted its candidate’s most alarming and appalling failures as a leader of a nation under attack — the inability to apprehend Osama bin Laden, the Iraq-war diversion — as banners of triumph. We’re supposed to ignore every other issue and re-elect the president because, hell, don’t we know there’s a war on?

Yet it is precisely for his record as a “war president” that Bush has already lost the traditional incumbent’s advantage, and goes into tomorrow’s elections with even less certainty of winning than he had in 2000. And it is precisely because the war still needs to be won that George Bush, a man whose hubris and chutzpah have betrayed his country, needs to lose this election.

Friedman’s choice

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I gave New York Times columnist Tom Friedman a hard time for not following his arguments about Bush’s failures in Iraq through to their logical conclusion, which would be a call for readers to vote against Bush.

It seems I was ignorant of an apparent Times policy that columnists can’t outright endorse candidates. And now Friedman has tiptoed up about as close to that line as possible.

Team Bush takes the pledge, ignores

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I’m back from Vancouver, thoroughly exhausted, and unable right now to pull together my notes and thoughts from OOPSLA, which I hope to get to, soon. In the meantime, some random postings:

## This report (from the Program on International Policy Attitudes of the Center for International and Security Studies at Maryland) on the relative perceptions of Bush and Kerry supporters (courtesy Metafilter) is, I suppose, not surprising, but still unbelievable:

 

Even after the final report of Charles Duelfer to Congress saying that Iraq did not have a significant WMD program, 72% of Bush supporters continue to believe that Iraq had actual WMD (47%) or a major program for developing them (25%). Fifty-six percent assume that most experts believe Iraq had actual WMD and 57% also assume, incorrectly, that Duelfer concluded Iraq had at least a major WMD program. Kerry supporters hold opposite beliefs on all these points.

Similarly, 75% of Bush supporters continue to believe that Iraq was providing substantial support to al Qaeda, and 63% believe that clear evidence of this support has been found. Sixty percent of Bush supporters assume that this is also the conclusion of most experts, and 55% assume, incorrectly, that this was the conclusion of the 9/11 Commission. Here again, large majorities of Kerry supporters have exactly opposite perceptions.

The report delicately refers to this overall phenomenon as a “tendency of Bush supporters to ignore dissonant information.” I’d say that’s a very polite way of putting it. A blunter description would be, “heads in the sand.”

## Meanwhile, over in Slate Chris Suellentrop has a report on the “Bush Pledge” that takes these final days of the election beyond the surreal and into the proto-fascist:

  “I want you to stand, raise your right hands,” and recite “the Bush Pledge,” said Florida state Sen. Ken Pruitt. The assembled mass of about 2,000 in this Treasure Coast town about an hour north of West Palm Beach dutifully rose, arms aloft, and repeated after Pruitt: “I care about freedom and liberty. I care about my family. I care about my country. Because I care, I promise to work hard to re-elect, re-elect George W. Bush as president of the United States.”

They’re also pledging, I bet, to continue to “ignore dissonant information.”

## Finally, RIP John Peel. During the months I spent in England in the early ’80s, I fell in love with his broadcasts, and more recently I’ve enjoyed the bonanza of CD reissues of “Peel Sessions” by bands I love.