"The Resentment Tribe"

Shamelessly stealing this whole posting from Digby:

The Resentment Tribe

The other day I rhetorically asked, "Why are they so angry?" and Matt Stoller replies :

As long as individuals can stand up outside of the tribe and claim Americanism as their own, the right is revealed as weak, because it is their own lies about themselves that they cannot stand. Proof in the form of our existence is enough to make them angry. This is why, as Digby wonders, they keep getting madder as they keep gaining power. They are not really after a conservative agenda in terms of policy; they are not even after power, really. They are after a complete and utter subjugation of the American consciousness to their tribal mentality. And they will not stop until they get it. Hence, the culture wars. And now, the real wars. And unfortunately, I don't think they are done.

They are far from done. In fact, it's so old and so familiar that we might as well prop open our eyelids with toothpicks and turn on "I Love Lucy" re-runs.

I wrote about this tribal divide sometime back and I agree with Matt’s analysis. This has its genesis in the original sin of slavery and is best illustrated by the fact that as the country has divides itself distinctly between the parties in a 50/50 fashion, the dividing line continues to fall along the same lines of the old confederacy. Once again, the best way to understand this is to go right to the heart of the beast and quote the first Republican president (who hailed from one of the bluest of blue states) Abraham Lincoln at the Cooper Union in New York in 1860:

And now, if they would listen - as I suppose they will not - I would address a few words to the Southern people.

I would say to them: - You consider yourselves a reasonable and a just people; and I consider that in the general qualities of reason and justice you are not inferior to any other people. Still, when you speak of us Republicans, you do so only to denounce us a reptiles, or, at the best, as no better than outlaws. You will grant a hearing to pirates or murderers, but nothing like it to "Black Republicans." In all your contentions with one another, each of you deems an unconditional condemnation of "Black Republicanism" as the first thing to be attended to. Indeed, such condemnation of us seems to be an indispensable prerequisite - license, so to speak - among you to be admitted or permitted to speak at all. Now, can you, or not, be prevailed upon to pause and to consider whether this is quite just to us, or even to yourselves? Bring forward your charges and specifications, and then be patient long enough to hear us deny or justify.

[...]

You charge that we stir up insurrections among your slaves. We deny it; and what is your proof? Harper's Ferry! John Brown!! John Brown was no Republican; and you have failed to implicate a single Republican in his Harper's Ferry enterprise. If any member of our party is guilty in that matter, you know it or you do not know it. If you do know it, you are inexcusable for not designating the man and proving the fact. If you do not know it, you are inexcusable for asserting it, and especially for persisting in the assertion after you have tried and failed to make the proof. You need to be told that persisting in a charge which one does not know to be true, is simply malicious slander.

Some of you admit that no Republican designedly aided or encouraged the Harper's Ferry affair, but still insist that our doctrines and declarations necessarily lead to such results. We do not believe it. We know we hold to no doctrine, and make no declaration, which were not held to and made by "our fathers who framed the Government under which we live." You never dealt fairly by us in relation to this affair. When it occurred, some important State elections were near at hand, and you were in evident glee with the belief that, by charging the blame upon us, you could get an advantage of us in those elections. The elections came, and your expectations were not quite fulfilled. Every Republican man knew that, as to himself at least, your charge was a slander, and he was not much inclined by it to cast his vote in your favor ... In your political contests among yourselves, each faction charges the other with sympathy with Black Republicanism; and then, to give point to the charge, defines Black Republicanism to simply be insurrection, blood and thunder among the slaves.

[…]

Your purpose, then, plainly stated, is that you will destroy the Government, unless you be allowed to construe and enforce the Constitution as you please, on all points in dispute between you and us. You will rule or ruin in all events.

This, plainly stated, is your language. Perhaps you will say the Supreme Court has decided the disputed Constitutional question in your favor. Not quite so. But waiving the lawyer's distinction between dictum and decision, the Court have decided the question for you in a sort of way. The Court have substantially said, it is your Constitutional right to take slaves into the federal territories, and to hold them there as property. When I say the decision was made in a sort of way, I mean it was made in a divided Court, by a bare majority of the Judges, and they not quite agreeing with one another in the reasons for making it; that it is so made as that its avowed supporters disagree with one another about its meaning, and that it was mainly based upon a mistaken statement of fact - the statement in the opinion that "the right of property in a slave is distinctly and expressly affirmed in the Constitution."

[…]

Under all these circumstances, do you really feel yourselves justified to break up this Government unless such a court decision as yours is, shall be at once submitted to as a conclusive and final rule of political action?

But you will not abide the election of a Republican president! In that supposed event, you say, you will destroy the Union; and then, you say, the great crime of having destroyed it will be upon us! That is cool. A highwayman holds a pistol to my ear, and mutters through his teeth, "Stand and deliver, or I shall kill you, and then you will be a murderer!"

To be sure, what the robber demanded of me - my money - was my own; and I had a clear right to keep it; but it was no more my own than my vote is my own; and the threat of death to me, to extort my money, and the threat of destruction to the Union, to extort my vote, can scarcely be distinguished in principle.

A few words now to Republicans. It is exceedingly desirable that all parts of this great Confederacy shall be at peace, and in harmony, one with another...Judging by all they say and do, and by the subject and nature of their controversy with us, let us determine, if we can, what will satisfy them.

Will they be satisfied if the Territories be unconditionally surrendered to them? We know they will not. In all their present complaints against us, the Territories are scarcely mentioned. Invasions and insurrections are the rage now. Will it satisfy them, if, in the future, we have nothing to do with invasions and insurrections? We know it will not. We so know, because we know we never had anything to do with invasions and insurrections; and yet this total abstaining does not exempt us from the charge and the denunciation.

The question recurs, what will satisfy them? Simply this: We must not only let them alone, but we must somehow, convince them that we do let them alone. This, we know by experience, is no easy task. We have been so trying to convince them from the very beginning of our organization, but with no success. In all our platforms and speeches we have constantly protested our purpose to let them alone; but this has had no tendency to convince them. Alike unavailing to convince them, is the fact that they have never detected a man of us in any attempt to disturb them.

These natural, and apparently adequate means all failing, what will convince them? This, and this only: cease to call slavery wrong, and join them in calling it right. And this must be done thoroughly - done in acts as well as in words. Silence will not be tolerated - we must place ourselves avowedly with them. Senator Douglas' new sedition law must be enacted and enforced, suppressing all declarations that slavery is wrong, whether made in politics, in presses, in pulpits, or in private. We must arrest and return their fugitive slaves with greedy pleasure. We must pull down our Free State constitutions. The whole atmosphere must be disinfected from all taint of opposition to slavery, before they will cease to believe that all their troubles proceed from us.

Lincoln had a keen understanding of the problem and he logically framed it in moral terms regarding the subject at hand, slavery. As it turns out this was not simply about slavery. It was about a deep and abiding tribal divide in the country that was originally defined by slavery but metatisized into something far beyond it, even then. Southern “exceptionalism” was always justified by its culture, which was assumed to be unique and unprecedented.

You can apply Lincoln’s arguments to any number of current issues and come out the same. There is an incoherence of principle that we see in every section of the republican party, the willingness to call to State’s Rights (their old rallying cry) when it suits them and a complete abdication of the principle once they hold federal power --- while still insisting that they believe in limited government! They blatantly misconstrue the plain meaning of long standing constitutional principles and federal policies (such as Brit Hume’s abject intellectual whorishness in the matter of FDR’s beliefs about social security privatization) and show irrational, rabid anger at any disagreement. They see Democrats as “traitors” fighting for the other side, just as the Southerners of the 1850’s accused the “Black Republicans” of fomenting slave revolts. They brook no compromise and instead repay those who would reach out to them with furious perfidy unless they show absolute fealty to every facet of the program. It is loyalty to “the cause”, however it is defined and however it changes in principle from day to day, that matters.

It’s clear to me that during the first 70 years of the country’s existence, the old South and the slave territories that came later (as defined in that famous map from 1860) created a culture based largely on their sense of the rest of the country’s, and the world’s, disapprobation. Within it grew what Michael Lind describes as its “cavalier” culture, which created an outsized sense of masculine ego and “fighting” mentality (along with an exaggerated caricature of male and female social roles.) Resentment was a foundation of the culture as slavery was hotly debated from the very inception and the division was based on what was always perceived by many as a moral issue. The character and morality of the south had always had to be defended. Hence a defensive culture was born.

The civil war and Jim Crow deepened it and the Lost Cause mythology romanticized it. The civil rights movement crystallized it. A two hundred year old resentment has created a permanent cultural divide.

This explains why the dependence on hyper-religiosity (and the cloak of social protection it provides) along with the fervent embrace of "moral values" is so important despite the obvious fact that Republicans are no more "moral" in any sense of the word than any other group of humans. It explains the utopian martial nationalism. And although that map shows that the regional divide is still quite relevant (and why the slave states fought for the Electoral College at the convention) it explains why this culture has now manifested itself as a matter of political identity throughout much of the country. Wherever resentment resides in the human character it can find a home in the Republican Party. This anger and frustration stems from a long nurtured sense of cultural besiegement, which they are finding can never be dealt with through the attainment of power alone. They seek approval.

Lincoln concluded the speech at the Cooper Union with this and I think it's relevant today to those of us who believe that our side is, as Lincoln thought then, the side of enlightened, moral progress:

Neither let us be slandered from our duty by false accusations against us, nor frightened from it by menaces of destruction to the Government nor of dungeons to ourselves. LET US HAVE FAITH THAT RIGHT MAKES MIGHT, AND IN THAT FAITH, LET US, TO THE END, DARE TO DO OUR DUTY AS WE UNDERSTAND IT.

This fight for the soul of America has been going on since the very beginning and it isn’t over yet. We can take heart in the fact that in every great battle thus far, the forces of equality and moral progress have won the day. It's never been easy.

Bush in Europe

I am, of course, put off by the whole cornpone act, but what really sets my teeth on edge is when Bush starts lecturing people on democracy. Put aside for a moment the question of the state of democracy in our own country these days. I am embarrassed by the arrogance of a guy who thinks Americans invented democracy, who has no awareness that every where he goes people have been struggling for hundreds of years with these issues.

And back to the sad state of democracy in our country, the brothers Michael Froomkin in Bush v. Facts and Dan Froomkin in the WaPo's White House Briefing chase down the facts about the Bush and Putin meeting.

catching up

here are a few things I have read that are worth passing on:

yesterday's Krugman: Kansas on My Mind

yesterday's Herbert: Thrown to the Wolves (just another ho-hum torture case)

Speaking of torture, this is a must-read from Newsweek:

Aboard Air CIA
The agency ran a secret charter service, shuttling detainees to interrogation facilities worldwide. Was it legal? What's next? A NEWSWEEK investigation

Good WaPo editorial from last week: Injustice, in Secret

And as for the war on terror, I didn't have a chance to comment on the testimony given last week by Porter Goss and others before Congress. Tom Englehardt has some choice analysis, especially about this most galling admission:

Goss looked far into the future; assured the senators that "tough decisions" needed to be made "about which haystacks deserve to be scrutinized for the needles that can hurt us most"; added that, in his testimony, he would "not attempt to cover everything that could go wrong in the year ahead" (whew!); and then, summoning every ounce of wisdom he possessed, passed the buck and covered his butt. His predictions more or less took in anything he could imagine that might conceivably happen on his watch -- including the possibility that "[i]t may be only a matter of time before al-Qa'ida or another group attempts to use chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear weapons." (Note the wonderful "may" in that sentence. In other words, it may -- or may not -- be only a matter of time.)

Oh, he did at least manage to say that George Bush's Iraq was now a terrorist-producing machine:

"The Iraq conflict, while not a cause of extremism, has become a cause for extremists… These jihadists who survive will leave Iraq experienced in and focused on acts of urban terrorism. They represent a potential pool of contacts to build transnational terrorist cells, groups, and networks in Saudi Arabia, Jordan and other countries."

Read the whole posting at TomDispatch. My favorite line: "...an administration that means to make every schoolchild but not a single leader 'accountable' for what they do." Lot's of info and links on Negroponte and other villains.

WPU's own Stephen Shalom has an important analysis of the "Salvador Option": Phoenix Rising in Iraq?

Hunter S. Thompson

I am late in posting this, but check out what Liz has sent:

amazing link...the obit he wrote for richard nixon, filled with links.

http://teaching.arts.usyd.edu.au/history/hsty3080/StudentWebSites/Nixon%20Obits/source9

I'll stick with terrorism

I have enough things to worry about. Or scare myself witless about. You, too? Then, definitely don't read the article in this week's New Yorker which, you should be thankful, is not available online (just this interview with the author). Thus, it doesn't really exist. Therefore, there really will be no such thing as an avian flu pandemic.

Oh, and don't read this article either: U.S. official sounds alarm on an avian flu epidemic

Cultural History of the Belly Button

I bet you have always wondered.... Admit it.

If so, read this brilliant article Navel Gazing

History Club trip to Hamilton Exhibit at NYHS

This comes to me from Anders:

There will be a trip to the New York Historical Society Saturday February 26, 2005 to see an Alexander Hamilton Exhibit. The History Club will meet in the Atrium Lobby at 8:45 and leave with either two or three cars that will carry ten to fifteen people. Nick Priessnitz and Mr. Nack have offered to use their cars for the trip, both of whom will be attending. The student fee is five dollars. I don't know how much it will cost for non students. The exhibit will be open from 10:00 AM to 6:00 PM and we will explore it for however long it takes. If you would like to invite yourself and/or others, I'd advise that you run the idea by Nick to see if there are any spots left (there should be). His e-mail address is deezroots@yahoo.com.

Here is the website for the exhibit Alexander Hamilton: The Man Who Made Modern America.

I encourage you all to check out also this critique (with links to numerous other articles) by Mike Wallace of the Gotham Center for New York City History.

I won't be going to the field trip but I am going to try to make it on Monday to this event:

Alexander Hamilton: The Man Who Made Modern America
Farewell Party
Monday, February 28, 2005

Due to tremendous demand, the New-York Historical Society will be open on Monday, February 28 for a final viewing of Alexander Hamilton: The Man Who Made Modern America. In celebration of the success of the Hamilton Exhibition, the Society will present an afternoon and evening of special programming.

All galleries will be open from 10:00am to 5:00pm

2:00pm
Alexander Hamilton: In Worlds Unknown, an original play by Don Winslow. "Don Winslow has given him flesh and blood again...Hamilton emerges as a brave, sometimes flawed but heroic man." Laurel Graeber (The New York Times, 12/31/04)

3:30pm
Symposium
Whose Hamilton? A Retrospective on Hamilton and His Legacies
Richard Brookhiser, Historian Curator, Alexander Hamilton: The Man Who Made Modern America and author, Alexander Hamilton: American
Carol Berkin, Professor of History at Baruch College and City University of New York Graduate Center
Richard Sylla, Henry Kaufman Professor of the History of Financial Institutions and Markets at the Stern School of Business at New York University

5:00pm
Alexander Hamilton: In Worlds Unknown, a repeat performance

5:45pm
Reception and Farewell
Throughout the day, the N-YHS Museum Store will offer a 25% discount on all Hamilton-related items.

Carol Berkin was one of my great grad school professors; she is brilliant and an exciting speaker.

Do you think Negroponte learned anything in Honduras that might be useful in his new job?

From Wikipedia:

John Negroponte
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
John D. Negroponte

John Dimitri Negroponte (born July 21, 1939) (pronounced neg-row-pontee) is the current United States ambassador to Iraq and the nominee as the first U.S. Director of National Intelligence. A career diplomat who served in the United States Foreign Service from 1960 to 1997, Negroponte served as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations from September of 2001 until June 2004. As ambassador to Iraq, Negroponte oversees the largest American diplomatic facility in the world.

He is a controversial figure because of his involvement in covert funding of the Contras in Nicaragua (see Iran-Contra Affair) and his alleged covering up of human rights abuses carried out by CIA-trained operatives in Honduras in the 1980s.

[...]

From 1981 to 1985 Negroponte was US ambassador to Honduras. During his tenure, he oversaw the growth of military aid to Honduras from $4 million to $77.4 million a year. At the time, Honduras was ruled by an elected but heavily militarily-influenced government. According to The New York Times, Negroponte was allegedly involved in "carrying out the covert strategy of the Reagan administration to crush the Sandinistas government in Nicaragua." Critics say that during his ambassadorship, human rights violations in Honduras became systematic.

Negroponte supervised the construction of the El Aguacate air base where Nicaraguan Contras were trained by the US, and which some critics say was used as a secret detention and torture center during the 1980s. Allegedly, in August 2001, excavations at the base discovered 185 corpses, including two Americans, who are thought to have been killed and buried at the site.

Records also suggest that a special intelligence unit (commonly referred to as a "death squad") of the Honduran armed forces, Battalion 3-16, possibly trained by the CIA and the Argentine military, may have kidnapped, tortured and killed hundreds of people, allegedly including US missionaries. Critics charge that Negroponte knew about these human rights violations and yet continued to collaborate with the Honduran military while lying to Congress.

[...]

When President Bush announced Negroponte's appointment to the UN shortly after coming to office, it was met with scattered protest. Some critics asserted that the administration intentionally arranged the deportation from the United States of several former Honduran death squad members who could have provided damaging testimony against Negroponte in his Senate confirmation hearings.

One of the deportees was General Luis Alonso Discua, founder of Battalion 3-16. In the preceding month, Washington had revoked the visa of Discua who was Honduras' Deputy Ambassador to the UN. Subsequently, Discua asserted to a left-wing website his portrayal of US support of Battalion 3-16. [1]

[...]

There is more, and links to other articles, so check it out.

Also, Americablog discusses and links to a fact-filled 1995 story from the Baltimore Sun.

This does not bode well...

Bush Names Iraq Envoy as Nation's 1st Intelligence Chief

President Bush on Thursday named John Negroponte as America's first national intelligence director, congressional sources said Thursday.

[...]

Negroponte's confirmation to the United Nations post was delayed a half-year mostly because of criticism of his record as the U.S. ambassador to Honduras from 1981 to 1985. In Honduras, he played a prominent role in assisting the Contras in Nicaragua in their war with the left-wing Sandinista government.

Human rights groups alleged that Negroponte acquiesced in human rights abuses by Honduran death squads funded and partly trained by the CIA. Negroponte testified during the hearings for the U.N. post that he did not believe death squads were operating in Honduras.

Media Whores

As Josh Marshall (among others) points out:

But if it turned out that any other president -- doesn't even have to be Clinton -- had a ringer 'reporter' stationed in the press pool to serve up soft-serve questions, and the same folks had already been caught paying off or buying or otherwise subborning other 'journalists' several times in recent months, AND evidence mounted that the ringer 'reporter' turned out to be a ringer 'reporter'/GI Joe-style male prostitute with what Sid Blumenthal rightly calls "enormous potential for blackmail", don't we figure that this would have ginned up a bit more big time press razzle-dazzle and gasps and awwws by now?

Or, put another way, as Wolcott did last week,

That so few major establishment papers have latched on to the unfolding Manchurian Beefcake story helps explain why major establishment newspapers are losing readers in droves, unable to spot a juicy scandal when it's doing a lapdance in front of their glazed eyes.

(Wolcott also links to Rigorous Intuition which reminds us of an earlier, similar scandal.)

Since I missed the Daily Show, and its webserver is overloaded right now, I will have to point you to a few excellent articles on the "Manchurian Beefcake" scandal:

Frank Rich, brilliant and eloquent as usual, The White House Stages Its 'Daily Show'

MoDo rises to her highest level, Bush's Barberini Faun

(If you want to see the original Barberini Faun, check out this site).

Sidney Blumenthal, in The Guardian, A hireling, a fraud and a prostitute: Bush's agent in the press corps has given spin a new level of meaning

The Christian Science Monitor weighs in with Bush administration blurs media boundary

And if you want all the salacious details, the dirt is dug and dished (with pix and linx) at Americablog and DailyKos.

Times' Editorial on torture

Read Self-Inflicted Wounds

Iran

A reader asks whether a nuclear Iran can be contained. That is, what does Iran want? You will find various opinions about this, or course; and it is often difficult to separate the political agendas of a commentator from his/her analysis. But this op-ed from yesterday's Boston Globe, gives one perspective:

Threats vs. diplomacy

By Ray Takeyh | February 14, 2005

AS IRAQI elections recede into memory, a new threat is emerging on the global horizon, namely the efforts by Iran to acquire nuclear weapons. Vice President Cheney has placed Iran at the ''top of the list" of the world's trouble spots while Secretary State Condoleezza Rice once more castigated Iran as an ''outpost of tyranny." Behind such strident rhetoric, there are ominous warnings of military strikes, with Seymour Hersh's New Yorker article describing preparations for such an attack. However, the only durable solution to Iran's nuclear imbroglio is a diplomatic one. To avert yet another proliferation crisis in the Middle East, Washington would be wise to join the on-going EU-Iran negotiations.

The question that is often neglected in such deliberations is why does Iran want nuclear weapons? Far from being an irrational state seeking nuclear arms as a means of intimidating and invading its neighbors, Iran wants the bomb for the purpose of deterrence against a range of external actors -- most notably today, the United States. At a time of massive projection of American power on all of Iran's periphery and the Bush administration's declared and persistent hostility to Iran, nuclear weapons make a degree of strategic sense. Washington's incendiary rhetoric and talk of military preparation only reinforce the cause of Iranian politicians who suggest the only manner of preserving Iran's territorial integrity and regime security is to acquire the ''strategic weapon."

However, all is not lost. Through an effective combination of carrots and sticks, the much-maligned Europeans have managed to obtain far-reaching concessions from Iran. It was, after all, EU diplomacy, not American belligerence that compelled Tehran to accept the Additional Protocol with its intrusive inspection regime and at least temporarily suspend attempts to enrich uranium.

Despite the effectiveness of EU diplomacy, so long as Iran's core security concerns are not ameliorated, it is unlikely to permanently dispense with its nuclear program. The critical player remains the United States, whose military borders Iran today and has displaced two of Iran's neighbors. The Europeans and the international community have been vocal in their call for constructive US participation if the negotiations are to succeed. The French Foreign Minister, Michel Barnier, conceded this point, stressing, ''Without the United States, we run the risk of failure." In a similar vein, Mohammad El Baradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, noted, ''This is not a process that is going to be solved by Europeans alone. The United States needs to be engaged."

In an ironic twist of events, should the United States embrace the diplomatic option, it is likely to have receptive interlocutors in Iran. An important and influential segment of Iran's ruling elite is seemingly embracing a variation of the North Korean strategy, namely using the nuclear card as a means of extracting security and economic concessions from the United States. The economic dimension is particularly important as Tehran has grudgingly realized that tense relations with the United States preclude an effective integration into the global economy and access to institutions such as the World Trade Organization. The path of Iran's economic rejuvenation may yet entail a degree of restraint on the nuclear issue.

The new Iranian strategy was dangled by Iran's powerful secretary to the Supreme National Security Council, Hassan Rowhani, when he stipulated, ''If the United States is after solving the nuclear problem, definitely there would be a way." Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi also noted, ''If negotiations are on the basis of equality and mutual respect in the same way we are talking to Europeans now, there is no reason not to talk to others." The significance of these declarations is that there exists in Iran's official circles a propensity to .

The Bush administration is correct in noting the dangers of proliferation and the importance of preventing Iran from crossing the nuclear threshold. However, Washington's strategy of inflammatory rhetoric, threats, and refusal to join the European states in crafting a viable diplomatic package undermines it own declared objectives. The best manner of dissuading Tehran is to confront it with an international consensus and rewards that it will gain should it comply with its treaty obligations and the sanctions it will face should it prove recalcitrant. As Iran charts its nuclear course, it is imaginative diplomacy, not unilateral threats of force, that may succeed in getting it to abandon its nuclear ambitions.

Ray Takeyh is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

A report from Reuters last week should also give us pause when listening to the neocons threaten Iran:

U.S. intelligence on Iran seen lacking - experts

WASHINGTON, Feb 9 (Reuters) - U.S. intelligence is unlikely to know much about Iran's contentious nuclear program and could be vulnerable to manipulation for political ends, former intelligence officers and other experts say.

Amid an escalating war of words between Washington and Tehran, the experts say they doubt the CIA has been able to recruit agents with access to the small circle of clerics who control the Islamic Republic's national security policy.

Serious doubts also surround the effectiveness of an expanded intelligence role for the Pentagon, which former intelligence officials say is preparing covert military forays to look for evidence near suspected weapons facilities.

"I will be highly remarkably surprised if the United States has (intelligence) assets in the organs of power," said Ray Takeyh, an Iran expert at the Council on Foreign Relations.

"They don't even know who the second-tier Revolutionary Guards are," he added.

Doubts about U.S. intelligence on Iran have arisen amid talk of possible military strikes by the United States or Israel against suspected nuclear weapons facilities.

Former chief weapons inspector David Kay, the first to declare U.S. intelligence on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq a failure, warned that the Bush administration is again relying on evidence from dissidents, as it did in prewar Iraq.

"The tendency is to force the intelligence to support the political argument," Kay said in a CNN interview on Wednesday.

He added that the CIA has yet to give U.S. policymakers an up-to-date comprehensive intelligence assessment on Iran.

NATIONAL INTELLIGENCE ESTIMATE

"We're talking about military action against Iran and we don't have a national intelligence estimate that shows what we do know, what we don't know and the basis for what we think we know," Kay said.

Problems arose for U.S. intelligence in Iran a quarter of a century ago after the Islamic revolution, when Washington cut diplomatic ties following the seizure of the American embassy by student radicals.

Richard Perle, the influential neoconservative thinker who was a driving force behind the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, said intelligence suffered a major setback in Iran with the arrest of about 40 agents in the mid-1990s.

"As I understand it, virtually our entire network in Iran was wiped out," Perle recently told the House of Representatives intelligence committee.

"I think we're in very bad shape in Iran," he said.

Some intelligence analysts argue a preemptive strike is the only way to delay Iranian nuclear-weapons production, despite the Bush administration's public emphasis on diplomacy.

Tehran denies U.S. charges that it is seeking nuclear weapons and has warned that a U.S. or Israeli strike would only accelerate its legal uranium enrichment activities.

U.S. intelligence has had a huge credibility problem over reports that prewar Iraq possessed large stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons and was pursuing nuclear arms.

The assertions were a main justification for the 2003 U.S. invasion, but no such weapons have been found.

"If U.S. intelligence was bad in Iraq, and it was atrocious, it's probably going to be worse vis-a-vis Iran," said Richard Russell, a former CIA analyst who teaches at the National Defense University.

The task of recruiting useful agents in Iran faces immense hurdles posed by a secretive decision-making hierarchy and widespread mistrust of the U.S. government, experts said.

"People have worked their whole lives on the 'Iran problem' and they'll finish their lives with a huge 'A' for effort and probably a 'C' in terms of recruited human sources," said a former senior intelligence official who asked not to be named.

Not even covert forays into Iran by U.S. military units would likely bear much fruit, the former official added.

"They're never going to find anything out of substance except that there's some mysterious place in the desert with barbed wire and mines around it," he said.

Left vs. Right in public discourse -- Part 2

I have been wanting to write more on this topic, but don't have a lot of time. So let me just point you in a few directions.

Tom Tomorrow's This Modern World touches on a point I made last time about the right wing's sense of victimization (gotta watch the ad at Salon). Very funny.

Digby is all over this issue every day, and a posting last week discussed what Matt Yglesias calls the "growing Putinization" of the GOP and what David Neiwert calls "pseudo-fascism." Digby has a lot of interesting and insightful analysis, as usual, but he also quotes and links to this article from the American Conservative:

Hunger for Dictatorship
War to export democracy may wreck our own.
by Scott McConnell
February 14, 2005 Issue
Copyright © 2005 The American Conservative

I urge you all to read this article. It comes from the antiwar right (did you know there was such as thing? check out www.antiwar.com) and thus cannot be dismissed as the ravings of a Michael Moore acolyte. You will have to dismiss it as the ravings of a Pat Buchanon clone instead!

Read Digby's comments, too. He concludes with these words from the historian Fritz Stern:

...the rise of National Socialism was neither inevitable nor accidental. It did have deep roots, but the most urgent lesson to remember is that it could have been stopped. This is but one of the many lessons contained in modern German history, lessons that should not be squandered in cheap and ignorant analogies. A key lesson is that civic passivity and willed blindness were the preconditions for the triumph of National Socialism, which many clearheaded Germans recognized at the time as a monstrous danger and ultimate nemesis.

We who were born at the end of the Weimar Republic and who witnessed the rise of National Socialism—left with that all-consuming, complex question: how could this horror have seized a nation and corrupted so much of Europe?—should remember that even in the darkest period there were individuals who showed active decency, who, defying intimidation and repression, opposed evil and tried to ease suffering. I wish these people would be given a proper European memorial—not to appease our conscience but to summon the courage of future generations. Churchmen, especially Protestant clergy, shared his hostility to the liberal-secular state and its defenders, and they, too, were filled with anti-Semitic doctrine.

Allow me a few remarks not about the banality of evil but about its triumph in a deeply civilized country. After the Great War and Germany’s defeat, conditions were harsh and Germans were deeply divided between moderates and democrats on the one hand and fanatic extremists of the right and the left on the other. National Socialists portrayed Germany as a nation that had been betrayed or stabbed in the back by socialists and Jews; they portrayed Weimar Germany as a moral-political swamp; they seized on the Bolshevik-Marxist danger, painted it in lurid colors, and stoked people’s fear in order to pose as saviors of the nation. In the late 1920s a group of intellectuals known as conservative revolutionaries demanded a new volkish authoritarianism, a Third Reich. Richly financed by corporate interests, they denounced liberalism as the greatest, most invidious threat, and attacked it for its tolerance, rationality and cosmopolitan culture. These conservative revolutionaries were proud of being prophets of the Third Reich—at least until some of them were exiled or murdered by the Nazis when the latter came to power. Throughout, the Nazis vilified liberalism as a semi-Marxist-Jewish conspiracy and, with Germany in the midst of unprecedented depression and immiseration, they promised a national rebirth.

Twenty years ago, I wrote about “National Socialism as Temptation,” about what it was that induced so many Germans to embrace the terrifying specter. There were many reasons, but at the top ranks Hitler himself, a brilliant populist manipulator who insisted and probably believed that Providence had chosen him as Germany’s savior, that he was the instrument of Providence, a leader who was charged with executing a divine mission. God had been drafted into national politics before, but Hitler’s success in fusing racial dogma with a Germanic Christianity was an immensely powerful element in his electoral campaigns. Some people recognized the moral perils of mixing religion and politics, but many more were seduced by it. It was the pseudo-religious transfiguration of politics that largely ensured his success, notably in Protestant areas.

German moderates and German elites underestimated Hitler, assuming that most people would not succumb to his Manichean unreason; they didn’t think that his hatred and mendacity could be taken seriously. They were proven wrong. People were enthralled by the Nazis’ cunning transposition of politics into carefully staged pageantry, into flag-waving martial mass. At solemn moments, the National Socialists would shift from the pseudo-religious invocation of Providence to traditional Christian forms: In his first radio address to the German people, twenty-four hours after coming to power, Hitler declared, “The National Government will preserve and defend those basic principles on which our nation has been built up. They regard Christianity as the foundation of our national morality and the family as the basis of national life.”

Things I have read recently

From History News Network, more on the parallels (and not) between Woodrow Wilson and George W. Bush:

Woodrow Wilson's Burden, Bush's--And Ours
By Robert S. McElvaine

Good article on evolution:

Is Evolution "Just a Theory"?
By Edward J. Larson

Interesting historical overview of the power of images:

Just How Big an Impact Do Pictures of War Have on Public Opinion?
By David D. Perlmutter

And, originally from the Chronicle of Higher Education, an excellent review of Slavery and the Making of America:

America: Made and Unmade by Slavery
by David W. Blight, Yale University

On truth and bullshit in the modern world

A couple of interesting articles in today's Times discussing books that tackle the possibility of arriving at "Truth" in the modern world.

A Princeton Philosopher's Unprintable Book Title can be printed here: On Bullshit.

The opening paragraph of the 67-page essay is a model of reason and composition, repeatedly disrupted by that single obscenity:

"One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much [bull]. Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his share. But we tend to take the situation for granted. Most people are rather confident of their ability to recognize [bull] and to avoid being taken in by it. So the phenomenon has not aroused much deliberate concern, nor attracted much sustained inquiry."

The book was written nearly twenty years ago, before the Bush Administration, believe it or not!Just where does Scotty McClellan fit into this schema?

"It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth," Mr. Frankfurt writes. "A person who lies is thereby responding to the truth, and he is to that extent respectful of it."

The bull artist, on the other hand, cares nothing for truth or falsehood. The only thing that matters to him is "getting away with what he says," Mr. Frankfurt writes. An advertiser or a politician or talk show host given to [bull] "does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it," he writes. "He pays no attention to it at all."

And this makes him, Mr. Frankfurt says, potentially more harmful than any liar, because any culture and he means this culture rife with [bull] is one in danger of rejecting "the possibility of knowing how things truly are." It follows that any form of political argument or intellectual analysis or commercial appeal is only as legitimate, and true, as it is persuasive. There is no other court of appeal.

The reader is left to imagine a culture in which institutions, leaders, events, ethics feel improvised and lacking in substance.

Tackling the problem from an entirely different angle is this review of a new book on Godol:

Truth, Incompleteness and the Gödelian Way
By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN

Relativity. Incompleteness. Uncertainty.

Is there a more powerful modern Trinity? These reigning deities proclaim humanity's inability to thoroughly explain the world. They have been the touchstones of modernity, their presence an unwelcome burden at first, and later, in the name of postmodernism, welcome company.

Their rule has also been affirmed by their once-sworn enemy: science. Three major discoveries in the 20th century even took on their names. Albert Einstein's famous Theory (Relativity), Kurt Gödel's famous Theorem (Incompleteness) and Werner Heisenberg's famous Principle (Uncertainty) declared that, henceforth, even science would be postmodern.

Or so it has seemed. But as Rebecca Goldstein points out in her elegant new book, "Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel" (Atlas Books; Norton), of these three figures, only Heisenberg might have agreed with this characterization.

His uncertainty principle specified the inability to be too exact about small particles. "The idea of an objective real world whose smallest parts exist objectively," he wrote, "is impossible." Oddly, his allegiance to an absolute state, Nazi Germany, remained unquestioned even as his belief in absolute knowledge was quashed.

Einstein and Gödel had precisely the opposite perspective. Both fled the Nazis, both ended up in Princeton, N.J., at the Institute for Advanced Study, and both objected to notions of relativism and incompleteness outside their work. They fled the politically absolute, but believed in its scientific possibility.

And therein lies Ms. Goldstein's tale. From the late 1930's until Einstein's death in 1955, Einstein and Gödel, the physicist and the mathematician, would take long walks, finding companionship in each other's ideas. Late in his life, in fact, Einstein said he would go to his office just to have the "privilege" of walking with Gödel. What was their common ground? In Ms. Goldstein's interpretation, they both felt marginalized, "disaffected and dismissed in profoundly similar ways." Both thought that their work was being invoked to support unacceptable positions.

A day without torture is like ...

Seems barely a day goes by without a dribble of info about our nation's continuing shameful descent into barbarism -- the condoning and ignoring of torture by our citizenry.

Yesterday's Times article Detainee Says He Was Tortured While in U.S. Custody tells one story.

This article from last week's New Yorker provides an excellent overview of the story:

OUTSOURCING TORTURE
by JANE MAYER
The secret history of America’s “extraordinary rendition” program.
Issue of 2005-02-14
Posted 2005-02-07

The article specifically highlights the way our government hands over suspects to other regimes who will do the torturing for us.

The Senate intelligence committee might hold hearings, says this article: Senate May Open Inquiry Into C.I.A.'s Handling of Suspects but I am not holding my breath.

A review of of The Torture Papers is here. It begins:

As soon as the repugnant photos of torture at Abu Ghraib prison - the pyramid of naked prisoners, the groveling man on a dog leash, the hooded man with outstretched arms - hit the airwaves and newspaper stands, they became iconic images: gruesome symbols of what went wrong with the war and postwar occupation of Iraq, and for many in the Muslim world, the very embodiment of their worst fears about American hegemony.

They have become a potent propaganda tool for terrorists, and at the same time, they remain so repellant and perverse that they have served to bolster the "few bad apples" argument - the suggestion not only that the photographed abuses were perpetrated by "a kind of 'Animal House' on the night shift," in one investigator's words, but also that the larger problem was confined, as the Bush administration has asserted, to a few soldiers acting on their own.

"The Torture Papers," the new compendium of government memos and reports chronicling the road to Abu Ghraib and its aftermath, definitively blows such arguments to pieces. In fact, the book provides a damning paper trail that reveals, in uninflected bureaucratic prose, the roots that those terrible images had in decisions made at the highest levels of the Bush administration - decisions that started the torture snowball rolling down the slippery slope of precedent by asserting that the United States need not abide by the Geneva Conventions in its war on terror.

Many of the documents here have been published before (most notably in Mark Danner's incisive 2004 volume "Torture and Truth"), but "The Torture Papers" contains some material not collected in earlier books. More important, the minutely detailed chronological narrative embodied in this volume, which has appeared piecemeal in other publications, possesses an awful and powerful cumulative weight. As one of its editors. Karen J. Greenberg, executive director of the Center on Law and Security at the New York University School of Law, observes, it leaves the reader with "a clear sense of the systematic decision to alter the use of methods of coercion and torture that lay outside of accepted and legal norms."

The book is necessary, if grueling, reading for anyone interested in understanding the back story to those terrible photos from Saddam Hussein's former prison, and abuses at other American detention facilities.

As this book makes clear, one of the premises that would inform many of the administration's decisions was an amped-up view of executive power - the notion, as Deputy Assistant Attorney General John C. Yoo put it shortly after 9/11 - that "the power of the president is at its zenith under the Constitution when the President is directing military operations of the armed forces," and that he has the authority "to take whatever actions he deems appropriate to pre-empt or respond to terrorist threats from new quarters" whether or not such entities can be "demonstrably linked to the September 11 incidents." Indeed, Justice Department memos suggested that in a war like the present one, presidential power can override both congressional laws and "customary international law": in short, that the president can choose to suspend America's obligation to comply with the Geneva Conventions if he wishes, authorize torture or detain prisoners without a hearing.

Finally, this letter regarding a review in last week's Times Book Review makes the link to Randolph Bourne that I have been talking about in my classes lately:

Of Terror and Torture
To the Editor:
Andrew Sullivan's powerful review of two books on torture (Jan. 23) makes clear the extent of responsibility for violations of the Geneva Convention and basic human rights. His admission that those like himself who supported the war for humanitarian reasons must share some of the blame is courageous. In this context it is worth remembering Randolph Bourne's devastating reply to intellectuals who, won over by Woodrow Wilson's idealistic rhetoric, supported American entry into World War I. In the illusory hope of promoting their own ''liberal purposes,'' Bourne wrote, intellectuals had allied themselves with ''the least democratic forces in American life.'' Those forces, not the humanitarian intellectuals, he predicted, would determine the war's conduct and consequences. Bourne's warning was vindicated when the Wilson administration unleashed the greatest assault on civil liberties in American history. The lesson — that the character of those who hold power determines how a war is conducted — remains valid today.
ERIC FONER

The next letter, however, points out that Sullivan's switch from pro-war to anti-torture is hardly as courageous as Foner generously contends:

To the Editor:
I am grateful to the Book Review for according such space and prominence to the review of my book ''Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror,'' and to Andrew Sullivan for the seriousness with which he treats the issue of torture. I wonder if I might make two comments.

First, Sullivan several times refers to documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union, which include reports by F.B.I. officials who witnessed torture of detainees at Guantánamo, some of it months after the Abu Ghraib photographs were made public. He notes, rightly, that these are ''not provided in Danner's compilation,'' but neglects to add that this is so because the documents were not released until two months after the book was published. Readers will find a link to the A.C.L.U. documents, which are part of a river of evidence that can be expected to grow in volume and force during the next few years, at my Web site, markdanner.com.

Second, Sullivan, after solemnly regretting how ''political polarization'' might have contributed to the relative silence that has greeted the American turn toward torture, makes the observation that ''most of those who made the most fuss about these incidents — like Mark Danner or Seymour Hersh — were dedicated opponents of the war in the first place, and were eager to use this scandal to promote their agendas.''

For my part — Hersh is well able to speak for himself — the first half of this statement is quite true. I thought invading and occupying Iraq a foolish and self-defeating step for my country to take and I said so, publicly and repeatedly. Simply put, I believed that the threat posed by Iraq to the United States was greatly exaggerated, and that the risks of invading and occupying that country were greatly understated. If these arguments constitute an ''agenda,'' events have sadly proved both of them true, with no help from me.

But if there is any evidence, beyond Sullivan's imputation of motive to me, that I was ''eager to use this scandal to promote'' my agenda — that is, to discredit the war — he does not offer it. In the thousands of words he writes I can find no criticism of bias, no fingerpointing at any exaggeration in the text or at any error of fact. Indeed, since Sullivan spends most of his review essentially restating as his own arguments I make in the book, one cannot escape the implication that when I write about torture and related issues it must be in order to discredit the war but when Sullivan writes about them he is simply performing a brave act of conscience. If there is an agenda being promoted here, it is a transparently self-serving one, and it is a pity Sullivan let it mar an otherwise eloquent essay.

I have been reporting on atrocities and human rights abuses for more than two decades, in Central America, Haiti and the Balkans, among other places. In some of those places, such as the Balkans, I believed that the United States should intervene; in others, such as Iraq, I believed that it should not. But I did not use massacres in Bosnia to promote my ''agenda'' any more than I did torture in Iraq.

As I hope I made clear in my book, I believe that the damage the United States is doing to itself by torturing prisoners transcends the Iraq war, and that the consequences will long outlive it. On this critical point Sullivan and I appear to agree.
MARK DANNER New York

Danner is right that many who came to the anti-war position late still blame the early war opponents for ideological or partisan Bush-hatred and don't allow that most of those who opposed the war from the get-go had ample reason to suspect and distrust.

Napster-to-Go

It seems to be what I have been waiting the last fifteen years for -- a portable device that holds any music I want. I can't exactly call up any song whenever I want; I have to download it. And the song selection is limited to what is currently being licensed -- thus, no Led Zeppelin, Jethro Tull, Smashing Pumpkins; Neil Young you have to buy, not borrow; lots of gaps in old punk and indie labels; and so on.

But I am pretty excited by my Napster-to-Go trial. Using my daughter's little Dell Pocket DJ, which is also darn cool.

This review -- Math Is Done: Napster To Go Doesn't Add Up -- from the Washington Post doesn't really sing the praises of the service; the author resents that he has to keep paying for the songs for the rest of his life. But I figure at $15/month it is worth it. I am listening to all sorts of music that I only have on vinyl and tape, as well as lots of new stuff that I can't get on the radio and I would never be able to afford if I had to buy all the cds. I have been using Rhapsody for the past year which provides the same service, but without the to-go feature.

Anybody have any opinions or advice?

Information Literacy

Geoffrey Nunberg in today's Times: Teaching Students to Swim in the Online Sea. A must-read for all history students, especially those in my Historical Methods course.

[update: link fixed]

Friedman on energy policy

Check out Tom Friedman's column today, No Mullah Left Behind. Some excerpts (with my highlighting in bold):

By adamantly refusing to do anything to improve energy conservation in America, or to phase in a $1-a-gallon gasoline tax on American drivers, or to demand increased mileage from Detroit's automakers, or to develop a crash program for renewable sources of energy, the Bush team is - as others have noted - financing both sides of the war on terrorism. We are financing the U.S. armed forces with our tax dollars, and, through our profligate use of energy, we are generating huge windfall profits for Saudi Arabia, Iran and Sudan, where the cash is used to insulate the regimes from any pressure to open up their economies, liberate their women or modernize their schools, and where it ends up instead financing madrassas, mosques and militants fundamentally opposed to the progressive, pluralistic agenda America is trying to promote. Now how smart is that?

The neocon strategy may have been necessary to trigger reform in Iraq and the wider Arab world, but it will not be sufficient unless it is followed up by what I call a "geo-green" strategy.

As a geo-green, I believe that combining environmentalism and geopolitics is the most moral and realistic strategy the U.S. could pursue today. Imagine if President Bush used his bully pulpit and political capital to focus the nation on sharply lowering energy consumption and embracing a gasoline tax.

What would that buy? It would buy reform in some of the worst regimes in the world, from Tehran to Moscow. It would reduce the chances that the U.S. and China are going to have a global struggle over oil - which is where we are heading. It would help us to strengthen the dollar and reduce the current account deficit by importing less crude. It would reduce climate change more than anything in Kyoto. It would significantly improve America's standing in the world by making us good global citizens. It would shrink the budget deficit. It would reduce our dependence on the Saudis so we could tell them the truth. (Addicts never tell the truth to their pushers.) And it would pull China away from its drift into supporting some of the worst governments in the world, like Sudan's, because it needs their oil. Most important, making energy independence our generation's moon shot could help inspire more young people to go into science and engineering, which we desperately need.

Sadly, the Bush team won't even consider this. It prefers cruise missiles to cruise controls. We need a grass-roots movement. Where are college kids these days? I would like to see every campus in America demand that its board of trustees disinvest from every U.S. auto company until they improve their mileage standards. Every college town needs to declare itself a "Hummer-free zone." You want to drive a gas-guzzling Humvee? Go to Iraq, not our campus. And an idea from my wife, Ann: free parking anywhere in America for anyone driving a hybrid car.

But no, President Bush has a better project: borrowing another trillion dollars, which will make us that much more dependent on countries like China and Saudi Arabia that hold our debt - so that you might, if you do everything right and live long enough, get a few more bucks out of your Social Security account.

The president's priorities are totally nuts.

Left vs. Right in public discourse -- Part 1

The Daou Report is a nicely designed blog that links to left, right, and mainstream blogs and news reports. It has just hooked up with Salon, so you will now have to subscribe or watch a commercial to access it, but it is a good place to see the range of topics and perspectives on a day-to-day basis.

One of the differences I notice between the left and right today is the way they approach politics and issues. It may surprise none of my readers that I find the left -- in general -- to be more responsible, thoughtful, and reasonable, while the right indulges in ideology, name-calling, victimhood, violence and even eliminationist rhetoric -- to the detriment of our republic. But let me give some specific recent examples.

First of all, I am not saying that the left is less partisan. And I am not saying that there are not name-callers, simpletons, charlatans, even idiots on the left. Two of my favorites, Digby and Wolcott, specialize in snarky vituperation. But for every obscure academic like Ward churchill on the left, there are numerous mainstream celebrity "journalists" and pundits like O'Reilly, Limbaugh, Coulter and Savage -- people who do not advance arguments based upon reasoned examination of facts but shout, insult, and threaten those they disagree with.

Check out, for example, the Center for American Progress if you want to get a sense of what liberals do when they oppose Bush administration policies. You can get a daily email from them that assembles facts, analyzes facts, draws conclusions, and proposes policies. You wont find anyone calling the opposition poopyheads or traitors.

One thing the rightwing blowhards share in common as well -- something I hope to get back to in more detail later -- is a sense of victimization. Going back to Nixon's "silent majority" and Falwell's "moral majority," the right has often claimed itself to be victimized by the pointy-headed liberal establishment. I think alot of the appeal of the right, especially for young people, is this sense of being an underdog, or taking an unpopular position, of "sticking it to the man" -- of being a rebel against the mainstream -- while simultaneously claiming to represent the oppressed mainstream. While decrying, especially, African-Americans' sense of victimization, the right has appropriated that -- white males as the besieged minority under attack from radical feminists, affirmative actioners, gay libbers, etc.

How does the right wing advance its agenda? Well, if you are president, you travel on the taxpayer's dollar to prescreened audiences to dishonestly sell the dismantling of the most sucessful government social program ever. You hold press conferences and when the questions get too tough you call on a plant -- no, I don't mean vegetation -- a guy who is not an accredited journalist (which all other White House reporters must be), who uses an alias, and who, as of today, seems to have quit after leftwing bloggers undercovered his true identity and partisan (Republican) credentials (see also here and here). If you are a bigtime newspaper pundit, you misuse other people's scholarship to support a partisan agenda. If you are the RNC, you threaten to sue those who dare to oppose the President's Social Security agenda. (I guess some lawsuits are more frivolous than others.)

And, I haven't even waded through the sewers of rightwing radio, tv and blogs. I don't have the stomach for it, nor the time. Nor, for that matter, the inclination. I know some lefties like to troll through the right's media and search for the most egregious violations of decency and reason. And I suppose someone has to do it. Media Matters has been doing a fantastic job of monitoring and factchecking the right. But I find the whole enterprise often makes the battles only personal; and I believe the right thrives on reducing everything to the personal -- hating Michael Moore for being a boorish oaf rather than having to wrestle with the uncomfortable truths that his film does present (whatever its faults).

Don't forget Clinton, Clinton, and Clinton. Each one the subject of the most sordid hatred that sucks up all the oxygen for miles around. After indulging in what in 1984 is called the "two-minutes-hate" there is no time or energy left to actually rationally assess policies, even if one were so inclined. So I don't think that the left is motivated by "Bush-hatred" to the degree that right wingers were and still are riled up by the Clintons. Sure, there is some of that. But I truly believe that most of us on the left deplore what has happened to our country and world in the past four years, and fear what will happen during the second term. That, at least, is what I am fighting about.

More later...

Advice for the Democrats from Friedman

Tom Friedman has spent the better part of the past three years offering the Bush administration unsolicited -- and unheeded -- advice. Today, as usual, he hits half the mark, but misses the other half. His advice to Democrats is, I think, well-founded. But when he tells them that the development of a social contract in Iraq will hasten Iran's democratization -- so "Just be patient" -- he is speaking to the wrong party. He needs to continue to speak to the party in power and to stop thinking that they are acting on the same principles as he is.

Kirkuk

Recently in my U.S. as Global Power class we spoke briefly of the situation with the Kurds in Kirkuk. An article and an op-ed worth reading in the Times:

Ballot Strength Leads Kurds to Press a Role as Deal Makers
By EDWARD WONG
Published: February 9, 2005

And:

The Coming Clash Over Kirkuk
By SANDRA MACKEY
Published: February 9, 2005

Tonight on PBS: Slavery and the Making of America

Don't forget to watch Slavery and the Making of America on PBS tonight at 9.

The Times review:

A Harrowing Look at a Murderous Institution
By NED MARTEL
Published: February 9, 2005

The Women Behind the Myths

Lot's of good stuff in the Times today (and I haven't even got to the op-ed page yet).

In my Historical Methods class we are studing popular culture this semester. Last night we were talking about questions of interpretation -- understanding the various ways pop culture both reflects and influences other social trends and issues. Today's Times has an interesting article on how mythologies surrounding Marilyn Monroe and the Bronte sisters have proliferated over the years:

The Women Behind the Myths
By CARYN JAMES
Published: February 9, 2005

History and National Identity -- Colonialism

Interesting article in the Times today about a new exhibit in Belgium on their colonial experience in the Congo:

Art Show Forces Belgium to Ask Hard Questions About Its Colonial Past
By ALAN RIDING
Published: February 9, 2005

Global warming: a threat to world security?

Nice roundup of recent articles on global warming from the Christian Science Monitor:

Global warming: a threat to world security?
With Kyoto starting next week, a bevy of experts and scientists warn of future conflict over disappearing resources.
By Tom Regan | csmonitor.com

Richard Clarke on the war on terror

Richard Clarke, former counterterrorism advisor to President's Clinton and Bush, has a new (weekly?) column called "The Security Advisor" in the New York Times Magazine. Here is his inaugural effort to explain in brief what the battle is about:

No Returns
By RICHARD A. CLARKE
Published: February 6, 2005

Why does David Kay hate America?

David Kay, the head of the Iraq Survey Group appointed by President Bush to find WMD in Iraq, warns us to be wary of the rush to war with Iran:

Let's Not Make the Same Mistakes in Iran
By David Kay
Monday, February 7, 2005; Page A21

In the current New York Review of Books, review of Kenneth Pollack's new book The Persian Puzzle goes into great detail about the Iranian nuclear situation:

Bush, Iran & the Bomb
By Christopher de Bellaigue

Michelle Chen on Ground Zero -- Part 3

Michelle writes:

Hey everyone. Here is the final installment in the WTC article series, which coincides nicely with initiatives in Congress right now to provide medical support for Ground Zero residents and workers. Read it in good health:

Lingering Threats: Contamination May Still Lurk Near Ground Zero
Part Three of Three
by Michelle Chen

Opposition to Social Security

A nice historical overview on the longstanding Republican project to end Social Security is here.

More Social Security

On my brief list of reliable commentators on Social Security, I left off Atrios and Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo who has been following things very closely. Or you can just read the President's own words over at Hullabaloo.

Marion Thompson Wright Lecture Series @ Rutgers-Newark

Richard Kearney sends along this notice: "This looks like a first-rate program and a chance to meet some major contemporary historians....right down the road at my alma mater Rutgers-Newark. And it's FREE too."

One of New Jersey's oldest and most highly esteemed Black History Month events, the Marion Thompson Wright Lecture Series, will mark its 25th anniversary by examining evolutionary changes in the study and scholarship of African-American history. Co-sponsored by the Institute on Ethnicity, Culture and the Modern Experience, the Federated Dept. of History, Rutgers-Newark/ New Jersey Institute of Technology; and the New Jersey Historical Commission, Dept. of State, this free lecture series will take place at the Paul Robeson Campus Center on the Rutgers-Newark campus, Friday, Feb. 18, 4 p.m. to 8 p.m., and Saturday, Feb. 19, 9:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m.

The event features keynote speaker Dr. James Oliver Horton, president of the Organization of American Historians and the Benjamin Banneker Professor of American Studies and History at George Washington University. His address, "A Different Story: The Meaning of African American History for America," will headline Saturday's agenda.

Eminent historians, including Professors P. Sterling Stuckey of the University of California, Riverside, Nell Irvin Painter of Princeton University and David Roediger of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, will kick-off the two-day program on Friday, February 18, at 4 p.m. with a panel discussion, "Reflections on the Evolution of African American Historical Scholarship." Professor Adrienne Petty of Rutgers-Newark will moderate the panel, which will be followed by a wine and cheese reception, featuring the Bradford Hayes Trio.

Saturday's lecture program will continue in the afternoon with Cornell University Professor Margaret Washington, the award-winning author of "A Peculiar People: Slave Religion and Community Culture Among the Gullahs," sharing her expertise on slave religion, culture and the social and political dimensions of African American cultural expressions. Michael Gomez of New York University will follow her with a discussion on "Diasporic Africa in Slavery and Freedom."

Special panel discussions will offer an insightful look into "Black Beauty Parlors and the Political Maturation of 20th Century Women," by Professor Tiffany Gill of the University of Texas and an assessment of the impact of "African American Hollywood Stars of the 1930's" by Dr. Miriam Petty, the 2004-2005 Geraldine R. Dodge Fellow at Rutgers-Newark. And, Professor Anastasia C. Curwood of Boston College will examine "The Private Lives of Black Americans during the Life and Times of E. Franklin Frazier, 1894-1962."

For more information, email ethnicity@andromeda.rutgers.edu or call 973/353-1871, ext.11.
--
Marisa Pierson
Program Coordinator
Institute on Ethnicity, Culture, and the Modern Experience (IECME)
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
337 Conklin Hall, 175 University Ave.
Newark, NJ 07102
Phone: 973.353.1871 x11
Fax: 973.353.5218
E-Mail: mpierson@andromeda.rutgers.edu
ethnicity.rutgers.edu

Global Warming

Tom Englehardt complains that Americans are so in denial about global warming that even his readership goes down when he discusses the subject. Prove him wrong by checking out Dropping in on the Apocalypse.

Ward Churchill

Fox News viewers have no doubt heard of Ward Churchill. If you haven't, a simple Google, NY Times, or Nexis search should tell you more than you want to know. I haven't weighed in because I don't have anything particularly insightful to add. So I will point you to a few good writings on the topic.

Timothy Burke at his fantastic and thoughtful blog Easily Distracted captures exactly my own sense of frustration with this kind of tiresome and predictable media hokum. But he also takes Churchill to task for being a slopping scholar. See Off the Hook

Kevin Drum at Washington Monthly does a nice job showing how the story gained media traction -- a formula that has been played out countless times in the past 15 years.

Digby in Witnessing History gives his usual acerbic and insightful take on the whole story, linking it clearly to broader issues in our culture and politics.

The folks at Cliopatria the blog at History News Network have been doing a good job following the story.

I was appalled by his remarks and appalled that his visit to Hamilton College was cancelled after threats of violence. Which is a greater danger to our republic: the fact that college professors can be idiots (something that should come as no surprise to my students) or the fact that intimidation silences dissenting speech?

Thoughts on Social Security

I can't competently parse the intricacies of the Bush Social Security Plan. There are others out there (Paul Krugman, Brad DeLong, Matthew Yglesias et al.) who have been doing a good job explaining the real story. But I am struck by a number of things about it. One is the strange racism in the way it is being sold to African Americans. I note also the obvious fear-mongering and lying that are the staple of this administration. Don't forget the Orwellian attempts to change and control the language that journalists use.

What strikes me as really odd, though, are that they admit this won't solve the fiscal problem that they claim exists. Thus, the real reason for getting rid of Social Security must lie elsewhere. I believe -- and a few quotes have leaked out here and there to this effect -- that this is part of a long-term stategy to destroy the program BECUASE it works. The battle is ideological: a federal program that works to help out all Americans, a program that is social and provides security, contradicts that conservative philosophy of government.

Even odder yet are these words from the State of the Union:

The goal here is greater security in retirement, so we will set careful guidelines for personal accounts. We will make sure the money can only go into a conservative mix of bonds and stock funds. We will make sure that your earnings are not eaten up by hidden Wall Street fees. We will make sure there are good options to protect your investments from sudden market swings on the eve of your retirement. We will make sure a personal account can't be emptied out all at once, but rather paid out over time, as an addition to traditional Social Security benefits. And we will make sure this plan is fiscally responsible, by starting personal retirement accounts gradually, and raising the yearly limits on contributions over time, eventually permitting all workers to set aside four percentage points of their payroll taxes in their accounts.

How is this conservative? "We will make sure ... we will make sure ... we will make sure...." Doesn't that sound like the ultimate in goverment paternalism? Bush keeps telling people in his tour around the country that they will not be able to use their retirement money in dice games. Well, why not? I thought this was supposed to be my money?

Oh, by the way, no one dared take the quiz I posted a few days ago: True or False: "By the year 2042, the entire system would be exhausted and bankrupt." The answer, of course, is: FALSE. Entirely false. A bald-faced lie.

Historical Parallels

In response to my posting of a 1967 article about elections in Vietnam that sounded eerily familiar (U.S. Encouraged by Vietnam Vote -- Officials Cite 83% Turnout Despite Vietcong Terror), reader Steve writes:

The post on Vietnam elections was interesting. Now if the Iraq election would have gone worse and failed would you have posted that article to show that failed elections are good because successful ones didn't work in Vietnam? It would seem that failed elections would break the "parallel" between Iraq and Vietnam so that would have to of been a good thing no? Or would you have simply reinforced your previous comments on the doubts surrounding the election and look at the election as vindication?

I am always amused when historians use "parallels" to compare historical events. I've always felt that forming "parallels" was the weakest form of critique or analyses a historian could use. Writing on "parallels" is similar to someone asking why apples fall from trees and answering them with "Apples fall from trees, just like oranges that's just the way it is". So the person goes on with their life knowing that apples fall from trees because oranges do too but one day they run across a pear tree. Now they have a problem, pears don't look like apples or oranges. Oranges and apples are fairly rounded but the pear doesn't look anything like them. It would impossible to use any "parallel" between the fruits. The fault being that when the person first asked the question, the answer should have been gravity but instead, they were told it happens because that’s what happens to other things like it. No one is any smarter from comparing historical events; you get smarted by understanding them and not making cosmetic "parallels".

I agree. But let me add some more thoughts.

Steve's analogy is interesting to me because just this week in my "West and the World" course we are covering the Scientific Revolution and reading a bit of Newton. Newton, of course, argued that if you see apples and oranges fall from trees, you can infer that pears do too, according to some universal principle. I don't want to push the idea of "universal laws" into history, but your analogy doesn't really prove your point. I wouldn't say that because something similar-sounding has happened before (even if it has happened many times) that, therefore today's event will follow the same pattern according to some universal principle. We do that to some degree, in history, and, just as with science, our conclusions and theories must continually be tested against the evidence.

That is as far as I want to push the scientific analogy, but there are other ways we can read that newspaper article from 1967. I agree with Steve that the article doesn't really answer any questions for us, but it SHOULD make us raise questions. I agree that Iraq is not Vietnam, and the Iraq War is not the Vietnam War, but that doesn't mean there are not some similarities worth investigating. To what degree are there parallels between Iraq and Vietnam? Or a better question: Can we learn anything from our experience in Vietnam that would help us better understand and influence what is happening today?

In the case of the article I posted, I think the "lesson" to be drawn -- or, really, the question to be raised, is: is our government wrong again about "turning the corner" (today's version of the Vietnam War's "light at the end of the tunnel"). Can this article from 1967 help us to raise questions about how our government understands and communicates the situation? Can it help us raise questions about how a foreign government in a land occupied by American troops establishes legitimacy? For example, the South Vietnamese government "elected" in 1967 never established legitimacy within the country. Clearly, the historical situations are very different between then and now, but I believe the article can raise questions about a similar problem with legitimacy.

A very different potential historical parallel was brought up by the eminent historian David Kennedy in this month's Atlantic Monthly (if it is not available through their website, you can go to the Cheng library's e-journal page):

What "W" Owes to "WW"
President Bush may not even know it, but he can trace his view of the world to Woodrow Wilson, who defined a diplomatic destiny for America that we can't escape

A similar point was made a while back in the New Republic (available through cheng's e-journal page) and a book called The Folly of Empire:

WHAT WOODROW WILSON CAN TEACH TODAY'S IMPERIALISTS.
History Lesson
by John B. Judis
Post date 06.02.03 | Issue date 06.09.03

Kennedy doesn't draw out the "lessons" in the same way Judis does, but I wish he did because he (Kennedy) makes some interesting and important points:

[...]Wilson would recognize George W. Bush as his natural successor, and he would recognize today's Americans as the direct spiritual descendants of the people he so reluctantly led into that conflict. For Wilson did not think that what came to be known, and often derided, as "Wilsonianism" was just a policy selected from a palette of possible choices. Rather, he saw it as the sole approach to international relations that his countrymen would embrace as consistent with their past and their principles. Wilson did not so much invent American foreign policy as discover it.

[...]

Woodrow Wilson instinctively reacted to the onset of the Great War by issuing a proclamation of neutrality. But as the conflict grew in scale and duration, wreaking devastation previously unimaginable, he became increasingly convinced that isolation was no longer a viable posture for the United States. Yet Wilson also felt (along with many other Americans) that Theodore Roosevelt's philosophy, with its embrace of raw power and cold national interest, was irrelevant, even alien. If neither traditional isolationism nor conventional realpolitik would do, then it fell to Wilson to craft an authentically American foreign policy that would so resonate in the hearts of his countrymen as to provide a sustainable basis for American international engagement.

Two assumptions underlay Wilson's thinking: that the circumstances of the modern era were utterly novel, and that providence had entrusted America with a mandate to carry out a singular mission in the world.[...]

What Kennedy points out is that Wilson didn't have "Wilsonianism" as a set of ideals to frame his worldview, he had to invent it, though out of the raw materials of American national mythology, at a time when the other ideals of isolationism and Rooseveltian imperialism/militarism seemed to offer no good answers. So, for Wilson, historical parallels were irrelevant, or only partially helpful.

Kennedy also reminds us that Wilson was very reluctant to go to war. This is where I wish he had engaged more directly with how Bush is or is not heir to Wilson. One could argue that Bush, like Wilson, found himself after 9/11 in a world where the reigning foreign policy worldviews provided no clear guide, thus he had to invent a new paradigm. (And one could argue that in seeing terrorism as a global war he did this successfully.) But where does that leave Wilson? Is Bush "properly" applying Wilsonian logic? Is he using the words but not the spirit? Is he adapting Wilsonianism to a changed world?

In his book and article Judis argues that both Wilson and T. Roosevelt learned from their experiences and their policies and worldviews eventually converged on a kind of internationalist pragmatic idealism (I am summarizing from memory, so don't take my word for it). I would like to hear more from Kennedy about whether he thinks Bush's Wilsonianism fits today's world or not.

"What I Heard About Iraq"

I linked to this article below, but here I just want to emphasize that if you read only one article about the U.S. and the Iraq War, read What I Heard about Iraq by Eliot Weinberger in the London Review of Books. Devastating.

Wolcott B. Goode

Juan Cole is an academic who actually knows something about the Middle East. Jonah Goldberg is a hacktackular pontificant who doesn't. Mediating their dispute is James Wolcott who can string words together just like he's ringin' a bell.

Haliburton in Iran

I have no problem with Halliburton Doing Business With the 'Axis of Evil'. I don't even care if they are breaking the law. In fact, I am sure they are too smart to do that:

Halliburton spokeswoman Wendy Hall said the company had not broken the law because all of the work in the South Pars gas field would be done by non-Americans employed by a subsidiary registered in the Cayman Islands.

See how great those offshore subsidiaries are? What pleases me is that Haliburton can now over-bill and cheat another country into bankruptcy. They are actually doing a great public service to the U.S. -- the highest form of patriotism.

Now, if only they would stop bilking American citizens.

[update: I missed this: Halliburton Will Withdraw From Energy Projects in Iran. I guess they're gettin' out before the war destroys their investments.]

A Quiz

True or False: "By the year 2042, the entire system would be exhausted and bankrupt."

You can count on me...

... to harp on the negative -- or at least offer some cautionary perspectives.

Remember, I danced around my house in my undies (boxer-briefs, if you must know) when I saw Iraqis danding in the streets of "liberated" Baghdad a couple of years ago. Sucker for democracy, indeed. So you will excuse me if I don't swallow the freedom on the march thing whole hog (and, no, I will not be watching tonight -- I always find the State of the Union address to be too much of a royal affair).

So, here are some perspectives and issues you probably haven't seen on the teevee.

Juan Cole, in The Iraq Election: First Impressions, reminds us that Bush opposed this whole election thing initially until Sistani forced his hand.

Jeff Jacoby finally looks at himself in the mirror: Saying nothing is torture in itself. An excerpt:

As regular readers know, I write as a war hawk. I strongly support the mission in Iraq. I voted for President Bush. I believe the struggle against Islamist totalitarianism is the most urgent conflict of our time.

But none of that justifies the administration's apparent willingness to countenance -- under at least some circumstances -- the indecent abuse of prisoners in military custody. Something is very wrong when the Justice Department advises the president's legal adviser that a wartime president is not bound by the international Convention Against Torture or the US laws incorporating it. Or when that legal adviser tells the Senate, as Alberto Gonzales did last week, that ''there is no legal prohibition under the Convention Against Torture on cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment with respect to aliens overseas."

If this were happening on a Democratic president's watch, the criticism from Republicans and conservatives would be deafening. Why the near-silence now? Who has better reason to be outraged by this scandal than those of us who support the war? More than anyone, it is the war hawks who should be infuriated by it. It shouldn't have taken me this long to say so.

Nick Turse continues his series Bringing It All Back Home: The Emergence of the Homeland Security State at Tomdispatch.

Jack Shafer has an amazing column at Slate, Together, Again: Judith Miller and Ahmad Chalabi -- killing democracy in two countries in one fell swoop!

In What I Heard about Iraq -- e.g. "I heard Donald Rumsfeld say: ‘Death has a tendency to encourage a depressing view of war'" -- Eliot Weinberger lists page after page of truth and lies that will make you weep.

And, finally, what would my neighbor Yogi have to say about this?

U.S. Encouraged by Vietnam Vote
Officials Cite 83% Turnout Despite Vietcong Terror

by Peter Grose, Special to the New York Times

WASHINGTON, Sept. 3-- United States officials were surprised and heartened today at the size of turnout in South Vietnam's presidential election despite a Vietcong terrorist campaign to disrupt the voting.

According to reports from Saigon, 83 per cent of the 5.85 million registered voters cast their ballots yesterday. Many of them risked reprisals threatened by the Vietcong.

....A successful election has long been seen as the keystone in President Johnson's policy of encouraging the growth of constitutional processes in South Vietnam. The election was the culmination of a constitutional development that began in January, 1966, to which President Johnson gave his personal commitment when he met Premier Ky and General Thieu, the chief of state, in Honolulu in February.

The purpose of the voting was to give legitimacy to the Saigon Government, which has been founded only on coups and power plays since November, 1963, when President Ngo Dinh Deim was overthrown by a military junta.