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Bush’s LBJ moment: Thomas Powers on Robert Gates

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On the eve of President Bush’s ill-fated invasion of Iraq, in March 2003, CIA historian Thomas Powers predicted, with almost spooky prescience, exactly how subsequent depressing events would unfold. So I pay a lot of attention to his analyses. Today he’s on the New York Times op-ed page with a piece that reads the tea-leaves on Bush’s nomination of Robert Gates as the new defense secretary. Rumsfeld’s resignation was widely and understandably viewed as a hopeful sign that the president was beginning to accept the reality of failure in Iraq and change policy accordingly. But Powers sees Gates’ selection as an indication that Bush is actually planning more of an LBJ-style digging in of the presidential heels:

Bad news from Baghdad and opposition at home may point to a lowering of expectations, at the very least, but I wouldn’t bet on it. Presidents take failure personally, can lift their voices above the din of opponents, and can use the immense power of their office to force events in the directions they choose.

The verdict of the elections was clear. The public wants to let Iraqis handle their own troubles from here on out, while we start bringing our soldiers home. But that’s not what President Bush has said he wants, so there will very likely be a series of fights over Iraq that will extend to the president’s last day in office. Robert Gates is smart, quiet, dogged and loyal: a well-considered choice for defense secretary by a president determined to bring home that “coonskin on the wall,” to borrow a phrase made memorable by an earlier president in a similar fix, Lyndon Johnson.

[tags]robert gates, thomas powers, iraq[/tags]

Iraq Study Group recommendation number one: Bush and Cheney should resign

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Every time I hear the words “Iraq Study Group” the phrase triggers a little involuntarily interior monologue that goes something like this:

“Study Group” — it sounds like a group of undergraduates cramming for finals. Isn’t “studying” what the Bush administration should have been doing back in 2002 and 2003 when it created the mess the Baker commission is desperately seeking a path out of today? What exactly is it that the “Study Group” is studying that the Bush White House, which appointed it, hasn’t already seen?

Hundreds of people are dying every day in Iraq, but the president has decided to let his disgraced Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, hang around a few weeks longer just so he can claim the title of “longest ever serving defense secretary.” Could there be a more ludicrous indication of how disconnected the White House has become from the carnage it has unleashed?

What options is the Study Group likely to propose — in the way of negotiations with Iraq’s neighbors, pressure on the Iraqi government, or timetables for withdrawal — that aren’t already obvious? What are we waiting for? Why are our leaders and the press splitting hairs over whether Iraq is in a state of “sectarian violence” or “civil war” or total anarchy?

The trouble is, our problems don’t lie where a “Study Group” might help, in figuring out what to do; they lie with an administration that has created a national disaster and now decided that cleaning up the disaster is not its problem at all. If you look at the coverage from Sunday’s Times exploring different roads forward for the U.S. in Iraq — “In Search of the Fixers” or the accompanying infographic — there is a strange absence of voices from the Executive Branch. After years of declaring victory and advocating “staying the course,” Bush and his team have now simply gone silent. (Or “checked out,” as Josh Marshall put it.)

It’s as if Bush, having driven the nation into a ditch, now wants to dust off his suit and walk away from the wreck. Trouble is, he’s not handing over the keys.

Now here’s something constructive the Study Group could recommend: The president needs to take responsibility for his failure and be a president for the next two years, leading the U.S. out of Iraq so it can repair its relationships with its allies, rebuild its armed forces and resume the real war we’re fighting against the group that attacked us on 9/11.

If Bush is unable to do that — and he may well be — he and his vice president should have the courage and honesty to resign. And the Baker commission should have the courage and honesty to say that to the president. In a parliamentary system, Bush and his people would have been out on their ears after this month’s election. That’s not our system — but we can improvise if we have to.

I don’t know whether, if Bush and Cheney actually did this before the new Congress takes office, Dennis Hastert would become president. After the Congressional transition, it would be Nancy Pelosi. Neither, of course, seems likely to move into the White House any time soon. But how can the country begin to move beyond our current disastrous paralysis, other than by starting with a clean sweep at the top? Are we going to spend the next two years pretending that we’re still “nation-building” and “fighting the terrorists” while American soldiers keep filling body bags and Iraqi morgues keep overflowing?
[tags]iraq, iraq study group, bush resignation[/tags]

Miscellany: Of drapes and atheism

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I’ve been hit with the accursed virus that’s going around — not a computer bug; the sniffly, rhinovirus sort. Meanwhile, I’m working my way through Don Knuth’s “Structured Programming with go to Statements”; the Code Reads for that should be up within a day or two.

In the political world, I keep returning to the condescending fuss the GOP made before the election about Nancy Pelosi having already begun to choose her new drapes. President Bush followed up with more in his “we took a thumpin'” press conference.

And all I can think is, drapes? This election was all about pulling back drapes. Bush’s Washington has been a place of closed curtains and shut doors — from the Cheney energy panel to the secret rendition of prisoners to the zipped-up treatment of the press. Pelosi could mint some appropriate symbolism by simply leaving her windows uncovered. Whether she does so or not, let’s hope for a little more sunshine on the workings of government now that we’re no longer a one-party state.

If politics is too mundane and Iraq too depressing, go read Gary Wolf‘s wonderful Wired essay on atheism. It’s a great tour of the subject with stops at the doors of Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett. Wolf concludes that, although atheism is the logical and philosophically sound stance for a scientific person, there’s something off-puttingly evangelical about its most fervent advocates, and that’s why the great bulk of us non-believers tend to identify as agnostics instead.
[tags]atheism, nancy pelosi, gary wolf[/tags]

Morning-after joke No. 1: “Gridlock looms”

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This morning’s Wall Street Journal headline: “Wth Democrats’ Gain, a New Divide: Threat of Gridlock Looms As Republicans Lose in Key Battlegrounds.”

Let’s see. “New” divide? As if the nation’s politics haven’t been bitterly divided for years?

As to the “threat of gridlock,” it’s hard to imagine what “gridlock” could be any more paralyzed and ineffectual than the previous congressional term. With a clear majority in both houses and the White House, the GOP was unable to do anything except prosecute a disastrously bungled war and implode into a mess of shame and scandal. If that’s “getting things done,” I’ll take the new gridlock any day!

This is important to watch — it’s one of the many spin-memes the Republicans will be tossing out in coming days. “Beware of gridlock! Democrats must roll over and play dead for the president or it will harm the nation!” This and similar notions deserve to be skewered early and often.

UPDATE: I notice that the online version of the story now has a less ridiculous headline: “Democrats Take Control of House: Divided Government Looms As Voters Seek Change; Senate Outcome Close.” So somebody’s still awake over there.
[tags]congress, elections 2006, wall street journal[/tags]

Razor-thin still cuts it

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It now seems conceivable, though one hates to invoke a jinx, that the Democrats might take the Senate as well as the House. If they do, it will be by the thinnest of margins — a few thousand votes in Virginia, perhaps something like that in Missouri Montana.

And if that happens, we can be sure that we will hear, both from the GOP’s spin brigades and their friends in the media, that a Democratic victory by such tiny margins isn’t that big a deal, and that the Democrats better watch it, and behave.

At that moment, listeners should flash back to recent political history’s most infamous close election: Florida 2000. The entire edifice of the Bush Administration has always rested on the thinnest of hotly disputed margins. That meager foundation never seemed to stand in the way of the GOP’s maximalist efforts.

Should the Democrats end up in control of both houses of Congress, sure, they should work professionally, with the opposition, to “solve the nation’s problems” — to use the dutiful formulation of the career politician. But they shouldn’t let the closeness of their possible win clip their wings.

A victory is a victory — an “accountability moment,” indeed! A sweep of two houses would indeed be a sweep of two houses, and a mandate lies wherever and whenever voters give you a win that gives you clout.
[tags]2006 election, senate, democrats[/tags]

Our elections are broken; new Congress must fix them

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Whatever happens at the polls today, you can count on one thing tomorrow: lots of post-mortems about disastrous problems with voting machines.

We thought that there’d be at least one positive outcome from the Florida 2000 debacle: Americans everywhere would realize how broken our elections are, and they’d rise up and demand change. The change, alas, has yet to happen. One reason is that it’s too easy, after election day, to return to our normal routines — until we wake up two years later for another “Groundhog Day” experience as we realize that, oops, the system is still a mess.

The other reason is that the party in power since 2000 has had no wish to fix the problem. Generally speaking, when fewer people vote, Republicans are happy. When Republicans control local governments, they’re happy to see chaotic situations in which their local officials can oversee recounts and such. Historically, the Democratic party has been the party of a wider franchise; Republicans spend their time looking for ways to make voting harder.

So let’s see if we can agree, now, as we head into the polls, on what the new Congress should do once we’re done electing it: Let’s get serious about improving our elections. They should be held on weekends, for starters. If they are going to use modern digital technology, we need paper verification, and the systems should be based on peer-reviewed, open-source software that can be independently appraised for its security and fairness.

Elections are run at the state and local level, so mandating this sort of thing nationally is quite difficult, but Congress tends to find ways to enforce its will when it needs to. When you control the federal purse, you control a lot. It shouldn’t be that hard for Congress to say to a state: Fix your voting mess, enable democracy, or we cut off your cash. What could be more important?

BONUS LINK: Legal guide for bloggers and citizen journalists on Election Day. Know your rights (though the laws on issues like photography at the polls are oddly vague).
[tags]elections, u.s. elections, voting machines[/tags]

Saddam trial Orwell watch

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We understand that, ever since the timing of the initial invasion — whose urgency was partly dictated by the need to “finish the job” well in advance of the 2004 election cycle — the Bush administration has done everything it can to orchestrate events in Iraq for maximum electoral impact.

So the fact that Saddam Hussein’s verdict has emerged immediately preceding U.S. elections can be safely ascribed to Bush’s desperate need to show some results from the Iraq fiasco.

This morning, White House spokesman Tony Snow said that suggestions that the U.S. “schemed” with the Iraqi court to time the verdict were “preposterous.” “The judiciary is operating independently,” he said. “It’s important to give [Iraqis] credit for running their own government.”

No, I don’t think the White House needed any “scheming.” The Iraqi court knows exactly what its “mission” is without being explicitly ordered. Coordination doesn’t require command.

The simple fact remains: this verdict represents a last-minute spasm of the GOP’s desperate hang-on-to-power campaign. And the White House is doing its Orwellian part in loudly denying the fact and protesting the Iraqis’ independence.

Sadly for them, the election’s outcome won’t really make a difference to the bloodshed in Iraq, the dynamics of which long ago spun out of American control. And once U.S. forces have abandoned the wreckage of the occupation, how long do you think Saddam’s judges have left to live?

UPDATE: It seems the court didn’t actually even finish preparing the full verdict. But there was some strange compulsion to report the verdict in abbreviated form on Sunday. See Josh Marshall’s post. This pretty much shreds the “Iraqis are independent, they work on their own timetable” lie.
[tags]saddam hussein, tony snow[/tags]

Vanity Fair’s Neo Culpa

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Vanity Fair talks to the neoconservative intellectuals who goaded the nation into invading Iraq and finds that they are, unsurprisingly, aghast and pointing fingers. Mostly, the fingers point at the incompetence of the Bush administration. “I just presumed that what I considered to be the most competent national-security team since Truman was indeed going to be competent,” says Kenneth “it’s going to be a cakewalk” Adelman. “They turned out to be among the most incompetent teams in the post-war era.”

“The policy can be absolutely right, and noble, beneficial, but if you can’t execute it, it’s useless, just useless,” Adelman says.

Here’s the problem with that: In the real world of international affairs, there is never an opportunity to disentangle the essential from the circumstantial. Circumstance rules. Execution is everything. Otherwise, we’d all just sit around, wish for world peace and goodwill towards all men, and wait for the happy result to unfold.

If you start with the assumption that anything is possible and everything will go right, it doesn’t matter what you advocate — the entire conversation is preposterous. It’s like saying, “I support the policy of regime change in North Korea by beaming our new mind-control weapon at the dictator’s head and making him abdicate.” A noble and beneficial idea — “but if you can’t execute it, it’s useless, just useless.”

To paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld’s immortal words, you’ve got to grapple with the world you have, not the world you want.

Nearly every single one of us who argued before the war that it was a mistake to invade Iraq agreed that Saddam Hussein was an awful dictator who, in the abstract, one would wish gone. But invading Iraq to overthrow him carried mad risks — risks that we have now seen play out in their near-worst scenarios.

Balancing judgments of risks against desired goals is the very essence of foreign policymaking. The neocons are eager to blame Bush administration competence, and they’re right, but it doesn’t get them off the hook. In their own foreign-policy field, the neocons — based, now, on their own testimony — have now definitively proven their own incompetence. It is time, really, for them to stop pontificating and go away.
[tags]vanity fair, neocons, neoconservatives, iraq, bush administration[/tags]

Crash in Iraq; Grove’s “shift left”

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Sometimes when I tell people I’ve written a book about how difficult it is to make software well, I get a blank stare, as if to say, “What could be further from mattering to me?” And I repeat my now well-rehearsed remarks about the way our lives increasingly move through a vast web of programming products — way beyond what we encounter when we’re online. Sometimes the stares even resolve into interest.

So when I read items like this in the news I’m reminded of why these questions still matter. This is from a longer New York Times piece on how the U.S. seems to have lost track of hundreds of millions of dollars worth of materiel in Iraq:

Mr. Bowen found that the American military was not able to say how many Iraqi logistics personnel it had trained — in this case because, the military told the inspector general, a computer network crash erased records. Those problems have occurred even though the United States has spent $133 million on the weapons program and $666 million on Iraqi logistics capabilities.

What — no backup? No paper records? How about, you know, asking the people whose job it was to train those Iraqi logistics personnel? Now it could be that this is a “dog ate my homework” sort of excuse, and that in fact the fruits of $666 million did not disappear in a network crash but rather into various people’s pockets, on the U.S. or the Iraqi side. But even at face value, that’s a pretty expensive crash.

(Peter Neumann’s Risks Digest tracks endless amounts of stuff like this on a regular basis.)

It’s hard to analyze this particular disaster without more detail. But military software tends to be big, complex, sometimes bloated. I thought of that, reading today’s fascinating Journal column by Lee Gomes about Intel’s Andy Grove and his latest cause — improving the health care system and its record-keeping. Grove is advocating a simple approach — plain text.

To explain “Shift left,” Mr. Grove describes the bottom axis of a scale in which products and services grow more full-featured, complicated and expensive as you move to the right. To “Shift left” on this scale is to, in effect, “Keep it simple, stupid.”

…Rather than designing an elaborate and technically sophisticated medical-database system, something practically every tech company is now trying to do, Mr. Grove suggests the exact opposite. Shift left; keep the record of a patient’s visit in, for example, a generic but Web-accessible word-processing file.

Just like the early personal computer, it will be far from ideal, but it will be a start, and it can get better over time. The alternative, he says, is to wait endlessly for a perfect technology.

That last sentence should be etched onto the monitors of CTOs and development managers around the globe.

Stuck inside of Iraq with the Swift Boat blues again

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John Kerry: “You know, education, if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don’t, you get stuck in Iraq.”

If you just read those words on their own, it’s pretty clear what Kerry is saying: Good students can “do well.” Those who maybe weren’t such good students — like, for instance, our current president — end up “stuck in Iraq.”

It’s not a great joke, and it’s no model of clarity. But only someone absolutely determined to score points would read it and state with certainty that Kerry meant our soldiers in Iraq are idiots. So of course that’s what Tony Snow and the GOP attack machine are saying. (CNN’s lead basically buys it hook and sinker.)

There’s the stench of Swift Boating here. But Kerry’s not up for election this time. The vote is about Bush’s disastrous Iraq policies. And anyone who really cares about the welfare of our troops — who’ve been thrust into an unnecessary war without the forces, the equipment, or the strategy they need to win — will realize that the Bush administration is playing a desperate game of “Don’t look behind the curtain.”

Maybe they’ll successfully hijack the news cycle for a day or two by twisting Kerry’s words. Every minute spent arguing about what Kerry might have meant is a minute we’re not talking about the wasted billions and the wasted lives. Sooner or later we’ll return to the stark fact of this White House’s responsibility for driving America into the Iraq ditch.

Kerry responds: “If anyone thinks a veteran would criticize the more than 140,000 heroes serving in Iraq and not the president who got us stuck there, they’re crazy… The people who owe our troops an apology are George W. Bush and Dick Cheney who misled America into war and have given us a Katrina foreign policy that has betrayed our ideals, killed and maimed our soldiers, and widened the terrorist threat instead of defeating it… No Democrat will be bullied by an administration that has a cut and run policy in Afghanistan and a stand still and lose strategy in Iraq.”
[tags]john kerry, iraq, 2006 elections[/tags]