lloydtown 

Are We Being Lied to about Zarqawi?

Good question from Josh Marshall, especially in a week when we learn the story is changing, yet again, on Jose Padilla, a U.S. citizen captured on U.S. soil.

Waterboarding and "Cold Cell" are forms of torture

The Bushies complain that they are not given enough credit for overthrowing Saddam, bringing a constitution and elections to Iraq, and reinforcing trends toward democracy in other Middle Eastern countries.

Surely it's a bit troubling that whatever exactly they're doing, they can't seem to tell the truth about it. It is Orwellian. It's like a Boy Scout, granted, but one who is pissed off, and can't stop lying and then saying anyone who doesn't believe his lies deserves to go to hell.

Marty Lederman on the Balkinization site is still working on the torture issue. (See here). There is now a list of coercive procedures that has been officially authorized for use by the CIA. As Lederman has mentioned before, the Bushies intend to take full advantage of the fact that the CIA has traditionally been considered exempt from at least some of the restrictions on coercive techniques that apply to Americans in uniform.

Bushies now say also that when the Convention Against Torture was ratified by the Senate at the urging of Bush 41, some of the language was deliberately changed so as to allow for more coercive techniques than the drafters of the treaty wanted. (The the U.S. wants to torture, much like other countries; however they are confident that they will not be the worst torturers; and they want to be fairly honest about what they are doing. Boy Scouts with a mean streak? Deluded ones?) Thus the present U.S. Administration may be going farther than previous administrations, but what they are doing is still arguably covered by the treaty.

Lederman sticks to a few points in reply:

If, for instance, one had asked the President and the 500+ representatives who voted for the torture statute whether waterboarding and "cold cell" and "Long Time Standing" constituted "torture" as they understood it, they all would have said "yes." And to the extent these techniques really aren't "torture" because of technical lacunae in the statute, perhaps that's a sign that Congress should consider amending its definitions.

Machiavelli and the U.S.

I just attended a job talk (by Christopher Lynch) on Machiavelli and war.

As I understand it, the U.S. has long been a great expression of Machiavelli's ideas. Participants in government (and leaders in the economy) don't need to have special concern for each other, or the country; they just have to compete aggressively, and keep each other in check. They can only win honour by doing some good for significant parts of the population, and as long as there are a lot of different ambitious people, there is a kind of freedom for a great many, if not all.

Lynch suggested Machiavelli did not think an aggressive, warlike foreign policy is always a good idea. In the case of the Roman Republic, imperialism led to the arming of the plebs, which laid the foundation for Christianity, which has imposed (in Machiavelli's time) a kind of deep-freeze on human ambition and accomplishment. This doesn't mean there are no human wolves; it simply means the wolves who remain (Bishops, etc.) can feed freely.

An alternative, Lynch suggests, is a warlike league that always remains sufficiently weak (perhaps because it is a mercenary army) that it avoids the downfalls of successful imperialism. The ancient and modern Tuscan leagues are supposedly examples.

Thus a hotly contested, self-interested, sometimes seemingly chaotic domestic politics in the U.S. might provide a sufficient outlet for ambition so that the U.S. will not be imperialistic in its foreign policy.

For a long time, this seems to have worked. In both world wars, the U.S. was slow to get involved, and finally did so largely on grounds of self-defence. Even the entry into Vietnam was cautious on the whole, and was precipitated by an invitation from the French. Other U.S. wars have been small scale.

In Iraq, however, we have the pre-emptive, almost entirely unprovoked attack on a good sized country. True, it seems important to the Bushies to cling to rationales that sound like self-defence: WMDs, nukes, imminent, links to al Qaeda. But it is difficult to believe that they believed all of this. Surely as the world's only megapower, far more powerful than anyone else, it was difficult to resist taking the hardware out for a spin. Surely it was easy to convince yourself that you were going to make history--especially if you made great efforts to re-build the country, and establish a constitution and elections.

Is this the beginning of more classically imperialistic wars? Or will something like Vietnam syndrome make the American public regret this adventure, and make another one unlikely?

UPDATE: One odd wrinkle is that beneath the rationales based on self-defence is a real fear. Instead of the richest and most powerful country that has ever existed, with no real rivals, being free of fear, it is now extremely fearful because it has been reminded that it lives in a bad neighbourhood. Now there is no level of security that can really be considered adequate. Big fences have to be built, with dogs and guards. But aggressive actions are also needed--armed incursions into the surrounding slums, for even if no recent attack has come from a particular neighbourhood, "we know" that it is that kind of neighbourhood that is the most likely source of attacks. Being a Boy Scout, one genuine wants to liberate a lot of slum-dwellers. But being fearful, one feels justified in bombing neighbourhoods, rounding people up at random, and using detention and torture as techniques of intimidation and/or information gathering.

Lynch did say it's amazing that a powerful country can say openly it has launched pre-emptive war, and make this a matter of doctrine--apparently a commitment for the future. That shows, he said, that we live in a Machiavellian world.

Boomers and Health

According to a new study, obese people don't necessarily live a shorter time than fitter people; they just cost the health-care system a lot more during the time they do live. One might have hoped that increasing short-term costs were outweighed by the savings that would follow from a shortened life. But no.

Ezra Klein, who links to this article on the Tapped site, is a liberal Democrat who naturally thinks this provides a justification for the government, which is obliged to pay out "entitlements," to do something--I'm not sure what--to prevent boomers from getting or staying fat.

Klein barely hints at a more drastic alternative. If you want to get rid of some of the boomers who are increasingly choking restaurants and buffet lines, it isn't enough to encourage them to be fat and lazy. You're better off encouraging them to take up smoking.

Parties and Ideologies

I've actually registered with the Toronto Star to get some of this. Some former Progressive Conservatives continue to feel disenfranchised by the new party, the Conservative Party of Canada. Generally they are left-leaning, at least on some issues. Even if they lost an argument within the old party, they felt they were at home there, and the argument was still alive. In the new party, their views simply don't get a hearing.

The high-profile Tory defectors are well known. Flora MacDonald, a cabinet minister in the federal Tory governments of Joe Clark and Brian Mulroney, voted for the New Democrats in 2004. Former Newfoundland premier Brian Peckford says he just didn't vote at all.

Scott Brison, a former Progressive Conservative leadership contender, is now a Liberal cabinet minister.

Sinclair Stevens, another former Mulroney minister, is so irked by the December 2003 merger that he's been challenging it in court ever since.

It was 1980 when Toronto businesswoman Annette Snel, then Annette Borger, became an active Progressive Conservative. She was 16.

As a teenager, she knocked on doors in her home riding of Leeds-Grenville in Eastern Ontario. Later, she worked as Queen's Park aide to then-Tory MPP Don Cousens.

During the 1993 election campaign, she laboured long and hard for former prime minister Kim Campbell. Four years later, she worked to elect then-Tory leader (and now Quebec Liberal Premier) Jean Charest.

"I always thought this was the party for me," she says.

Like many Ontario Tories, Snel had no time for the Canadian Alliance or for its leader, Harper.

She was pleased in May 2003 when her party's new leader, Peter MacKay, vowed not to merge with the Alliance. She was horrified when MacKay went back on his word and quietly authorized unity negotiations.

When both sides ratified this merger, she ripped up her party membership card.

She can't bear to vote Liberal. On most issues, she doesn't agree with the New Democratic Party. But in the 2004 federal election, she voted for it because she liked the local candidate.

"I'm the sorriest Tory that ever lived," laments Snel. "I'm an orphan. I'm so disenfranchised I don't know who to vote for."

She's not unique.

Take Bruck Easton. The Windsor lawyer had been a Progressive Conservative since 1974. In late 2003, he was the party's national president.

"The Liberals used to be the party of big spenders and big deficits," he says. "Now, everything has flipped. With people like (U.S. President George W.) Bush and Harper, it's the right that is the party of deficits."

So, Easton supported Martin's Liberals in 2004. And when the next election is called, he's thinking of running as a Liberal.

If the Conservatives dump Harper, would he go back? "I think the leader is representative of the party, unfortunately," Easton says. "It's not a place I'm comfortable in any more."

Other former Tory activists echo this same refrain.

"My party disappeared," says Toronto corporate communications consultant Kiloran German. She joined the Tories when she was 14 and until the merger laboured as a party organizer. Now, she supports the NDP.

Apart from consideration of abortion itself, it's useful to remember that even the hottest of hot-button culture war issues are rarely set in stone. Rather, they exist as a means to an end--and the end is to define yourself as the antithesis of your opponent. This helps explain why Dems and Reps, or liberals and conservatives, can flop on issues ranging from federalism to overseas intervention without missing a beat. The point for partisans is not to maintain allegiance to particular ideals; it's to identify in opposition to your enemy.

The Democrats

Whatever exactly Bush's problems are, it's no doubt true that the Democrats have problems of their own. The reason they want to harp on whether Bush lied is that they hope this might unite them, and help them move on. Those Democrats who voted for the Resolution (not necessarily for war) can say they were lied to, thus uniting them with those Democrats (vociferous, and good at raising money) who have been against the war all along.

However this is resolved, the Democrats are probably still going to have to explain what they propose in Iraq right now and for the future. My suspicion is that a lot will still be going on in Iraq on Election Day 2008. If a Democrat is somehow elected, he or she will have to remain engaged for some time. They will not dare to show weakness, etc.--once again, echoes of Vietnam, but with the parties reversing their roles.

The beginning of the war

What does Mickey Kaus say: asymptotically approaching the truth?

Glenn Reynolds likes this part of a Washington Post story:

The administration's overarching point is true: Intelligence agencies overwhelmingly believed that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, and very few members of Congress from either party were skeptical about this belief before the war began in 2003. Indeed, top lawmakers in both parties were emphatic and certain in their public statements.

Torture Again

In one way, at least, we live in a very strange time. Many Americans obviously believe that someone, somewhere, should be tortured. It doesn't seem to matter a great deal who exactly the victims are, or what exactly they've done. There seems to be a preference to keep their numbers quite small, if only so that one can maintain the reassuring belief that there are very few truly evil people in the world. But whoever they are, it is torture, apparently, that they need.

I don't watch 24, but everyone has been struck by it there. I'm hooked on Law and Order, and it came up recently there. (If only we could torture the guy who kidnapped that little girl--then we could save her). Even Mickey Kaus has argued that torture probably works.

The Bush Administration has obviously given voice to the anger over 9/11, among other ways by defending torture. It makes me think part of the reaction to 9/11 was: everyone is basically supposed to love us. OK, we understand, that's a bit much to expect, but at least at crucial moments we expect real affection, and we think it is reasonable that we don't face out and out hatred from anyone except evil people. 9/11 was, from a certain point of view, an expression of raw hatred, in a way more infuriating than a regular war.

I've been assuming that part of the inspiration for torture among the Bushies was Israel. Now Kevin Drum has this:

The Israelis, Baer said, have learned that they can gain valuable information by establishing personal relationships with the inmates and gaining their trust.

"They found that torture, abusive tactics, made things overall worse for them politically," Baer said. "The Israelis are friendly with their prisoners. They play cards with them and allow them to contact their families. They are getting in their minds to determine what makes up a suicide bomber."

.... Vincent Cannistraro, a former chief of operations and analysis in the CIA Counterterrorist Center, said detainees would say virtually anything to end their torment.

Baer agreed, citing intelligence reports from Arab security services that yielded useless information. "The Saudis and Egyptians torture people all the time, but I have yet to see anything that helped us on the jihad movement and (Osama bin Laden's deputy Ayman al) Zawahri," he said.

"If we are viewed as a country that engages in torture ... any possible information we might be able to gain is far counterbalanced by (the negative) effect of public opinion," McCain, R-Ariz., said on CBS' "Face the Nation."

Yet the Pentagon cannot point to any intelligence gains resulting from the techniques that have so tarnished America's image. That's because the techniques designed by communist interrogators were created to control a prisoner's will rather than to extract useful intelligence.

France: Too Much Welfare State

It's remarkable to see a liberal Democrat, Matthew Yglesias, admit that the riots in France have something to do with a welfare state that is, in a way, too generous.

Viewed cynically, what you have here are two contrasting approaches to social control. After the riots of the 1960s, the United States acted to create an African American elite quickly and on the cheap via affirmative action. Now that we're into the second and third generation of that experiment, the truly disadvantaged don't derive much benefit (if any) from affirmative action because inner-city kids can't compete for slots in college with the children of the black middle-class. At the same time, despite the unpopularity of affirmative action among the public at large, it's embraced by business, political, military, and other elites of both parties as a quick-and-dirty way of lending broad legitimacy to social and political instutions.

In France, by contrast, everything is run by the homogenous quasi-meritocracy of Grandes écoles graduates and there are essentially no prominent government officials or big corporate executives of Arab or African extraction. On the other hand, France does much more to subsidize and assist the French underclass, which enjoys a higher standard of living than its American counterpart even though France as a whole is significantly poorer than the United States. Somewhat unfortunately, the French model seems to work much less well than the American one.

The WMDs Debate is back

Norman Podhoretz writes in Commentary, defending the Bushies on WMDs--and on links to al Qaeda. Attacks on Bush's credibility must be pretty serious. Soon an expedition will be sent up the mountain to bring down some more tablets.

Kevin Drum does a good job of summarizing the issues here, the specific claims made by high-level Bushies, and the problems with these claims. Basically, Bush's defenders try to discuss evidence that is no newer than December 2002. Even at that point it's not true that "everyone," as Glenn Reynolds likes to say, believed Saddam had WMDs, but there were certainly many serious accounts around to that effect. Both Clinton and Kenneth Pollack thought so, and they can be brought up with relief by Bushies. The implication is "Those guys were both smart and well-briefed (unlike some people we could mention), and they both thought Saddam had WMDs." There were serious doubts in the intelligence community, and noone had more of an opportunity to realze that than Bush and his senior people (Clinton had not had a high-level briefing for almost two years). But there was a rough consensus that Saddam had something pretty formidable--chemical and biological, if not nukes.

In the early months of 2003, however, quite a lot changed. The newest and most reliable reports, including those from UN weapons inspectors who had gone precisely to sites where the Bushies were predicting massive and dangerous facilities, were all in the direction of Iraq having far fewer weapons than had been feared. Instead of acknowledging this clear trend, the Bushies escalated their claims that Saddam definitely had lots of threatening weapons of all kinds. They caused the gap between reality and their statements to widen.

It is still probably true that when the U.S. invaded, there was no serious or credible report suggesting that Saddam had no WMDs at all, nor indeed that he was virtually defenseless--although this is what turned out to be the truth. So the Bushies were, to some degree, clueless as well as lying. There are still stories that Saddam himself was clueless as to the extent of his defencelessness--and how were the Bushies supposed to know more about it than him?

As more of the anger of Cheney and his people emerges, one can see it from their point of view. At some point it became an article of faith that Saddam had to be removed. For everyone who had worked for Bush 41, Saddam's continued rule was a standing humiliation. It was easy for them to persuade themselves either that Saddam had something to do with 9/11, or that now would be a good time to act. They honestly didn't think it would be difficult to make a case. There just had to be a lot of weapons there. As the more credible reports pointed the opposite way, they simply became more enraged, and more willing to lash out at people like Wilson. The CIA must be accused of pursuing their own agenda. (Pathetically, but with some truth: "They're the liars! They're the leakers!"). George Tenet, getting a whiff of a Presidential Medal of Freedom, knuckles under and says "slam dunk" (probably after some fairly unpleasant meetings).

Glenn Reynolds and the Pyjamas Media folks are making their name by saying the mainstream media are unreliable, through a combination of pursuing an agenda and lazy habits. Yet Reynolds sticks with the WMD story, and to a lesser extent to the links to al Qaeda? In March it will be three years since the invasion, and four and a half years since 9/11.

UPDATE: More detail--especially relevant to the specific charge, by Bush and others, that Democrats had the same information he did in the lead-up to the war:

[blockquote]Five of the nine Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee, including [then Chairman Bob] Graham and [Richard] Durbin, ultimately voted against the resolution, but they were unable to convince other committee members or a majority in the Senate itself. This was at least in part because they were not allowed to divulge what they knew: While Graham and Durbin could complain that the administration's and Tenet's own statements contradicted the classified reports they had read, they could not say what was actually in those reports.[/blockquote]
...[snip]

But, although the United States conceded most of the IAEA's inconvenient judgments behind closed doors, Vice President Cheney publicly assaulted the credibility of the organization and its director-general.