Slobber And Spittle (Archive)

Juan Cole discusses the relative threat of Islam versus the West:

Listening to Newt Gingrich, the great bloviator, go on this morning on the alleged Muslim threat, set me off. Gingrich did his dissertation on Belgian educational policy in the Congo, where he managed to miss the genocide perpetrated by the Europeans. Gingrich knows better, he is just hate-mongering. But since he brought it up, it is Westerners like Gingrich (who supported illegally invading and occupying Iraq, which led to hundreds of thousands of deaths) of whom one might justifiably be a little afraid…

Who’s the Threat? Western Powers have invaded and Killed Millions of Muslims

He then presents a short table showing a rundown of who has invaded or attacked whom since the end of the 18th Century. Let's just say it doesn't look good for our side, unless you think that killing more people is winning. I can't think of any Muslim invasions to add to that list, that's for sure.

Islam, as a religion with some incredibly intolerant adherents and leaders, is certainly a source of evil in the world. But when I'm almost simultaneously presented with a Foreign Policy article extolling the virtues of signature strikes, and Secretary of State John Kerry lying his ass off about how America isn't bombing targets where civilians are present (see NOTE 1), I have to say that Muslims aren't the only ones who can go to extraordinary lengths to avoid admitting the human costs of what they're doing.

NOTE 1 Since when have we refused to bomb valid targets that don't happen to have civilians in the area? In World War II, Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq, our clear policy was that, while we might try to minimize civilian casualties, that wouldn't stop us from destroying something we thought was important enough to send planes to bomb.

And for those not familiar, please note, I've defended some of those bombings in the past. I just recognize those statements of Kerry's as the utter horse shit that they are.

A longish response to this article by Taylor Marsh concerning the Susan Rice debacle:

The sad truth is that in the U.S. career foreign policy establishment there are no diplomatic candidates that an elite politician as president could appoint that wouldn’t fall in line with more wars over more diplomacy.

John Kerry is a Better Choice for State Than Susan Rice

Well, yes, other than the thousands of former Foreign Service officers and thousands of former military officers whose careers included a lot of work with foreign militaries and the like. Surely, there are at least a few politically-savvy people among them.

Way back in 2008 I could already see the rough outlines of what Obama’s foreign policy was likely to be, thanks to who he listened to on the issues. Continuation of the “War on Terrorism” and rampant interventionism were likely goals, and most folks with a few functioning brain cells to call their own figured that out when they looked. Susan Rice was one of the reasons.

Leaders don’t appoint advisers who are likely to disagree with them. They don’t want to waste time listening to pitches and having discussions about things they’ve already decided. People who are likely to oppose a leader’s decisions are better off being part of the opposition. That’s not necessarily a bad thing in itself. When a smart leader realizes he’s been setting the wrong agenda, he can change, and find different advisers.

What makes that tendency a bad thing these days in America is that DC is full of people who are always willing to praise the leaders of their party no matter what. People dissenting on matters of fact or principle are rarely part of the conversation, and even when they are can be dismissed as either cranks or partisans. After all, how can you not be either a crank or a partisan and not recognize the wonder that is [Bush|Obama]? What amazes me about both George W. Bush and Barack Obama is how often and blatantly they disregarded the values of their base, and yet were praised to the heavens by many of the people who said they believed in those things. In an environment like this, I have to believe that leaders are even less likely to recognize their own failures and make adjustments.

To me, that’s the most basic problem that Susan Rice represents, even more basic than the particular problem of the nonsensical foreign policy priorities she represents. I don’t like her conflicts of interest, but just about anyone who is chosen from the inner circle of DC is likely to have at least a couple. It would be just lovely if people were chosen for cabinet positions based on their knowledge of the subject matter and willingness to speak out when they think the President is wrong, but that ain’t happening.

But, like one of those excuses for why the economy isn’t jumping up and succeeding, it’s not because there aren’t qualified people out there. It’s because DC doesn’t want to pay for them. In this case, that price isn't in wages, but in the bad publicity and "confusion" open disagreement among government leaders supposedly causes the public.

That's the sad truth of Susan Rice. Personally, I don't think John Kerry would be a better Secretary of State. For one thing, I don't think he has the ability to charm people that Hillary Clinton clearly had. But, more importantly, there's little reason to believe that he'd either speak out or resign on principle if President Obama tried to involve us in another costly and ultimately fruitless foreign adventure. He wouldn't even stand on principle when he was thinking about being our country's leader. How likely is he to fall on his sword now?

Image credit: Wikimedia Commons




I've finally connected my computer up to my stereo, and all the music I've been digitizing over the years is now being played through the biggest speakers in my house. I'm hearing many tunes that I haven't heard in a while. The great thing about computers is that you can just tell them to play a bunch of songs in random order. They can even learn what songs you like, and play those more often if you like it that way.

The one that came up just now is this one:

Don't want to be an American idiot.
Don't want a nation under the new mania
And can you hear the sound of hysteria?
The subliminal mind fuck America.

Welcome to a new kind of tension.
All across the alien nation.
Where everything isn't meant to be okay.
Television dreams of tomorrow.
We're not the ones who're meant to follow.
For that's enough to argue.

Green Day: American Idiot

Green Day's American Idiot was released in Fall, 2004. The first time I heard it was while I was on what was, by then, an interminable string of road trips for the company I was working for at the time. I was in Colorado Springs just before Thanksgiving. On a day off, I'd gone to one of the local music stores and bought the CD. I put the CD in my laptop computer, and when I heard these lyrics, all I could think was:

Yes, this is the America I'm living in.

This was a couple of weeks after John Kerry had lost his bid to replace George W. Bush as President. It was a time when you couldn't hear a single word on TV about how foolish the war in Iraq was, or how short-sighted nearly everything the Bush Administration had done to "fight terrorism" was. Anyone who criticized Bush or the "War On Terrorism" was an unpatriotic soft-headed pinko, according to the loud, thoughtless voices all around us, which seemed to be the only ones speaking. It was a time when I kept asking myself "Don't these people remember Vietnam and Communism?", and "Don't they know what freedom really means?"

There isn't a time in my life when I remember being more pessimistic about our future as a country than I was that year.

And then these kids, who were too young to remember Vietnam, probably too young to even remember how afraid we once were of Communism, and whom I'd only known as a group who wrote clever songs about teenage angst, showed that they got it. They understood, without having to live through the hysterias of our past, that we were in another full-blown hysteria then.

That realization restored what little optimism you who read this blog are seeing today.

For that I have to thank Green Day, and all the other young people who demonstrate that some of their elders really need to pay more attention to the world around them.

This is the Canadian cemetery at Beny-sur-Mer. It holds some of the dead from one country in one battle of the Second World War. Image credit: Wikimedia Commons.

It's November 11, or 11/11, which is an easy date to remember. It was first celebrated in 1918, when the guns fell silent in Europe on what would come to be known as Armistice Day. It ended what was, at least up until that time, the worst war Western civilization had ever fought. U.S. President Woodrow Wilson announced that World War I would be the "war to end all wars". If his optimism had been justified, that's what we'd still be calling this day. No doubt, we'd be sadly shaking our heads at the folly and the sad, futile loss of life in some event from long ago.

Instead, we now call the day Veteran's Day. In Canada and much of the English Commonwealth, it's now Remembrance Day, and in much of the West it has similar names. The changes of name reflect the fact that we've fought an even more destructive war since then, and many more before and after.

At his blog Sic Semper Tyrannis today, Patrick Lang quoted this bit of dark humor from a Captain Wilfred Owen, who served in the British Army in World War I:

For 14 hours yesterday, I was at work-teaching Christ to lift his cross by the numbers, and how to adjust his crown; and not to imagine he thirst until after the last halt. I attended his Supper to see that there were no complaints; and inspected his feet that they should be worthy of the nails. I see to it that he is dumb, and stands before his accusers. With a piece of silver I buy him every day, and with maps I make him familiar with the topography of Golgotha.

Veteran's Day - "Only the dead..."

Capt. Owen died a week before the Armistice. John Kerry's words before Congress during the Vietnam War are as sadly relevant to that long-gone war as they are today:

How Do You Ask a Man to be the Last Man to Die for a Mistake?

How do we ask anyone to die for a mistake, once we realize we've made one? Clearly, wars can't be gotten out of as easily as they were gotten into. That's fairly obvious - the "war to end all wars" is a classic example of that fact. Still, you have to ask yourself why, thirty years later, Kerry didn't heed his own words when it was his turn to decide whether another generation of American kids should go to war. In the end, Kerry at least tried to stop the madness. There are plenty of worthless bastards, on both sides of the aisle, who did precisely nothing to stop this thing. They acted as if it was some terrible burden to risk political repercussions to stop a foolish war.

I wish they'd take a hard look at this cemetery and tell me who is bearing the real burden.

It's a day to remember our veterans, and thank the ones who are still alive to thank. It's also a day to remember the ones who now need our help. But I'd like to ask one more thing of all Americans. Please, the next time some "leader" insists that we must go to war against some enemy who hasn't attacked us, and who seems to represent little real threat, can we ask them "Why?" As in, "Why do we need to risk the lives of our soldiers in some place we've never heard of, so they can kill people they have no argument with? Why must we believe you without you having presented a shred of real proof?" And if the answer is "We know more than you do. Trust us.", tell them "Go down to Arlington - find the biggest, tallest flagpole there, and fuck yourself with it."

That's how I'd like to see us celebrate Veterans' Day. With a little well-placed skepticism.

UPDATE: Bob Geiger adds this thought: Don't pretend to "support the troops" and then refuse to support the G.I. Bill. (h/t Eli)

Image credit: Obama campaign, HillaryClinton.com, reduced by Cujo359.
Whenever the subject of who would be a good Vice-Presidential candidate has come up at other blogs, I've always taken a pass, except to suggest Hillary Clinton. What I always write is that the most important thing is that Obama chooses a candidate who will help him shore up support in his own party, both the leaders and the rank and file. That lesson was driven home clearly by this poll today:

John McCain has pulled even in Ohio, after trailing in PPP's June and July polls of the state. He and Barack Obama are each at 45%, with 10% of Ohio voters reporting as undecided.

Party unity is an issue for Obama in the Buckeye State. While McCain has an 89-7 lead with voters who identify as Republicans, Obama has a narrower 75-17 edge with Democrats. Delving deeper into the numbers, it appears that residual unhappiness from Hillary Clinton supporters could be the cause. The 25% of Democrats who currently either support McCain or are undecided are disproportionately middle aged, white, and female or in other words prototypical Clinton voters.

McCain pulls even in Ohio

The Republicans usually vote as a block these days. Call it unity, call it authoritarianism, call it small-minded hatred of people they disagree with. Whatever it is, it's a unifying force among them. Democrats tend to be less unified. We on the left tend require persuasion to vote a particular way.

Whoever Obama chooses needs to be able to help him with this gap. Hillary Clinton is one such person, but I suspect there are others. Obama's a good campaigner, and he seems to be doing well with the party's movers and shakers. Wes Clark, John Kerry, and John Edwards, among others, are supporting him. His lack appears to be his inability to convince the core Hillary supporters that he's the better alternative.

If I were Obama's people, I'd be asking folks like Taylor Marsh and Larry Johnson (not to mention Susan Hu) who they think would be helpful.

Asking folks like me won't do much good.

[John Edwards near the end of his 2008 campaign. This was a photograph from his campaign's Flickr site.]

Since I endorsed his candidacy in this election, it's at least possible that some of you reading this wonder what I think of the recent revelations about John Edwards. In case you haven't heard, which probably means you pay even less attention to broadcast news than I do, here's the gist:

The John Edwards “love child” story finally hit the national news media and made the front page of yesterday’s Times. For weeks, Jay Leno joked about it, the Internet was abuzz, and readers wondered why The Times and most of the mainstream media seemed to be studiously ignoring a story of sex and betrayal involving a former Democratic presidential candidate who remains prominent on the political stage.

They could ignore it no longer when Edwards, who had been running away from reporters for weeks, sat down with ABC News and admitted he had an extra-marital affair and lied repeatedly about it. He denied he fathered Rielle Hunter’s 5-month-old daughter, as the National Enquirer reported in December before the baby was born.

Sometimes, There’s News in the Gutter

[As an aside, I find the tone and title of this article precious - as if these assholes haven't been living in the gutter the last year and a half rather than discuss how the candidates might deal with the issues we face.]

Here's the executive summary: It doesn't make much difference to me.

I never assumed that Edwards was an angel. I don't assume that about anyone running for President. I expect that the person I support will try to live up to the oath he takes, not make any serious blunders in foreign policy, and maybe try to make our lives a little better. These days, anything else is gravy. We haven't seen the potatoes, let alone the gravy, in a long time.

So I personally couldn't care less what John Edwards, or any other politician, does in his spare time. I care about what the manner in which he conducts those activities might say about his character, and in that regard Edwards may have disappointed me a little. Beyond that, though, I don't give a rat's ass, and I'm continually astonished that anyone in this country does these days. Isn't an illegal and ruinous war, a failing economy, and the potential loss of our freedom enough?

Some folks who have criticized him have a point. Jane Hamsher points out:

But Edwards did play the family card quite heavily during his campaign, and if he'd gotten the nomination, the Democrats would be sunk right now and we'd be looking at four years of John McCain. So on that count, I'm profoundly grateful that he didn't get it. He was risking a lot for all of us by doing this stuff and running at the same time. It was incredibly stupid.

John Edwards Admits To Affair

There's a lot of supposition in this analysis and a little amnesia. The supposition is that somehow this would have been enough to torpedo his candidacy when anything else they could have invented wouldn't have. John Kerry was slimed when he did nothing wrong. What makes anyone think Edwards would have been any different? There's also the supposition that the "family" thing was what made Edwards interesting to those of us who supported him. In my case, that was a very small part of it.

The amnesia comes in because six months ago, Edwards couldn't catch a break with the broadcast news. They chattered endlessly about his expensive haircuts, how he didn't stay home with his sick wife, and (ironically) how gay he looks.

What anyone who has watched this campaign unfold as closely as Jane has should realize by now is that the press doesn't need a reason. If the Right can't find something to criticize about a Democratic candidate, they'll make something up, and the news corporations will parrot it. That's what they do.

The one part of this criticism that makes sense to me is that Edwards didn't handle this well from a political perspective. If he'd just admitted, of his own volition, that this had happened back in 2007 then this probably wouldn't have affected his campaign at all. Some voters are surprisingly pragmatic, and many of us who are were already his supporters. He didn't handle the politics well. Let's face it, handling politics is a big part of being President. Barack Obama has handled the Jeremiah Wright issue well, and, astonishingly, hasn't been touched by the Rezko business at all. On that level, Edwards doesn't look quite as good as he once did.

The only thing I can think of to explain this decision, beyond utter foolishness, is that he didn't want to put his wife through any more humiliation than she felt already. He had, so he claims, told her about this affair after it happened. This would have come up some time before her illness was announced, but maybe it was a factor. I don't have any inside information or special insight here - I'm only guessing. The difference between my guesses and many peoples' is that mine are identified as such. Take that for what little it's worth.

This is the first such scandal I've encountered regarding Edwards. That would imply that there aren't many others waiting to be discovered. If what we know now is any indication, this was a rare screwup on his part, if not a singular one.

I don't regret supporting John Edwards one bit. He was still the person most likely to be the kind of President we say we want in this country. I'm not angry. To my mind, the only people who have any business being angry are Elizabeth Edwards and the rest of Edwards' family. The rest of us need to grow up, because this isn't even a minor consideration. It's nothing at all. If you think you've never done anything foolish or hurtful in matters of sex or love, then you're either a damn fool or a hermit. If you think people over the age of forty are immune to such foolishness, then you're either much younger than I am, very lucky, or frighteningly uninformed. In fact, there's no reason to assume that you're not all three.

Being good at the job Edwards was applying for is difficult enough. If you have to be a saint, then we might as well shutter the White House now. We'll never find anyone who's really qualified.

UPDATE (Aug. 10): Lotus has some thoughts and a link to an interesting article by Newsweek reporter Jonathan Darman on Rielle Hunter, the woman with whom Edwards had the affair. He met her while she was working with his campaign.

"How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake? ... We are here to ask, and we are here to ask vehemently, where are the leaders of our country? Where is the leadership?"

John Kerry before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, April 23, 1971

Photo credit: U.S. Navy

The Numbers

Today marked the death of the 3,000th American soldier during combat operations in Iraq. Note all that qualification - considerably more Americans have died since the start of the war, but they weren't officially killed in combat, or they weren't soldiers. Increasingly, according to this GAO report among others, the war is being conducted with the help of civilian contractors, who provide everything from lunches to security. As White House Press Secretary Tony Snow said about the 2,500 mark, it's just another number. It's just a number, of course, unless you happen to be one of those 3,000 or their families.

There's another number to consider. That's the 650,000 plus Iraqis who have died due to the violence or privation of this war. To me, this is an incredible number. I've never lived in a town with more than 90,000 people in it. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica 2004 Almanac, Baltimore, MD, Memphis, TN, and Austin, TX all had populations of about 650,000 in 2000. What's more, this was the differential increase in the death rate, which means that this is how many more people have died because of the invasion than would have died had mortality rates remained at their old levels. Those old levels are after eight years of economic sanctions and two major wars. Iraq, in other words, wasn't a terribly healthy place to begin with. The Lancet article on this study describes this slaughter in dry statistical terms:

Pre-invasion mortality rates were 5.5 per 1000 people per year (95% CI 4.3–7.1), compared with 13.3 per 1000 people per year (10.9–16.1) in the 40 months post-invasion. We estimate that as of July, 2006, there have been 654,965 (392,979–942,636) excess Iraqi deaths as a consequence of the war, which corresponds to 2.5% of the population in the study area. Of post-invasion deaths, 601,027 (426,369–793,663) were due to violence, the most common cause being gunfire.

Mortality after the 2003 invasion of Iraq: a cross-sectional cluster sample survey

In other words, more than 600,000 people, more than the population of Milwaukee, WI, have died since the invasion due to violence of one form or another.

Here is another number - one. One man hanged for being a murderous bastard of a dictator who ordered the deaths of tens of thousands of his own people and started a ruinous war that killed hundreds of thousands more.

Finally, zero is the number of people this war has caught who were involved in the 9/11 attacks on our country.

That's it. More than 3,000 Americans dead, more than half a million Iraqis, numerous missed oppurtunities to make progress in Afghanistan and deny the Taliban and Al Qaeda a home, with the result that one egregious dictator, who wasn't much of a threat to us, could be executed for crimes against his own people. I can't imagine any reasonable person saying that the world is worse off without Saddam Hussein in it. Unfortunately, I suspect he'll be succeeded by another one fairly soon. Anyone feel like breaking out the champagne?

What The Numbers Mean

We've gotten nothing out of this war that the average American would want. We haven't defeated Al Qaeda. We haven't defeated a country that was a threat to us. We haven't even made that country healthier, let alone a thriving democracy. That adds up to nothing for a whole lot of death, not to mention a whole lot of expense.

When Taylor Marsh posted an article on her website noting the death of the 3,000th American servicemember in combat operations in Iraq, the only thing I could think of commenting with was the quote from a John Kerry of long ago that appears at the start of this article. Where are our leaders? How in the world did we get into a war that was so clearly wrong, and so clearly not in our interests? How did we end up killing more than half a million Iraqis for something that was barely worth the trouble of sending witnesses?

What drove me to choose that quote was that Kerry is so symbolic of how dysfunctional our government has become. Of all the elected officials in Washington, DC, his experiences fighting in and then trying to end a useless, wasteful war should have taught him not to trust that someone else has asked all the relevant questions about whether we should go to war. He voted for the Iraq War authorization, despite not knowing the true story about the justifications for war. He did it despite the obviously preposterous story that then Secretary of State Colin Powell told to the United Nations. He did it despite being a leader of the opposition party in Congress. Why he did it may always remain a mystery. He said he did it because he didn't want to undermine the President's bargaining position. Maybe that's true, but if so it was a very bad decision, which, in fairness, Kerry acknowledges. That quote of his, uttered at the time of the Vietnam War, could just as well be directed at him today.

I'm not trying to blame Kerry for the Iraq War - that circus would have gone on no matter what Kerry did. The Republicans controlled the House and Senate, and they were far more slavish to the President's desires than the meakest Democrat. Nevertheless, Kerry made it seem a more legitimate exercise by voting for it. He also had a lot of company; more Democratic senators voted for the Iraq War authorization than voted against it. Nor do I feel that I have much room to criticize - I spoke out against the war, but I still worked for the defense industry at the time. Kerry's gone through far more for his country than I ever have, and hopefully ever will. It's just that he personifies what's been dysfunctional in our government in a way few other politicians do on this issue, even the other Vietnam veterans. He forgot the lessons he learned in Vietnam, as did a great many people.

The Lessons We Forgot

So, what are those lessons? What have we, once again, forgotten about being a functioning democracy that has gotten us into yet another ridiculous conflict entirely of our own making?

The politicians forgot that if you want to get the country involved in a war, you need the overwhelming support of the American people. They also forgot that "overwhelming support" doesn't mean the part of the country who were fools enough to believe the lies they were told about why we needed to fight.

The press forgot that their job is to find out what the truth is, not to correct the spelling of government press releases or edit White House press conferences to get rid of the stuttering. They're not there to be cheerleaders. Being a journalist takes more than practicing that piercing stare until you've got it just right for the promos. It's about having a desire to pierce through the BS to find the truth. Got that, Mr. Williams?

We forgot, to quote Bruce Springsteen, that blind faith in government can get you killed. Why we forgot that one, when so many of us who are parents and grandparents remember Vietnam, may be the biggest and saddest mystery of all.

Maybe this time, someone will write these things down so we remember them next time, and there almost certainly will be a next time. I heard so many lectures from morons about how Iraq isn't like Vietnam I can practically recite them back by now. I'm pretty sure they'll forget the real lessons again, assuming they even learned them this time.

Which means, I suspect, that we'll go through all this again in thirty years.

Happy New Year.

UPDATE: Christy Hardin Smith at Firedoglake has another take on the numbers.