Fly Trap
Sarah Posner

5.06.06

How Are The Republicans Keeping You Safe Today?
Sarah Posner (8:23AM)

I simply don't get why Democrats give the Republicans a free ride on the perception that Republicans are "tough on terror" while Democrats are softies. Bunker-busting mini-nukes do not make tough on terror. When confronted with a campaign contribution or a yacht or a contract award for a crony, Republicans become downright weak-kneed.

Yesterday, of course, the big news was that the head of the CIA resigned abruptly with no replacement. Given the well-documented disaster of his tenure, perhaps an intelligence agency without a head is better than one known to be overwhelmed by the workload, and to purge his political enemies from the agency. But despite well-placed spin (case in point, WaPo quoting "senior White House officials" who won't go on the record to say something as innocuous -- although contrary to reality -- as the resignation had been in the works for weeks), even the likes of Bob Barr and Bill Kristol admit something else has got to be afoot.

That something else could have to do with cigar-puffing Congressman and Administration officials hiring prostitutes at poker parties. That Brent Wilkes, pal of Goss's deputy Dusty Foggo (himself now under criminal investigation), may have played pimp is a possibility the MSM barely deigns to utter, seeing it as a story reported by bloggers, even ones with strong pedigrees as investigative journalists.

But let's set aside the poker parties and hookers arranged by government contractors for a second. While all of this -- if true -- clearly plays into the Democrats' "culture of corruption" narrative, there's something else here that they have yet to mine. The Republicans' "culture of corruption" doesn't just undermine trust and confidence in government, or the ethical functioning of government, or all of that high-mindedness we can only dream of from our elected officials. Corruption -- not just the "culture" of it, but actual, real life corruption -- say it, Nancy, say it, Harry! -- is undermining our national security.

WaPo reports this morning on the limousine service, Shirlington Limousine, that with its connections to Wilkes, received a multi-million dollar contract from the Department of Homeland Security to ferry DHS officials around Washington. Let's forget for a minute that it's also alleged to have ferried hookers around to members of Congress. Check this out, on the company's owner, Christopher Baker:

Officials said Baker's criminal record, which includes numerous misdemeanors and two felony convictions, would not have affected the company's bid. When the agency contracts with a company, officials said, they do not check the criminal backgrounds of its executives -- nor do they run their names against the government's terrorist watch list.

WHAT?

Okay, so let's get this straight. The Director of the CIA, whom everyone pretty much agrees was an incompetent who turned the agency into shambles, has left the agency rudderless, purged of career spies, demoralized, ill-equipped to do its job. His hand-picked deputy -- Foggo -- is under criminal investigation for steering contracts to pals, including pals who are either under investigation for or have pled guilty to bribing Duke Cunningham, now in the pokey. The CIA -- which is supposed to be able to screen out the nefarious among us -- might have high-ranking officials in its midst who are susceptible to bribes, possibly those of a sexual kind. And some of those bribers might actually be spying on us.

Meanwhile, the Department of Homeland Security gives out contracts to companies without as much as a criminal background check? Are they kidding?

It's the national security, stupid.

Copyright © Sarah Posner. Material presented on The Gadflyer is the opinion of the respective author and not that of The Gadflyer, the web host or any other entity.


Jonathan Weiler

5.05.06

True Colors
Jonathan Weiler (10:00PM)

Glenn Greenwald has been engaged in an exchange with Jonah Goldberg of the National Review Online about whether Bush is a "liberal." (I shit you not). Greenwald notes that this newfound characterization (actually, as Greenwald says, Digby commented on it last Fall) is a lame cop-out because conservatives, of course, claimed Bush as one of their own while his approval ratings were stratospheric. Only once those ratings fell through the floor did they begin to disavow him as not really conservative at heart.

In turn, Goldberg has bristled at Greenwald's attack. Goldberg argues that he has long registered discontent with "compassionate conservatism." Further, Goldberg argues, he meant to suggest that Bush-as-a-liberal was of limited utility, applicable in the narrow sense that Bush has always believed that when "somebody hurts, government has to move." For Goldberg, what animates compassionate conservatism is the notion that the power of the state should be deployed to do good. This is a "liberal" sensibility at heart.

I'll give Goldberg this - he means it when he says he's got no time for compassion:

"I never liked compassionate conservatism.
I never thought conservatism needed an adjective. Maybe because I'm more of an Old Testament guy, I like conservatism filled with more smiting and wrath. Compassionate conservatism always struck me as the Republican version of Clintonism, rather than the Republican alternative to it."

But, one important premise of this discussion is that Bush is to be taken seriously as "compassionate." And, more to the point, that he's committed himself to deploying government to helping people who hurt and that, in this sense, he's working from the same playbook as liberals. But, what has Bush actually committed himself to as President? Among other things:

- massive tax cuts, overwhelmingly benefiting the wealthiest Americans.
- A punitive approach to dealing with the least well-off among us, typified by the nickel and diming of programs for the poor by Congress last December, when that right-wing conservative body decided to put a finger in the dike of Bush's massive deficits by cutting significantly programs aimed primarily at the poor, even though those programs account for a relatively small percentage of government expenditure.
- Runaway military expenditures and a Manichean worldview yielding a hyper militarized foreign policy
- Contempt for civil liberties, and a recklessly expansive view of executive power at the expense of other branches of government and the constitution.
- An expansion of Medicare that while of dubious benefit to the millions of seniors now subject to the new prescription drug plan, delivers undeniable benefits to major corporate interests, specifically the pharmaceutical industry and the private insurance industry.
- A (thankfully) ill-fated effort to privatize (i.e., begin to undermine) THE pillar of American liberalism, social security.

In the American vernacular, if you're committed to all of the above and you're also anti-choice, opposed to the gay rights agenda, and otherwise committed to the Christian right agenda, you simply can't be said to be liberal in any meaningful sense.

There's simply no good faith way to speak of Bush in "liberal" terms. Furthermore, it matters not a whit that Goldberg is talking about some underlying philosophical construct, because another key premise of this discussion – that post-war political conservatism has really been opposed to expanding the power of government – is garbage. For many, Reaganism was the touchstone of what "true" small government conservatism really was. But, it's worth asking, did conservatives during the Reagan era decry the war on drugs, the massive expansion of the prison-industrial complex, the larger expansion of executive/policing power in the United States, a Christian-inspired agenda intent on legislating the private social affairs of ordinary Americans, all massive efforts to expand the power of the modern American state?

What has bothered right-wing conservatives about "big government" was whom it was helping and how that help was, presumably, undermining the larger social fabric. But, the idea that conservatives really wanted to restrain the power of government per se is crap. Since 1980, dominant conservatism has whole-heartedly embraced government as an instrument to advance their preferred interests – corporations, the religious right, incarceration-based interests (and isn't support for the death penalty a certain kind of "faith" in the infallible judgment of government institutions?), the military-industrial complex and so on.

Yes, these remarks can be qualified. Safire was genuinely concerned about civil liberties. The Cato Institute is consistent in its denunciations of corporate welfare. Goldwater was outspoken in favor of gay rights later in his life. There are other examples, to be sure.

But, to reiterarte, the twin premises here are wrong. Bush is not compassionate in any consequential policy sense. And conservatives aren't opposed to deploying state power to promote their agenda. With no meaningful political resistance, with control of all branches of government, they have sought to implement the conservative agenda as any common sense understanding of it over the past quarter of a century would recognize: reduce the capacity of government to do right by the less well-off, expand police power to punish people for the consequences of its failed social vision, and deploy government (including legislation written by corporate lobbyists) aggressively to suit the needs of its favored constituencies.

Bush, in these terms, perfectly exemplifies the core agenda of the conservative movement as it has fought its way to control of America's political institutions over the past generation. It has succeeded in realizing its vision at the expense of the New Deal/Great Society liberal worldview to a greater extent than any conservative could have dreamed of hoping for in 1979. In other words, Conservatives got what they paid for – a President fundamentally indifferent if not hostile to the weak among us and committed to indulging the better off and better connected.

Given its now evident and dramatic failings, right-wing conservatism's legitimacy as a governing philosophy very much hangs in the balance. Therefore, shifting the terms of debate for evaluating the philosophical terrain on which this administration is to be judged becomes of vital political importance. However, limited Goldberg's explicit allusion to liberalism was, his larger purpose is transparent: save conservatism from accountability for the failings of this paradigmatically right-wing conservative presidency and duck responsibility for everything over which the movement has actually waged real political combat since the 1970s.

For folks like Goldberg, that appears to be preferable to actually living with the consequences of their advocacy.


Copyright © Jonathan Weiler. Material presented on The Gadflyer is the opinion of the respective author and not that of The Gadflyer, the web host or any other entity.


Sarah Posner

Ray McGovern on the Kool-Aid Drinkers
Sarah Posner (1:00PM)

Ray McGovern on watching himself on TV:

[J]ust listening to this little clip here, I find it scary. These were ostensibly educated normal people, and their reaction was very much like the one that Goebbels stirred up. You can see it was a very unfriendly audience to anyone who posed any kind of question to the Defense Secretary. So -- and listening to it, I'm sort of scared, because if this is indicative of the brainwashing that has taken place, it's going be a long, long struggle to speak truth to power, as Fannie Lou Hamer so famously said, and Damu Smith, as well.


Copyright © Sarah Posner. Material presented on The Gadflyer is the opinion of the respective author and not that of The Gadflyer, the web host or any other entity.


Joshua Holland

The Bush Agenda …
Joshua Holland (11:50AM)

A few posts down, Jonathan asks a question, the answer to which, he concedes, is self-evident: does the U.S. use trade policy -- or economic power more broadly -- as a political weapon?

It's well understood that it does, and Jonathan lays out some good examples and discusses the subject in the context of Russia.

Less understood, however, is the way that the U.S. uses literal weapons -- the military -- to promote "trade" policy, and the many ways that neo-liberal economics encourage militarism, a subject I've discussed in the past.

Over at AlterNet, I have a Q and A with Antonia Juhasz, a resident scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies, about her new book, The Bush Agenda. It's a great, in-depth look at what she says are the three pillars of the Bush administration's foreign policy: militarism, imperialism and corporate globalization.

After you pick up Waldman's book -- I'm going to get it this week -- grab this one. It's a must read.

And check out my interview with Juhasz. There's also an excerpt for your reading pleasure.


Copyright © Joshua Holland. Material presented on The Gadflyer is the opinion of the respective author and not that of The Gadflyer, the web host or any other entity.


Joshua Holland

Iran holds 150,000 hostages …
Joshua Holland (11:15AM)

From the department of unbelievably ironic headlines, this just in:

US State Dept calls Turkey to respect Iraq's sovereignty

Just thought I'd share that.

All irony aside, I want to highlight a view of Iraq -- and looking out towards Iran -- that you don't see every day in the media via the excellent blog, Baghdad Burning.

River Bend talks about how all the Iraqi television stations went down during the invasion and, after they attached an old TV to a car battery, the only news they could get was from an Iranian channel.

It was around 9 pm on the 11th of April when we finally saw the footage of Saddam's statue being pulled down by American troops- the American flag plastered on his face. We watched, stunned, as Baghdad was looted and burned by hordes of men, being watched and saluted by American soldiers in tanks. Looking back at it now, it is properly ironic that our first glimpses of the 'fall of Baghdad' and the occupation of Iraq came to us via Iran- through that Iranian channel.

We immediately began hearing about the Iranian revolutionary guard, and how they had formed a militia of Iraqis who had defected to Iran during the Iran-Iraq war. We heard how they were already inside of the country and were helping to loot and burn everything from governmental facilities to museums. The Hakims and Badr made their debut, followed by several other clerics with their personal guard and militias, all seeping in from Iran.

Today they rule the country. Over the duration of three years, and through the use of vicious militias, assassinations and abductions, they've managed to install themselves firmly in the Green Zone. We constantly hear our new puppets rant and rave against Syria, against Saudi Arabia, against Turkey, even against the country they have to thank for their rise to power- America… But no one dares to talk about the role Iran is planning in the country.

The last few days we've been hearing about Iranian attacks on northern Iraq- parts of Kurdistan that are on the Iranian border. Several sites were bombed and various news sources are reporting Iranian troops by the thousand standing ready at the Iraqi border. Prior to this, there has been talk of Iranian revolutionary guard infiltrating areas like Diyala and even parts of Baghdad.

Meanwhile, the new puppets (simply a rotation of the same OLD puppets), after taking several months to finally decide who gets to play the role of prime minister, are now wrangling and wrestling over the 'major' ministries and which political party should receive what ministry. The reason behind this is that as soon as a minister is named from, say, SCIRI, that minister brings in 'his people' to key positions- his relatives, his friends and cronies, and most importantly- his personal militia. As soon as Al-Maliki was made prime minister, he announced that armed militias would be made a part of the Iraqi army (which can only mean the Badrists and Sadr's goons).

A few days ago, we were watching one of several ceremonies they held after naming the new prime minister. Talbani stood in front of various politicians in a large room in the Green Zone and said, rather brazenly, that Iraq would not stand any 'tadakhul' or meddling by neighboring countries because Iraq was a 'sovereign country free of foreign influence'. The cousin almost fainted from laughter and E. was wiping his eyes and gasping for air… as Talbani pompously made his statement- all big belly and grins- smiling back at him was a group of American army commanders or generals and to his left was Khalilzad, patting him fondly on the arm and gazing at him like a father looking at his first-born!

So while Iraqis are dying by the hundreds, with corpses turning up everywhere (last week they found a dead man in the open area in front of my cousins daughters school), the Iraqi puppets are taking their time trying to decide who gets to do the most stealing and in which ministry. Embezzlement, after all, is not to be taken lightly- one must give it the proper amount of thought and debate- even if the country is coming unhinged.

As for news of the new Iraqi army, it isn't going as smoothly as Bush and his crew portray. Today we watched footage of Iraqi soldiers in Anbar graduating. The whole ceremony was quite ordinary up until nearly the end- their commander announced they would be deployed to various areas and suddenly it was chaos. The soldiers began stripping their fatigues and throwing them around, verbally attacking their seniors and yelling and shoving. They were promised, when they signed up for the army in their areas, that they would be deployed inside of their own areas- which does make sense. There is news that they are currently on strike- refusing to be deployed outside of their own provinces.

One can't help but wonder if the 'area' they were supposed to be deployed to was the north of Iraq? Especially with Iranian troops on the border… Talbani announced a few days ago that the protection of Kurdistan was the responsibility of Iraq and I completely agree for a change- because Kurdistan IS a part of Iraq. Before he made this statement, it was always understood that only the Peshmerga would protect Kurdistan- apparently, against Iran, they aren't nearly enough.

The big question is- what will the US do about Iran? There are the hints of the possibility of bombings, etc. While I hate the Iranian government, the people don't deserve the chaos and damage of air strikes and war. I don't really worry about that though, because if you live in Iraq- you know America's hands are tied. Just as soon as Washington makes a move against Tehran, American troops inside Iraq will come under attack. It's that simple- Washington has big guns and planes… But Iran has 150,000 American hostages.

In Antonia Juhasz' new book, The Bush Agenda, she stresses that there absolutely was a post-war plan for Iraq -- a plan to re-write Iraq's political-economy in the interest of foreign investors -- and I agree. But one thing American planners simply could not fathom was the limited utility of our awesome hard power in a post-war environment, and nothing casts that in such sharp relief as Iran's remarkable level of influence.

Of course, like everything else about the Iraq adventure -- and the adventure that's being planned for Iran -- it was wholly predictable by anyone not steeped in American exceptionalism. It was just that those folks were shut out of the meetings.

Copyright © Joshua Holland. Material presented on The Gadflyer is the opinion of the respective author and not that of The Gadflyer, the web host or any other entity.


Sean Aday

I Can't Believe We're Losing to This Guy...
Sean Aday (12:19AM)

In an apparent attempt to make fun of the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq's military ineptitude, the U.S. Command in Iraq on Wednesday released a video of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi fumbling with an automatic rifle and wearing New Balance tennis shoes.

Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, spokesman for the U.S. command, mocked Zarqawi as he showed the video to reporters, saying that the whole thing "makes you wonder" about the skills of Zarqawi and his minions.

I gather from the way the Pentagon pushed this story, coupled with Lynch's sneering commentary, that the point of this press conference was to show what a buffoon Zarqawi is and make us all realize we're this close to winning the war.

I mean, who cares about the hundreds of U.S. soldiers and tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians Zarqawi has killed? The clown can't operate his own gun!

And he wears American tennis shoes!

Note to Rumsfeld: Probably not a good idea to make the enemy you can't beat look like a patsy.

Deeper in the story we get something more closely approximating the truth:

At least 20 people were killed across the country Thursday, including two American soldiers who died in a roadside bombing in Baghdad. Ten people were killed in a suicide attack at a court building in eastern Baghdad, police said, and the military said U.S. troops killed eight insurgents in a gunfight in Ramadi.

No word yet on what kinds of footwear the terrorists were wearing. But I'm sure Maj. Gen. Lynch will let us know at his next Five-O'Clock Follies yuk-fest.

Copyright © Sean Aday. Material presented on The Gadflyer is the opinion of the respective author and not that of The Gadflyer, the web host or any other entity.



5.04.06

Racism: Only Bad When It's Inauthentic
Bart Acocella (3:20PM)

I'm of a few minds about Ryan Lizza's cover story on Virginia Sen. George Allen. When it comes to hit-jobs on leading right-wingers, I say bring it on. And the kind of Confederacy nostalgia in which Allen has clearly dabbled is unquestionably contemptible. At the same time, Lizza relied a little too much for my taste on unflattering but politically unrevealing vignettes both present (Allen spit his chewing tobacco at the feet of a "carefully put-together" pony-tailed blonde approaching him for an autograph) and past (young Allen was a terrifying bully to his younger siblings).

And perhaps this is a quibble, but I'm not impressed with Lizza's revelation that then-Congressman Allen went on the record to express sorrow at the passing of an old racist Senator. If memory serves, Bill Clinton, as President, quite publicly eulogized his segregationist predecessor Orval Faubus. Besides if Allen is to be crucified for his young man's Stars-and-Bars fetish, what do we do with Democratic elder statesman Robert Byrd, who was actually a member of the Ku Klux Klan?

But much more curious than Lizza's piece was this follow-up post by his colleague, Jason Zengerle, on The Plank, TNR's blog. To Zengerle, what's unsettling about Allen is not his fondness for the artifacts of the ante-bellum south per se, but the fact that his upper middle-class Southern California roots make said fondness inauthentic. It's okay, apparently, to pine for separate drinking fountains as long as you're a genuine-article Southerner, suckled in the cradle of Dixie. But when such views are held by phony west coast poseurs…well, then they become truly reprehensible. Here's Zengerle:

"I actually have a fair amount of sympathy for some Southerners who love the Confederate flag…For these people, the flag really is a representation of their heritage;"

Indeed. A dark and shameful heritage, one that ought not be a source of continued celebration.

"perhaps more importantly, it may be the only thing in their lives that actually transcends their daily existence. Put it this way: if you're a guy whiling away your days in Scotland Neck, North Carolina, the fact that your great-great-grandfather fought at Gettysburg--the only thing connected to your life that you ever actually read about in a history book--is a real source of pride. Therefore, it's perfectly understandable that you'd express that pride by flying a Confederate flag, or putting a sticker of it on your car. And there's nothing more unfair than being branded a racist for doing so." (Emphasis mine).

Nothing more unfair? How about being an African-American in the South with little choice but to swallow every day a symbol that justified the purchase and sale of your ancestors, as if they were mules?

If you're proud that your great-great grandfather fought at Gettysburg, what are you proud of? Proud that an ancestor would sooner cleave the nation in two than give up the right to own black people?

Ed Kilgore, who I'll concede knows considerably more about the history of the South than I, insists here – somewhat sentimentally – that the Civil War was "about everything other than the ownership of human beings--about states' rights, about agrarian resistance to capitalism, about cultured Cavaliers defending civilization against philistine Puritans, about Honor, about Duty." About states' rights? Yes…their states' right to take an entire race as personal property! The rebel cause was about "cultured Cavaliers defending civilization" in the same way that the Third Reich was about German national honor.

Back to Zengerle. If "the only thing connected to your life that you ever actually read about in a history book" is something deeply violent and inegalitarian …well, that doesn't make you a bad person, nor does it require daily displays of self-flagellating repentance. I would just submit that it's not something to be decorating your bumper about.

Come to think of it, a little contrition is perhaps in order. Did I miss some kind of regional cleansing ritual? Holocaust guilt runs through the veins of modern Germany; why do so many remain unchastened by the South's ignominious history on race? And why do left-leaning commentators who know better, like Jason Zengerle – he calls slavery "outré", as if it were a zoot suit that had slipped out of fashion -- indulge Confedero-philia?

Good old-fashioned racist emblems aren't enough to get a rise out of Zengerle. What he finds more troubling is non-Southerner George Allen's appropriation of the symbol. You're allowed to be a civil rights retrograde, so long as you come by your prejudice honestly:

"…if…Allen's embrace of the flag was simply his attempt to fit in in his new surroundings [after moving to Virginia as a young adult], …that's similarly problematic. …no matter how much you love the South, no matter how native you go, if you're not from the South, then there are certain things and certain words and certain actions that will never truly be yours. And one of those, I would say, is the Confederate flag."

Y'hear? The gall of those Yankee interlopers trying to horn in and get a piece of this Confederate flag action. The vile hatred it represents belongs to Southerners and Southerners only!

Copyright © Bart Acocella. Material presented on The Gadflyer is the opinion of the respective author and not that of The Gadflyer, the web host or any other entity.


Joshua Holland

Ahmadinejad never "threatened to wipe Israel off the map"
Joshua Holland (2:28PM)

Juan Cole made a couple of incredibly important points in a post responding to a drunken and libelous fit of dyspepsia by Christopher Hitchens.

They are: 1) Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad does not have any power over the Iranian military establishment, and 2) he never threatened to wipe Israel off the map. I'll get to why these points are so important after the excerpt.

Cole:

I object to the characterization of Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as having "threatened to wipe Israel off the map." I object to this translation of what he said on two grounds. First, it gives the impression that he wants to play Hitler to Israel's Poland, mobilizing an armored corps to move in and kill people.

But the actual quote, which comes from an old speech of Khomeini, does not imply military action, or killing anyone at all. The second reason is that it is just an inexact translation. The phrase is almost metaphysical. He quoted Khomeini that "the occupation regime over Jerusalem should vanish from the page of time." It is in fact probably a reference to some phrase in a medieval Persian poem. It is not about tanks. […]

The phrase he then used as I read it is "The Imam said that this regime occupying Jerusalem (een rezhim-e ishghalgar-e qods) must [vanish from] from the page of time (bayad az safheh-ye ruzgar mahv shavad)."

Ahmadinejad was not making a threat, he was quoting a saying of Khomeini and urging that pro-Palestinian activists in Iran not give up hope-- that the occupation of Jerusalem was no more a continued inevitability than had been the hegemony of the Shah's government.

Whatever this quotation from a decades-old speech of Khomeini may have meant, Ahmadinejad did not say that "Israel must be wiped off the map" with the implication that phrase has of Nazi-style extermination of a people. He said that the occupation regime over Jerusalem must be erased from the page of time.

Cole's clear in his enmity for Ahmadinejad and "everything he stands for." He's talking about the justification for attacking Iran, and just that.

As for the matter at issue, Ahmadinejad is a non-entity. The Iranian "president" is mostly powerless. The commander of the armed forces is the Supreme Jurisprudent, Ali Khamenei. Worrying about Ahmadinejad's antics is like worrying that the US military will act on the orders of the secretary of the interior. Ahmadinejad cannot declare war on anyone, or mobilize a military. So it doesn't matter what speeches he gives. [emphasis added]

Moreover, Iran cannot fight Israel. It would be defeated in 72 hours, even if the US didn't come in, which it would (and rightly so if Israel were attacked). Iran is separated by several other countries from Israel. It has not attacked aggressively any other country militarily for over a century (can Americans say that of their own record?) It has only a weak, ineffective air force. So why worry about it?

What is really going on here is an old trick of the warmongers. Which is that you equate hurtful statements of your enemy with an actual military threat, and make a weak and vulnerable enemy look like a strong, menacing foe. Then no one can complain when you pounce on the enemy and reduce his country to flames and rubble.

It is obvious that powerful political forces in Washington are fishing for a pretext to launch a war on Iran, and that they are just delighted to have Ahmadinejad as cartoon villain and pretext.

Over at AlterNet, Robert Parry has a good piece about how iffy the intelligence is on Iran's nuclear program and how far away from a bomb they probably are.

We need that, but it's not enough. I'll say it again: a debate about intelligence and crystal ball-gazing about if and when Iran will have nuclear weapons is un-winnable. It accepts the premise that we have the right -- indeed, the duty -- to launch an unprovoked attack on a country because it might, at some point, develop one one-thousandth of the nuclear capacity that we ourselves have. Once we accept those terms, we're cooked.

The narrative we're hearing is that deterrence -- the Mutually Assured Destruction that kept the U.S. and the USSR from blowing up the world for forty years -- won't work with Iran because a homicidal maniac with no regard for human life runs the country. He's happy to bring about the apocalypse, they say. 72 virgins in heaven and all that crap.

The nuclear mad-man story is important. Without that, the whole thing falls apart. You can forget about the moral and legal arguments against a unilateral attack; without the mushroom clouds the cost/benefit ratio is ridiculous -- we know that the consequences of attacking Iran would be incredibly serious; both the loss of blood -- on both sides -- and the economic impact would be huge.

And not just for the U.S. and Iran; deadly acts of terror all over the world tripled between 2003 and 2004.

Let's learn from how we got suckered into Iraq. Three years ago we got pulled into a debate about whether or not Saddam Hussein had these generic things called Weapons of Mass Destruction. It was a loser because most people (including yours truly and many who opposed the war) believed there was a good likelihood that Saddam had squirreled away some artillery shells with chemical warheads or some bugs in a deep hole somewhere.

Allowing the debate to hinge on the question of WMD was a distraction from the only real issue: did a well-contained tin-pot dictator with a third-rate army -- a secular one who hated Osama Bin Laden -- pose a threat to us. That should have been the question, and our argument should have been: "yeah, Saddam probably has something nasty tucked away but he's an insignificant flea under our shoe and doesn't remotely pose a threat to us."

Now we come to Iran three years later. Same ideologues pushing for a fight, same bootlicking media hacks sucking up all their propaganda and regurgitating it with breathless worry.

Let's challenge the parameters of this debate before it's too late.

Copyright © Joshua Holland. Material presented on The Gadflyer is the opinion of the respective author and not that of The Gadflyer, the web host or any other entity.


Jonathan Weiler

Trade as a Political Weapon
Jonathan Weiler (2:01PM)

It has become a common trope in discussions about Russia to decry that country's use of energy supplies as a political weapon, especially in the context of its brief cut-off of energy supplies to Ukraine at the beginning of 2006. In the latest such instance, in remarks yesterday criticizing Russia's backsliding on human rights, Vice-President Cheney also commented that "no legitimate purpose is served" by Russia's use of oil and gas as a political weapon.

In fact, the New York Times, among other publications, has repeatedly characterized Russian actions in these terms over the past few months. Let's leave aside the fact that Russia wanted full market price for its energy supplies or that it turned back on the spigot as soon as a new price was negotiated, a set of circumstances that no mainstream US commentator would have thought twice about had the US been in the position that Russia was.

I am more interested in the larger implication of the Vice President's comments, and the repeated criticisms of Russia – not just about energy, but about trade in general. Namely, does the United States use its economic resources and trade, more generally, as a "political weapon?"

On one level, the question answers itself. Trade between countries is an irreducibly political process and anyone who has studied the rules governing international trade agreements, from NAFTA to the WTO understands that politics influence, fundamentally, the terms of trade between countries. Furthermore, it is overwhelmingly true that the terms of trade and the rules governing trade globally favor the richer countries, including the United States.

But, let's leave aside that point as well, and ask more specifically: does the United States use economic leverage as a "weapon" to punish countries for political reasons? This is the more concrete charge repeatedly leveled against Russia these days.

But, that question answers itself, too, doesn't it? Of course the United States uses economic levers as a political weapon, and on a scale that would be difficult for Russia to match.

Let's start close to home: what is the embargo of Cuba, if not a massively organized effort to use economic tools as a political weapon? The US embargo against Cuba, from which almost every other country dissents, has wreaked havoc on Cuba's people, especially since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the loss of Cuba's key international benefactor. In fact, it remains one of the world's most under-remarked, but remarkable achievements that a small country with limited economic resources, and subject to economic punishment on the level that Cuba is, has managed to maintain a level of health standards for its people that, on important indicators, matches those of the US.

Similarly, the United States subjected Iraq to a crushing embargo for twelve years, the consequence of which was, depending on the estimate, the premature deaths of 150,000 to over half a million children.

Ironic about both embargoes is that ordinary people in each country were punished, rather than the leader, under circumstances where among the key justifications for the embargo in the first place was the brutal disregard of the leader for the wishes of the people.

There are many other lesser examples of the United States using economic leverage to punish countries whose political line deviates from that which is acceptable to Washington. In fact, United States foreign policy, like that of any major power, is predicated on rewarding friends and punishing enemies, and economic levers are central to that system of punishment and reward. Again, it's a point so obvious that it almost seems banal to even mention it.

But, given the context-less repetition of the claim against Russia, as if that country is committing a unique transgression in international practice, it can't pass without comment. I have written a book criticizing Russia's human rights record, and I have also written at length about its democratic backsliding. But, there is every reason to be skeptical about the administration's newfound concern for that backsliding. And, the insistent harping on Russia for using energy resources as a political weapon simply obscures the central place in international life of that sort of approach to foreign policy, the US most definitely included.

Copyright © Jonathan Weiler. Material presented on The Gadflyer is the opinion of the respective author and not that of The Gadflyer, the web host or any other entity.


Sarah Posner

Flan In The Pan
Sarah Posner (12:03PM)

Picking up on Paul's post about Caitlin Flanagan's extended rant in Time about how the Democratic Party hates her, I just have to chime in -- given that I, too, ditched a career at motherhood, and now have a brand new career that happens to be operated out of an office carved out of my basement. I, unlike, Flanagan, managed to pull all of this off without a nanny and a housekeeper, and I, apparently, still have my sanity intact. I love being a mother, and I love being a writer, and I am damn lucky that I have been able to do both. I'd hardly complain about how things have turned out for me. Maybe I'm able to separate my career from motherhood and feel like I have some distance from an identity as "just a mom" (not that there's anything wrong with that) because I don't spend all my time writing about motherhood. Sounds like Flanagan needs to get out more.

Flanagan says the Dems disdain her because she's a "stay-at-home mom." That's horseshit. Not because, as Paul pointed out, Flanagan is not the stay-at-home mom she pretends to be, since she also happens to be lucky enough to get writing gigs for the New Yorker and Time -- hardly a typical set up for stay-at-home moms. It's horseshit because it's simply not true. Sure, there are always people with sticks up their asses who might turn their nose down at a woman who gives up her office job to take care of her kids, but welcome to the world. Please ignore the people with sticks up their asses.

Based on my vast knowledge of stay-at-home motherhood, most women I know lament not the grind of the housework (especially if they have a housekeeper!), or the travails of raising kids under the insane pressure of perfect mommyhood culture, which Flanagan appears to buckle under (again, please just ignore the advice offered by people with sticks up their asses). Instead, most women I know lament the fact that the working world hasn't figured out a way for them to keep at least a foot in it while raising their kids. The 40+ hour workweek, the pressure to "produce," to stay ahead, to be the best in your field, along with the lack of decent, flexible, affordable child care, all make dabbling in what you used to do, pre-kid, all but impossible for most women. (And that's not even touching the surface of the hurdles facing women who have to work for economic reasons.) The Democratic Party could attract women not, as Flanagan suggests, by going ga-ga over a Republican vision of perfect family life. Perfect family life, as Flanagan surely knows, is not based on all family members falling in lock-step into pre-designated roles, but in having the flexibility to support each other in the many pursuits that human beings want and need for a fulfilling life.

Oh, but there's hope. Women are an enterprising bunch, and I know many, many of them who have started their very own businesses out of their homes -- writers, political consultants, management consultants, shrinks, entrepreneurs -- all while maintaining the household, shuttling the kids to soccer, volunteering for the PTA, going to church, going to synogogue, cooking dinner, doing the laundry, and voting Democratic. All without whining! They don't want to hear about how much Democrats love them for loving their kids and juggling all that stuff. They want to hear how someone might have some brilliant ideas for making the world more flexible, more feasible, and less hectic for their daughters and sons.

Copyright © Sarah Posner. Material presented on The Gadflyer is the opinion of the respective author and not that of The Gadflyer, the web host or any other entity.


Thomas F. Schaller

5.03.06

McCain IS a moderate...and we need to deal with it
Thomas F. Schaller (4:14PM)

I've waited a bit before weighing in on the emerging debate over John McCain's changing spots. Since this debate portends to continue through at least February 2008, if not November 2008, we ought to get one thing straightened out: Words from McCain's mouth and labels applied to his partisan/ideological identity aside, McCain is far more moderate than most Republicans--and more moderate than he was when he came into the Senate in 1987.

Jacob Weisberg made the case for McCain as a moderate. Folks like Steve Benen and Paul Krugman counter-claimed that McCain is really a conservative pretending to be a moderate. Matt Yglesias cautions that it's really a matter of how we define our terms.

The meaning of various labels aside, there a few ways to quantify the question. Doing that has less to do with McCain's public comments--although Jon Chait, who generally echoes the Weisberg position, makes a strong case--than looking at his roll call votes.

The National Journal computes ideological scores for member of Congress, and reported the scores for McCain's entire Senate career in its February 25 issue. Here they are:

1987: 83.5
1988: 82.3
1989: 85.3
1990: 82.5
1991: 81.8
1992: 84.5
1993: 74.8
1994: 89.2
1995: 70.2
1996: 75.3
1997: 71.5
1998: 68.3
1999: 67.7
2000: 61.7
2001: 66.8
2002: 59.8
2003: 62.2
2004: 51.7
2005: 59.2

These values are scaled from 0-100, with 100 indicating the percentage of times a senator votes more conservatively than his colleagues (of both/any party).

So, how "conservative" is McCain? This can be answered one of two ways: based on how he compares to fellow Senators, and how he compares to himself across time.

On the first count, McCain is obviously more conservative than liberal. His score never dips below 50, though it came perilously close in 2004. Still, when you approach 50, you're almost a moderate by definition--it means half the Senate is voting more conservatively and the other half more liberally than you. If that not's moderate, it at least makes McCain the median voter, something Anthony Downs surely appreciates.

On the second count, the pattern is clear: McCain has grown more liberal across time. That doesn't mean he is a liberal, just more--much more--liberal, by Senate standards at least. His ideological number ticked up a bit in 2005 to 59.2, but that's still lower than in any year before he first ran for president, in 2000.

The only possible way to contend that McCain is just as conservative as ever is to argue that the Senate, and especially the Republican caucus, has moved right by replacing liberals and moderates with conservatives and uber-conservatives--and thus McCain has stayed where he is for twenty years and the ideological terrain has shifted underneath his feat. Though this surely accounts for some of the shift from a guy who voted more conservatively than about five of every six fellow senators early in his career to voting more conservative today than only out out of every two, I don't think we can attribute his career trend to secular changes in the ideological composition of the Senate.

McCain is, in my view, going to be very hard to beat in the general election unless he undermines the biggest of his three main assets: His credibility as a straight-talkin' maverick/moderate…or whatever you want to call him. (The other two, of course, are his biography as a Vietnam vet/prisoner-of-war, and his media-friendly personality and friendly media coverage.)

Moving to the right could destroy that image, and could also change the way the media covers him. Frankly, I hope McCain continues to undermine himself by moving to the right. Still, liberals must concede that, at least by Republican standards and based on his Senate voting behavior, McCain is a moderate.

Or, rather, that he is today.

Copyright © Thomas F. Schaller. Material presented on The Gadflyer is the opinion of the respective author and not that of The Gadflyer, the web host or any other entity.


Paul Waldman

Identity and Big Ideas
Paul Waldman (10:40AM)

In a new column over at TomPaine.com, I finally get around to tackling this whole Tomasky/Halpin/Teixeira "common good" thing. Here's an excerpt:

Unlike liberals, conservatives have understood that articulating contrasts is essential to building a political identity. It isn't just about who you are, it's about who your opponents are as well. Each of the Four Pillars of Conservatism implies its opposite, the bad thing liberals are supposed to favor. So when progressives articulate their fundamental beliefs, they have to present a coin with two sides: the positive things they want people to believe about them, and the negative things they want people to believe about conservatives.

This is why I offer a variant of the "common good" idea, one that is likely to perform its political function more effectively. The answer to the question, "What do progressives believe at their core?" is this: Progressives believe we're all in it together.

One might ask, isn't this just a quibble over language? It is most definitely about language, but it's anything but a quibble. First and most importantly, my formulation implies its opposite: while progressives believe we're all in it together, conservatives believe we're all on our own and we're all out for ourselves.
Read the whole thing here.

Copyright © Paul Waldman. Material presented on The Gadflyer is the opinion of the respective author and not that of The Gadflyer, the web host or any other entity.


Paul Waldman

Straw Housewife
Paul Waldman (10:37AM)

This week, Time magazine treats us to a truly awe-inspiring whine-a-thon from Caitlin Flanagan, author of To Hell With All That, one of a seemingly endless series of attacks on feminism for ignoring the virtues of the traditional family. The twist, however, is that this one isn't written by some Stepford Wife from Concerned Women for America, but by someone who writes for such liberal-friendly publications as the New Yorker. Flanagan's problem? Liberals have criticized her attacks on working women.

To get the full flavor you have to read an extended excerpt:

I am a 44-year-old woman who grew up in Berkeley who has never once voted for a Republican, or crossed a picket line, or failed to send in a small check when the Doctors Without Borders envelope showed up. I believe that we should not have invaded Iraq, that we should have signed the Kyoto treaty, that the Starr Report was, in part, the result of a vast right-wing conspiracy. I believe that poverty is our most pressing issue and that we should be pouring money and energy into its eradication. I believe that allowing migrant women and children to die of thirst in American deserts is a moral transgression that will stain us forever.

But despite all that, there is apparently no room for me in the Democratic Party. In fact, I have spent much of the past week on a forced march to the G.O.P. And the bayonet at my back isn't in the hands of the Republicans; the Democrats are the bullyboys. Such lions of the left as Barbara Ehrenreich, the writers at Salon and much of the Upper West Side of Manhattan have made it abundantly clear to me that I ought to start packing my bags. I'm not leaving, but sometimes I wonder: When did I sign up to be the beaten wife of the Democratic Party?

Here's why they're after me: I have made a lifestyle choice that they can't stand, and I'm not cowering in the closet because of it. I'm out, and I'm proud. I am a happy member of an exceedingly "traditional" family...

Most of the 60 million people who voted against George W. Bush have lifestyles more like mine than the Democratic Party would like to admit. Most of us aren't the Hollywood elite or the nontraditional family. Many of us do what I do, which is go to church on Sunday, work hard and value my marriage. Again, it's not so much my party's platform that rejects the family; God help us all if Bush's brutality to the poor continues much longer. It's a small but very vocal minority, the Democratic pundits, who abhor what I represent because it doesn't fit the stereotypical image of the modern woman who has escaped from domestic prison.

Oh, please. No one has responded to Flanagan's book by saying that because she stays at home, Flanagan has no place in the Democratic Party. That's such an absurd slander against her critics that the Time editors should be ashamed of themselves for allowing it into print.

If you untwist Flanagan's phony response to her critics, you find a kernel of truth: they have gone after her for attacking women who choose to work when her own "traditional" lifestyle is made possible by her wealth and gigs most writers would kill for, all of which allows her to have a fulfilling career from home. As Joan Walsh wrote in Salon:

Everyone knows Caitlin Flanagan isn't a stay-at-home mother, she's an accomplished writer who plays a stay-at-home mom in magazines and on TV. Right? Part of why I've never gotten upset about Flanagan's pro-hearth and home shtick is that I've seen it as just that, shtick. I'd read enough to know she had a full-time nanny when her twin sons were infants and she was trying to be a novelist; then she wrote about modern womanhood and family life for the Atlantic Monthly after they hit preschool; now, with her boys in grade school, she's got a great gig at the New Yorker. So how is she not a career woman who's also a mom?...

She readily confesses that although she's an at-home mother...the "home" part of the equation doesn't get much attention; she's not much for cooking or housekeeping or bleaching or mending, or any wifely duties, really, except (we're supposed to infer from a chapter about how feminists won't give their husbands sex) sex. She's had a full-time nanny, housecleaning help, a "household organizer," and now that the kids are in school, no nanny, but a baby sitter.

But no liberal critic that I've seen has criticized Flanagan for choosing to stay at home; millions of liberal women (and a few men) do the same thing, and the attitude from progressives is always, if that works for you, fine.

This is the heart of the difference in how progressives and conservatives look at family arrangements: progressives think everyone should be free to make their own choices, and conservatives want to tell you that their choice is superior to yours. This is why it's easier for conservatives to make a simple argument on this subject: Dad working/mom at home = good, both parents working = bad. Progressives, on the other hand, think it's fine for mothers to stay at home, if they have the means to survive on one income and if that's fulfilling for them, but they also think that if that isn't the choice you make, then no one should tell you you're offending God or turning your children into axe-murderers.

We also think that though gay people should be able to marry, that doesn't mean everyone should be gay and married. And that it's OK for some people to marry but not have kids, and that doesn't mean no one should have kids. And so on.

Copyright © Paul Waldman. Material presented on The Gadflyer is the opinion of the respective author and not that of The Gadflyer, the web host or any other entity.


Joshua Holland

Stop trying to "frame" Iran (and quit with the timetables)
Joshua Holland (1:52AM)

We never learn.

Three years ago we got suckered into a debate about whether or not Saddam Hussein had these generic things called Weapons of Mass Destruction. It was a dumb and losing debate because most people (including yours truly and many who opposed the war) believed there was a good likelihood that Saddam had squirreled away some artillery shells with chemical warheads or some bugs in a deep hole somewhere.

Allowing the debate to hinge on the question of WMD was a distraction from the only real issue: did a well-contained tin-pot dictator with a third-rate army pose a threat to us. That should have been the issue, regardless of whether he had some mustard gas or vials of anthrax buried in a shelter somewhere.

Now we come to Iran three years later. Same ideologues pushing for a fight, same bootlicking media hacks sucking up all their propaganda and regurgitating it with breathless worry.

Another Next Hitler™ is gonna need some killin' and soon. You know the drill.

And here comes the left, God bless 'em, telling us how to frame the issue.

But the Iran brouhaha doesn't need a frame. People mistake "framing" with "coming up with good talking points." The latter is absolutely needed in respect to Iran, and the former -- coming up with language that evokes a larger emotional or moral framework -- has been done very well already. Thomas Aquinas and St. Augustine and Hugo Grotius and Emmanuel Kant developed it and they did a great job. The perfectly valid frame is known in academic circles as Just War Theory, but we can put it more plainly: war should always be a last resort.

Here's the bottom line: a) we can get Iran to give up their nuclear program anytime we want and b): if we don't do so we can live with the consequences.

Three times in the past five years the Iranians have sought direct negotiations with our government and three times they've been rebuffed. Iran wants what Russia and the EU can't offer: normalization of relations with the U.S., or at least a security gaurantee. Why won't we talk with them? Because there's an odd but consistent notion in foreign polciy circles that if the United States sits down at a conference table with someone, we're rewarding them for their behavior -- we're legitimizing their position.

Some of the old-school internationalists in both parties understand how short-sided that is. So, while on the one hand you have Nicholas Burns, Undersecretary of State for Neocon Wingnuttery, saying that Iran was leaving itself "no exit points" and becoming ever more isolated, on the other you have Republican internationalist Richard Lugar telling Reuters that direct talks with Iran "would be useful … the Iranians are a part of the energy picture." Noting the country's energy deals with India and China, Lugar added: "We need to talk about that. Maybe we need to focus our attention less right now on the centrifuges than on how power is going to come out … to all of these countries in some more satisfying way."

Then there's the message that Iran is ten years away from building a nuke (or is it six?). John Aravosis, in a post titled "Here is the Democratic message on Iran," says:

Iran is ten years away from developing nukes.

I'll say it again, TEN YEARS away. That would be TEN YEARS at the earliest, according to the best estimate we have. And that's not according to some peacenik liberal, it's according to the best estimate of US intelligence.

Getting into an argument about intelligence is the worst approach. Better to point out that whatever happens, our ten thousand advanced warheads are plenty of deterrent. After all, they kept the Cold War cold.

Worse, it accepts the administration's claims that Iran is definitely going for a weapon. We have no evidence of that. The administration has gotten the Security Council and the IAEA to go along with the Iranian threat narrative by promising that they won't use military force to resolve the so-called impasse (or threatening to use force if they don't get the resolutions they want.

So the Security Council called on the Iranians to give up their enrichment activities. Of course Iran has a treaty that gives them an "inalienable right" to enrich uranium for civilian purposes. The SC resolution provides no basis for why Iran's inalienable right is now … alienable.

But more importantly, the IAEA submitted a report (PDF) that said there were "unanswered issues" regarding Iran's program. That'll make the papers. But what won't make the papers is this (via Juan Cole):

All the nuclear material declared by Iran to the Agency is accounted for. Apart from the small quantities previously reported to the Board, the Agency has found no other undeclared nuclear material in Iran. However, gaps remain in the Agency's knowledge with respect to the scope and content of Iran's centrifuge programme. Because of this, and other gaps in the Agency's knowledge, including the role of the military in Iran's nuclear programme, the Agency is unable to make progress in its efforts to provide assurance about the absence of undeclared nuclear material and activities in Iran.

It's madness. But I have to say, Iranian president Ahmadinejad is, as they say at the State Department, "not helpful" to those of us trying to overt a catastrophe. Just as Bush is using Iran to shore up his base, that's what Ahmadinejad is doing. Nothing will unite Iran behind their government like a U.S. strike.

Anyway, here are the talking points that I think are important:

  • The administration may be ready to bomb Iran, but they won't sit down and talk to them.
  • Iran hasn't violated any international law or treaty and the IAEA, while expressing concern over "unresolved issues" has accounted for all of Iran's uranium.
  • Attacking Iran will be the death of Iran's reform movement and will cement the Mullahs' power, and the power of Iran's vocally anti-American and anti-Israeli president for a long time.
  • If Iran were to acquire nukes, there'd be the same Mutually Assured Destruction that kept the U.S. and USSR from blowing up the planet in the Middle East. Desirable? No. But something we could live with.
  • And here's an important one that should work nicely this summer:

  • Attacking Iran will cause gas prices to skyrocket.
  • Copyright © Joshua Holland. Material presented on The Gadflyer is the opinion of the respective author and not that of The Gadflyer, the web host or any other entity.


    Joshua Holland

    5.02.06

    Nuclear madness ...
    Joshua Holland (12:23PM)

    Over at AlterNet, I look at how Bush's radical moves in nuclear energy policy and on nuclear weapons are linked by the usual suspects.

    a tease:

    According to Bush administration spin, the mighty atom is a 21st century panacea for the United States' -- and the world's -- most intractable problems. Nuclear energy will free us from our dependence on those "tyrannical regimes" that sponsor global terror, bail out the planet from global warming and avert a new superpower struggle by giving fast-industrializing behemoths like China and India an endless supply of "renewable" energy. Nuclear weapons that we can deploy freely in small conflicts will lock in our global dominance for the rest of the century. And, of course, all this will create lots and lots of high-paying jobs.

    It sounds great on paper. But if you look behind the dramatic shifts in U.S. nuclear policy over the course of Bush's presidency, you find an intense lobbying and public relations campaign by a handful of firms that stand to rake in billions from the construction of new civilian reactors, and by a generation of Cold Warriors that lusts after new, more "usable" nukes for their toy chest.

    Check it.


    Copyright © Joshua Holland. Material presented on The Gadflyer is the opinion of the respective author and not that of The Gadflyer, the web host or any other entity.


    Joshua Holland

    Evo's got a gun ...
    Joshua Holland (12:19PM)

    If we weren't mired in Iraq, preoccupied with a manufactured crisis in Iran and almost universally loathed across Latin America, Fox News would be annointing Bolivian president Evo Morales as The Next Hitler™ and the marines would be preparing to land in La Paz.

    Morales is committing a cardinal sin; he's getting tough with the energy companies:

    Bolivian President Evo Morales ordered the military to occupy the country's natural gas fields after nationalising the hydrocarbons sector and threatening to expel foreign companies if they do not sign new contracts within six months.

    Impoverished Bolivia has the second largest natural gas reserves in South America after Venezuela, and the question of how the country should manage these riches has been at the heart of several popular revolts since 2003.

    Morales became president in January on vows to exert more state control over the country's natural resources, reflecting a growing backlash against free markets and foreign investment in Latin America.[…]

    "We are not a government of mere promises, we follow through on what we propose and what the people demand," Morales said after signing a nationalisation decree at the San Alberto field, operated by Brazil's state-owned Petrobras in the southeastern province of Tarija.

    Bolivian Vice President Alvaro Garcia said officials from state energy company YPFB and the military began taking control of dozens of energy installations - including gas fields, pipelines and refineries - after Morales signed the document.

    The State Department characterized Morales' nationalization decree as "a proposal." Funny.

    Make no mistake: it's a "proposal" that's fraught with dangers and potential pitfalls, not least of which is scaring away foreign investors on a massive scale -- the country desperately needs capital for its energy infrastructure. But this is a great Bad Cop move, and if these big multinationals have a bit of fear put into them, perhaps they'll start coming to the bargaining table with just a tad of humility and an understanding that they had better be prepared to share the wealth.

    For some background, see my piece on Bolivia's new government from January.

    Copyright © Joshua Holland. Material presented on The Gadflyer is the opinion of the respective author and not that of The Gadflyer, the web host or any other entity.


    Jonathan Weiler

    Turning Point
    Jonathan Weiler (9:51AM)

    President Bush's proclamation yesterday of yet another turning point in Iraq with the prospective formation of a permanent government prompted me to compile a list of some previous "turning points" in the war in Iraq.

    Most of the following are turning points, or turnings of the tide proclaimed by the President himself or his direct spokesmen, though there are a couple of instances where other prominent supporters of the war declared a turning point. These include, but are by no means limited to the following:

    May, 2003 – As Bush played soldier aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, while real ones were dying, he proclaimed our "Mission Accomplished" in Iraq and a "turning of the tide" in the war on terror. State department reports on global terror beg to differ, of course.

    July 2003 – The murder of Saddam's two sons hailed as a turning point.

    December 2003 – The capture of Saddam hailed as a turning point. In fairness, many people believed this was so and, as you'll recall, Howard Dean was pilloried for suggesting otherwise.

    May 2004 – Intensified US operations against Moqtada al-Sadr deemed a turning point (this from Sullivan when he was still desperately trying to defend his support for the war – he's mostly given that up now).

    January 2005 – Iraq's first post-Saddam elections heralded as a turning point.

    Bonus prediction from January 2005: McClellan called those elections a "body blow" to terrorists. Apparently, McClellan meant, from the terrorists' perspective, the good kind of body blow.

    March 2005 – RNC regards the (short-lived) drop in US casualties in Iraq following the January elections as a turning point.

    December 2005 – Iraq's parliamentary elections celebrated as a "turning point."

    "There's still a lot of difficult work to be done in Iraq," the president said, "but thanks to the courage of the Iraqi people, the year 2005 will be recorded as a turning point in the history of Iraq, the history of the Middle East and the history of freedom."

    I clearly don't understand what the phrase "turning point" means. But, I do know that all these turning points are sure making me dizzy.

    Copyright © Jonathan Weiler. Material presented on The Gadflyer is the opinion of the respective author and not that of The Gadflyer, the web host or any other entity.


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