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Josh Marshall sums up the findings of the Senate Select Intelligence Committee report on the Iraq intelligence failure very clearly. The report:
"a) places all the blame for the intelligence failures on the CIA, b) specifically -- and quite improbably -- rules out administration pressure as a cause of the problem, and c) avoids any discussion of how or whether the administration manipulated or distorted intelligence community findings to build their case for war."
The Republicans control Congress. What is most amazing is what the Democrats have agreed to:
"...in his comments at the press conference [Sen.]Rockefeller seemed to say that each of these conclusions was either false or so incomplete as to be deeply misleading.
"As one of the first reporters to get a question in perceptively asked, why exactly then did they vote for it?"
As Marshall says, there was a time when Bush people were putting out the story that the CIA were stodgy bureaucrats who refused to see the extreme danger posed by Iraq. They had to be dragged into the light of day by key, hard-driving political staff--especially Feith's operation. There are lots of indications that Bush and his people had decided to invade Iraq, based on a combination of Chalabi and who knows what, and they were searching high and low for the evidence to justify this move. Now we are told the wicked old CIA misled the poor Bushies, who had no independent source of information, into invading one of the most defenceless countries on earth, and taking out a regime that had nothing to do with 9/11. Not Machiavelli, or Chalabi, or oil, or a real war to justify homeland security, or the 2004 election campaign--just Gomer Pyle.
(See also this piece, which at least mentions Chalabi--remember him?--although not by name; via pie filling in for Atrios).
And, hard to believe though it may be, the Niger story is still alive. (See here). Bush defenders now say (as I understand it) that the statement in the State of the Union address was based on forgeries. It's all the fault of the bad old CIA, and it shouldn't have happened. The White House did the decent thing and admitted that mistake. All along, however, there was earlier and much more solid evidence from the Europeans to the effect that Saddam was trying to get uranium from Niger. For some reason, the White House chose not to get out of the SOTU issue by bringing this evidence forward, but it is coming forward now.
The Bush White House, which is able and willing to spin on little or nothing, had something solid and chose not to use it for a favourable spin? Josh Marshall says he has more on this, and Glenn Reynolds joins in the challenge to him to produce what he has.
Marshall today: contrary to a WP story, the CIA was very consistent in believing and stating that there was no credible evidence that Iraq had tried to purchase uranium from Niger. (Link via Kevin Drum, who focusses on the Joe Wilson story that has never interested me very much).
UPDATE July 12: Laura Rozen actually looks at the older, supposedly better Niger documents, and reports that they are laughable forgeries.
As a political operation, including its control of spin, the Bush White House may be one of the best ever. Even its control of Republicans in both the House and the Senate is a real accomplishment. The U.S. Congress,in contrast to a British-stle parliament, is famous for a lack of party discipline, for the presence of "renegades." Republicans today, by contrast, even McCain, can pretty well be counted on not to criticize the President. No doubt they fear that if they cross the White House, they could get the full Max Cleland treatment--a full-scale negative campaign because you are not on-side on key votes.
The price the White House seems willing to pay is to let every Senator and Congressperson spend on practically anything they can think of.
UPDATE: How would the White House get the answers it wanted out of the CIA, or at least suppress answers it didn't want, without actually "telling anyone what to say?"?
Kevin Drum has an example: a more senior CIA person telling a less senior one that "the powers that be" have no interest in hearing that one of Chalabi's golden witnesses on Iraq weapons is probably a fraud. The word radiates down as to what is wanted and what is not wanted. This might include removing certain risk assessments: "Don't anyone say that if a tree is cut down with little preparation, it might fall on someone." Just don't say it.
Ken Pollack has written that the Bush political people had a way of reporting only a worst-case scenario, out of what had been a range of possibilities.
I pulled together a description of Rumsfeld's style in shaping briefings, based on both Pollack and Fallows, here (toward the end).
UPDATE July 11: Suddenly there seem to be lots of examples where Administration officials doctored up documents to make a different case than the CIA itself had made.
Jonah Goldberg:
"Truth be told, I'm fairly disgusted with the GOP these days. Again, I think conservatives sacrificed a lot when we bought into the notion that the President of the United States doesn't need to be an effective communicator. Yes, it's nice to know that Bush's gut instincts are often right (though they're also often left), but his inability or unwillingness to make serious arguments hurts. And that style informs the GOP style across the board these days. Being the majority party in a system which so effectively empowers the minority party means that everyone has to listen to your arguments, it doesn't mean your arguments automatically win.
"So, when the majority party refuses to ground its actions in principle and defend them with reason it will, of necessity, look like it is ruling by whim rather than governing by conviction. With a few important exceptions, Bush's domestic priorities look like an attempt to buy support rather than persuade the public about anything. That works for Democrats because the Democratic Party is, at the end of the day, about bribing the electorate. The Republican Party is supposed to be the party which persuades the electorate that they'd be better off not accepting the bribes. And everyone -- America and the GOP included -- loses when the two parties get into a bidding war like divorced parents over who can spoil Americans more." (See Matthew Yglesias' response here, and Goldberg again here).
Nice segue into some shots at the Democrats: if the Republicans aren't careful, they'll slide down to the moral level Democrats are always at.
This started as a contribution to the discussion of the keynote speakers scheduled for the Republican convention, most of whom are pro-choice and probably at least somewhat opposed to Bush's massive tax cuts. Kevin Drum asked: are Republicans so ashamed of Bush's actual policies, and so worried about their political impact, that they dare not expose them on national TV?
As he weighs into this--saying Bush has always been a moderate, not really a conservative, etc., Goldberg makes the rather amazing statements above. Raising the question: is Bush the most inarticulate president ever? Or simply the most inarticulate since mass media became a factor?
Does this go with not really knowing or caring much about what anybody thinks--not really caring about policy at all, as Yglesias suggests? Kevin Drum says, a bit more carefully, that the present Bush has latched on to about two of Reagan's ideas, and simply sticks to them stubbornly with no real idea of how to implement them in a flexible way.
Much of the debate on the web about Fahrenheit 9/11 centres around: is Moore as dishonest as Bush? More dishonest? Is there more leeway for a filmmaker to be dishonest than a president?
Jonah Goldberg on the Corner adds a strange twist:
"If the new Moore-standard says you can be a force for good even if you argue through half-truths, guilt-by-association and innuendo, then the case against Joe McCarthy evaporates entirely. He did, after all, have the larger truths on his side."
Somehow, people in National Review-land can't give up defending "that" McCarthy. William Buckley, who just received a lot of congratulations as he retired, wrote a book defending McCarthy in the 50s, and then re-issued it in the 70s. (See Buckley's review of Ann Coulter's book, which is largely dedicated to defending McCarthy/attacking his enemies; Buckley says the re-issue of his (and Bozell's) book was in 1961).
I haven't read up on this for a long time. Goldberg says Senator Joe was correct on the "larger truths"--meaning that Communism was a threat, and American institutions had to be defended against it. We now know that Communism was probably never as much of a threat as some anti-Communists said, but that doesn't mean people in the early 50s could figure that out.
Let's try a partial list of things to think about:
There were idealistic people who preached Communism and said the U.S. not only would inevitably collapse, but deserved to do so. These people were emboldened in various ways when the U.S. and the USSR were allies during World War II.
There were cases--and the Screen Actors Guild in L.A. was one--where the Communists simply took over a supposedly legitimate, vaguely left-wing organization. There were some unions where the fights for control got violent. No doubt the U.S. was never Spain amongst the Republicans, but it is still true that the Communists could and would take over a "Popular Front," and make use of "useful idiots" who were mildly left-wing intellectuals.
Having said all that, how could Buckley suggest once--much less for decades--that Harry Truman was somehow soft on security risks, or indeed on international Communism? Harry Truman? Buckley seems to have wished that McCarthy could have been given more of a free reign to have people arrested, held without a charge or hearing, and questioned in a wistful hope that they might say something about some "big fish". (As I recall, in all the famous spy cases in the 50s, the fish were simply dropped into the FBI's lap: Alger Hiss by Whittaker Chambers, Julius Rosenberg by Klaus Fuchs. J. Edgar Hoover doesn't seem to have known how to investigate such things, or where to start. Rosenberg was actually running a substantial spy ring, as the FBI belatedly discovered, but they never succeeded in making a case about it).
(UPDATE: It may even be that the lists of left-wing sympathizers McCarthy worked from, almost by definition, didn't include any Soviet or Chinese spies, or anyone who knew anything about any spy operations. The Rosenbergs had "official" memberships in certain groups when they were young, but as soon as Julius, at least, became a spy, they dropped all such memberships. Communist governments weren't that stupid).
Undeniably there were some real security risks here and there. But McCarthy was willing, to say the least, to violate the constitutional rights of a lot of people, and destroy careers, for a so-called investigation that was completely lacking in solid leads or respectable methods. It has often been said that McCarthy gave anti-Communism a bad name. This doesn't mean the left is correct that if he had lived he would have destroyed the very institutions he claimed to be defending, blah blah--Eisenhower and the others didn't trust him to go for coffee, and they were slowly suppressing him in a way that brought no political risk to themselves.
But Buckley was just too willing to keep defending this demagogic yahoo--and now Goldberg is at it too. This phenomenon gives off a distinct odour, and of course it is reminiscent of some of the homeland security stuff today. (See Diane McWhorter on Buckley in Slate here).
I guess Allan Bloom had the best presentation. He said McCarthy did no real harm to the academy (saying nothing about federal public servants or movie people--many of whom landed on their feet somewhere). But he also allowed his readers to link the admitted hysteria of red-hunting in the early 50s with the hysteria over Sputnik at the end of that decade. The reaction to Sputnik led to rivers, showers and mountains of cash being dropped on every aspect of higher education and research in the U.S. If this is mass hysteria, one can hear Bloom saying, let's have more of it.
The public were willing to pay for everything in higher learning--French, art, everything--but somehow underneath it was all about science and engineering. I guess that hard political fact of spending tons on research under the rubric of "national defence" is what continues today.
I'm not sure Kerry could have chosen any better than Edwards. The running mate is supposed to help in states where the presidential candidate is weak. Edwards should help Kerry in the South, or least in border states including Arkansas and Tennessee, both of which Gore lost. (Maybe even Gephardt's Missouri, which Gore also lost; and Bob Graham's Florida). Maybe Edwards' talk about saving jobs will resonate in the rust belt, including Ohio and Michigan.
Edwards certainly offers a great story. His career is certainly more impressive than W before 2000, or Dan Quayle before 1988.
Kerry/Edwards will still have problems beating Bush. It almost seems to go back to the old problem: the party out of office wants to say there are problems, etc., but the Democrats seem tempted to say: there are people permanently (or systemically) excluded from prosperity, the very optimism of the winners causes them to forget the losers, etc.--so that they end up with a downer message: things aren't as good as they seem, and no one should enjoy what they have unless or until the worst off (or the resentful people who have recently lost jobs) are somehow provided for.
This downer message seems like a loser in American politics. Mickey Kaus blames part of it on Bob Schrum (scroll down to "The Downside"); it seems to go back to Patrick Caddell's "malaise" message, which infected Carter and then candidate Jerry Brown.
Tariffs as a solution to lost industrial jobs, when the U.S. has benefitted so much from free trade? Letting the teachers' unions keep "fixing" the public schools? Populism tilted against large corporations? It does seem this speaks for that aspect of the left which requires victims with grievances in order to stay in business.
Kaus says (scroll down to "Winning Kerry Message") the Democrats need a slogan that says: whether you have agreed with Bush up to now or not, he has brought about historic change in a short time; let's catch our breath, and assess where we are. For that we don't need a hothead, but someone's who's willing to keep the country at peace for a while. Kaus hates Kerry's attempted slogan "Let America be America again," since there is nothing unAmerican about Bush. He also doesn't want references to "Normalcy." Maybe: "Let's Appreciate This Moment in History." (I think "Thank God for Interesting Times" would be going too far).
Oh, and as Matthew Yglesias says: don't promise to free a lot of inmates from prison, even if you happen to think there are too many of them there.
Jeffrey Dubner at Tapped
posts on part of a story in USA Today:
"Suspected foreign fighters account for less than 2% of the 5,700 captives being held as security threats in Iraq, a strong indication that Iraqis are largely responsible for the stubborn insurgency.
"Since last August, coalition forces have detained 17,700 people in Iraq who were considered to be enemy fighters or security risks, and about 400 were foreign nationals, according to figures supplied last week by the U.S. military command handling detention operations in Iraq. Most of those detainees were freed after a review board found they didn't pose significant threats. About 5,700 remain in custody, 90 of them non-Iraqis."
As Dubner says, there are two possibilities about the forces hostile to the U.S. in Iraq: either they are people the U.S. would have to fight sooner or later--more or less part of international terrorism, more or less connected to 9/11, etc.; or they are caught up in an Iraqi struggle. The Iraqi struggle in turn can be divided between long-standing civil wars that were more or less kept under wraps by Saddam, and then unleashed by the U.S. invasion; and more recent battles that are more or less entirely opposed to the U.S. occupation.
The most recent indications, including musings by the new government on how difficult it is to distinguish people who can be co-opted from those who cannot (here and here), suggest that the U.S. waded into a volatile situation, almost entirely separate from 9/11 or international terrorism, and at least ran a serious risk of making it worse.
When my 19-year-old nephew stayed with us for a couple of days, I had a chance to put some tunes I like on the stereo. He actually came from a far part of the house when he heard the theme from "Shaft." He recognized the Cars right away, and when I put on Peter Gabriel live he said "awesome album." He mentioned that he recently enjoyed seeing some old video of Genesis with Gabriel as the front singer.
We compared notes about playing. I played in a kind of cynical wedding band many years ago--the band became rockier, and in a way more respectable, toward the end. My nephew has been in a battle of the bands (as drummer) in which he played the Yes tune "Roundabout."
About the same time our 14-year-old son came upstairs asking for more "old" albums. Do we have any Jimi Hendrix? No. How come the only Beatles album we have is a weird compilation by George Martin? I mentioned that we own Led Zeppelin and the Who, and he said "those are just compilation albums."
As a family we recently enjoyed seeing some of the Stones concert in Toronto from last summer on TV: one tune by AC/DC, a fairly respectable one by Justin Timberlake, and then the Stones. (The official DVD has just come out). There aren't very many things on TV that keep us all watching at once.
I'm always amazed at younger generations getting into some of the same music as me. When I started teaching at St. Olaf College in Minnesota in 1987, I discovered that some of the students who were serious about music, i.e. didn't just listen to radio tunes, were heavily into Led Zeppelin. "Really?" I asked them. "That's what you like?"
It's been said many times, but somehow the music that boomers like keeps coming back.
Saw The General's Daughter on TV last night. We saw it in a theatre when it was new. My impression was the same: quite good for the first hour or so, then it runs out of gas. Especially in that first hour, it conveys the atmospherics of a big military base quite well. Travolta is good.
Bought two movies in VHS at Wal-Mart for $3.00 each. Today I watched "The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean," starring Paul Newman. A special credit says "Introducing Victoria Principal" as a Mexican girl who barely speaks English. Is the actress indeed originally Mexican or Chicano? [UPDATE: probably more Italian than anything, but I can't find anything that says for sure].
Jacqueline Bisset was about 28 in 1972, but she plays a 20-year-old. Director John Huston must have decided he wanted her in the picture.
Some good writing toward the beginning. Several famous actors (and Huston) put in fairly brief appearances. Poor old Anthony Perkins as a preacher toward the beginning, and the exchanges between him and Newman are good. Newman says "I know the law. I've spent my entire life in its flagrant disregard."
"We'll have peace. And I don't care how many people I have to kill to get it."
Perkins as minister: "This land abounds in ruffians and varlets. Ther numbers are legion, their evil skills commensurate."
Newman: "Piss on 'em."
As this exchange indicates, the literacy goes down as the movie proceeds. In a way, the confrontation between Bean and a lawyer indicates that the inarticulate he-man beats--or deserves to beat--the effete, morally creepy intellectual every time. Yet the writing in the early minutes is literate and fantastic. Somebody wrote in Commentary years ago that while it is not true that movies now tend to be crap, whereas they earlier tended to be great; it is true that they earlier tended to be literate, and now they tend not to be. Characters sounded like they had gone to college. Now they say "yo," if you are lucky.
The movie has a musical interlude quite similar to the one in "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid," which came out earlier. Both are part of the decline toward that abomination, the pop tune soundtrack which has no connection to any interesting movie.
No doubt the movie softens or glorifies the real Roy Bean. Texas is a big theme, and the ending is funny in that the moral stand against the lawyer is (by now) also against the automobile and the entire oil industry, which has struck some gushers right in Bean's town. There is something true about this: does the Texas he-man really look back to some traditional life, or does he want to be the most successful capitalist he can be, even if that means raping the land?
Bean, both in life and in the movie, supposedly idolized a female music-hall star he knew only from posters and press notices. He even wonders if he can marry without offending his proper worship of her. Shades of Don Quixote and Dulcinea.
The aluminum tubes? The ones we were told were probably for use in gas centrifuges to enrich uranium?
They had a peaceful purpose only--not even dual use. And it took some torquing at official levels to get relevant people to say otherwise.
Shells containing sarin, found by Poles? Two contained sarin, all dating from the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s; 16 did not. (Contrary to Secretary Rumsfeld's statement). (Via Atrios).
The "original" shells, or one two-part shell, containing sarin and mustard gas: also dating from late 80s or so. Recent users may not have known what they had. (Fox via good old Wonkette--who says she doesn't do actual journalism?)
Libs 135, NDP 19 = 154 seats, exactly half of 308. Normally the Libs would make one of their own Speaker, which would mean one fewer voting Members; there is an Independent who might vote consistently with the Tories, giving Conservatives pls Bloc Quebecois 154 seats.
As the Montreal Gazette says, all of this can be managed by Prime Minister Martin. Above all, the opposition parties will have trouble agreeing amongst themselves on anything, and they will not want another election soon. (My favourite line--from an Anglo paper in Montreal--is about the new BQ Members: "The Bloc's new caucus is about half rookies; few of them will want to put their new jobs on the line, less than one-sixth of the way to that golden MP's pension."
The Tories not only lost to the Libs in Atlantic Canada and (urban and suburban) Ontario, and became even more irrelevant in Quebec--they lost to the NDP in BC. That kind of leaves them: Alberta. Colby Cosh joins Ted Morton in saying: just you wait: there really will be an independence movement here some day. (See more Colby here).
This might amount to admitting defeat in the rest of the country. Beyond that, I don't really get it. I haven't lived in Alberta since the Lougheed days, when the electorate seemed secular, mainstream, wanting government to move to the left and right from time to time in a pragmatic way. Are there really a lot of voters in Alberta now who are American Republicans?
CJR via Laura Rozen.
Short response from a long list of reporters and journalists who have been caught reporting Chalabi's crap: I either had my own independent sources for this crap, which I now have trouble recalling, or if the INC was my only source, I made that clear. "Get big tobacco" hero Lowell Bergman says "we had no way of getting in to Iraq ourselves," so Frontline relied on INC-supplied defectors. "A lot of questions remain unanswered."
Once again: Chalabi received over $30 million from the U.S. government from 2000 to 2003 alone.
UPDATE: While we're at it, there's also the story of how Chalabi "gamed" the intelligence services of a half dozen or more countries. As Kevin Drum says, we need to update the phrase "useful idiots."
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