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The surge Catch-22

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The date by which we are supposed to judge whether the “surge” is working keeps getting pushed back, but even slippier than the timeline is the total absence of any administration yardstick for success.

In theory, you’d think that the goal of escalating the war is to reduce the violence. Right there we’re already in topsy-turvyland of the “destroy the village in order to save it” variety. But it only gets more illogical. The administration warned that we should expect a rise in casualties as the surge works its magic, because we’re putting more boots on the ground and in harm’s way, and we’re fighting the bad guys, so there’s likely to be more violence, not less, for some indeterminate time.

Now we’re hearing the next level of this Catch-22: Once we really do start achieving some effective “stabilization” of parts of Baghdad or Anbar or wherever, this will only enrage the insurgents and make them more desperate, so they’re going to attack harder. In other words: we can tell we’re achieving stability because of all the instability our success is provoking!

This may sound insane, but here it is, on Tuesday’s New York Times op-ed page. Owen West, a Marine major and veteran of two tours in Iraq, tells us that the Democratic effort to set a withdrawal date will undermine the progress that’s visible to him on the ground:

The Iraqi battalion I lived with is stationed outside of Habbaniya, a small city in violent Anbar Province. Together with a fledgling police force and a Marine battalion, these Iraqi troops made Habbaniya a relatively secure place: it has a souk where Iraqi soldiers can shop outside their armored Humvees, public generators that don’t mysteriously explode, children who walk to school on their own. The area became so stable, in fact, that it attracted the attention of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia. In late February, the Sunni insurgents blew up the mosque, killing 36.

Huh? Look, the bad guys blew up the mosque — that’s how you can tell how stable the area had become!

The value of this mad rhetoric is obvious: Any way things go, the administration wins. If violence decreases, the surge is working, and if violence continues or increases, the surge is working, too. The only losers are the American soldiers and Iraquis who keep dying, abandoned in a game of run-out-the-clock.
[tags]iraq, surge, new york times op-ed[/tags]

Who lost Iraq?

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The controversy over Senate majority leader Harry Reid’s statement that the war in Iraq is “lost” is an exercise in capital Kabuki.

Everyone in Washington knows that Reid was speaking the truth. The war in Iraq is indeed lost. The war the politicians are fighting now is over who takes the blame for the loss.

By rights it should be President Bush. He started the war. He got everything he asked for from a compliant Republican Congress. He did it his way, and he failed, colossally. The Iraq adventure has damaged U.S. standing, U.S. interests, U.S. allies and the U.S.’s struggle with Al-Qaeda. It has killed and maimed thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. It is a global train wreck, today, now, whatever happens in the budget battle on Capitol Hill.

Politicians have been reluctant to state, forthrightly, how futile the situation has become; they worry about being framed as undermining morale in the field — just as Reid is now being charged. But the endgame of the Bush administration is forcing some bluntness on the Beltway.

Everything that Bush and his people do between now and 2008 needs to be understood through the lens of their “run out the clock” strategy. The attorney purge scandal, for instance, happened as part of an effort to polish up the resumes of “loyal Bushies” before lame-duckness sets in.

In response to the clear verdict of the 2006 election rejecting the war Bush chose to escalate the conflict instead, with one goal in mind: keep total defeat at bay, prevent a humiliating-retreat fiasco for two more years, then hand the hot potato off to his successor. Let the helicopters lift off from the Green Zone roofs any time after Jan. 20, 2009, just not on my watch, Bush wants to be able to say — no matter how many more soldiers and civilians have to die so he can say it.

That’s why Reid is saying the war is already lost. And why it’s important that he’s saying it today, with nearly two years still left of the Bush presidency. The Bush White House never takes responsibility for anything; the bad stuff was always someone else’ fault. (Remember the ludicrous argument that the Bush team started during its first administration about who was to blame for the recession that mired the country for Bush’s first few years: “It had already begun when we took office!” was the administration dodge.) If we’re honest that the war is already lost, and that everything we do henceforth is about cleaning up the mess, it’s that much harder for Bush and Cheney to turn around and somehow lay blame for the war’s disastrous conclusion at the feet of the Democrats who are trying to wind it down.

That’s the importance of Reid’s statement about the war: It’s about responsibility. President Bush started the war; President Bush lost the war. And he did both in a cloud of lies. Everything else is a footnote.
[tags]iraq, iraq war, harry reid, president bush[/tags]

David Halberstam, RIP

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The journalist, who died in a car crash near the Dumbarton Bridge here in the Bay Area, was 73. (SF Chron; Mercury News.)

I first read his 1972 masterpiece, The Best and the Brightest, as a curious teenager trying to figure out how and why our country was stuck fighting a war that could not be won on behalf of people who plainly did not want us to do so. It’s fair to say that the book shaped my view of U.S. foreign policy, and of the need to curb our government’s predilection for fighting unnecessary wars. Halberstam’s chronicle of the arrogance of power illustrated how the confidence of Kennedy’s Harvard-trained managers meshed with the cupidity of the Cold War military-industrial complex to produce the Vietnam quagmire. The title, in other words, was ironic.

In some of his later works Halberstam allowed his reputation as a Pulitzer-garlanded star to inflate his style. But The Best and the Brightest was taut and tragic. Today it reminds us that the “Vietnam complex” was not some debilitating national illness that needed to be shucked off; it represented experience of imperial power’s limits, hard-won through an ill-begotten war. How shameful that those lessons vanished from Washington so soon, and that another generation of Americans must once more seek the answers I found in Halberstam’s book.

UPDATE: This from Clyde Haberman’s Times obit:

William Prochnau, who wrote a book on the reporting of that period, “Once Upon a Distant War,” said last night that Mr. Halberstam and other American journalists then in Vietnam were incorrectly regarded by many as antiwar.

“He was not antiwar,” Mr. Prochnau said. “They were cold war children, just like me, brought up on hiding under the desk.” It was simply a case, he said, of American commanders lying to the press about what was happening in Vietnam. “They were shut out and they were lied to,” Mr. Prochnau said. And Mr. Halberstam “didn’t say, ‘You’re not telling me the truth.’ He said, ‘You’re lying.’ He didn’t mince words.”

[tags]David Halberstam, journalism[/tags]

Why Gonzales may stick around

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After his feeble attempt to defend his record of deception and cronyism before the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales must surely be polishing up his resume. Right? Well, under normal circumstances, that would be inarguable. But these aren’t normal circumstances at all.

Unless the Senate chooses to impeach Gonzales, the only person who can remove him from office is the man who selected him. So far, President Bush has remained steadfast behind his old friend. That’s no coincidence. The Justice Department is the tip of the iceberg; there are heaps more corruption and lies waiting to be aired throughout this administration, and now that the Democrats are running Congress, some of that information is beginning to come out.

Having a loyal “Bushie” fixer like Gonzales in the A.G. chair is the Bush crew’s chief defensive bulwark. Replacing him with a similar toady would, today, be impossible.

Under normal circumstances, given the revolt against Gonzales not only among Democrats but in his own party, a president would eventually bow to the inevitable; otherwise, he’d understand, he’d be unable to get anything else done for the remainder of his administration.

Here’s the catch: The Bush administration isn’t trying to get anything done any more. All these guys want to do is hang on for the next 18 months without ending up in jail or accepting the inevitability of defeat in Iraq. That’s it. How does firing Gonzales help them achieve those goals? While the Senate smolders over the arrogance and incompetence of Bush’s attorney general, the clock keeps ticking. The longer they deliberate over Gonzales, the less time they have to investigate everybody else.

I won’t be surprised if Gonzales survives a lot longer than pundits are presently predicting. Bush’s stubbornness isn’t just a character flaw; it’s a desperate by-the-fingernails defensive tactic.

The U.S. attorney purge and Watergate

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During Watergate, one would sometimes hear a certain volume of complaint: Sure, there was a petty burglary at the Democratic headquarters — but why was that such a big deal? Didn’t the government have more important things to worry about? Didn’t we know there was a war on?

Of course, as eventually became clear, the little breakin at the Watergate Hotel was the tip of an iceberg of corruption and fraud. And that lawbreaking wasn’t random or motiveless; it was centered on the aggressive rigging of a national presidential election. Watergate’s collective menagerie of petty evils insured that Nixon would be re-elected. That was the grand crime: subversion of the democratic process.

As the implosion of the Gonzales Justice Department continues, it’s important to keep that history in mind. Right now we’re still hearing the protests: This was just about firing a few political appointees! They weren’t following the White House’s wishes! Bush wanted them to root out election fraud, and they weren’t getting with the program! Why are we troubling ourselves over this stuff? Don’t we know there’s a war on?

In the U.S. attorney purge scandal as with Watergate, the “it’s just not a big deal” defense is collapsing — only faster this time. To understand why you only need a handful of facts.
[Read more…]

COPA plaintiffs win, yet again

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Alberto Gonzales has bigger problems these days, but his Justice Department just lost the latest round in a longstanding Internet censorship conflict.

The Child Online Protection Act went on trial again in recent months, and today, again, a federal court has struck down the law — which would require commercial online publishers like Salon to make sure that their readers are over 18 or face criminal prosecution for publishing material that might be “harmful to minors.” Publishers are supposed to be able to protect themselves from prosecution by requiring site visitors to register with their credit cards, thus ostensibly demonstrating their adult status.

The law is supposedly only aimed at commercial pornographers, but the law is absurdly vague. Somehow, publishers are supposed to trust the Justice Department to make the right call and understand who is a “bad” publisher and who isn’t. Placing such trust was problematic when the law was passed, under the Clinton administration; in the era of Bush justice, doing so would be utterly foolish.

Here’s the decision, which concludes that:

COPA facially violates the First and Fifth Amendment rights of the plaintiffs because: (1) COPA is not narrowly tailored to the compelling interest of Congress; (2) defendant has failed to meet his burden of showing that COPA is the least restrictive and most effective alternative in achieving the compelling interest;
and (3) COPA is impermissibly vague and overbroad.

I am proud that Salon has been a plaintiff in this suit since 1998, when the ACLU first launched it. (Here’s my account of the 1994 oral arguments before the Supreme Court in an earlier phase of the COPA fight.) I have no idea whether, defeated at every turn, the Justice Department will drag this proceeding into another decade by appealing it. In the meantime, we can take another deep breath and be glad for the victory.

Here’s the AP story. And here’s a post by Salon editor Joan Walsh, who testified in this most recent round of the case. And here’s the ACLU’s page. And here’s CNET’s story.
[tags]copa, aclu, child online protection act, salon, internet censorship[/tags]

WSJ headline writers hallucinate again

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Today’s Journal features an op-ed piece by Edward Jay Epstein on the recent confession by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (“KSM”). The article is headlined “KSM’s Confession.” The subhead (that’s how it appears online — in the print paper, it appears as a blow-up quote) reads: “New Questions About the Link Between Saddam and al Qaeda.”

I’d read the general coverage of this event, in which the imprisoned al Qaeda leader confessed to a long list of attacks and crimes. I hadn’t followed it in great detail, but I couldn’t recall anything in the confessions that seemed to offer any real news about the long-discredited notion that, before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Saddam and al Qaeda were in cahoots (they were, it was reasonably clear before the war and even more evident today, enemies).

So I read the Epstein piece closely, looking for “new questions” about “the link” that never was. And, strangely, though the article discusses many subtleties about the information the 9/11 commission relied on, about possible connections between the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and the 9/11 attacks, and other complex intelligence issues, the name “Saddam” does not appear once in the piece. There is virtually nothing in the article about putative links between Saddam and al-Qaeda.

There is only one paragraph that even mentions Iraq: that’s where one of the 1993 bombmakers, a guy named Abdul Rhaman Yasin, fled. But the notion that this reopens the question of a Saddam-Qaeda link depends on a long list of conditionals — If KSM is telling the truth (which Epstein says is a big question); if the network KSM used to plot the 9/11 attack also drew on support from his former cohorts from 1993; if one of those supporters was the Baghdad-protected Yasin. There are no “new questions” at all; there is, at best, a set of preliminary question that, should they all align in one direction, might set up a new question or two. That may be why Epstein himself confines the matter to a convoluted aside in his article, which mostly focuses on what he views as mistakes made by the 9/11 commission (which he’s writing a book about).

Is it possible that someone at the Wall Street Journal editorial page is still clutching desperately at the thinnest reeds of justification for the Iraq war, still trying to put flesh on the ghastly skeleton of Dick Cheney’s misleading claims about the Saddam-Osama axis, still doing everything possible to burn the phrase “link between Saddam and al Qaeda” into our consciousness?

Oh, right, it’s not only possible, it’s inevitable.

Damien Cave in Baghdad

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I worked with Damien Cave for years at Salon, where he did great work for our technology section. Several years ago he decamped for New York and ended up at the New York Times. He’s now reporting from Baghdad.

I’ve been catching up on reading some old papers that I neglected during the frenzy of my book launch. This morning I read his two-week-old piece “‘Man Down’: When One Bullet Alters Everything.” It’s a remarkable bit of eyewitness reporting from Haifa Street in central Baghdad, just outside the Green Zone, where Cave accompanied an American platoon on a sweep. It’s about the difficult choices facing U.S. forces trying to coordinate with Iraqis who are ostensibly leading the mission. It’s about the terrors and horrors facing Iraqi residents of the torn city. But mostly it’s about the choices and emotions encountered by the young American soldiers when one of their sergeants is struck down by a sniper. It is entirely sympathetic to the embattled Americans at the same time it illuminates how futile their effort is.

Perhaps the next time President Bush calls a press conference, the White House correspondents could collectively agree to stop wasting their time asking questions of a leader who will not give truthful answers — and instead, each read a sentence from this article, telling the president a story about what his mistakes have wrought.

Bloggers, Edwards, and transparency

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Back when blogging was young, one idea its early enthusiasts shared was that blogs would cut through the fog of corporatespeak and give the players in business and politics and other hierarchically organized fields a chance to communicate honestly, openly and directly. Blogs were a means to route around the PR pros and the media intermediaries.

And they do still sometimes achieve that: Look at how Steve Jobs issued his challenge to the music companies to drop their counter-productive stance on “digital rights management.” (It wasn’t a blog posting, but same principle.) As Dave Winer points out, Jobs didn’t hand this as a scoop to a New York Times or Wall Street Journal reporter; he just posted it on his Web site.

All this makes it exceedingly strange to be reading, today in 2007, about the little dustup in the Edwards campaign, where, as you may have heard, two bloggers who’d been hired by the campaign found themselves targeted by the right-wing media for stuff they’d written on their own blogs. Salon reported they’d been fired, but now it seems (see the Salon follow-up) that, after a day of turmoil, the campaign is keeping them on.

What’s strange is that we’re talking about two bloggers here and a campaign that has its own blog; and yet, as far as I can tell, none of their blogs actually tells much of the story of what’s actually happened. There’s a couple of ritual apologies from the two bloggers whose opening paragraphs read like they were written by committee, and an official statement from Edwards that’s similarly impersonal. Were they actually fired? No? What really happened between them and Edwards? Isn’t this precisely the sort of thing a blogger might tell us?

I don’t spend a lot of time in the political blogosphere that Amanda Marcotte and Melissa McEwan hail from. I don’t doubt that they’re basically victims of a witch-hunt. I just find it strange to be reading stories like those in Salon, full of quotes from unnamed “sources close to the campaign” telling us of an apparent inside story about a firing and then rehiring, while the bloggers at the center of the tale — who are, presumably, torchbearers of transparency — don’t give their own readers the scoop on what’s happened.

I suppose some of this is inevitable when the practice of blogging meets the crucible of presidential campaigns. I just wonder what the point of bringing bloggers into the political machinery is unless you let them be bloggers. (This is a variation on the old debate about blogging from inside big companies, which I was pessimistic about several years ago, because I figured it would face similar hurdles.)

No doubt we’re entering a long period of time in which people are going to be forced to ritually abase themselves and disown anything controversial they’ve written on a blog or elsewhere online before they are allowed to participate in the councils of power. And then, down the line — just as we now have presidential candidates who freely admit that, once upon a time, they inhaled — all of this will become somewhat quaint.

Good reads

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I’ve got a little link backlog. Let’s do something about it!

  • Earlier this week Jay Rosen wrote a remarkable essay about the recent kerfluffle in the right-wing blogosphere over charges that AP reporters in Iraq had made up a source. The excitable warbloggers, understandably dejected that they’ve lost the battle both on the ground and in the American public, grew excited at the thought of MSM blood. But it turned out the entire charge was bogus — the source was real.

    Rosen parses the motives and suggests that the warblog crowd would have done their cause a favor by being more critical of the Bush administration’s reality-evasion from the start:

    For Bush supporters who soldier on, the choices resemble what the go-getters from Enron faced: confront the bad accounting that’s gone on for years or adopt even more desperate measures to conceal losses and keep your hand alive. But if the AP had fabricated a source and relied on that source 60 times, maybe the tables could be turned again and the reckoning put off….

    If you really wanted Bush to succeed in Iraq, and you noticed that he could never be wrong or accept that bad news bearers could be right, this was a warning sign that the warbloggers themselves, as friends of the president’s project, should have taken the lead in discussing. Why didn’t they?

    The children of Agnew have been fully on his side, soldiers in his struggle, happy warriors with Bush because they believe in their red state bones the press is biased against them. Like him they also disbelieve the bad news on principle, and then find someone more loyal to look into it.

  • Michelle Goldberg’s recent Salon interview with Chris Hedges on fundamentalism in America and his new book, American Fascists, is also a great read: One passionate reporter who’s immersed in a fascinating subject interviewing another, equally obsessed.
  • Finally — this one’s a month old, but I’m just catching up — Clive Thompson’s New York Times magazine piece on open source spying. Can wikis and blogs really help the intelligence establishment do a better job assessing terrorist threats? It seems outlandish, but it grows on you the more you think about it (and read Thompson’s explanations).

    This passage rung my Dreaming in Code bell:

    The blog seemed like an awfully modest thing to me. But Meyerrose insists that the future of spying will be revolutionized as much by these small-bore projects as by billion-dollar high-tech systems. Indeed, he says that overly ambitious projects often result in expensive disasters, the way the F.B.I.’s $170 million attempt to overhaul its case-handling software died in 2005 after the software became so complex that the F.B.I. despaired of ever fixing the bugs and shelved it. In contrast, the blog software took only a day or two to get running. “We need to think big, start small and scale fast,” Meyerrose said.

    One of the big problems the agencies have, even with their closed networks, is persuading intelligence officers to share information. On the one hand, their desire to protect sources is understandable; on the other, the information doesn’t do the U.S. any good unless it gets circulated to people who can assess its significance.

    Is this the sort of information that is safe to share widely in an online network? Many in the intelligence agencies suspect not. Indeed, they often refuse to input sensitive intel into their own private, secure databases; they do not trust even their own colleagues, inside their own agencies, to keep their secrets safe. When the F.B.I. unveiled an automated case-support system in 1995, agents were supposed to begin entering all information from their continuing cases into it, so that other F.B.I. agents could benefit from the collected pool of tips. But many agents didn’t. They worried that a hard-won source might be accidentally exposed by an F.B.I. agent halfway across the country. Worse, what would happen if a hacker or criminal found access to the system?

[tags]journalism, fundamentalism, intelligence, open source spying[/tags]