First Impressions of Bangkok
S. and I managed to endure the 30 something hours of airports and planes and are now safely installed in Thailand. We went out to eat at about two in the morning last night before turning in. We have been wandering aimlessly for most of today. I feel a sense of urgency — the per minute internet access rate and, at least in my head, a very full schedule — so I may just jot a few things while here and save some more considered comments for later.
The standouts so far:
The prevelance of sex workers is shocking. They are everywhere, so much so that one is hard pressed to seperate the working girls from the regular ones. And we haven't even ventured into the red light district. Second only to the sex workers, at least in terms of impression made, are the rest of the scam artists. Forget all the usless Thai words in the phrase book that I have. They are all polite phrases, the Ps-and-Qs and whatnot. What I want to know how to say in Thai is "go fuck yourself." Eye contact is enough to have someone follow you for a block insisting that he knows where you want to go and that only he can take you there in his tuk-tuk.
The most annoying scam to date, one that took us in twice before we recognized it, is someone who is a sort of tuk-tuk dispatcher who poses as a friendly person trying to help the tourist. But what they are really doing is talking your ear off about the best sights to see until surprise! their friend the tuk-tuk driver shows up to take you there.
Our rule system has evolved. At first the rule was "Don't buy anything from anyone who approaches us first; only buy when we initiate contact." Now the rule is, "Don't talk to anyone except for strict business." Even when it doesn't seem like they are selling something, there is a hook in there somewhere.
But I guess that being scammed is a part of the tourist experience, like getting lost and dysentery. The food so far is not all that. Contrary to the tour guides, it is quite difficult to order vegitarian. The vegitable soup that I just ordered came with shrimp in it — oh, yeah, and a large yellow inch-worm. I ignored him on the first few passes because I though he was a row off of a baby corn. He was well cooked and since part of the reason that I don't like shrimp is that they are just aquatic insects and I was eating around them, I fished out Mr. Worm, ladeled the soup over some rice and kept right on eating. The waiter raised an eyebrow when he spotted the worm on the side of my plate but tried not to alert us that he had noticed anything out of the ordinary.
We are in the dirty backpacker district of town right now. More amiable to westerners. That's what it took to find internet access. And now that we are here, we are walking past the food carts with the "no meat" prices listed, so maybe we will do better in the near future.
Stray animals are everywhere. You've never seen dogs and cats so mangey, scruffy, sickley and thin. The heat seems to have made them near comatose (it has that effect on humans too). I probably wouldn't even mention it, except that S. is a serious animal lover and it is driving her to distraction. I tell her to put on her Professor Xavier psychic animal locator helmit and envision all the animals in the world suffering this very instant. The ones that you can see before you are but a tiny fraction of the animals in the world who are suffering right now. Somehow this thought doesn't help.
We've bairly set foot in the dirty backpacker district and there is still the Chinatown market and nightlife of our own sleezy hood to get back to. Just down from is is an awsome bar with palm trees and outdoor pool tables so off.
Politics and Lives
Robert Reich gets to put a question to Senator John McCain ("John McCain's Real Plan for Iraq," 20 November 2006):
I talked with John McCain Sunday morning in the green room just before "This Week." I asked him why he continued to call for more troops for Iraq when he must know it's a political non-starter.
...
I think McCain knows Iraq is out of our hands — it's disintegrating into civil war, and by 2008 will be a bloodbath. He also knows American troops will be withdrawn. The most important political fact he knows is he has to keep a big distance between himself and Bush in order to avoid being tainted by this horrifying failure. Arguing that we need more troops effectively covers his ass. It will allow him to say, "if the President did what I urged him to do, none of this would have happened."
McCain is smarter on this score than Dems who intend to engage in post-Baker Commission "what we must do now" bipartisanship. It may make Dems feel relevant and important, but it will also make them complicit in the impending failure. Come 2008, they will share the responsibility for the horror of Iraq. HRC will be drawn in, as will Barak Obama and all other Dem notables who will feel it necessary to participate in a "plan."
In the end, McCain alone will be able to escape blame. At least, that's what I think he's thinking.
All due caveats for the above being mere informed speculation, but when I read stuff like this it drives me up the wall. "Dear Next Of Kin: We regret to inform you that your loved one was killed in Iraq owing to process reasons in Washington, D.C." Americans are dying in Iraq because ambitious politicians in the Capitol calculate that it is not yet expedient to reveal their true assessment of the situation. How do you ask someone to be the last to die for a lost cause indeed. How do you ask that person to be the last to die for a politician's career advancement.
On the other hand, this is the way politics works. The most direct rout to the end of a problem isn't always politically feasible. So a politician comes up with a more circuitous route. In this case, Senator McCain could come out against the continued U.S. presence in Iraq. The result wouldn't be that President Bush would then finally be shamed into removing U.S. soldiers. He is a lame duck with no successor. He believes that he is doing the will of god and that he has unique understanding of events in Iraq. All that Senator McCain's announcement would do is bump poll numbers a percent or two further in the direction of no confidence in President Bush and administration policy in Iraq.
So Senator McCain's plan is to spend the next two years scheming to get the person most capable of handling the Iraq situation — surprise! Himself — elected president. In the meantime Americans will continue to die at the rate of a few score a month, Iraqis a few thousand a month, bus after two more years of this, plus time for the McCain administration to sort it out — probably the first two years of his administration — withdrawals are complicated business — the dying will finally come to an end for Americans. Of course that is when it will really start in earnest for the Iraqis, but that'll all just be bad karma for us which doesn't translate into all that much politically. I mean, see, George Bush can say all sorts of stupid things about the Vietnam war and even say them while in Vietnam and we are directly or indirectly responsible for the deaths of, what?, millions there.
Picking on Senator McCain or anyone else who continues to provide cover for the administration misses the crucial point that there is only one person who can do anything about the situation in Iraq, and hence no one to blame for said situation, save the President. And that won't change until the president changes.
Of course, whether Senator McCain really wants the U.S. to get out of Iraq is a debatable proposition. Perhaps he will just be the Richard Nixon to the Lyndon Johnson of George W. Bush and drag the war out for another eight ever more bloody years. Picking on Senator McCain for being a conniving, ambitious and grossly wrong on policy is all fair game.
I went to one of Presidential Candidate McCain's campaign rallies on the boardwalk near the Bremerton Naval Ship Yard. The setting, the atmosphere and the sentiment of the crowd that day conspired to make Senator McCain seem almost cinematically heroic. I think about that little political rally often. My feelings toward Senator McCain at this point is that he is beneath contempt. A few weeks ago when the Senator was on the Daily Show and S. wanted to listen to the segment, I walked out of the room. I no longer care what John McCain has to say. The straight talker and maverick reputations are merely what are called a "usable political personae."
Cat Blogging: Packing for Thailand
On Tuesday S. and I get on a plane for two weeks in Thailand. We are mostly done with the process of shopping and packing for the trip, but it has been hell. Here is a photo of S. with all nominated packing items spread out on the living room floor. As usual, Kitty is there to help out, trying to bury first aid kit supplies like the room was a giant litter box.
We were away for a few days for Thanksgiving and by the time we got back, Kitty was already about as beside himself as cat pride was going to allow, alternately solicitous and taking out his anger cat-style: with claws. I imagine he will be pretty discombobulated by the time we get back from two weeks.
When I was a kid I was always dismayed at the excruciating, weeks-long ordeal my parents made of preparing for a trip. Hitherto, whenever I have traveled, I have just thrown a few things in a bag the day before I left. This is my first vacation where things have changed. S. and I have spent the last two weeks making lists, spending money like crazy, checking off lists, studying travel guides, making test packs of our bags, fretting about how our coworkers will survive our absences and so on and on.
I am going to try to make an electronic travel log while abroad as I have done in the past. But this is the first time I have traveled since starting a blog, so rather than the blast e-mails of the past, it will be a series of posts. Pull instead of push. I am just going to post text while I am afield and will update the posts with photographs when we get back.
I'm glad to see that just prior to our arrival, George W. Bush has been touring the region, refreshing the memories of the people of the region why they don't like Americans. Thanks. I thought the job of the president was to keep the American people safe. The best way that he can do that at this point is simply to disappear from peoples' minds.
I have half a mind to come up with some new travelers' patch to sew on a bag. It would say something like, "I'm from the other America." Maybe under an American flag with a red field of stars and blue stripes. But I don't think foreigners follow U.S. politics enough to get the whole red / blue America terminology.
Ghosts of Henry Kissinger
One of the things that former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger is apparently counseling the President is that what is required in Iraq is a demonstration of will. And you don't have to ask twice for a demonstration of will — or at least a demonstration of someone else's will — from this president. From the sound of his last press conference ("President Bush Meets with Prime Minister Howard of Australia," Sheraton Hanoi, Hanoi, Vietnam, 17 November 2006), President Bush is taking Mr. Kissinger's advice to heart. There is a paragraph of Bush boilerplate setting it up but the "hey, Vietnam is back" line is the last one:
Q: Are there lessons here [in Vietnam] for the debate over Iraq?
President Bush: I think one thing -- yes, I mean, one lesson is, is that we tend to want there to be instant success in the world, and the task in Iraq is going to take a while. ... And it's just going to take a long period of time to -- for the ideology that is hopeful, and that is an ideology of freedom, to overcome an ideology of hate. Yet, the world that we live in today is one where they want things to happen immediately.
And it's hard work in Iraq. ... We'll succeed unless we quit.
"We'll succeed unless we quit." That just completes the litany: Republicans have to a one taken the absolute wrong lessons from the Cold War. From Truman they learned shock and awe (previously named Hiroshima and Nagasaki) but nothing about conciliation, nation building and the importance of alliances. From Eisenhower they lapped up all the rollback rhetoric but failed to notice that Eisenhower never acted on that rhetoric, even in 1956. From Kennedy they learned resoluteness, but nothing of that ballyhoo about the risks of escalation. From Carter they learned that weakness incites, but failed to notice that international norms (Helsinki) can have real consequences. From Reagan they learned how to spend on weapons, but have left the fine points about arms control and extending the olive branch to an enemy for liberals to debate among themselves.
All of this wrong-headed thinking came together in the Bush administration and its decision to go to war in Iraq. The President's remark shows that the wrong lessons continue to inform official thinking about Iraq.
I thought that maybe Republicans were finally letting go of their Vietnam Dolchstoßlegende, but now we hear from no les a person than the President — channeling the improbably still corporeal ghost of Henry Kissinger — that the real lesson of the Vietnam war is not that fighting a fundamentally more motivated insurgency is futile, but that the problem was that the United States didn't stay long enough. I'm glad to know that such clairvoyant wisdom will continue to serve us in Iraq.
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Oops, looks like I'm too late on the Kissinger counseling will power story line. Kissinger said in an interview ("Kissinger Foresees No Military Win in Iraq," Associated Press, 19 November 2006) Monday,
If you mean by "military victory" an Iraqi government that can be established and whose writ runs across the whole country, that gets the civil war under control and sectarian violence under control in a time period that the political processes of the democracies will support, I don't believe that is possible.
Burkhas Are Sexy
I picked up the latest issue of Marie Claire because there is a hot picture of the perfect Ashley Judd on the cover (lower right) — perfect at least in appearance: she has an unbroken record of choosing awful scripts. She has amassed a career that looks like the cardboard box that a consortium of dowdy office women have established to exchange dime store mystery thriller and harlequin romance novels, the kind that they tear through at a rate of about one a day on their smoke breaks.
I thumbed the issue looking for some sexy photos as promise on the cover, but instead came across a startling and sophisticated photo spread of Islamic fashion (e.g. top). It was bound to happen eventually. The West cannot focus on Islam for this long without becoming enamored. It is like a softer version of Nietzsche's dictum about looking long into the abyss. Or maybe, to be more economic and sadistic rather than Freudo-Nietzschean, the aspirant master cannot help but subsume the other under his conceptualizing purview.
And Dubai is all the rage these days — the New Yorker and Vanity Fair and anyone else who can afford to put up a photographer there have all done a piece on the place — and it is acquiring a reputation as the big cosmopolitan party town of the Middle East — a sort of Paris on the Persian Gulf. The Marie Claire shoot was sure to feature the city's famous entire city skyline going up all at once as a background.
The next photo spread in the issue is titled "Covered Girls." It is mostly a bunch of English / Irish looking lasses frolicking in misty green fields, but then there is this picture included lower left above in which the woman is wearing robes of a distinctive purple that smacks of the burkha particular to the Afghani as so often seen in Western media circa 2002.
Who knew that — like the Betty Page B&D bursting from repressed 1950s housewife sexual imagery — the burkha and the veil too would be sensualized. There really is no defeating sexuality. I guess fashion and the Bedouin were destined for each other: both are nomadic, eclectic and partly dependent on raiding for their prosperity.
Boom Town
Washington, D.C. is a city that like most in the 1970s and 80s was severely depopulated owing to white flight. The scars still abound. Also like most cities it is in the midst of a serious revival. White flight has been replaced by gentrification. Everyplace you go there are mammoth new mixed use commercial / condominiums going up, leases available Fall 2007 starting at $400k. It's all the posh and shiny new urbanism stuff.
I ride my bike to work on 13th Street in the mornings. If I time it right, I can get up enough speed down the hill between Clifton and Florida and then not hit a single stop light, even through Logan Circle, all the way to M Street. But the timing is key. So I sit every morning at the top of the ridge along the north of town in one of the few places in D.C. with an expansive view.
There are few places where D.C. feels like a real city to me. Ridding the 42 bus down Columbia between 16th and Calvert I see the bustle and grit that I expect from a city. About half way down the same ridge on 18th as on 13th, a view across a tenant district of town toward the Washington Monument in the distance opens up that is very urban looking.
The view from the top of 13th never strikes me as particularly urban in appearance, despite the obvious ambition of developers. But this picture, with the steam rising and the layers of dull brick, requires closer consideration.
I wish I could display a better picture, but after a whole season of looking at the town from this vantage I can report that D.C. is a very hazy city. In the summer you can see the humidity over the distance of a single block. From the top of the 13th Street hill, there is almost never a clear view.
Truth Be Told: Shinseki Was Right
It's amazing what generals will tell Congress once the Secretary threatening their career has become a lame duck. This week General Abizaid finally fesses up to what has been obvious to everyone with eyes for nearly three years now (Gordon, Michael R. "General Warns of Risks in Iraq if G.I.'s Are Cut," New York Times, 16 November 2006):
General Shinseki was right that a greater international force contribution, U.S. force contribution and Iraqi force contribution should have been available immediately after major combat operations. ... I think you can look back and say that more American troops would have been advisable in the early stages of May, June, July.
All that was required was to fire Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz and the truth took but a week to come out. Maybe with the departure of the Congressional Republicans in January a little more truth can be aired?
Friday Cat-Dog Blogging
Last night I wasn't quite ready to go to bed and so ended up watching a little of Countdown with Keith Olbermann (MSNBC, 16 November 2006). On his list of weird stories was the obviously spurious tale of a cat in Brazil who successfully mated with a dog to produce a litter of freaky kitten-puppies. Oddly enough the story is being reported the world over.
There are only two things that merit passing this story along. First is that it is Friday and this is an amusing deviation from Friday Cat Blogging. Second is how Mr. Olbermann decided to characterize the story:
And number one [newsmaker of the day]: [Cassia Aparecida de Souza] of Brazil — more particularly, her cat Mimi, who she claims has given birth to a litter of three cat-dogs. She says, three months ago, Mimi had a little soiree with the neighbor's dogs, and there you go, cats with dog characteristics — fire and brimstone coming down from the skies, rivers and seas boiling, 40 years of darkness, earthquakes, volcanoes, the dead rising from the grave, human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria.
At about the word "brimstone" I saw where he was going with this and erupted into a full-body fit of laughter. If this is the level of goofing off that can regularly be expected from Mr. Olbermann, I may become a regular watcher.
I have never really like the show — though maintaining a respect for the stuffy, grim, Lurch-like manner of delivery employed by Mr. Olbermann. The show seems even more edgy than when it began. I wonder if owing to The Daily Show and The Colbert Report Mr. Olbermann has a lot more liberties.
1776: The Beginning of the End
At Positive Liberty Jason Kuznicki reads the correspondence of Thomas Jefferson and John and Abigail Adams ("Natural Law and the Conservative Soul," 13 November 2006). Among his takeaways:
Yet this [limited government] was only one of the accomplishments of the American Revolution. There was another as well, one they regarded as an equal and maybe even a greater world-historical event: the separation of government from religion. Adams and Jefferson vigorously agreed that this was the other key reason for their struggle: that they could be free from ecclesiastical government, from subsidized Churches and of religious tests for office, from the tyranny that religion inevitably becomes when it is united with government power.
...
As many will note — and a few with satisfaction — Adams, Jefferson, and their contemporaries did not fully achieve this aim. But they remained confident, well into their old age, that 1776 was the beginning of the end, not just for personal or arbitrary government, but also for the alliance between priestcraft and statecraft.
I, For One, Welcome Our New Sea Otter Overlords
From last week's Southpark ("Go, God, Go XII," Season X, episode 152, 8 November 2006), as the Allied Atheist Alliance plots against the United Atheist Alliance and the Unified Atheist League, a discussion of the sea otter's raison d'etre breaks out (imagine Southpark otter voices):
Blavius: They are not a logical race, Wise One! They go around chopping down trees for tables, when they have perfectly good tummies to eat on. How logical is that?!
Otter Leader: Yes! The great Dawkins said we cannot tolerate those who don't use reason! How reasonable is it to eat off wood instead of your tummy?
...
Otter Leader: Kill the table-eaters! In the name of Almighty Science!
This is actually a fairly subtle point about relativism.
Reason is but a formal system, radically unmoored from the world. It bears a questionable, theoretical at best, relation to phenomena. Reason by itself merely works on propositions about which reason itself is neutral. Not properly calibrated by a proper empiricism, it can go horribly awry. As Immanuel Kant said, "Experience without theory is blind, but theory without experience is mere intellectual play."
And as Aristotle asserted, ethical reasoning is not an abstract, but an empirical science. One starts with principles germane to humans. Aristotle even leaves open the possibility that one begins one's moral reasoning with the principles germane to a particular city of humans, implying that other civilizations starting from different principles might come to similarly valid moral conclusions.
Given that the principles on which moral reasoning works are the characteristics of the moral agent, it follows that sea otters, having different characteristics, would work their way to different moral conclusions, ones related to their own physical and psychological makeup. Hence, "How reasonable is it to eat off wood instead of your tummy?"
I don't think I am making this up. I think that South Park really is making the relativist attack on Richard Dawkins that reason alone won't save us because we are prisoners of our particularity. And the cynical point that we will turn to violence over tables versus tummys.
Nuclear Weapons: Easier Than You Think
Peter D. Zimmerman and Jeffrey G. Lewis have, in the current issue of Foreign Policy, what must be the most terrifying story I have read in a long time ("The Bomb in the Backyard," November / December 2006, pp. 32-39). It is about how a terrorist sleeper cell might construct a nuclear weapon inside the United States.
Mr. Zimmerman and Mr. Lewis describe the construction of a gun-type design — much easier than the implosion-type device — for a nuclear weapon similar to the skinny boy dropped on Hiroshima resulting in a 12.5 kiloton blast that killed 100,000 people.
Most terrifying is what I take to be their central claim — that it wouldn't be as hard as many imagine:
Could a nuclear attack by bin Laden, or any other terrorist, actually happen? Some say it would be impossible, mistakenly believing that terrorists do not have the motivation, or the ability, to assemble the highly sophisticated, modern tools necessary for the task. Most observers, however, agree that a small group could construct a lethal nuclear weapon since they are conceptually simple devices. After all, the technology involved in creating a nuclear weapon is more than 60 years old. In fact, it is perhaps easier to make a gun-assembled nuclear bomb than it is to develop biological or chemical weapons.
...
The actual pit — or core of the weapon containing the highly enriched uranium — could be fabricated quickly. When China built its first nuclear bomb in 1964, a single technician named Yuan Gongfu used a lathe to shape the highly enriched uranium in just one night. New or used lathes large enough to properly finish the roughly cast pit can be bought on the Internet, even on eBay, for $10,000. These instruments are probably as capable as the one Yuan used more than 40 years ago. (pp. 34 & 36-37)
And the financial calculus is there too. Mr. Zimmerman and Mr. Lewis estimate that the entire thing could be done for $5.4 million, a per casualty expense significantly less than the 11 September 2001 attacks.
In Mr. Zimmerman and Mr. Lewis's scenario the terrorist band purchases the highly enriched uranium on the black market and smuggles it into the United States. Enriching the uranium themselves would be another beast entirely. That is a nearly impossible task, requiring billions of dollars worth of the most cutting edge machines, taking up facilities covering tens of thousands of square feet. That option is out for our hypothetical terrorist cell. Mr. Zimmerman and Mr. Lewis don't delve into the availability of nuclear fuel on the black market in much detail, but do report that the International Atomic Energy Agency has documented 18 cases of the interdiction of stolen plutonium and highly enriched uranium in the last year alone, which is enough cases, one might think, to prompt a slightly more elevated level of concern on the part of the authorities of the world.
Hopefully the Democrats will make fully implementing the September 11th Committee recommendations, especially those dealing with cargo security, a pretty high priority come January.
In Come the Realists
Bush administration defenders have fairly effectively beaten back the criticisms of the current foreign policy coming from the realist school by arguing that realism is outdated, that years of following it's policy recommendations is what got us to where we are in the Middle East, that it is fundamentally out of sync with America's culture and position in the world. Usually they did this in defense of a neoconservative interventionism.
A perfect example is William Kristol's remarks in the New Yorker's profile of Brent Scowcroft this time last year (Goldberg, Jeffrey, "Breaking Ranks," 31 October 2005).
With the President's Second Inaugural Address and Colin Powell's departure, it seemed like the realists were routed and the neoconservatives on the march. But with Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, Lewis Libby and now Donald Rumsfeld out and Henry Kissinger and James Baker advising the administration in an informal capacity, things have turned significantly toward the realists.
The appointment of Robert Gates to replace Mr. Rumsfeld will complete the repudiation of neoconservatism in favor of hitherto reviled realism (Sanger, David E. "After Rumsfeld: Bid to Reshape the Brain Trust," New York Times, 9 November 2006):
Robert M. Gates, President Bush's choice to become defense secretary, has sharply criticized the Bush administration's handling of the Iraq war and has made it clear that he would seek advice from moderate Republicans who have been largely frozen out of the White House, according to administration officials and Mr. Gates's close associates.
The administration officials said that Mr. Bush was aware of Mr. Gates's critique of current policy and understood that Mr. Gates planned to clear the "E Ring" of the Pentagon, where many of Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's senior political appointees have plotted Iraq strategy.
Stephen J. Hadley, the national security adviser, said Thursday afternoon that Mr. Bush regarded his choice of Mr. Gates as "a terrific opportunity" to rethink Iraq.
In doing so, Mr. Gates will be drawing on his experience and contacts from the administration of Mr. Bush's father, including the former security adviser Brent Scowcroft and former Secretary of State James A. Baker III. "Gates's world is Brent Scowcroft and Baker and a whole bunch of people who felt the door had been slammed in their face," one former official who has discussed Iraq at length with Mr. Gates said Thursday. "The door is about to reopen."
In the afore mentioned New Yorker piece on Mr. Scowcroft, Mr. Kristol said, "I think it's a pseudo-springtime for realism." I think we can drop the "pseudo-," no?
The big question is where is Condoleezza Rice? She has, by all observations, been steering foreign policy in a more realist direction since becoming the Secretary of State, but when the National Security Advisor, she oversaw the production of that touchstone neoconservative document, The National Security Strategy of the United States of America. She was a prodigy of Brent Scowcroft, but again according to the New Yorker piece, really ignored Mr. Scowcroft once she became National Security Advisor for Bush and has completely refused to speak to him since he wrote an editorial in the Wall Street Journal advising against the Iraq invasion ("Don't Attack Saddam," 15 August 2002).
I suspect that she is a weak bureaucratic operator and just blows with the prevailing winds. Whatever the case, it will probably be pretty awkward for Ms. Rice and a vindication for Mr. Scowcroft the first time he is invited in to advise the National Security Council.
Send Borat Straight to the Slag Heap
I don't care if Borat is the funniest movie ever or how The New York Times reviews it. Unless S. drags me, I'm not going to see it. It may be hilarious, but people ought to be aware that Borat is going to end up on the same entertainment slag heap as Yakov Smirnoff and Balki Bartokomous. Only he's the post-Jackass version thereof.
Any time Americans are forced to focus on foreigners — something we try at all costs not to do — all we can do is make jokes about how weird they are. Borat seems to me the product of Hollywood red necks. I think just as much as the next American that foreigners are weird — I work for a language services company so I deal with them all day long. But have a little perspective. Thinking that foreigners are weird is nothing to make a show about. It's condescending and vaguely racist.
It's like Americans have to sooth their consciousness by portraying the enemy de jour as disarmed and ridiculous. We don't really have to worry about South Asian Muslims because they are really just a bunch of swarthy keystone cops. If they came to this country, we'd have them at "Wha'd up?" In an homage to his predecessor, shall Borat say, "America, what a country!" Don't worry, America. Outwardly the alienated of world society may want to kill as many of us as possible, but in their heart of hearts they really want to be us. Their inept attempts to be us are merely of a piece with their ineptitude at being themselves.
In foreign countries are their entertainment seasons beset by perennial shows about ridiculous Americans bamboozled and overwhelmed by their dazzling societies?
A Crashing End
The Economist's postmortem on Donald Rumsfeld, titled in the paper's sly fashion, "Gracious Me" (Vol. 381, No. 8503, 11 November 2006, pp. 37-38), ratifies a few points I have made here. The first in passing when they point out that Secretary Rumsfeld has been,
... more controversial even than the Vietnam-era Robert McNamara, a man to whom he bears an eerie physical resemblance.
The resemblance of the two is a point I made on Thursday in my "Non-Systematic Observations on Donald Rumsfeld" (Obs. no. 3).
To be slightly less cheeky, they also blame the outcome in Iraq on Secretary Rumsfeld's attempt to make of the war a demonstration of a theory:
These failures [in Iraq] stemmed from a single strategic error. Mr. Rumsfeld wanted to use Iraq to test his theory of "light" warfare — the ability of a small high-tech army to topple a regime. But the job in Iraq was about building a stable democracy as well as toppling a tyrant.
I take it that the conservative Economist more or less stops there. I go to a little more extreme of a position in trying to surmise what the Secretary's motive was in Iraq war planning in my post, "The Divide and Crack-up Strategy."
Just to be sadistic, I will point out that they begin their article characterizing the week's events thus:
On Wednesday one of Washington's longest political careers came to a crashing end.
Update, 13 November 2006: Need any more McNamara similarities? Scowcroft Associates partner Arnold Kanter tells the New York Times that Robert Gates "is poised to be George W. Bush's Clark Clifford." (Sanger, David E. "After Rumsfeld: Bid to Reshape the Brain Trust," 9 November 2006). But Mr. Rumsfeld doesn't get the consolation prize of the World Bank appointment. I wonder if there is any black glee in the heart of Paul Wolfowitz that he was the rook blocking that move?
A Few Non-Systematic Observations on Donald Rumsfeld
I'm almost sad to see Donald Rumsfeld go. Some are commenting that with him gone things will finally change. I seriously doubt it. George Bush and Dick Cheney are still in charge. It's not like this was all the brain child of Secretary Rumsfeld and he is the only one in denial about the outcome. If anything, he was an apt Secretary of Defense. He was the Secretary of Defense that this administration required and deserved. If he is gone, it is because he was simply more out in from than the others of his same ilk. That and he is the one who was an appointee and hence could be gotten rid of. There is simply nothing to be done about the President and Vice President.
On the occasion of his resignation I want to get out a few non-systematic observations that have been rattling around in my head about this most quixotic Secretary of Defense.
Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, et. al. represent a takeover of the foreign policy of the United States by a unique ideology outside the consensus that is almost without precedent.
I'm thinking maybe the American imperialism of McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt, the moralism of Wilson or the rise of humanitarian intervention in the 1990s as comparable. But to take the case of humanitarian intervention, its first major expression is in Somalia, a venture launched by the first President Bush and built upon by Clinton. And the most powerful expression of the philosophy is Bush, Sr.'s "new world order" rhetoric. Further, a host of societal factors such as globalization and the so-called CNN-effect play into humanitarian intervention. In other words it is a development that takes place in society, within the foreign policy establishment and across parties. Similar arguments could be made for Roosevelt and Wilson. The Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz worldview is like Diana: sprung full-grown from the mind of Zeus. Donald Rumsfeld is the most interesting figure to come to political prominence since Ronald Reagan. His quizzical comments, CEO's grilling of the accepted wisdom and "snowflakes" — the endless shower of memos coming from his office — are almost unheard of in a politics that values conformity and avoidance of controversy. Most high-level appointees in Washington simply accept the bureaucracy, try to work within its limits and maybe attempt a few incremental, glacially-paced reforms. Rumsfeld attempted a revolution at perhaps the most intransigent bureaucracy in the world — one that is so for good reasons I should add — and would not take no for an answer.
I think it's easy to call Mr. Rumsfeld arrogant, pig-headed, wrong and a failure, but as Charles Stevenson points out in his book, SECDEF: The Nearly Impossible Job of Secretary of Defense, nearly every Secretary of Defense this country has had since the creation of the position in 1947 has not lasted long and left office considered a failure. The Pentagon may be ungovernable; there may be something fatally flawed with the design of the bureaucracy.
Such things aren't the primary reason that Mr. Rumsfeld is gone, but the troubled relations between the Secretary, the bureaucracy and the services hasn't helped on a political level and one should judge carefully in these areas. Secretary Rumsfeld's similarity to Robert McNamara is the most apt comparison between the Iraq and Vietnam wars. They even look and condescend the same. Every history of the Bush administration and the Iraq war to date — The Assassin's Gate, Fiasco, America at the Crossroads — has attempted a thumb-nail sketch ideological history, but a full-blown ideological history of how we got into the Iraq war remains to be written. The closest such work we have is James Mann's Rise of the Vulcans.
As Nietzsche said, the greatest ideas are the greatest events and every war has its ideas that motivate and shape it. The First World War was fueled by a strategy, the Schlieffen Plan; the Vietnam war was motivated by a scenario, the domino theory. The extent to which the United States was driven into this current war by ideology, not contingency, is always there but never adequately put in the foreground of the story. And Secretary Rumsfeld is one of the central ideologues of this story.
One aspect of this ideology that I haven't discussed before is the beliefs of this group about the problems of the intelligence bureaucracies and the moral status of so-called rogue states. By the time this administration began its marketing campaign for an Iraq war, its denizens had been in the business of undermining the intelligence community in favor of a hawkish agenda for thirty years, from the Committee to Maintain a Prudent Defense in 1969 through Team B in 1976 up to the Rumsfeld Commission to Assess the Ballistic Missile Threat in 1998. There is a whole superstructure of theory as to why intelligence agencies constantly underestimate our foes and the true depth of depravity of said enemies.
Combine this shibboleth with the Straussian cult of the will and the sort of post-Vietnam over-compensatory jingoism and romanticization of the military so well described in Mann's book or in Andrew Bacevich's The New American Militarism and I think you begin to get a sketch of what has happened. But again the full story has yet to be written.
(I am going to re-read the anonymous "Werther Report: Is Preemption a Nuclear Schlieffen Plan?," Defense and the National Interest, 20 July 2002. I recall it being a pretty jarring discussion of the ideological makeup of the administration. I am thinking mainly of the section titled "The Strange Case of the Beltway Prussians.")
It is always hard to watch a man publicly judged as a failure. Donald Rumsfeld is in his 70s and this would have been the capstone on an illustrious life. Such turns are why the Greeks said never judge a man happy until he is dead.
Of course I can't feel too sorry for Mr. Rumsfeld. He has to live with his self-esteem bruised. In his wake, all too many have to live without their limbs or their loved ones. And that makes judgment easy — but apparently not easy enough for his boss.
Outcome — to date — 2006
Some before bed observations about the election:
Of course the Democrats took the House. That was just a matter of magnitude. I thought the Senate was too much to hope for, but within the realm of possibility. But tonight with McCaskill in Missouri and Tester in Montana both up by over ten thousand votes each, it looks like control of the Senate will come down to Virginia where the Democrats are up too. A Democratic takeover of both houses is a real possibility. In fact it seems just a few ugly months of recount wrangling away from a done deal. The Democrats have learned something since 2000: if it's close, declare victory first. The guy asking for the recount will look like sour grapes. It is the electoral equivalent of possession being nine tenths of the law. In a reversal of 2004, results from less populous rural areas came in first giving Republican candidates early leads. Results from urban areas came in more slowly, eroding those leads and eventually turning elections in favor of Democrats. What would cause a reversal like this? Note to 2008 self: don't count chickens until hatched. I am overjoyed that Santorum went down, but soured that Joe Lieberman kept his seat. Santorum helped make the Republicans look like whack-jobs. Senator Lieberman does more to give them legitimacy than anyone else in Washington. The message that his defeat would have sent to turncoats everywhere would have been useful. Joe Lieberman is going to have to get a big present from the Democrats. If the Democrats control the Senate 51-49, the offers from the Republicans to pick him off will be juicy indeed. Democrats will have to give him a plum committee chairmanship to keep him from bolting and to make amends. Probably Armed Services. That a supposed repudiation of President Bush's foreign policy will elevate one of its most bullish supporters to such a position of foreign policy power — though one from which he won't be able to do too much to derail the Democratic agenda — further sours his victory. All that the so-called liberal media has been able to talk about all night long is how it is going to be impossible for ultra-liberal Nancy Pelosi to hold together the party newly infused with all these conservative Democrats. I bet it'll even be the damn second-tier headline on the Washington Post tomorrow. Would the media pleas not declare the Democratic majority inoperative before it's even sworn in. First of all, Senator Pelosi is not that much of a leftist and where she is personally, she will probably still be a pragmatist in her position as Speaker of the House. Second, the standard interpretation on the left — where the pundits are connected to party strategists — is that the Democrats will all try to help one another position the party for 2008 by steering clear of divisive issues and picking initiatives around which there is consensus and that will make the President squirm, e.g. a minimum wage hike. With the power to set the agenda, why would the Democrats chose one that would put themselves at a disadvantage? The Republicans chose all wedge issues calculated to split the Democrats for the last six years. Why wouldn't the Democrats do the same? So how about amending that opening few days' agenda to include a nonbinding vote of no confidence in the Secretary of Defense, eh, Speaker Pelosi? You would only be the messenger for the vote of no confidence that the American people just made.
Recovering Our Good Name
The American Conservative has an astonishingly powerful editorial ("GOP Must Go," 20 November 2006) endorsing, if not the Democrats, at least a repudiation of the Bush administration:
Faced on Sept. 11, 2001 with a great challenge, President Bush made little effort to understand who had attacked us and why — thus ignoring the prerequisite for crafting an effective response. He seemingly did not want to find out, and he had staffed his national-security team with people who either did not want to know or were committed to a prefabricated answer.
As a consequence, he rushed America into a war against Iraq, a war we are now losing and cannot win, one that has done far more to strengthen Islamist terrorists than anything they could possibly have done for themselves. Bush's decision to seize Iraq will almost surely leave behind a broken state divided into warring ethnic enclaves, with hundreds of thousands killed and maimed and thousands more thirsting for revenge against the country that crossed the ocean to attack them. The invasion failed at every level: if securing Israel was part of the administration's calculation — as the record suggests it was for several of his top aides — the result is also clear: the strengthening of Iran’s hand in the Persian Gulf, with a reach up to Israel's northern border, and the elimination of the most powerful Arab state that might stem Iranian regional hegemony.
The war will continue as long as Bush is in office, for no other reason than the feckless president can't face the embarrassment of admitting defeat. The chain of events is not complete: Bush, having learned little from his mistakes, may yet seek to embroil America in new wars against Iran and Syria.
Meanwhile, America's image in the world, its capacity to persuade others that its interests are common interests, is lower than it has been in memory. All over the world people look at Bush and yearn for this country — which once symbolized hope and justice — to be humbled. ...
There may be little Americans can do to atone for this presidency, which will stain our country’s reputation for a long time. But the process of recovering our good name must begin somewhere, and the logical place is in the voting booth this Nov. 7. If we are fortunate, we can produce a result that is seen — in Washington, in Peoria, and in world capitals from Prague to Kuala Lumpur — as a repudiation of George W. Bush and the war of aggression he launched against Iraq.
Tonight we begin to steer the ship of state away from the iceberg against which it has run.
Better Constitution Needed, I Second
Matthew Yglesias does a considerably better job ("Better Constitution Needed," 6 November 2006) with the point that I was trying to make in my post Sunday night (which is why he is paid to do it and I founder in obscurity):
... the dynamic of this election is a reminder that it would really be better to have a parliamentary system. A head of government who's both a huge objective failure and has become wildly unpopular ought to be removed from office and replaced by someone else. In a proper democratic system Bush either would be on the ballot tomorrow or else the GOP would have dumped Bush as leader and ran under the banner of a different standard-bearer. As things stand, though, the best you can do is try to put into place a Democratic congress that'll do hearings and oversight and subpoenas and so forth. Even if the Democrats succeed, however, it's not as if we're going to simply get oversight. Instead, there'll be "a cataclysmic fight to the death" as the White House seeks to evade congressional oversight.
Then'll come to Broderish fainting spells about "partisan wrangling" and "ugly tone" and so forth. And it'll be true, the tone really will be ugly and people really will be spending time on wrangling rather than coping with the issues. But Democrats will have no choice -- this is a White House out of control and it needs to be restrained. Better institutions of government, however, would let us avoid the whole dynamic.
I don't know that the Democrats will have the courage or the wherewithal to see any hearings through to their bitter end, but I agree that if they do, the focus in the media will all be the heat and not the light.
The U.S. Constitution was specifically designed to protect decision makers from the vagaries of the masses — which is a fairly conservative and, I think, prudent device. Unfortunately is also has the effect of protecting the incompetent from judgment. The Constitution has a provision to deal with this too, but unfortunately the whims of political decorum have ruled this option out.
That there is not some regular course of business, non-cataclysmic means to remove a president that has gone this far off the rails suggest that our system is very broken indeed. A better option is needed.
No Matter What, Two More Years
On Thursday I predicted The End of the Bush Presidency. I further said that I will watch with glee, but it hasn't taken much subsequent reflection to realize that effectively little will have changed come Wednesday.
No matter what happens on Tuesday, George Bush will still be the president for two more years. And that being the case, U.S. soldiers will continue to die at the rate of about a hundred a month in Iraq, Iraq and Afghanistan will continue their slide into chaos, North Korea will continue to menace the international community, Iran will continue to enrich nuclear fuel and plans will continue for a preemptive bombing raid against them.
Against all these problems and more, a Democratic capture of the House of Representatives will have no effect whatsoever. The President isn't about to negotiate with Nancy Pelosi over what to do in Iraq which means that Congress can either follow Mr. Cheney's recommendation and go fuck themselves for the next two years or vote to cut off funds to the military in Iraq. The latter move is simply beyond consideration for this group of pipsqueak Democrats with their nonexistent national security credentials. The administration knows this so they will stick with plan A. In Iran, bombs will be on targets before the Democrats even know what is going on. A military attaché will brief key leaders after the F-111s are en route and cruise missiles airborne.
The Democrats will probably launch some rounds of investigations, but investigations will do nothing but pad the footnotes of future historians. Their main aim will be the 2008 election. Investigations will do nothing to change foreign policy of the U.S. in the here and now.
The Bush presidency will only have ended for the purpose of the myth creators. There will be no more grand policy initiatives on the part of the administration in the next two years and hence no chance to reverse the President's abysmal approval ratings. In fact, with the Democrats hopefully launching a series of investigations into White House wrongdoings and peppering them with a series of annoying bills in need of veto and with there being no obvious means of improving the situations in Iraq and Afghanistan, the President's approval stands to go still lower. Though how much lower I can't say. My reaction to these low thirties approval ratings is not shock that they are so low, but shock that they still remain as high as they are! Who can still think anything positive of this administration? Obviously this is a pretty hard-core.
But on the other hand, the Democrats will not have enough of a majority to do anything of much significance with it. I suspect that they will not even be able to muster enough votes to repeal even the most odious parts of the tax cuts, make any progress towards balancing the budget or fix the hole in the prescription drug bill.
That an administration can do this much damage to the country and to the world and that nothing can be done about it, that he still has two years in which to further drive the country into the ground, says to me that there is something fundamentally wrong with our system of government. No matter what happens on Tuesday, we are still stuck with George W. Bush as the President for two more years.
The End of the Bush Presidency
It seems fairly obvious at this point that, absent John Kerry escaping from the dungeon into which he has hopefully been stuffed to commit further speech acts, the Democrats will take the House. The Senate will be tight and a Democratic takeover is improbable, but is still in the running.
George Bush is taking his ever nasty rhetoric to new levels in defense of his presidency, but it seems that his every appearance serves only to reinforce the perceptions already drawn by the nation. What will the loss of one branch of Congress mean for Mr. Bush? When one considers the scenarios, one can see why Mr. Bush has become so desperate. I think that it will be the effective end of his presidency and the beginning of the obituary writing.
I don't think that the Democrats will have enough of a majority in the House of Representative to do much of anything, even pelt the administration with a series of embarrassing bills to veto. The Democrats have moved pretty far to the right by this point, so far that what I suspect that we will see is a House dominated by a coalition of centrist Republicans and right-leaning Democrats. The party effects very little discipline and even if they could, the Senate, most likely still in the hands of the Republicans, would continue to run interference for the administration in the most difficult cases.
I have said that the history of the Bush administration is already all but written (see "The First Draft," 7 February 2006; and "First Draft Revisionists," 26 February 2006). Administration strategists have always loved the bold move and so long as Congress was controlled by the Republicans, the possibility of such a second wind-delivering maneuver remained. With at least one branch of Congress controlled by the Democrats, that possibility has been foreclosed.
Further, the Democrats probably won't be able to advance a positive agenda with a slender majority and a Republican veto — finally to be deployed after atrophying for six years. They should focus the next two years on setting up for the real agenda time: after the 2008 election. That means hearings, subpoenas, popular initiates over which the President will have to weald an unpopular veto. The disarray of his administration will grow under the pressure of deteriorating circumstances and as people can no longer deny the writing on the wall. Desertions and leaks will accelerate, cementing the long-standing history of the administration. Talented replacements will become impossible to find as people who hope for futures run for cover.
President Bush is a man who likes to win above everything else, and he is a man who turns into a sullen baby when he doesn't get his way. As the trend of his political capitol goes into reverse, I expect he will diminish into a nasty, petty, confused, isolated husk of a president — the president he always was were it not obscured by the blinding light of current events.
The bottom line is that I am going to be overjoyed to watch these shysters go down on Tuesday. The icing on the cake: John Stewart and Stephen Colbert will be covering it live.
Americans Agree: Administration All Hot Air
I had a few doubts about my last post ("Cut and Run," 31 October 2006), but apparently I am in good company in making it. The latest New York Times / CBS News poll finds that among Americans,
… 80 percent said Mr. Bush's latest effort to rally public support for the conflict amounted to a change in language but not policy.
(Nagourney, Adam and Megan Thee, "With Election Driven by Iraq, Voters Want New Approach," The New York Times, 2 November 2006)
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