Frank Rich on The “Good Germans” Among Us

Frank Rich has an excellent op-ed regarding public opinion over the Iraq war entitled The “Good Germans” Among Us. He begins:

“BUSH lies” doesn’t cut it anymore. It’s time to confront the darker reality that we are lying to ourselves.

Ten days ago The Times unearthed yet another round of secret Department of Justice memos countenancing torture. President Bush gave his standard response: “This government does not torture people.” Of course, it all depends on what the meaning of “torture” is. The whole point of these memos is to repeatedly recalibrate the definition so Mr. Bush can keep pleading innocent.

By any legal standards except those rubber-stamped by Alberto Gonzales, we are practicing torture, and we have known we are doing so ever since photographic proof emerged from Abu Ghraib more than three years ago. As Andrew Sullivan, once a Bush cheerleader, observed last weekend in The Sunday Times of London, America’s “enhanced interrogation” techniques have a grotesque provenance: “Verschärfte Vernehmung, enhanced or intensified interrogation, was the exact term innovated by the Gestapo to describe what became known as the ‘third degree.’ It left no marks. It included hypothermia, stress positions and long-time sleep deprivation.”

Still, the drill remains the same. The administration gives its alibi (Abu Ghraib was just a few bad apples). A few members of Congress squawk. The debate is labeled “politics.” We turn the page.

While the entire column is well worth reading, the heart of the column comes a little later:

I have always maintained that the American public was the least culpable of the players during the run-up to Iraq. The war was sold by a brilliant and fear-fueled White House propaganda campaign designed to stampede a nation still shellshocked by 9/11. Both Congress and the press — the powerful institutions that should have provided the checks, balances and due diligence of the administration’s case — failed to do their job. Had they done so, more Americans might have raised more objections. This perfect storm of democratic failure began at the top.

As the war has dragged on, it is hard to give Americans en masse a pass. We are too slow to notice, let alone protest, the calamities that have followed the original sin.

In April 2004, Stars and Stripes first reported that our troops were using makeshift vehicle armor fashioned out of sandbags, yet when a soldier complained to Donald Rumsfeld at a town meeting in Kuwait eight months later, he was successfully pilloried by the right. Proper armor procurement lagged for months more to come. Not until early this year, four years after the war’s first casualties, did a Washington Post investigation finally focus the country’s attention on the shoddy treatment of veterans, many of them victims of inadequate armor, at Walter Reed Army Medical Center and other military hospitals.

We first learned of the use of contractors as mercenaries when four Blackwater employees were strung up in Falluja in March 2004, just weeks before the first torture photos emerged from Abu Ghraib. We asked few questions. When reports surfaced early this summer that our contractors in Iraq (180,000, of whom some 48,000 are believed to be security personnel) now outnumber our postsurge troop strength, we yawned. Contractor casualties and contractor-inflicted casualties are kept off the books.

It was always the White House’s plan to coax us into a blissful ignorance about the war. Part of this was achieved with the usual Bush-Cheney secretiveness, from the torture memos to the prohibition of photos of military coffins. But the administration also invited our passive complicity by requiring no shared sacrifice. A country that knows there’s no such thing as a free lunch was all too easily persuaded there could be a free war.

After further discussion, again all of which is worth reading, he concludes:

Our humanity has been compromised by those who use Gestapo tactics in our war. The longer we stand idly by while they do so, the more we resemble those “good Germans” who professed ignorance of their own Gestapo. It’s up to us to wake up our somnambulant Congress to challenge administration policy every day. Let the war’s last supporters filibuster all night if they want to. There is nothing left to lose except whatever remains of our country’s good name.

There is some protest in this country, which the right unsuccessfully tries to write off as protests of a radical left fringe. There is no doubt that the Democrats have been failures as an opposition party, too frequently toning down protests out of fear of being labeled unpatriotic or soft on terrorism. It remains the Republicans who are most directly complicit in these acts which makes it impossible to see them as being fit to continue to govern regardless of the faults of the Democrats.

The Nazi reference has resulted in protest from the conservative blogosphere. Most of the criticism of this column is easily disregarded as conservatives ignore, the ethics of the situation, the lack of efficacy of torture, and how these acts ultimately harm the United States. The Van Der Galiën Gazette has a more balanced comment as he does acknowledge that “the treatment of prisoners is truly embarassing to the US. Gitmo, Abu Ghraib, etc. have done great damage to America’s image.” Unfortunately he also writes, “With regards to the treatment of prisoners Rich compares the US to… Nazi Germany (as liberals are so fond of doing these days with anyone and everyone they disagree with).”

This is certainly true of some liberals, and Michael might have been overly-influenced by a recent attack on him from one of the more off the wall liberal blogs in a dispute which did involve the over-use of Nazi comparisons. I do have three objections to this, the first being that, while sometimes true, this is hardly characteristic of the majority of liberals. Secondly, Rich was quoting conservative writer Andrew Sullivan, not a liberal, in making the Nazi comparisons. Thirdly, there are some situations in which Nazi comparisons are valid. In this case Rich does draw a valid parallel.

It is important in making any comparisons to Nazi Germany that we are looking at a considerable difference in degree. That doesn’t rule out utilizing such analogies. American treatment of prisoners is not any where near as bad as the atrocities committed by the Nazis, but not being as bad as the Nazis is hardly a meaningful defense. This is especially important as, in dealing with those who might turn to terrorism, this is largely a battle of hearts and minds. If we are seen as the moral equivalent of the Nazis, regardless of whether those thinking this understand that the Nazis were far worse, we have no chance to win this battle.

Charlie Reese on Experience and Obama’s Foreign Policy Statements

Charlie Reese argues that experience is not always a virtue:

Would you really prefer an experienced killer? An experienced crook? An experienced con artist? An experienced whore? An experienced grifter? An experienced politician? An experienced liar?

I doubt it. For one thing, you can’t expect a fresh look at old problems from experience. Experience often means that the person has developed fixed opinions and fixed ideas. Experienced people tend to be the kind who “know” the situation long before they hear any evidence. Most of the time, they are the kind of people who don’t want to hear any evidence that contradicts their own ideas. I would even say that choosing a president with a lot of experience is a guarantee of maintaining the status quo, and, as I hope you know, the present status quo stinks.

Reese is not endorsing Obama, but he also defends Obama against many of the attacks and distortions of his positions:

I was just incensed at the cheap attempt to distort what the man said. He said he would talk to our so-called enemies. Those are exactly the people a president should talk to. The Cold War ended because American presidents talked to Soviet leaders, who were certainly our enemies at the time. There are only two ways to resolve a conflict – by negotiation or by force. I hope none of you is looking forward to a new century of war.

He also said that if we developed definitive information on the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden and the Pakistan government refused to act, he would. Isn’t that what a normal person would want in a commander in chief? Someone who would act decisively in pursuing America’s goals? He didn’t say he would declare war on Pakistan. He simply said he’d go after our chief enemy, who has eluded the Bush administration for six years now.

Deliberate distortion of an opponent’s statements is a standard tactic among dishonorable politicians. That seems to be the majority of politicians these days. However, the American people deserve the right to choose their candidates based on what they actually say and do and not on the basis of lies and distortions spread abroad by their opponents and their hired truth-twisters.

Secondly, you should realize that today there are no Lone Rangers running for president. They all are surrounded by advisers, and the winner will enter the White House with an entourage. Presidents not only get bombarded with advice, they have at their disposal the world’s largest, if not the most effective, intelligence apparatus.

Thirdly, keep in the mind that the worst members of the Bush administration are the most experienced. That includes Vice President Dick Cheney, who often has had no doubt about things that weren’t so, and former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who boasted that “we know where the weapons are.” Their collective experience amounted to disaster.

Finally, what you want in a president is intelligence, an open mind, energy, curiosity, courage, honesty and sound judgment. None of those is a product of experience. A modern president can collect data up the yazoo. That’s not the problem. The problem is in analyzing the data and deciding what, if anything, to do about a situation.

Condi’s Failures on Iraq and Terrorism

The Economist has a quite unflattering look at Condoleezza Rice while reviewing two books on her:

Ms Rice’s star, which rose so fast, has plunged back into obscurity, and the reason is easy for anyone reading this pair of biographies to see. As secretary of state, she has mostly failed in grappling with a web of problems that she herself helped to create when she was turning out to be a notably weak national security adviser. Mr Powell presciently said of Iraq, “If you break it, you own it.” That might serve as an epitaph for Ms Rice’s career at the top of American policymaking.

In reviewing a biography by Marcus Mabry they describe her relationship with George Bush.

Which makes it mysterious how she came to serve him so badly. The national security adviser is meant to co-ordinate foreign-policy making. Yet in that job Ms Rice seemed entirely unable to resolve the many disputes between Donald Rumsfeld at Defence and Mr Powell at State. Even without that failure, it would have been impossible not to allot her much of the blame for the mistakes in Iraq. If she realised America was sending too few troops and had rejected all post-war planning, she should have told the president: she had his ear, and access. If she did not realise, she should have done.

Mr Mabry dwells at length on Ms Rice’s inability to admit to error. This quality of impenitence also extends to her refusal to accept any blame for failing to anticipate the attacks of September 11th 2001. The book presents abundant evidence of the warnings repeatedly sent to her by the CIA (one of the agency’s untrumpeted successes) and of her failure to take them seriously. He notes that Ms Rice seems to have had a blind spot about the potency of terrorism in general.

This was Rice’s biggest failure of all. She not only ignored warnings about terrorism, but later lied about even receiving them ad I’ve discussed in previous posts. In a column in the Washington Post on March 22, 2004 she wrote, “No al Qaeda plan was turned over to the new administration.”

Documents obtained from the National Security Archive  showed that these statements from Rice were untrue. The documents include a January 25, 2001, memo from counterterrorism coordinator Richard Clarke to national security advisor Condoleezza Rice and “Tab A December 2000 Paper: Strategy for Eliminating the Threat from the Jihadist Networks of al-Qida: Status and Prospects,” These documents show that Rice had received both warnings about al Qaeda and plans for handling them from the Clinton administration but ignored the warnings.

The consequences of Condi’s failure was seen on September 11, 2001.

Republicans Realizing Incompetence of Bush White House

Liberals are often accused of doing nothing but Bush-bashing, but it is becoming increasingly clear to all that there has been good reason for this. We’ve never had a President who was so incompetent, and who has done so much harm to this country. David Ignatus reports that even Republicans are beginning to understand this, with today’s best Bush-bashing line (emphasis mine) coming from a Republican:

If you want to hear despair in Washington these days, talk to Republicans. The Democrats are exulting in their newfound political power and are eager to profit from Bush’s difficulties. But Republicans voice the bitterness and frustration of people chained to the hull of a sinking ship.

I spoke with a half-dozen prominent GOP operatives this past week, most of them high-level officials in the Reagan and Bush I and Bush II administrations, and I heard the same devastating critique: This White House is isolated and ineffective; the country has stopped listening to President Bush, just as it once tuned out the hapless Jimmy Carter; the president’s misplaced sense of personal loyalty is hurting his party and the nation.

This is the most incompetent White House I’ve seen since I came to Washington,” said one GOP senator. “The White House legislative liaison team is incompetent, pitiful, embarrassing. My colleagues can’t even tell you who the White House Senate liaison is. There is rank incompetence throughout the government. It’s the weakest Cabinet I’ve seen.” And remember, this is a Republican talking.

A prominent conservative complains: “With this White House, there is loyalty not to an idea, but to a person. When Republicans talked about someone in the Reagan administration being ‘loyal,’ they didn’t mean to Ronald Reagan but to the conservative movement.” Bush’s stubborn defense of Gonzales offends these Republicans, who see the president defiantly clinging to an official who has lost public confidence, just as he did for too long with former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

Obama’s Official

Barack Obama might have less experience in Washington than most of his rivals, but he is quickly learning the rules to media coverage. A candidate can receive coverage both for announcing an exploratory committee, and then again for announcing that they are actually running. The cable news networks were repeating film of his announcement today with Breaking News banners. Is a previously announced appearance to say what everyone knew was going to happen really Breaking News?

Obama is trying hard to turn his lack of experience into something positive:

I recognize there is a certain presumptuousness – a certain audacity – to this announcement. I know I haven’t spent a lot of time learning the ways of Washington. But I’ve been there long enough to know that the ways of Washington must change.

The genius of our founders is that they designed a system of government that can be changed. And we should take heart, because we’ve changed this country before. In the face of tyranny, a band of patriots brought an Empire to its knees. In the face of secession, we unified a nation and set the captives free. In the face of Depression, we put people back to work and lifted millions out of poverty. We welcomed immigrants to our shores, we opened railroads to the west, we landed a man on the moon, and we heard a King’s call to let justice roll down like water, and righteousness like a mighty stream.

Each and every time, a new generation has risen up and done what’s needed to be done. Today we are called once more – and it is time for our generation to answer that call.

Frank Rich is more concerned with Obama’s judgement than experience:

The day after the resolution debacle, I spoke with Senator Obama about the war and about his candidacy. Since we talked by phone, I can’t swear he was clean, but he was definitely articulate. He doesn’t yet sound as completely scripted as his opponents — though some talking-point-itis is creeping in — and he isn’t remotely defensive as he shrugs off the race contretemps du jour prompted by his White House run. Not that he’s all sweetness and light. “If the criterion is how long you’ve been in Washington, then we should just go ahead and assign Joe Biden or Chris Dodd the nomination,” he said. “What people are looking for is judgment.”

What Mr. Obama did not have to say is that he had the judgment about Iraq that his rivals lacked. As an Illinois state senator with no access to intelligence reports, he recognized in October 2002 that administration claims of Saddam’s “imminent and direct threat to the United States” were hype and foresaw that an American occupation of Iraq would be of “undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences.” Nor can he be pilloried as soft on terrorism by the Cheney-Lieberman axis of neo-McCarthyism. “I don’t oppose all wars,” he said in the same Chicago speech. “What I am opposed to is a dumb war.”

Rich concluded his column with suggesting that the inexperienced might do better than those who have been in Washington:

Washington’s conventional wisdom has it that the worse things go in the war, the more voters will want to stick with the tried and true: Clinton, McCain, Giuliani. But as Mr. Obama reminds us, “Nobody had better Washington résumés than Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld.” In the wake of the catastrophe they and their enablers in both parties have made, the inexperienced should have a crack at inheriting the earth, especially if they’re clean.

The Carpetbagger Report compares years in elected office among several of the candidates:

* Obama: 10 years (7 state Senate, 3 U.S. Senate)
* Clinton: 8 years (8 U.S. Senate)
* Edwards: 6 years (6 U.S. Senate)
* Giuliani: 8 years (two, four-year mayoral terms)
* Romney: 4 years (one four-year gubernatorial term)
* McCain: 25 years (4 U.S. House, 21 U.S. Senate) (more…)

Red State Has a Dream

When one has a dream which is scary it is called a nightmare. Is there a word for a dream that is both a nightmare but also hilariously funny? Red State dares to dream of its ideal ticket, both on policy and a ticket they think can win in 2008. Believe it or not: Donald Rumsfeld and John Bolton.

Paul Krugman on Missing Molly Ivins

Paul Krugman on Molly Ivins:

Molly never lost sight of two eternal truths: rulers lie, and the times when people are most afraid to challenge authority are also the times when it’s most important to do just that. And the fact that she remembered these truths explains something I haven’t seen pointed out in any of the tributes: her extraordinary prescience on the central political issue of our time.

I’ve been going through Molly’s columns from 2002 and 2003, the period when most of the wise men of the press cheered as Our Leader took us to war on false pretenses, then dismissed as “Bush haters” anyone who complained about the absence of W.M.D. or warned that the victory celebrations were premature. Here are a few selections:

Nov. 19, 2002: “The greatest risk for us in invading Iraq is probably not war itself, so much as: What happens after we win? … There is a batty degree of triumphalism loose in this country right now.”

Jan. 16, 2003: “I assume we can defeat Hussein without great cost to our side (God forgive me if that is hubris). The problem is what happens after we win. The country is 20 percent Kurd, 20 percent Sunni and 60 percent Shiite. Can you say, ‘Horrible three-way civil war?’ ”

July 14, 2003: “I opposed the war in Iraq because I thought it would lead to the peace from hell, but I’d rather not see my prediction come true and I don’t think we have much time left to avert it. That the occupation is not going well is apparent to everyone but Donald Rumsfeld. … We don’t need people with credentials as right-wing ideologues and corporate privatizers — we need people who know how to fix water and power plants.”

Oct. 7, 2003: “Good thing we won the war, because the peace sure looks like a quagmire. …

“I’ve got an even-money bet out that says more Americans will be killed in the peace than in the war, and more Iraqis will be killed by Americans in the peace than in the war. Not the first time I’ve had a bet out that I hoped I’d lose.”

So Molly Ivins — who didn’t mingle with the great and famous, didn’t have sources high in the administration, and never claimed special expertise on national security or the Middle East — got almost everything right. Meanwhile, how did those who did have all those credentials do?

With very few exceptions, they got everything wrong. They bought the obviously cooked case for war — or found their own reasons to endorse the invasion. They didn’t see the folly of the venture, which was almost as obvious in prospect as it is with the benefit of hindsight. And they took years to realize that everything we were being told about progress in Iraq was a lie.

Bob Herbert: Lessons Never Learned

Bob Herbert looks back at the Ford years and writes about the Lessons Never Learned:

It would be foolish to suggest that the United States as a whole hasn’t made tremendous progress since the 1960s and ’70s. But it’s impossible to reflect on the presidency of Gerald Ford, who formally ended U.S. participation in the war in Vietnam, and fail to notice that his defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, and chief of staff, Dick Cheney, were among the chief architects of the current calamity in Iraq. There were lessons galore to be learned from Vietnam. But Mr. Rumsfeld and Mr. Cheney, like frat boys skipping an important lecture, managed to ignore them.

The trauma of the 1973 oil embargo actually spooked the country into action on the energy front. Fuel economy standards for automobiles were ratcheted up and improvements were made in the energy efficiency of refrigerators, air-conditioners and other household appliances. But those successful early efforts, instead of being strengthened, were undermined by the conservative political tide of the past several years.

Now we’re confronted with the dire threat of global warming, and as usual there is no plan.

If history tells us anything, it’s that we never learn from history. We could have stepped back from the war in Iraq, and stepped up to the challenge of global warming. We could have learned something when James Brown was on the charts and Gerald Ford was in the White House.

Maybe next time.

Obama and the Experience Factor

Barack Obama continues to dominate the news media. Peggy Noonan, not surprisingly, considers him a man from nowhere who doesn’t believe in anything. Reading The Audacity of Hope proves that Obama does have convictions, even if there is reason for peoplle left and right to wonder about the specifics of what he would do in office. In contrast, Rosa Brooks believes that Barack’s ready:

Obama bashers now complain that his two years in the U.S. Senate have been largely devoid of shock and awe. That’s not a bad thing. Obama wisely hasn’t tried to hog the limelight; instead, he’s focused on issues that are unsexy but important.

He forged a sturdy partnership with Indiana Republican Richard Lugar, for instance, and the two successfully sponsored legislation that steps up U.S. support for global programs designed to secure or destroy stocks of conventional weapons, including shoulder-fired missiles, small arms and abandoned ordnance. (Hand-wringing about WMD is de rigueur in Washington, but most politicians forget that it’s conventional weapons that kill U.S. soldiers in Iraq, allow terrorists to shoot down aircraft and fuel the bloody conflicts that have killed so many civilians from Darfur to Colombia.) On a dozen equally unglamorous issues, from global warming to our decaying public health system, Obama has shown a similar steady commitment.

In any case, experience, like charisma, can be overrated. A good president doesn’t have to know everything about everything. (If he doesn’t know anything about anything, of course, that’s no good. We’re still trapped in an unhappy national experiment with a guy in that category.) Good presidents strike a balance: They learn all they can, then appoint smart, thoughtful aides, people who can fill in the gaps in their own knowledge and serve as honest brokers. At the end of the day, good presidents need the judgment and common sense necessary to make tough decisions. But to get there, they need to know how to listen and how to nurture, rather than crush, dissenting voices.

We hear from Barack Obama himself in a Chicago Tribune interview:

Asked how he would address the issue of his relative lack of experience, Obama said he thought that the campaign itself–how he managed it, his position on issues and his framing of a vision for the country–would answer the question. “That experience question would be answered at the end of the campaign,” he said.

“The test of leadership in my mind is not going to be what’s on a paper resume,” Obama said. Vice President Dick Cheney, a former defense secretary, and departing Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld “had the best resume on paper of any foreign policy team and the result has been what I consider to be one of the biggest foreign policy mistakes in our history,” he said.

(more…)

Keith Olbermann Found His Voice

While most of the news media has acted as lapdogs to the Republicans, Keith Olbermann has been speaking out, receiving increased attention lately. Olbermann fans might enjoy the article on him in the San Francisco Chronicle. An excerpt:

Keith Olbermann just needed to find his voice. He’d been a droll sportscaster, a serious news anchor and a bickering critic of Fox News host Bill O’Reilly. But none of those personas really clicked.

Then he found one. A little over a year ago, as the White House fumbled and botched the Hurricane Katrina recovery, Olbermann finally blew up.

He concluded a broadcast of his MSNBC cable news show, “Countdown,” with an indignant rant in the rat-a-tat-tat cadence of his idol, Edward R. Murrow. He called it a “Special Comment.”

And just like that, Olbermann found his voice — the angry everyman. He became a liberal counterpoint to conservative media ranters like O’Reilly and Rush Limbaugh, and an Internet star, too.

The result has been a cultural earthquake.

“Here’s what happened,” Olbermann said in a phone interview this week. “Five years ago (on Sept. 11), 50 percent of the country went quiet. There was this self-imposed censorship. Suddenly it became unimaginable to criticize the administration. And no one else was brave or stupid enough to say, ‘I don’t remember signing that document.’ ”

Today Olbermann is hot, in every sense of the word. He likes to say that the first step to creating one of his blistering editorials is to “get pissed off,” and that’s certainly how he sounds.

But there’s something more to it, too. Conservatives may hate his attacks, but no one doubts that he comes across as one of the smarter guys in the room. When he laid into then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld on Aug. 30, he threw in references to Neville Chamberlain and the policy of appeasement. Let’s see NBC network anchor Brian Williams pull that off.

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