Surveillance and Warrants

Many are asking why the administration didn't simply get warrants, including Colin Powell (link to Washington Post). A few moments' reflection leads to a conclusion that no one, as far as I know, has yet drawn:

(Keep in mind that this is all speculation, of course.)

The administration did not seek warrants for its domestic surveillance operations because it is simply impossible to seek enough warrants to cover the numbers of people who were/are subject to eavesdropping. It isn't a question of secrecy or the "inherent" authority of the President. It is much, much simpler. They were spying on so many people that they could not put together cases for warrants for everyone under surveillance. They cast such a wide net, the NSA likely didn't even know who they were listening in on. They couldn't go to the FISA court and say, "we need 1.5 million warrants to listen in on this major artery of phone traffic", and they couldn't get a warrant to read potentially every email in the world that contained certain keywords. Suspicion of being involved in terrorist activity, what the FISA court is supposed to determine, became peripheral. The FISA court wouldn't know what to do with a request as broad as that, and they would deny it (because it is overreaching). Or, perhaps there are procedures for warrants as broad as that, but the administration decided it was too much of a political risk to ask for permission. So, they kept it secret, and kept it extralegal. The reason for failing to get warrants isn't arrogance--it is scope. (Of course, the scope of the surveillance is itself indicative of arrogance...)

This, it seems to me, is the only explanation. It is the only reason they would bypass the FISA court and tell Congress, essentially, nothing about the plan at all.

Reviewing the Revolting Year

Eleanor Clift at Newsweek has a nice summary of our year that will soon be mercifully over: The Year Of Big Lies.

Clift makes an excellent point about the NSA affair and the resulting political risk to the whole country of having a weakened and wounded presidency for longer than 3 more years. We are stuck with this administration until January of 2009. It is the only "leadership" we'll have in the White House.

Not only has this administration now admitted breaking the law, but it also says it has the authority to continue to do so because it says it has the authority to do so. Does this sound like the voice of an effective branch of government, capable of handling crises and the grueling work of running the country? They are using the "because we said so" argument, best known for getting children to eat vegetables. It is not a constitutional principle.

America--boys and girls: Daddy Bush and Uncle Cheney want you to eat all your bitter extralegal surveillance sprouts, and they don't want to hear you complain about how they taste like the ashes of the Bill of Rights. You'll eat them and you'll like them, because they said so.

An Excellent Question

Heard on CNN: An intrepid reporter asked some version of the following question of Attorney General Gonzales today during his press conference with DHS Secretary Chertoff:

If, as the administration asserts, the President has the authority to enact new surveillance rules unilaterally, why is the administration concerned about the reauthorization of the Patriot Act? Couldn't the President simply reinstate the lapsed provisions on his own, using the same justification he has so far put forth in the NSA affair?

Good question. In fact, it's the best question I've heard a reporter ask in a long time. Someone should ask the President the same thing.

Should've Stayed In Pakistan

Whew! Vice President Cheney sprints back from the middle east to make sure pesky Medicare/Medicaid and student loan spending is cut. Finally, a "deficit reduction". This is super, folks! Who needs health care and who wants education, anyway? What good is the New Deal at all, really? People can just buy health care and college out of pocket. We should think about reforming government all the way back to the Articles of Confederation. I bet that would be cheaper.

Note: Italics denote sarcasm.

Integrity and Casuistry

The Washington Post reports something unusual in George W. Bush's Washington: adherence to principle. Judge Robertson resigned from the FISA court in protest, saying it has been "tainted" by the current scandal. He has respect for both law and the spirit of the law. He has integrity. But instead of symbolic protest resignations from those who were trying to uphold the law in spite of this administration's best efforts, America needs the not-so-symbolic resignations of the people that broke those laws. America needs accountability.

Casuistries can be comforting in times of abstract fear, even for smart people. However, when we get new reports everyday about mishandling of information that, say, Richard Posner in Wednesday's Washington Post, or Bill Kristol in Tuesday's, deny is possible, likely, believable, subject to oversight, subject to law, worth fearing, or even worth attention (...don't you know there's a war on?), can they believe what they are saying? Really? Finding someone's phone number in Osama's satphone (a scenario Kristol posits) wouldn't convince FISA to issue a surveillance warrant? Really? C'mon, can anyone really think that? That's a doozy. Or, as Posner asserts, "No secrets concerning matters that would interest the public can be kept for long"? The NSA surveillance order was signed by President Bush in 2002, and that secret lasted through a very partisan election. Doesn't that "interest the public"? Shouldn't it? That's some "sieve"...

Christopher and Christmas

Normally Christopher Hitchens' pose (over-the-top self-righteousness and contrarianism purely for the sake of contrarianism) strikes me as disingenuous, thin, fickle, and fueled by aggression. Claiming the mantle of pluralism, he has no actual capacity for it. He purports to combat absolutism in all its forms but has none of the elegance of a mind capable of accepting the reasonability of value judgments others make that do not match up exactly with his own. However, in his latest contribution to Slate, re: The War on Christmas, all that becomes purely amusing, which distracts me, momentarily at least, from his nastiness. I find that on this one point I could not agree with him more. And so, I wish him a Dickensian "Compliments of the season".

You Expect Me To Pay For "Select", Now?

This is a disgrace. Pure and simple. What if this story had made it out of the NYT Editor's secrets drawer a year ago, as it should have? This amounts to a campaign contribution from the Gray Lady to Bush-Cheney '04. They couldn't publish the story because the terrorists would figure out they were being watched? Unbelievable. They buried the story after caving to the White House's national security "argument" to shield its reelectability? Hmmmm... shameful and believable. What other stories are the editors of the "paper of record" agreeing not to publish in the interest of preserving national (polling) security? What else are we not being told?

I can't even bring myself to really address the perniciousness of a White House that attempts to control the press using such a patently manipulative "argument" (and succeeds!). Who's "playing politics" with national security now? This administration thinks that whenever they mention these two words, "national security", it means nothing further can be reported, questioned, or criticized. So it doesn't matter what they do--they can get away with anything by saying those magic words. It is amazing that they get away with something that so deeply violates what I hope are still our national priniciples, values, and ideas.

First Judith Miller and now this? If I ever hear President Bush or any Republican make a flippant remark about the "lefty New York Times" or the "liberal media" again, I expect the Earth will collapse into a singularity composed entirely of infinitely dense irony. The media has gone beyond being sympathetic to the administration--it has become a co-conspirator.

Bush and Delay

So President Bush said Delay is innocent. Does that count as a promise to pardon him? Furthermore, he says he likes having him in Congress, "over there", because "we get our votes through the House". Yep, all it takes is a majority won at any cost, and then you get to accomplish all sorts of things: solving the health care crisis, fixing education, balancing the budget, and "saving" social security... (Wait, I'm actually glad they didn't do that last one.)

Senator Schumer has rightly said that commenting on this ongoing investigation should free the President to comment on the CIA-Plame affair. This whole episode is, of course, just a single facet of the much larger, glistening, glittering jewel that is this administration's hypocrisy.

Vindication

Seems the White House has finally cracked under the pressure. Cheney and Hadley can't be pleased.

See my old comments from November for more.

Voting and Governing

Voting is good. Seeing waves of Kurds flooding the polls in Kirkuk is a hopeful sight.

But that is all it is--hopeful. The Iraqi election is just another first step. Another positive start that should have come earlier, should have been planned better, executed better. But where to from here? Zalmay Khalilzad will still be in charge. When will the government start governing? Will it be secular, headed by ambitious secular friends of the U.S.? Or, will it be religious, composed of forces like followers of Moqtada al-Sadr and the pro-Iran Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq? If it is perceived as being too close to U.S. intentions, will it be seen as legitimate? If the government is a democratically elected theocracy, will it be a "democracy" like Iran?

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Bush has avoided sounding too optimistic. That's a nice change. Now he must find a way to make sure that we don't sabotage whatever small chance there is that this election will actually create a government that both represents the diverse interests of the Iraqi people and protects those interests once someone is put in charge. The trick will be getting someone in power to stabilize Iraq--but they can't have a mandate to do anything, lest they their opponents simply rebel.

I hope we have a plan this time around. This whole problem comes from our failure to plan. I hope that now we have a plan and that it includes our forces getting out of there very soon.

The USA Patriot Act "Fights" Meth

It turns out that the renewal of the scary USA Patriot Act includes a provision that would "regulate" the sale of over-the-counter decongestants, which are the easiest source of raw materials for manufacturing crystal meth. After reading Steve Suo's excellent reporting in The Oregonian recently, it's obvious that grotesquely destructive crystal meth only exists as a result of a few stupid policies. (It also happens to be, as Congress just acknowledged, harmful to the innocent who live in communities where it is manufactured.) So why isn't this new "tough" law tough enough to cut off the supply of the ingredients altogether? Why is this only coming as an add-on to the Patriot Act? Why hasn't it been on the books for a long time? Why can't we send "classic" Sudafed to the big medicine cabinet in hell, where we (at least tried to) put ephedra and Vioxx? Answer: Big Pharma and "the American consumer" must not be inconvenienced.

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As Suo reports, the meth ingredients are made in only 4 countries, and are not necessary for producing decongestants and other drugs. Alternatives that cannot be made into crystal meth are already on the market. Congress should require that only those alternatives be manufactured at all. Slightly stiffer regulation of sales won't do anything. They'll get armies of addicts out on the streets going from Walgreens to Rite Aid to Duane Reade to CVS all day long, buying one pack of Sudafed or the "new" OTC Claritin-D with pseudoephedrine in its formula, and then they'll walk down the street or go to the next town over to buy more in other stores. They are addicts. Crazy addicts. They will not be stopped by formalities. They will be stopped if what they want in the first place doesn't exist anymore.

The stupidity of the users is astounding, certainly, but even worse is the stupidity of our country's inability to regulate the production of this terrible drug's ingredients. Think of the cost to society--prison terms, health effects, law enforcement. This should be a larger political issue than it is. A surprisingly large number of Americans are rotting on this stuff.

An analogy: What if there were a certain kind of laundry detergent, Fluffy Breeze. Now, Fluffy Breeze is discovered to be very easily converted into a highly effective explosive. Let's say Fluffy Breeze was used in thousands of explosions all around the country each year. Would anyone care if the Fluffy Breeze company didn't want to completely switch to manufacturing its just-as-effective Fluffy Breeze NE ("Non-Explosive") detergent, but instead wanted to "regulate" the explosive Fluffy Breeze, selling it "behind the counter", just one bottle per customer?

Failure to address this epidemic with real action that stands up to the Big Pharma lobby is a national shame.

Brain Cell Injections

I'd like to recommend an as-yet undiscussed potential for new research reported on in the Washington Post today. Along with uses such as the treatment of neuronal illnesses, it could prove fruitful to pursue an application we could call the "Congressional Upgrade" ... with a few "booster shots" of grade A human-mouse brain cells we could transform Congress so that it would balance the budget, investigate corruption, address our expanding trade deficit, demand accountability for continued bungling in Iraq, and in general do good things.

Come to think of it, any congressman involved in a corruption scandal could repay his debt to society by donating himself to science and the public good. Boy, if any of them had a history as an exterminator, that would give the whole thing a twist of irony, wouldn't it?

This could give America a real shot in the arm, people ... except it would be in the brain.

"Moderation" and Montreal

Sometimes "moderate solutions" just won't cut it. They often don't amount to solutions at all, as when it comes to climate change and greenhouse gases. The middle ground in the U.S., if properly informed, would insist on aggressively updating our energy systems. The reasonability of the extremist claim that everything is fine, and that our country shouldn't "foreclose" its "economic growth" by trying our level best to reduce climate change, if that position ever was reasonable, has now evaporated like a melted glacier. The half-measure "agreement" to disagree at the Montreal conference is not good enough. Americans should demand better.

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What, exactly, would the "modest curbs" proposed by Senator McCain and other moderates accomplish?

This from the NYT: 'As the meetings under the treaties roll on through 2012 and beyond...the pace of growth in Asia, both in economies and the use of coal and oil, the main source of carbon dioxide emissions, will be explosive. "Even if everybody adhered perfectly to Kyoto, China could wipe that out in maybe six months, nine months," Dr. Smil said. "We're cooked."'

Bill Clinton is right (as usual): focus needs to be put on the economic stimulus of an overhaul of the nation's energy system, which goes hand-in-hand with the environmental necessity. We can create jobs with new economic stimulus packages that aim to reduce our country's emissions, not just their "intensity".

Global emissions growth demands that we try to reduce our contribution to it in real terms, and find a way to make it economically desirable for developing nations to limit their output. Throwing up our hands and saying "not our problem" would be a disaster.

Bill O'Grinchly

You're right, Erich, I can't really approach Jon Stewart's transcendent commentary. But I have to try. What I love about this fracas more than anything is this: The "argument" is supposed to be about preserving the true "religious" character of the holiday. You remember: love, kindness, charity, forgiveness, tolerance, peace, etc. etc. "Traditional Americans" versus "secular progressives", O'Reilly says. So, the big conflict of values is over how we shop for gifts?

The gifts part is pagan, people. So is the tree, and Santa, and flying reindeer, etc. No flying reindeer in the Bible. Definitely no elves. Lists of who's been naughty and nice? ...probably. But I'm also pretty sure that the Bible doesn't say anything about being sure to explicitly refer to Jesus Christ in every store in America.

Where does it say "Thou Shalt Contribute to the Yearly economy-rescuing consumption Frenzy"? And why is Christmas about "traditional Americans"? Did Christ die for Americans getting 0% financing on HD flat panels? Is that is the "true spirit of Christmas"?

Can't we keep the shopping at least a little separate from the traditional element of Christmas? Can't Christmas be about our values, or inclusion (Ruth Marcus in the Wa Po), or spirituality, or charity, or family, or Santa Claus, or even HD flat panels? Why make it about partisan nonsense or jingoism? That would ruin Christmas.

New Primary Schedule?

Aside from New Hampshire's complaints, I wonder if there are unreported factional struggles within the party surrounding the implications of changing the primary calendar? Are certain potential candidates fighting for a particular dance card?

Oh, Libi!

Oh, Scooter ... wait ... I mean ... Oh, Ibn al-Shaykh ... tell me more of your sweet, sweet "information" ... otherwise this other guy over here will torture you ...

Um, as for the rest of you, just remember that America doesn't torture anyone. So quit worrying about it, everyone. Everything's fine, nothing to see here. Move along ...

... Moderate Republicans should be horrified, and they should be bolting their party. This is disgraceful. What does "moderate" mean if not the rejection of this kind of "leadership"?

Update: Slate draws attention to this excellent column on the same issue from the Nov. 25 LA Times.

And It's... David "Tory Blair" Cameron!!!

As a bit of an anglophile, having lived in London for a spell, the occasion of the Tory leadership debate has caused me to think lately about British v. American politics. I can't like everything about a culture that is fascinated by this guy, but it has advantages. You see, David Cameron is a Tory--not at all liberal by British standards, but his ascension to the helm of the party of Churchill and Thatcher has some lessons for American... --Oh, bloody hell ... sod it...

No!--the Tory leadership debate has no lessons for us, because, you see, British politics are fundamentally different from ours. They have what's called an "informed electorate", and a press that does something called "informing the electorate".

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British political debates have some articulation, direct (even confrontational!) argument, and attempts at rigorous logic. It comes from their press. Listen to the Today program on the BBC every now and then. Listen to John Humphrys interview a politician and then tell yourself with a straight face that Wolf Blitzer is "hard-nosed" or that these two will ever break any story.

Our democracy will survive only as long as the press has a pulse.

The British press is better for two reasons. (1) There is no anti-intellectualism in that country of the kind we're plagued by, so they can be smart without everyone switching to Access Hollywood. (2) Opposition politicians don't pander for the softest of the "please-don't-blame-me" middle ground. They attack attack attack, and they put up their best and brightest people to do it. We, simply...don't. We need smarter candidates, and we need to start organizing a shadow government system like the Brits have.

Shadow governments are the best thing Britain has developed since colonization--and we've certainly already imported that! (And kinda screwed it up...)

We Democrats need to select members of Congress to be responsible for the message on any given topic, or they should self-appoint if we're too silly to do it in an organized way. We need them deployed every day into the morass of cable news, and we need them to grow a pair and force our lame press to actually host a debate or two. Because, God willing, we will win.

In the meantime, I’ll listen to the BBC and weep softly.

Only Some Progress In VA

Governor Warner is getting my attention. A new policy for Virginia closes expensive institutions and replaces them with efficient and effective community-based services for the disabled and the mentally ill. This should be part of a national debate, and perhaps Warner's budding candidacy will help to do that.

UPDATE: On closer inspection, his proposal doesn't go far enough. If Warner wants to make a point and show his independence in order to garner support in the upcoming cycle, he'll need to be a little firmer with the unions.

Key quote from the article: "New state-of-the art hospitals and training centers for the mentally retarded, costing $290 million, will be built at or near the existing facilities over the next four years, the governor said. Employees now on the job will not lose their positions, [Gov. Warner] said."

Bowing to union pressure to keep institutions open when community-based services are so much more effective and less-soul-crushing than institutions is a failure to compare values. Democratic ideals are in conflict here--union jobs vs. inclusion and equality for people with disabilities. But the deeper ethical issue must trump the union complaints.

No one should live in an institution. Jobs supporting people with disabilities who are helped to live in the community will be available to current institution workers who are concerned about losing their jobs, as well. Let them unionize those jobs. Institutions are wasteful and a throwback to a less enlightened age. Warner is acknowledging that institutions are bad for everybody, but he's keeping some of them open anyway as a "compromise". All it does is compromise his position as a potential candidate with conviction.

Critics Need To Come Together

For anyone who is anti-war or simply dissatisfied with its progress (which should cover just about everyone), it's time for the alternative position to be clearly defined and agreed upon. Lawmakers need to fight for a new policy and actually get it implemented, rather than arguing while the administration continues to stumble down its lonesome road to nowhere. The administration certainly isn't going to change course anytime soon (until polling and Congressional election strategy compel it).

More from Rep. Murtha in response to President Bush's "Amazing Progress" speech today, and this from Gen. Clark yesterday. How do we combine these two?

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I do not think they are mutually exclusive. I think they are two facets of the same argument: that the war is not going to go the way it should with Bush running it the way he is. Murtha is facing up to tough questions about the impact of our mere presence on the perpetuation of the Iraqi Insurgency. Clark is facing up to the scary and destabilizing ethnic, sectarian, and nationalistic forces that our war has released in the region. The conclusion each man comes to is this: radical change is necessary, and it should involve some kind of significant redeployment.

"Defeatism" needs to be redifined in the debate as the position that there is nothing more we can be doing--that everything is going as well as it could be going. That position is insane, and it is the driving force behind current U.S. policy.

Victory and Withdrawal

Theodore Sorenson and Arthur Schlesinger Jr., both aides to President Kennedy, give an account of JFK's considerations regarding withdrawal from Vietnam.

Again, this is the point that too many moderates like Hagel and Murtha are allowing to be sucked into the morass of jingoism and the rhetoric of "victory vs. defeat". Moderate critics need to be louder: victory requires a well-executed withdrawal.

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The key quote:

"If we leave Iraq at its own government's request, our withdrawal will be neither abandonment nor retreat. Law-abiding Iraqis may face more clan violence, Balkanization and foreign incursions if we leave; but they may face more clan violence, Balkanization and foreign incursions if we stay. The president has said we will not leave Iraq to the terrorists. Let us leave Iraq to the Iraqis, who have survived centuries of civil war, tyranny and attempted foreign domination.

Once American troops are out of Iraq, people around the world will rejoice that we have recovered our senses. What's more, the killing of Americans and the global loss of American credibility will diminish. As Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, a Republican and Vietnam veteran, said, "The longer we stay, the more problems we're going to have." Defeatist? The real defeatists are those who say we are stuck there for the next decade of death and destruction."

We are not just nobly saving the Iraqis from terrorists, we are fighting the Iraqis. Can there be an argument for "staying the course" that meets Sorenson and Schlesinger's points head-on, without resorting to questioning critics' patriotism?

CIA-Europe-Prisons

Dana Priest, authoritative as ever, gives further details over the CIA-Europe-Prisons story. I don't see this story going away, and frankly, it shouldn't.

The Bush administration continues its mission-from-God version of foreign policy, and not just in Iraq. Liberals and Moderates of all stripes need to draw as much attention to this as possible. So far, we're not. This should be as big of a story as Abu Ghraib.

Can This Be Mainstream?

Emily Bazelon in Slate explains yet another reason why Bush's newest Supreme Court nominee should concern anyone who doesn't want judges who will "legislate from the bench".

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I know, I know. Of course that is a meaningless, partisan phrase, and of course all judicial nominations are ideological. Otherwise a Reagan would nominate a Breyer and a Clinton would nominate a Scalia.

But Alito is different. He displays two kinds of thoughtlessness again and again that should give even conservatives pause: his shaky and oft-overturned legal reasoning, and his reluctance to have even a passing consideration for a case's place in the great ethical controversies of our time--for instance, racism and gender equality. Unless blinded by a single-issue cause, we should all be able to agree that judges who repeatedly prove to be incapable of basic care should be given a long, hard stare when they testify.

Arlen Specter at least says he'll do just that. I'm not confident.

Charles Schumer, or Russ Feingold, I'm looking to you to use your time to read Emily Bazelon's articles aloud. Try to get Alito's response. Get him to explain. Knowing enough about what he thinks about many issues, I think most people would conclude Alito is miles from the mainstream, and that they wouldn't want their own fate, or their children's, decided by a man who has had his mind made up about everything for decades. Opposing such a nomination is mainstream.

It is time for moderate justices, who are capable of thinking, and therefore capable of changing their mind.

Rice and the "Salt Pit"

Dec 3: An update from the Washington Post's Glenn Kessler today. Apprently it is now U.S. policy to respect the "sovereignty" of our European allies. Good to hear, if it's true. Was there ever a question about whether that's a good idea? How about their laws?
As the Washington Post's Anne Gearan says in "White House Defends Human Rights Record", there is "mounting criticism" over U.S. detainment policy and the use of so-called "extraordinary rendition". Reuters reports that Germany is "waiting patiently" for a response from Secretary Rice on the charge that the CIA has abducted foreign citizens and flown them to secret prisons in Europe, Afghanistan, and perhaps elsewhere, first reported by Dana Priest in the Washington Post a month ago. Reuters says one such person was a German citizen, abducted in Macedonia, and then flown to the "Salt Pit", a prison in Afghanistan, where he was drugged and beaten. The BBC reports that the ACLU is to sue the CIA over one such abduction.

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Putting the Reuters and BBC reports together, it seems likely that the German citizen will be speaking next week at a press conference with the ACLU where he will describe his ordeal. We'll have to wait and see what Rice will have to say to the Germans, and to the countries across the EU, where this is a huge story.

One interesting question that will need a follow-up: what companies own the aircraft used in these extraordinary rendition flights? The BBC reports that the "ACLU also wants to name corporations which it accuses of owning and operating the aircraft used to transport detainees secretly from country to country." What corporations could those be? "Gimme an H!..."

So here's another question, kind of similar to a lot I've been asking lately: where's the Democratic opposition on this? What have we done lately to support those like McCain who don't want to support torture in this country? Ghost detainees are ghosted for one reason--don't kid yourself: it's a whole lot easier to torture someone when no one knows where they are or even if they exist. Torture is the only reason the "Salt Pit" exists. There is a debate about torture we can have, and win, but we're simply not doing it. We're not being loud enough.

Each incredibly ridiculous thing this administration does is so baffling that it distracts the press, the public, and the Democrats from all the other issues they should also be talking about. Who will step up and be our Shadow Secretary of State? (...and Shadow AG, and Shadow Defense Secretary, and Shadow UN Ambassador, and...)

Iraq and Responsibility

Read the Washington Post’s Jonathan Weisman on the Democrats now that withdrawal is the front-and-center issue. Then read Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker and James Fallows in The Atlantic (not free). These brilliant articles address the issues that will complicate the now-inevitable withdrawal of most American forces from Iraq in the next year. Democrats, while right to call for a timely withdrawal (for this reason and this reason, among many others), make themselves vulnerable to some very underhanded but very predictable Republican attacks. A more comprehensive and far-sighted policy proposal, backed by all Democrats, would go a long way toward countering the imminent Republican fecklessness and opprobrium.

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Hersh: Bush has a religious faith that Iraq will work out well, and the “planners” now “plan” on the December 15 elections allowing us to say “job well done, take down the flags, we’re out of here.” Apparently withdrawal, once politically viable, will be conducted on faith, as well. We’ll simply vanish into thin air. Except, of course, for the Air Force. We’ll keep them in the region to provide air support against the insurgency. But wait--how will the Air Force support the Iraqi Security Force (ISF)? Will Iraqis get clearance to call in airstrikes? If they do, the danger is that the simmering ethnic and sectarian conflicts in the country could lead to destructive score-settling and coup attempts. We could have a Sunni-Shiite civil war fought with precision guided American bombs.

This is, of course, only if there is an ISF to give airstrike capability to.

Fallows: From before Day 1 in Iraq, the Pentagon made a series of mistakes and miscalculations. All that hubris has now left our military in the position of trying to train an ISF while also maintaining its own security operations that are necessary for giving that ISF a chance to start functioning on its own. We simply do not have, and never had, enough troops in Iraq to complete both missions. For years, the U.S. military has conducted, essentially, all the counterinsurgency operations, using almost all of its forces in the country to do so. We cannot now divert resources to training without giving too many opportunities to all the little incipient Zarqawis in the desert.

So, we don’t have an ISF trained or even close to trained. If suddenly there were one, it would still be weak, as it will not have any air power. So how do we support it while at the same time avoiding making any contribution to sectarian or ethnic power struggles that should be fought out in elections.

What is the Democratic policy about the inevitable problems with the withdrawal? Critics need to address these issues, because it appears the administration won’t or can’t. The existence of these problems is not support for “staying the course”, by any means, but it will not be enough for Democrats to propose the necessary withdrawal and stop there. I can already see Dick Cheney, on “Meet the Press” next October, blaming everything that goes wrong with his war on “the war critics” and “the cut-and-run Democrats”. It will be un-American rhetoric of the most insidious kind, but we all know it will happen. We need a full Iraq plan to counter that political inevitability.

Democrats must propose a plan for withdrawal, and for what to do in Iraq once we start to leave. This war is the albatross around the Republican’s neck, but now that momentum is gathering for the withdrawal, the Roves and Kristols of the world will try to, somehow, make the whole thing our fault. They can’t handle responsibility for starting the disaster, so they’ll shift it to those who got them, finally, to end it.

The Iraq War's Effect on American Political Culture

There is irony surrounding conservative laments about isolationism like David Brooks’ column (not free) in the Dec. 1st NYT. For years, many conservatives fought against Clinton intervening in the Balkans, or really any intervention, humanitarian or otherwise. But now, through their own overseas adventure, conservatives have finally managed to convince the American public of what they have been saying all along: that messy nation-building can go not-so-well.

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The real tragedy is that those neo-conservatives who seem so concerned about having enough political will to extend US military power into the world in order to “spread freedom” and do lots of generally good things is not strong enough to, for example, make any kind of effort other than glancing, wistful references to help stop the Darfur genocide-in-progress. American power can be a force of tremendous progress, security and liberalization, but only when its targets are chosen carefully, and the goals that are set are reached quickly and effectively. Essentially, Americans remain confident when they see competence everywhere they look. I know, I know, it's purely a hypothetical.

Fight Corruption, Please

Read Michael Kinsley in the Washington Post. Then try to tell yourself, honestly, that the Democratic Party is doing anything of substance to fix the problems that allow the Republicans to exploit the undemocratic money-for-influence system in Washington. It is time for Democrats to address their own complicity, but also to use the relative cleanliness that comes form being out of power to seize this issue's moral high ground for good. (Along with the money corruption, a lot of attention is due to Delay's vote-rigging in Texas, as reported by Dan Eggen of the Washington Post. However, of course, Democrats aren't exactly succeeding at doing much gerrymandering or seizing control of Congress these days, so they have less complicity to admit here.)

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It's easy to use it as a line to win one election, but Democrats need to get that we will win more elections in the long run by being the populist anti-corruption party, rather than simply settling for second place in the money race year after year, and merely talking about the Republicans' corruption. Time for some maverick reform. This is a moderate issue because it is the great unacknowledged agreement amongst all voters--corruption is bad. Campaign finance is dirty, all around. Full stop. Propose laws. Propose them again and again. Try. Please try.

Where's The Energy Debate?

Energy independence will preempt the wars of the future long before missile defense saves us from anything.
Britain is having a nuclear power debate. Here’s the Times and the Guardian. Where are the Democrats on this? All Iraq all the time? It can easily be argued, obviously, that there is a link between Iraq and energy policy...

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The lynchpin of America’s future security is being left to a Congressional conference committee. The debate about pros and cons in Britain going on right now over nuclear power is at least closer to the kind of serious discussion of our energy future that we need to have. It does descend into bickering, and it does turn around a lot of false dichotomies. Everyone in this country, when they have the presence of mind to even think about the future of energy in this country, seems to settle on one single answer to the problem. Oh, it’s obvious that we need to build more nuclear power plants, or wind turbines, or hydroelectric dams, or drill in ANWR, or build fields of solar panels in California, or secure Iraqi oil fields and install a government that can serve the dual purpose of both not being a dictatorship (“Freedom”), and selling us oil (“Other Interests” or “Trade”).

Any claim that either (a) only one answer is good and all the rest are bad, or (b) any single answer could solve all our long-term energy problems is disingenuous and useless almost to the point of comedy. (Leave aside the silliness of any claims that global warming isn’t at least a long-term threat on the one hand, or that we can achieve energy independence simply by buying more hybrid cars and turning off the lights diligently when we’re done parking it in the garage next to our other car, the Expedition we can’t afford to drive anymore.) No, energy policy solutions will be messy, very far from anyone’s ideal, and will include some version of all the strategies and technologies above (here’s hoping it doesn’t include ANWR, the self-righteously symbolic and empty-headed brainchild from the same people who get campaign contributions from companies that sell only foreign oil).

Democratic energy policy proposals need to at least try to be as realistic about costs and advantages as the British debaters seem to be. While it is very nice to imagine an environmentally sound energy system springing into existence soon, it won’t happen. The American economy is too big, and the politics of business in this country are too messy and underhanded for any honest reform to happen with any speed. Energy Utopianism is a waste of time, and it makes Democrats too vulnerable to the dishonest smear attacks that claim they hate American business just because we don’t want all children to get asthma and all rain to be acid. A piecemeal approach is the only way this country will make any effort toward attaining the new systems that we will need this century. Some of this, some of that, throw out the worst and prima facie useless proposals, but in general, if there is some evidence that some technology might help ten years or thirty years down the road, let’s fund it. If it involves a few newly designed, high efficiency, and secure-from-terrorism nuclear generators to get us through the interim while we wait for a less toxic alternative to become practical, we surely won’t like it, but so be it. (Especially if the new plants can replace older, more unstable versions.)

I think we need to blend a little of our thought process regarding military weapons purchases with our energy strategy. First, don’t worry about what is the only weapon we’ll need, just try to imagine all the scenarios in which any weapon might prove useful (see: Osprey). The US military has a lot more than AK-47s and white phosphorous--they have many many weapons systems that are no longer appropriate to the threats we face.

Instead of saying, “Nuclear power is the only answer”, or “Hydrogen cars are an energy panacea”, or even “Bio-diesel will provide limitless tasty-smelling transportation”, let’s fund research and development in all of them. Make them all better, cheaper, and more readily available as choices for American consumers. They will eventually defeat in the marketplace all of the dirty, foreign, inefficient and toxic sources of energy we now rely on. Second, develop American jobs-creation plans to develop, build and maintain these new energy infrastructures. Remember when we talked about jobs in this country? Fight for their survival in congress as hard as members currently like to fight for military programs in their states and districts. Instead of Air Force bases full of fighter jets we’ll never use, we’ll have energy sources that, while likely imperfect, would still be better than extra fighter jets or missile defense systems.

My point is this: instead of recklessly wasting trillions of dollars in the coming years on weapons systems ill-suited to the military and terror threats that we will plausibly face, let’s throw all the money at energy solutions. Sure, some of it will be wasted, not all plans will work, but some might. And you know what happens when we make progress in the “war on energy dependence”, don’t you? We can start to imagine a world that is slightly less full of war and diplomatic strife that is, ahem, fueled by energy crises and the jitters over how all the world, once it is industrialized, could possibly be powered by the dwindling fossil resources we’ve been relying on for a century. Someday, someone will find a clean, cheap, and fully renewable source of energy. I think such a revolution would be progress of truly unfathomable power. Wouldn’t it be nice to have that happen during our lifetimes, rather than just ever-increasing tensions in the developed world over all the problems and limitations of our turn-of-the-last-century technologies? We could stop funding Saudi Arabia. We could stop being vulnerable to hurricanes and refining capacities. Can anyone in their right mind envisage a stable, attractive, and positive future that is run on oil, coal, and low efficiency nuclear power? Only if they also think the Osprey is or ever was a good idea.

"Plan" 2: Not So Clear Kristol

Read the Washington Post's Peter Baker, and then read Bill Kristol.

How can Kristol draw these conclusions? If things stay more or less the same, it's going to be good for Republicans and the Bush administration? I think everything staying more or less the same has been the problem for the last couple of years. That's why this is all over the front pages. These guys sure love their rosy predictions...

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Kristol: "Bush's strong speech today means the GOP is likely to be--if Republican Congressmen just keep their nerve--the party of victory. Now it is possible that the situation in Iraq will worsen over the next year. If that happens, Bush and the GOP are in deep trouble. They would have been if Pelosi had said nothing. But it is much more likely that the situation in Iraq will stay more or less the same, or improve. In either case, Republicans will benefit from being the party of victory."

The strategy of Kristol and the like seems to be willful ignorance when it comes to the question Murtha raised--directly--of whether the American presence in Iraq makes the situation worse. It's either "victory" or "defeat" in their jargon.

As soon as any ideology has complete control, it becomes unwilling to even acknowledge the existence of criticisms, because it doesn't like to think it should have to bother with anyone or anything (even facts) that disagree with it. The idea that victory might be achieved more quickly and completely by planning a timely redeployment is apparently something Mr. Kristol cannot comprehend, so he resorts to silly things like calling his party "the party of victory". Even from his perspective, what is that supposed to mean? How dare he say that Congressman Murtha (along with Congresswoman Pelosi, by agreeing with him) makes the Democrats the "party of defeat"?

I would say that being a defeatist means not acknowledging that something as large and as important as the American involvement in Iraq is a dynamic situation, one that requires planning and firepower, but also adaptation and a willingness to adopt new strategies in response to new realities. Also required is the acknowledgement that there will be no easy answers, let alone perfect ones. Instead, what we got from the Bush administration, as the Washington Post's Peter Baker so rightly puts it, was stubbornness: "But broadly Bush gave no ground to critics who want a major course change, and the plan he released yesterday offered nothing new substantively."

The timing--arbitrary, except when seen as a response to Murtha and public opinion (yes, polls, yes, Bush listens to polls)--explains everything. Of course there's nothing new. This is more a Bush Plan for Political Triage than a "National Strategy for Victory in Iraq". Otherwise, why would it read like a press release from the RNC, with all those quotes from the President? Shouldn't military strategy be at least presented as nonpartisan?