Categories
Humor Libertarianism Politics The Bush Legacy The Opinionsphere

Are You A Libertarian If…

DarkSyde at the Daily Kos lists the “Top 10 Signs You Might Not Be A Libertarian.” It captures the silliness of the claims some people make – especially those who only fled the label “Republican” as George W. Bush became less popular:

[I]f you think government should stay the hell out of people’s private business — except when kidnapping citizens and rendering them to secret overseas torture prisons, snooping around the bedrooms of consenting adults, policing a woman’s uterus, or conducting warrantless wire taps, you are no Libertarian.

Check it out. Funny, yet true – the best combination.

Categories
The Bush Legacy The Opinionsphere

Andrew Sullivan: “American evangelicals are much more pro-torture in this respect than many Iranian Muslims”

Andrew Sullivan – still theoretically not blogging during his August sabbatical to work on articles for The Atlantic – had to chime in last week when further torture documents were released:

American evangelicals are much more pro-torture in this respect than many Iranian Muslims.

This is what Bush and Cheney truly achieved in their tragic response to 9/11: two terribly failed, brutally expensive wars, the revival of sectarian warfare and genocide in the Middle East, the end of America’s global moral authority, the empowerment of Iran’s and North Korea’s dictatorships, and the nightmares of Gitmo and Bagram still haunting the new administration.

But what they did to the culture – how they systematically dismantled core American values like the prohibition on torture and respect for the rule of law – is the worst and most enduring of the legacies.

One political party in this country is now explicitly pro-torture, and wants to restore a torture regime if it regains power.

Last summer, I actually wrote a piece coming to almost the exact same conclusion. I wrote that Bush had made things “just bad enough” that we would be able to reverse course and start down a better path – that his presidency had served as a kind of innoculation against certain tyrannical elements. This proved to be true on a political level – but I missed the cultural transformation that has led so many people to defend the indefensible. This is perhaps the most damning legacy Bush of Bush’s presidency.

Categories
National Security Politics The Bush Legacy The War on Terrorism

The CIA Hired Blackwater to Help with Covert Killings

Mark Mazzetti gleans another detail in the “executive assassination ring” that Leon Panetta finally found out about earlier this summer and promptly informed Congress of: the always upstanding, peace-loving organization Blackwater was involved, having been hired by the CIA to help in some unclear capacity. As Mazzetti points out, hiring a private organization to participate in a covert killing program adds yet another layer of bureacracy and legal protections that makes accountability all the harder. This is especially true of Blackwater, given its byzantine structure and secretive leader, Erik Prince.

Categories
Barack Obama Health care Politics The Bush Legacy The Opinionsphere

Gog et Magog, Hypomania in the White House, Reuters!, The Most Interesting Man in the World, and the NRLC

1. Gog and Magog. James A. Haught breaks some news – at least in American papers – explaining one line of “reasoning” George W. Bush attempted to use to convince Jacques Chirac to support the invasion of Iraq:

Gog and Magog are at work in the Middle East… The biblical prophecies are being fulfilled… This confrontation is willed by God, who wants to use this conflict to erase his people’s enemies before a New Age begins.

Chirac was so confused by this reasoning that he actually called in a Swiss theologian to explain. Just last week, Chirac confirmed this in an extended interview in France.

2. Hypomania in the White House. John Gartner for Psychology Today profiles Rahm Emanuel and the Emanuel family that shaped him. He describes Emanuel as hypomanic – which he stresses is not a psychological disorder, but a condition. Some of the more interesting tidbits:

Emanuel says f*ck more frequently than “if, and, or but,” insists political scientist Larry Sabato. Obama himself regularly jokes about Emanuel’s profanity: “For Rahm, every day is a swearing-in ceremony.”

Gartner also discusses how Emanuel’s family shaped him:

Stuck with each other, the brothers created their own subculture—unlike most gifted high-energy kids, who must deal with the confusing feelings that come with being different. Like the X-Men at the Mutant Academy, the brothers felt most normal in one another’s presence, where they could be themselves—with a vengeance.

The brotherhood may have been instrumental in curbing another hallmark of hypomania. If you’re hypomanic and gifted, you always have the feeling of being the smartest guy in the room. But if you have two other guys just as smart and aggressive in the room who say, “That’s a stupid idea” and start to pound you, it’ll knock some of the grandiosity out of you.

And this:

While Rahm has called the verbal combat that took place there “gladiatorial,” Zeke described it to me as more of a Talmudic debate—the Jewish tradition of argument where one’s opponent is viewed as an ally in the search for truth. “It’s a sign of love to take someone’s view seriously,” says Zeke, who has fostered at NIH a style modeled directly on the Emanuel dinner table; he calls it “combative collegiality.”

3. Reuters! Reuters believes in a link economy. Suck on that AP.

4. The Most Interesting Man in the World. I was going to link to an article at AdAge by Jeremy Mullman on Dos Equis’s spectacularly successfuly “Most Interesting Man” campaign – but as the article went viral, AdAge has apparently attempted to limit its distribution and now placed it behind a firewall. Google does have a cached version here. For now. It’s an interesting story of how the ad campaign broke all of the rules of beer advertising – and led Dos Equis to buck the trend of declining imported beer sales and actually notch a double digit rise.

5. The NLRC: Not about abortion any more. William Saletan explains why certain pro-life Democrats are having their loyalty questioned by the National Right to Life Committee despite their unchanged anti-abortion stance:

In 2007, Ryan began to flunk the scorecard because the scorecard was no longer primarily about abortion. It wasn’t Ryan who changed. It was NRLC.

[Image by me.]

Categories
Barack Obama Liberalism Libertarianism Political Philosophy Politics The Bush Legacy The Opinionsphere

The Libertarian-Democratic Alliance Will Survive

[digg-reddit-me]Jon Henke over at The Next Right scoffs now at Markos Moulitsas’s prediction – a few years back – of “an emerging brand of ‘libertarian Democrats.'” Henke makes two mistakes in his scoff: first, he equates the tea bagging movement with libertarianism; and second, he is extrapolating from the immediate post-election dynamics to more general party dynamics in the future.

In the first, he is certainly right that the Tea Bagging movement has adopted libertarian themes and rhetoric – and there are certainly libertarians among this group. But there are also many right-wingers of other sorts. And if the Tea Baggers truly were outraged by government spending, they had eight years to get excited before Obama took office. The Tea Bagging movement is an odd combination of right-wingers angry with Obama using libertarian rhetoric and libertarians who are fed up with everyone in American politics except Ron Paul. But I’d be pretty certain that the majority of people at these rallies decrying socialism and government interference also join in the right-wing’s attempts to demonize Obama for his modest steps in reining in the national security state.  Henke – in equating the Tea Bagging movement and libertarianism does libertarians a rather severe disservice.

Second, it was inevitable that the libertarians that were part of the anti-Bush coalition would not fit so well into the pro-Obama coalition, despite their support for Obama over McCain in 2008. It was always clear that Obama would not move fast enough on national security matters – and would not even attempt to go far enough for libertarians – and that Obama’s domestic agenda, especially health care, goes against libertarian principles. That said, there are significant areas of agreement between libertarians, progressives, and liberals – and these are considerably stronger than those between right-wingers, Republicans and libertarians. On economic matters, the Republican Party has done very little to embrace free market reforms – instead, embracing a form of crony capitalism; on national security issues, the party has embraced every accoutrement of a police state; on spending, Republicans have been far more fiscally irresponsible; on social issues, the Republican Party has abandoned libertarian principles and embraced a christianist platform. The Democratic Party – on the other hand – is for reigning in the police state (though not enough); and on social issues, it often sides with libertarians; on economics and spending, this gets more complicated. Obama’s positions do seem at first glance to be exactly what libertarianism stands against – but if I’m right about what Obama is doing – that he is adapting the Democratic Party and liberalism to a market-state in which the state seeks to provide the maximum opportunity to its citizens rather than providing for them (as socialist, Communist, and post-New Deal American capitalist states did), then the Democratic Party’s economic platform will be less of a threat to libertarian values and the party will be more or less aligned with the libertarians on every issue.

These first years of Obama’s presidency were always going to strain the libertarian-Democratic alliance. But it seems the long term trends favor this alliance.

[Image by Brian Buchanan licensed under Creative Commons.]

Categories
Law Politics The Bush Legacy

Alberto Gonzales: Sharp Like An Old Crayon

The Times always gets an interesting array of questions written by prominent individual for its pre-Confirmation hearing piece with questions for the nominee. This last attempt was no different – but as always – the questions often revealed more about the questioner than their intended answerer. For example, Alberto Gonzalez suggests Sotomayor be asked:

Some overseas critics have questioned the legality of United States government policies on the war on terrorism. Should America’s standing in the world, to the extent it may be affected by the outcome of a case, ever inform a judicial decision?

Clearly, Gonzales thinks it should affect the outcome of cases – but it seems impossible to see how this principle would be applied. But one can guess that this argument was used to push Gonzales into taking positions he might not have otherwise as David Addington, Scooter Libby, and other top Bush administration officials working under Cheney pushed various extreme positions in secret – and then to cover up the excesses while Alberto “I Don’t Recall” Gonzales was Attorney General.

But it takes some sharp like Gonzales (sharp like an old crayon) to expose the underlying idea so baldly. Presumably Gonzales thinks American citizens have a right to know what the American government is doing in their name – but that this right must be counterbalanced by a Court acting as a kind of public relations arm of the U.S. government. As Glenn Greenwald said (in a piece I cannot find at the moment, so I paraphrase): “The inevitable logic of this position is that the worse the crime is, the greater the necessity to cover it up to protect America’s image.” This obviously creates an incentive for administration officials to make sure that their crimes are so bad future administrations will be compelled to protect them – to prevent information from becoming public and damaging America’s reputation.

[Image by Matthew Bradley licensed under Creative Commons.]

Categories
National Security The Bush Legacy The War on Terrorism

Is The Secret Plan Panetta Found Hersh’s “Executive Assasination Ring”?

[digg-reddit-me]Sam Stein of the Huffington Post got there first – but when I first heard the news about the secret plan so shocking that CIA Director Leon Panetta immediately shut it down and informed Congress late last week – my first thought was of the vague remarks by Seymour Hersh this March about “an executive assassination ring” run by Vice President Cheney.

Last night, reading the Wall Street Journal piece by Siobhan Gorman, this inkling seemed confirmed. Gorman reported:

According to current and former government officials, the agency spent money on planning and possibly some training. It was acting on a 2001 presidential legal pronouncement, known as a finding, which authorized the CIA to pursue such efforts. The initiative hadn’t become fully operational at the time Mr. Panetta ended it…

One former senior intelligence official said the program was an attempt “to achieve a capacity to carry out something that was directed in the finding,” meaning it was looking for ways to capture or kill al Qaeda chieftains.

Most of the other pieces on this subject have linked it specifically to Cheney – which is little surprise as most of the more extreme measures taken in the aftermath of September 11 were instigated by Cheney. Stories have also noted that this program is not related to the interrogation of prisoners or the wiretapping of information.

Compare this to Hersh’s comments back in March:

Right now, today, there was a story in the New York Times that if you read it carefully mentioned something known as the Joint Special Operations Command – JSOC it’s called. It is a special wing of our special operations community that is set up independently. They do not report to anybody, except in the Bush-Cheney days, they reported directly to the Cheney office. They did not report to the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff or to Mr. [Robert] Gates, the secretary of defense. They reported directly to him…

Congress has no oversight of it. It’s an executive assassination ring essentially, and it’s been going on and on and on. Just today in the Times there was a story that its leaders, a three star admiral named [William H.] McRaven, ordered a stop to it because there were so many collateral deaths.
Under President Bush’s authority, they’ve been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving. That’s been going on, in the name of all of us.

It’s complicated because the guys doing it are not murderers, and yet they are committing what we would normally call murder. It’s a very complicated issue. Because they are young men that went into the Special Forces. The Delta Forces you’ve heard about. Navy Seal teams. Highly specialized.

In many cases, they were the best and the brightest. Really, no exaggerations. Really fine guys that went in to do the kind of necessary jobs that they think you need to do to protect America. And then they find themselves torturing people.

The glaring discrepancy between the program Hersh is describing – and the one news reports are now – is that one point being emphasized in the current coverage of the concealed program is that it was never fully operational. But Sam Donaldson – in an unusual bit of worthwhile commentary – pointed out Sunday on This Week that we didn’t know how operational was being defined. He asked: Were there pilot programs? Was this tested in the field? Was there training? These questions are important – especially given how a word such as torture was parsed out of existence. And of course the most basic question, being fooled once, can we trust that this secret operation was not actually operational?

[Image by askpang licensed under Creative Commons.]

Categories
Barack Obama Criticism Foreign Policy History Iran Law National Security Politics The Bush Legacy The Opinionsphere The War on Terrorism

McNamara, Cuomo, Bearing Witness, Iran’s Bomb, Sri Lanken Victories, and Historical Dignity

It’s that glorious time of the week – Friday. So, here’s my recommendations of some interesting reads for this weekend that came up this past week…

  1. There were a number of excellent obituaries of Robert McNamara published upon his death. But what I would recommend would be reading this speech given in 1966 at the height of his power.
  2. Another speech worth reading is Mario Cuomo’s “Our Lady of the Law” speech from November 2007 which was published for the first time on this blog earlier in the week.
  3. Roger Cohen in the New York Times tries to express the insufficiency of online reporting aggregating news and media – as Andrew Sullivan and Nico Pitney did so usefully did during the Iranian protests. As these two journalists amassed tweets, photos, videos, news stories and every other bit of information about what was going on in Iran, Roger Cohen himself was in Tehran having evaded the Iranian censors. He went to the protests, interviewed the protesters, ran from basij with them. What I could see then was that while what Sullivan and Pitney were doing was new and unique – and extremely useful for understanding what was happening, it was missing a certain urgency that Cohen was able to provide with his bylines from Tehran. So he writes here about the “actual responsibility” of the journalist – to “bear witness:

    “Not everyone realizes,” Weber told students, “that to write a really good piece of journalism is at least as demanding intellectually as the achievement of any scholar. This is particularly true when we recollect that it has to be written on the spot, to order, and that it must create an immediate effect, even though it is produced under completely different conditions from that of scholarly research. It is generally overlooked that a journalist’s actual responsibility is far greater than the scholar’s.”

    Yes, journalism is a matter of gravity. It’s more fashionable to denigrate than praise the media these days. In the 24/7 howl of partisan pontification, and the scarcely less-constant death knell din surrounding the press, a basic truth gets lost: that to be a journalist is to bear witness.

    The rest is no more than ornamentation.

    To bear witness means being there — and that’s not free. No search engine gives you the smell of a crime, the tremor in the air, the eyes that smolder, or the cadence of a scream.
    No news aggregator tells of the ravaged city exhaling in the dusk, nor summons the defiant cries that rise into the night. No miracle of technology renders the lip-drying taste of fear. No algorithm captures the hush of dignity, nor evokes the adrenalin rush of courage coalescing, nor traces the fresh raw line of a welt.

  4. Robert Patterson in Foreign Policy brings some measured historical analysis to what would happen if Iran got the bomb.
  5. Robert Kaplan in The Atlantic explains how the Sri Lankan government was able to achieve a monumental victory over a terrorist group – and also why America should not imitate its methods in any way. He concludes bleakly:

    So is there any lesson here? Only a chilling one. The ruthlessness and brutality to which the Sri Lankan government was reduced in order to defeat the Tigers points up just how nasty and intractable the problem of insurgency is. The Sri Lankan government made no progress against the insurgents for nearly a quarter century, until they turned to extreme and unsavory methods.

  6. David Brooks wrote about dignity:

    In so doing, [George Washington] turned himself into a new kind of hero. He wasn’t primarily a military hero or a political hero. As the historian Gordon Wood has written, “Washington became a great man and was acclaimed as a classical hero because of the way he conducted himself during times of temptation. It was his moral character that set him off from other men.”

Categories
Foreign Policy History The Bush Legacy

Henry Kissinger on Obama

The German weekly Der Spiegel ran an interesting interview with Henry Kissinger about the Treaty of Versailles and Barack Obama’s foreign policy. There are those who simply condemn Kissinger as a war criminal and choose to ignore his opinions – but by most accounts, his tenure as Secretary of State and National Security Advisor under Presidents Nixon and Ford were a virtuouso performance as he exercised American power at a time when many saw it being diminished. I do not seek to defend Kissinger’s green-lighting of the Chilean coup or his sabatoging of the Paris peace talks with Vietnam to ensure Richard Nixon’s election in 1968. This last act was certainly treason – and his role in Chile led to the reign of the convicted war criminal, Augosto Pinochet and the removal of the elected leader of that country.

But existing alongside these amoral acts – and underlying these acts – are an understanding of power – as it is, rather than as it should be. Kissinger saw – with Nixon – that by persuading China to seperate itself from the Soviet Union’s world order, he would strengthen America’s hand significantly – and help end the stalemate that the Cold War had become. With Richard Nixon succumbing to alcoholism late in his term, it was Kissinger who single-handedly ran America’s foreign policy – managing crises and coups d’etat throughout the world.

Unsurprisingly to some (Stephen Walt had already described Obama’s foreign policy as “Kissingerian“), Kissinger seemed to have a more substantial understanding of Obama’s foreign policy approach:

Obama is like a chess player who is playing simultaneous chess and has opened his game with an unusual opening. Now he’s got to play his hand as he plays his various counterparts. We haven’t gotten beyond the opening game move yet. I have no quarrel with the opening move.

Unlike Ahmadinejad’s useful idiots from McCain to “Smart” Girls to Ajami, Kissinger credits Obama for having a strategy, while witholding judgment about its effectiveness.

Kissinger offers a revealing criticism of Wilson’s Fourteen Points and America’s role in the Treaty of Versailles – which also rather neatly contradicts the Bush doctrine:

The American view was that peace is the normal condition among states. To ensure lasting peace, an international system must be organized on the basis of domestic institutions everywhere, which reflect the will of the people, and that will of the people is considered always to be against war. Unfortunately, there is no historic evidence that this is true.

And of course Kissinger also came out with this quotable line:

I believe more suffering has been caused by prophets than by statesmen.

[Image by DarthDowney licensed under Creative Commons.]

Categories
Criticism National Security Politics The Bush Legacy The War on Terrorism

It Is a “War”

[digg-reddit-me]I’ve tried to make this point before – and have gotten constantly sniped at as I’m presented with supposed tautologies of ideologically certain “reasoning” – which are really mere collections of catchphrases –  by those to my “left”. But I’m trying again because I think this is important.

This is one of those times where I almost wish I had the support and/or insights of the JournoList

First, a political argument. If a liberal president declares an end to the War on Terrorism – and says we need to take a law enforcement approach – he or she would be setting themself up for a hard fall if a major terrorist attack did occur. Dick Cheney already seems to be trying to set up this dynamic, even with the modest and cautious steps that Obama has taken. But it’s not clear to me that Cheney’s critique will have enough to latch onto: unless a prisoner released to the Bahamas smuggles a nuclear weapon into the United States or a lead generated by torture is not followed up because of the “poison tree” doctrine – Obama would be in command of events enough to ensure that his policies aren’t blamed. And given the massive blowback that will certainly accrue if a politician is seen to be using a national tragedy as a political weapon, it’s possible that a move by Cheney under the circumstances would backfire. ((Progressives and liberals of all stripes here must be ready to shriek – but Bush did use 9/11 as a political weapon! And he got away with it! He did – and I’ve referenced this many times on this blog. But though he got away with it in 2002 and 2004 – by 2006, the public had become more cynical – and began to see Rove’s game for what it was. Many people didn’t want to believe that this is what Bush was doing – and lived in denial. Now, with a greater suspicion of Bush administration officials and Obama officials and pundits having pointed out the game Cheney is playing with national security issues, I think the public is politically oriented towards blowback if Cheney were to try to capitalize on an attack too eagerly.))

I don’t think there are many out there who disagree that Cheney has set up this poisonous trap – allowing him and other Bush administration apologists to blame Obama for the attack they all were sure was coming from September 12 until the day they left office – and which they are now sure is going to occur under Obama. Though I think many on the left and right pessimisticly disagree with my belief that Cheney’s plan will backfire.

Even so, any responsible politician must try to mitigate the damage that would be done to them under these circumstances. By declaring we are no longer at “war,” Obama would be instead increasing the damage done to him in the event of an attack. And indeed, Obama would be setting up his less extreme approach to be discredited if he describe as  a step down from Bush’s war approach.

If nothing else, Obama, in maintaining that we are still at war, but changing how the government is waging that war is hedging against an attack.

Second, on policy grounds. After September 11, there was a widespread shock at the scope of the attack. There was a realization that several factors had made our society more vulnerable to terrorism than at previous points in history: the empowering of individuals in a globalized, technological world, as made especially evident by weapons of mass destruction; the insulating effects of the combination of global communication, reactionary religion, and the internet; the ubiquity of media delivery and production.

This situation has created unprecedented vulnerabilities – vulnerabilities which previously could only be exploited by nation-states. This leaves us – as a society – now always vulnerable in a way we have previously only been in time of war.

Whether we call this state of readiness, of awareness that our society is in jeopardy, “war” or “peace” the reality is the same. But the truest – and most politically useful – way to understand this state is as a war of our entire society (rather than our government) to protect the American way of life. While the words here may be similar to those that Bush used, this is not a reason to do away with them. Rather, instead of using words as mere political weapons we should take them seriously. We must determine what it is that makes our society what it is – free, dynamic, fun, individualistic – and strive to protect these values even in a state of war.

I think the problem is that many liberals, progressives, and others on the left – and libertarians on the right – have convinced themselves that terrorism is not a serious threat. (Maybe I’m wrong – but bear with me for a moment.) Certainly these groups often make the argument that terrorism is not as serious of a threat as it is made out to be – and they make many good points on this front. Yet, despite this, they have made relatively little headway.

The reason these arguments aren’t taking hold is the same reason Iran will never be the same now that the people have proven their power by taking to the streets in defiance of the Supreme Leader – because now that people know it is possible, it will be done again. Through a combination of luck, hard work, distraction, and military action, our military, our intelligence services, and the Bush and Obama administrations have prevented another attack on American soil. And God willing, this will continue. But I cannot help but believe that at some point someone will try and succeed in another spectacular attack. More important, given the power non-governmental organizations now have in our society with technology such as it is, and given the power of America in maintaining the status quo around the world, some group will declare war and more successfully wage a war of terrorism on America – whether this group be Al Qaeda or another.

Why do I believe this? Because the technology is there. Because the will is there. Because the social dynamics are there. And because a group such as this now has an example to follow.

We need to prepare for this as a society – or we could easily be destroyed as a society – not likely by the weapons of such terrorists but by our unconsidered reaction. Just as September 11 demonstrated to some terrorist group in the future what a success might look like, so the Bush administration’s reaction – to a great degree – demonstrated how a poorly thought out response could undermine our liberties at home and our power and interests abroad.

Liberals and progressives have tended not to discuss policy with the thought in their minds: “What then, after another attack?” Avoiding this line of thought is a bad habit formed after years of Bush constantly invoking it – and using it as an implicit and explicit political weapon. It is necessary to think past that step – and to create policies that will survive another attack.