When I started this site two years ago, nearly to the day -- the big anniversary was this past 4th, in case you missed it, and was coronated nationwide with large fireworks displays, barbecues, and parades. It was lovely, and quite touching. My thanks to all who showed their appreciation for what transpires here by participating -- I was a frustrated grad student disheartened by the state of debate and analysis of the pressing political issues in the country. 9/11 was three years down the road, the war in Iraq was nearing its first "mission accomplished" accolade, and the tight presidential election was drawing to its agonizing close, yet the nabobs on CNN's Crossfire -- sadly then acknowledged as one of the best places to get well-rounded debate and examination of the issues -- could still be found shouting past each other every night over the threat of gay unions to the institution of marriage or whether Tom DeLay, Jack Abramoff, and the Enron gang were really all that bad.

And this was an allegedly non-partisan, unbiased source. Meanwhile the gang at Hannity & Colmes,  The O'Reilly Factor, and Rush Limbaugh's eponymous radio show were left to bring the unvarnished truth -- fair, balanced, and ringing with liberty -- to the poor, huddled masses. So rather than cry about it to my room- and classmates, I decided to rely on my newspaper background and create a forum, no matter how meager (and believe me, despite the accolades the site has gotten in the intervening time -- featured during the last election and ranked as a host site fave now, as well as pseudo-syndicated on other sites -- the number of people I regularly reach is less than the number of slices in a jumbo pizza, most likely) to address the issue.

The goal then and now was simple -- to foster debate on the topics that are of critical importance to our world today, yet are treated with an almost deafening silence by the vast majority.

American Idol discussions light up the chat rooms and garner pages upon pages of coverage in various newspapers, magazines and TV news broadcasts, yet the ones that really mattered -- justifications for the war in Iraq, lessons and failures from the tragedy of 9/11, examination of the legality of wire-tapping programs, secret prisons and Guantanamo, and the president's continuous consolidation of power -- get next to nothing, hidden more securely than a skier at the bottom of an avalanche. And so by highlighting various news stories and journal or magazine articles I felt were key, the aim was to start a conversation -- to force people to engage subjects that, for whatever reason, they were avoiding or neglecting and dig that unfortunate downhiller out from the mountain of snow above him, bringing a little light to the darkness around him, so to speak.

The point, as I said in that inaugural post, was to pause and reflect, to think and then engage rather than spout off immediately with instinctive, reactionary responses. The aim was to observe, in essence, the Jewish concept of Shiva, taking time for reflection and inner dialogue before offering one's thoughts and opinions on a situation. And I hope that is what has been given -- nuanced arguments and carefully considered comments that come from days (and now weeks) of thought and discussion.

Because not much has changed in the surrounding media. Crossfire may be off the air, but the rest of them remain, and mainstream media coverage has by and large gotten worse over that span, spending hours and hours of time prattling on about runaway brides or missing teenagers in Aruba in lieu of deteriorating situations in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Israel/Palestine. As it was before, there are pockets of value and hope -- a handful of scattered skiers saved while the city remains buried in snow -- though they are few and far between.

The main problem is the need these outlets feel to present both sides of the story, giving more or less equal time to the opposing camps, when the validity and credence of what some are saying does not warrant this parity. It's one thing to give equal time to a debate over the psychological effects of assisted suicide on families or how an abundance of fiber in the diet affects heart disease and the risk of cancer in the body. It's another thing entirely, though, to do so when the other side's arguments are unqualified, based in opinion over fact, or have been refuted altogether.

It would be like asking a veterinarian how the former affects families or a mechanic how bran biologically affects the heart and putting their thoughts on equal footing with a psychiatrist's and a cardiologist's -- it's preposterous; the equivalent of giving equal time to those who still maintain the world is flat or deny evolution despite nearly infinite amounts of evidence to the contrary. But it happens all the time, and until it stops we are going to continue to be starved for real political debate and textured, nuanced analysis of the issues that affect all of our lives.

Until it does, we're going to continue to have large numbers of Americans who believe the Bush tax cuts are actually beneficial for the middle and lower classes and not wildly skewed towards the top ten percent; who believe that Saddam and Osama were working together for 9/11 and that somehow the former was responsible, thus justifying his removal from power; and who believe the President was truthful in the runup to the Iraq war and that its WMDs are still lingering out there somewhere, just waiting to be found; as polls frequently show. To sum up, no, they aren't, no, he didn't, and no, they're not.

And yet papers, magazines, and newscasts here constantly present arguments such as these as though they haven't repeatedly proven false; as though they are an actual, valid point that needs to be considered before making a final judgment rather than a spurious claim worthy of no more thought or energy than assertions trying to convince you the world is flat. I feel we've done a good job here over the years dissecting the issues and sifting through the bullshit, keeping a spotlight on the real area of discussion and not allowing ourselves to get lost in the ever-burgeoning sea of rhetoric and irrationality.

Thus it is with somewhat heavy heart I declare that I will no longer be able to do so. Due to an unfortunate byproduct of my new job for the government, I have been informed I will no longer be able to post without permission, and thus -- due to the stance I so often take here, one critical of the merry band of idiots running the show -- this will be my last posting for the site. And while the environment is nowhere near as improved as I'd have liked -- I'd always secretly hoped to have a little "mission accomplished" party of my own for my last post, replete with snug jumpsuits and cocksure swagger under giant, rippling banners, once the political discourse in this country had become more fulfilling than a lifetime of stale rice cakes -- I feel that at least among the meager circle of readers here, positive change has been affected.

Debates, both online and off, have been generated, arguments refined, beliefs tested, and allegiances questioned, much for the better of all involved. And so now the task is to continue the project in your necks of the woods -- when you're in line at the movies, sitting at the local Starbucks, or sucking back cocktails at the local bar. We must continue the conversation and force people to justify their opinions, jettisoning that which cannot be shown to be true, no matter how comforting or convenient. We must prove to our leaders that the public is interested in these matters and capable of having an honest, intelligent discussion about them; that the adolescent complacence and intellectually diminished stupor we've been lulled into is neither desired nor satisfying. In short, we must lead this country and those wary of how it is now being run out of the darkness of the rabbit hole we've descended into and back to where we were before.

It is, as I wrote in that first Independence Day post, "the perfect day for a new beginning":

"Today is a day to reflect upon the things that made this country great upon its founding. Principles, ideals, and thoughts about a better way of living and doing things that transcend the years and guide the heart and mind. Belief in an idea; in the strength of the human spirit and in a path of action that is relentlessly scrutinized and constantly refined, and thus fundamentally correct; in people who demand more than a blind acceptance of explanations or the status quo and who are always seeking answers to the question, 'Why.' These are the things you should expect from me and the criteria you should evaluate my writings on. So welcome to the Lines of Lattitude, where the obvious is always questioned and the questions being wrestled with aren't always obvious."

I want to sincerely thank all of you the support and comments over the years and ask that you remember two things -- 1) The answers are out there, if you're willing to do a little digging and 2) Our officials are elected to represent us, not ignore us, so keep up the fight. We'll right this ship yet. Until I find you all again -- thank you.

Until next time, my friends... --T

In yesterday's Times magazine there is an interesting article on Britain's current dilemma of how to deal with its sizeable Muslim population and the threat its more zealous individuals may pose to the UK and others abroad. Written by Christopher Caldwell, it details a society that is grappling to come to terms with this issue in the wake of last July's transit bombings as they try to strike a balance between the protection of civil liberties and religious freedoms with increased security for the wider population. For a location that is as geographically small, highly populated, and ethnically diverse as Britain is, the import is particularly concentrated after more than a decade of laxity helped lead to the attacks nearly one year ago.  Over the course of the intervening time Prime Minister Tony Blair's government has lurched into action, creating a twelve-step plan to target the issue by shoring up asylum and deportation laws and their enforcement, banning various hard-line Islamic groups, as well as proscribing related incendiary literature and the locations that sell it.

Compounding the matter, though, is the fact that three of the four bombers of last July were British-born citizens, as opposed to outraged imports as has previously been the case. As a result, Blair's administration has also tried a softer approach, attempting to reach out to the country's Muslim leaders in an effort to generate goodwill and more moderate stances at the sources for that population's information dissemination. As Campbell writes,

"Britain's approach — tightening up law enforcement for all its citizens, while trying to ensure that Muslims feel represented in every step of the process — differs from that of both the United States, which has focused on border control and electronic eavesdropping, and France, which relies on infiltration and an aggressive investigative judiciary. But its basic problem in fighting terrorism is the same one that all Western countries face. Britain is trying to clamp down on its Muslim communities and empower them at the same time. Clamp down too hard, and you alienate the people you want to win over. Empower communities indiscriminately, and you give free rein to people it is foolish to trust."

The problem, as Campbell notes, is how to identify the more moderate (and thus more receptive, ostensibly) members of this population. How do you separate the more politically passive or religiously flexible individuals from the 40 percent who favor the installment of Islamic law in Britain, if only in a "piecemeal," restricted fashion, according to a February poll in the Daily Mail? How do you distinguish between the temperate in predominantly Muslim areas in London and the majority who "sympathize viscerally and overwhelmingly with the radical position on Israel and, more generally, on foreign policy," according to Campbell? As he writes,

"What is a moderate Muslim? It could mean someone who's not very serious about his religion or someone who's quite serious about his religion but not very political about it. What of the common formulation that terrorism is "not Islam"? This could be a politically correct dodge or a hardheaded diagnosis that something more unholy is at work. The mainstream Islamic organizations, which unite Muslims around political grievances, are certainly a useful route into the British political system, but maybe they are whipping up those grievances in the first place. And nonbelievers are so numerous among people of immigrant background that dealing with religious leaders may be a wrongheaded strategy in the first place."

Finding the answers to these questions are difficult, and according to him slow in coming. There's been considerable pushback to segments of Blair's plan regarding how long suspects can be detained (28 days, pared down from the originally sought-after 90), how large areas are where people can be stopped and searched without reason (these Section 44 areas, named for the portion of the anti-terrorist legislation from which they came, are said to encompass virtually all of London, according to critics, and be arbitrarily determined), and how to enforce provisions banning the incitement of religious hatred. (Do jokes apply, or just intolerant, vitriolic prosletyzing calling for violent retaliation against one's transgressors?) And then there's the question of what's really to blame here -- the religion itself or its politically violent manifestations? Are the two linked at all or is the former being coopted to serve the latter's purposes? Campbell, for his part, seems to think there may be something to the latter assertion. He writes,

"When you talk to many Muslim leaders in Britain, you hear them focus almost obsessively on international politics, to the exclusion of religious, social and local political issues. The charitable way of looking at this is to say that it is a function of young people's burning to change the world... The uncharitable way is to say that even some mainstream religious leaders are practicing what the French Islamologist Olivier Roy calls 'neofundamentalism' — or what the Iranian journalist Amir Taheri calls 'a religion without a theology, a secular wolf disguised as a religious lamb.' If the 'religion' causing problems is not really about religious things at all, then the risk of talking at cross-purposes is high."

Campbell goes on say that Iraq has become a particularly poignant -- and convenient -- rallying point for the creation of future radicals. Besides the religious justifications given for the resistance -- that of the imperialist interloper in holy lands -- the situation in Iraq feeds the notion that "government is casual to the point of unconcern about the lives of Muslims," according to one British MP he interviewed.  It's difficult to discern how much truth there is to these sentiments, especially the latter half, and Campbell addresses some of the uncertainty below.

"Whether Iraq is a 'cause' of terror or a mere pretext is a difficult question...[I]f Iraq 'causes' someone to become a suicide bomber, it is almost certainly not in the way Western liberals understand political causation. The terrorist may already hold jihadist views. He may be whipped into bloodlust by images on TV or the Internet. He may regard the invasion of Iraq as an incursion upon the prerogatives of the Ummah — but the source of his anger is unlikely to be any supposed violation of international law. In the end, though, it may not matter if everyone means something different by 'Iraq.' A shared opposition to the war tightens the identification between radical and non-radical Muslims, and between both those groups and some members of the non-Muslim Western left, and this muddies the terms with which the battle of ideas around terrorism is fought."

For Sam Harris, though, author of the unbelievably interesting book, The End of Faith, there is no equivocation as to the root of the above: the intolerant, illogical underpinnings of faith, as well as one's unflinching adherence to it in spite of these facts. Harris' book  posits that modern faith -- Islam in particular, here, organized religion, in general -- and its ability to avoid any criticism or rational discussion over its veracity for fear of offending the believers, has caused, and continues to, an infinite number of problems globally. Because it isn't forced to adhere to the same levels of rigor and verification as other areas of intellectual and philosophical debate, Harris asserts we've created a situation where irrationality and delusion reign, which he fears is leading us towards a Huntington-esque showdown between Islam and the West. He writes,

"For anyone with eyes to see, there can be no doubt that religious faith remains a perpetual source of human conflict. Religion persuades otherwise intelligent men and women to not think, or to think badly, about questions of civilizational importance. And yet it remains taboo to criticize religious faith in our society, or to even observe that some religions are less compassionate and less tolerant than others. What is worst in us (outright delusion) has been elevated beyond the reach of criticism, while what is best (reason and intellectual honesty) must remain hidden, for fear of giving offense."

Harris states that part of the problem, and a key difference between Islam and western religions, is that bastardizations and corruptions of Christian texts to justify violence requires splitting hairs and misreading (or plain ignoring) a lot of what is there. With Islam, though, the inverse is true -- those who claim it to be non-violent in its majority are the ones splitting hairs as so much of the text is violent and intolerant in nature, stating explicitly and repeatedly what is to be done to non-believers, sinners, and transgressors of the faith. (Harris compiles a list of these statements in order to better illustrate his point and the list runs for over five pages, full-text. Amazing.) It is therefore no surprise that he writes,

"A future in which Islam and the West do not stand on the brink of mutual annihilation is a future in which most Muslims have learned to ignore most of their canon, just as most Christians have learned to do. Such a transformation is by no means guaranteed to occur, however."

The problem with all of these religions, he says, is that the form of faith they perpetuate is immune to the precepts of logic and reason, which only serves to lead us further and further down the rabbit hole of intolerance and stupidity. Harris explains,

"Tell a devout Christian that his wife is cheating on him, or that frozen yogurt can make a man invisible, and he is likely to require as much evidence as anyone else, and to be persuaded only to the extent that you give it. Tell him that the book he keeps by his bed was written by an invisible deity who will punish him with fire for eternity it he fails to accept its every incredible claim about the universe, and he seems to require no evidence whatsoever…"The truth is that religious faith is simply unjustified belief in matters of ultimate concern…Faith is what credulity becomes when it finally achieves escape velocity from the constraints of terrestrial discourse – constraints like reasonableness, intellectual coherence, civility, and candor…Faith is nothing more than a willingness to await the evidence…it is the search for knowledge on the installment plan: believe now, live an untestable hypothesis until your dying day, and you will discover that you were right."

"The problem that religious moderation poses for all of us is that it does not permit anything very critical to be said about religious literalism…by failing to live by the letter of the texts while tolerating the irrationality of those who do, religious moderates betray faith and reason equally… Not even politics suffers from the anachronism that still dominates our thinking about ethical values and spiritual experience…Either we perfected our religious understanding of the world a millennium ago – while our knowledge on all other fronts was still hopelessly inchoate – or religion, being the mere maintenance of dogma, is one area of discourse that does not admit of progress…Religious faith represents so uncompromising a misuse of the power of our minds that it forms a kind of perverse cultural singularity – a vanishing point beyond which rational discourse proves impossible…"It is time we realized that we need not be unreasonable to suffuse our lives with love, compassion, ecstasy, and awe; nor must we renounce all forms of spirituality or mysticism to be on good terms with reason."

Regardless of your religious beliefs (or lack thereof), Harris' book raises a slew of interesting questions (and more than its fair share of cockles, I imagine) and provides an incredibly cogent argument that maybe, for once, it's time to sit down and consider whether our religious tenets and teachings are more trouble than they're worth. For as he writes,

"If all that is good in religion can be had elsewhere -- if, for instance, ethical and spiritual experience can be cultivated and talked about without our claiming to know things we manifestly do not know -- then all the rest of our religious activity represents, at best, a massive waste of time and energy."

Perhaps it's time to put our money where our mouths are and justify that which we believe. Until next time, my friends...

An article in the latest NY Review of Books, "Power Grab" by Elizabeth Drew, has convinced me to revisit a topic we've touched on several times here, that of the presidential signing statement. As mentioned before, our president, the Great Decider, has a historically unique penchant for these statements, both for how pronounced they are in their power and how proficient he is at their issuance.

Delivered in near or complete silence for an unprecedented 750 items (according to the Boston Globe report referenced in my May 14th post), these statements seem to know no limits in their scope or influence, affecting everything from torture as an interrogation technique and government wiretapping of domestic calls to the distribution of government science scholarships. The President has acted with far more frequency than his predecessors, even his most modern ones -- ever since Reagan began using these as a strategic device to circumvent Congress and aggregate power, numbers have been higher than in the past, yet nowhere near Bush's tally. Reagan issued 71 of these in his eight years in office, while the President's father, HW, fired off 146; on the other side of the aisle, Clinton split the middle of these two goalposts with 105 in his eight years. There were only 75 issued total before these guys got into office, in the entire history of the country. Yet even taken together, their 322 -- for 20 years in office, mind you -- is nowhere near the profligacy of the Great Decider's five and change, to this point.

But other than having a broad understanding of what these proclamations do -- essentially giving a nice, big "F.U." to the members of Congress -- the finer points of them are lost on the general public. What Drew's article does a nice job of is explaining functionally how these things work. She writes:

"Bush has cited two grounds for flouting the will of Congress, or of unilaterally expanding presidential powers. One is the claim of the "inherent" power of the commander in chief. Second is a heretofore obscure doctrine called the unitary executive, which gives the president power over Congress and the courts. The concept of a unitary executive holds that the executive branch can overrule the courts and Congress on the basis of the president's own interpretations of the Constitution, in effect overturning Marbury v. Madison (1803), which established the principle of judicial review, and the constitutional concept of checks and balances."

Since the President can issue these statements whenever he wants to and with as little fanfare or explanation as he deems necessary (which, if you're like our current leader, is about the same as the number of stripes you'll find on an elephant), this leads to the sham of public pageantry described in the following passage:

"The public scenes of the President surrounded by smiling legislators whom he praises for their wonderful work as he hands out the pens he has used to sign the bill are often utterly misleading. The elected officials aren't informed at that time of the President's real intentions concerning the law. After they leave, the President's signing statements—which he does not issue verbally at the time of signing— are placed in the Federal Register, a compendium of US laws, which members of Congress rarely read. And they are often so technical, referring as they do to this subsection and that statute, that they are difficult to understand."

Take the President's response to Senator McCain's anti-torture amendment for detainees, which was tacked onto the end of the Defense Appropriations Bill last year, HR 2863, and approved by both chambers of Congress -- 90-9 in the Senate, 308-122 in the House -- as an illustrative example of this last point. To explain his dissent for the bill and his intentions to disregard it if necessary, he wrote:

"The executive branch shall construe Title X in Division A of the Act, relating to detainees, in a manner consistent with the constitutional authority of the President to supervise the unitary executive branch and as Commander in Chief and consistent with the constitutional limitations on the judicial power, which will assist in achieving the shared objective of the Congress and the President, evidenced in Title X, of protecting the American people from further terrorist attacks. Further, in light of the principles enunciated by the Supreme Court of the United States in 2001 in Alexander v. Sandoval, and noting that the text and structure of Title X do not create a private right of action to enforce Title X, the executive branch shall construe Title X not to create a private right of action. Finally, given the decision of the Congress reflected in subsections 1005(e) and 1005(h) that the amendments made to section 2241 of title 28, United States Code, shall apply to past, present, and future actions, including applications for writs of habeas corpus, described in that section, and noting that section 1005 does not confer any constitutional right upon an alien detained abroad as an enemy combatant, the executive branch shall construe section 1005 to preclude the Federal courts from exercising subject matter jurisdiction over any existing or future action, including applications for writs of habeas corpus, described in section 1005."

This is what lawmakers -- not lawyers with a dozen years of deciphering legal jargon -- were supposed to read, understand, and contest, if they had a quarrel with it when it showed up unheralded in the Register and the White House website. Sure, in a perfect world our lawmakers would have the time, wherewithal, and wisdom to digest this and each of the other 749 statements -- 750 rebuttals to the products of their hard labor -- but when these statements come in the form of heavily encrypted missives such as this, that need to be intercepted before they can even be decoded, the chances are worse than finding those aforementioned stripes. (And this isn't even the most damning example. That garbled cogitation -- of construing x "in a manner consistent with the constitutional authority of the President" -- is one of the President's favorite chestnuts, showing up repeatedly in his signing statements, apropos of essentially nothing, including five times in the linked one above.)

Now consider how the much-maligned President Clinton used his signing statements to reject portions of law while during his term in office.This excerpt, taken from a random signing statement from 1996 -- his Statement on Signing the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 1996 -- deals with a provision that permits (requires, actually) "the discharge of military personnel living with HIV, where such discharge is not required by any medical, public health, or military purpose." Clinton registered his displeasure thusly:

"This provision is blatantly discriminatory and highly punitive to service members and their families. People living with HIV can and do lead full and productive lives, provide for their families, and contribute to the well-being of our Nation. The men and women affected by this provision are ready, willing and able to serve their country with honor and should be allowed to continue to do so. Therefore, I strongly support the current efforts in the Congress to repeal this provision before a single service member is discharged from the armed forces.

Consequently, I have concluded that this discriminatory provision is unconstitutional. Specifically, it violates equal protection by requiring the discharge of qualified service members living with HIV who are medically able to serve, without furthering any legitimate governmental purpose...In accordance with my constitutional determination, the Attorney General will decline to defend this provision. Instead, the Attorney General will inform the House and Senate of this determination so that they may, if they wish, present to the courts their argument that the provision should be sustained.  Further, to mitigate any unfair burden that this legislation could place on these service members and their families pending any repeal or judicial invalidation, I have directed the Secretaries of Defense, Veterans Affairs, and Transportation, in carrying out the provisions of this Act, to take all steps necessary to ensure that these service members receive the full benefits to which they are entitled - including, among other things, disability retirement pay, health care coverage for their families and transition benefits such as vocational education."

Not only does he explain why he disagrees with the bill, he explains exactly what he is going to do as a result. Clear, cogent, and concise, with no beating around the bush or efforts at subterfuge. Which means that Congress or the Court, should they have felt so inclined, could then have directly challenged Clinton's assertions and intended enforcement of the bill or altered the existing legislation in an effort at compromise. With Bush's cryptic dicta, you need someone to divine the scattered coffee grounds at the White House to even know these things exist before you could begin to formulate a response.

And that's precisely what he wants. As Dahlia Lithwick notes in this Slate article from January (which explains the difference between her 505 instances and the Globe's 750 five months later), what is unique about the Bush presidency -- besides the aforementioned problem of how often and how broadly he uses these statements -- are the myriad encroachments he perceives on his power and the scarce explanation he gives to justify his subsequent actions. She writes:

"Of the 505 constitutional objections he has raised over the years, Cooper found the most frequent to be the 82 instances in which Bush disputed the bill's constitutionality because Article II of the Constitution does not permit any interference with his 'power to supervise the unitary executive.' That's not an objection to some act of Congress. That's an objection to Congressional authority itself. Similarly, Cooper counted 77 claims that as president, Bush has 'exclusive power over foreign affairs' and 48 claims of 'authority to determine and impose national security classification and withhold information.' Bush consistently uses these statements to prune back congressional authority and even—as he does in the McCain statement—to limit judicial review. He uses them to assert and reassert that his is the last word on a law's constitutional application to the executive. As he has done throughout the war on terror, Bush arrogates phenomenal new constitutional power for himself and, as Cooper notes, 'these powers were often asserted without supporting authorities, or even serious efforts at explanation.'"

And while every President since Monroe has used these statements, as detailed nicely in the historical part of this essay by Miami University professor Dr. Christopher Kelley, this Administration is the first to act so surreptitiously and in full knowledge that what they are doing, many times, is improper, if not outright illegal, in their efforts to avoid Congressional or judicial checks and balances. As Grover Norquist -- yes, that Grover Norquist, surprisingly -- says in Drew's article, "They're not trying to change the law; they're saying that they're above the law and in the case of the NSA wiretaps they break it."

Consider the January press briefing she quotes to that end between Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and reporters:

"Asked why the administration didn't go to Congress for authorization to wiretap domestic calls in terrorism cases without seeking a warrant, Gonzales replied: 'We have had discussions with Congress in the past—certain members of Congress —as to whether or not FISA could be amended to allow us to adequately deal with this kind of threat, and we were advised that that would be difficult, if not impossible.' In other words, having been told that Congress was unlikely to authorize the warrantless wiretaps of domestic calls, the administration went ahead and did the tapping."

And when it was revealed that they had gone against these Congressional warnings, the President attacked the leakers and his need to inform anyone of what he was doing.

"'In his statement acknowledging the wiretapping program, Bush said, "The fact that we're discussing this program is helping the enemy.' In an attempt to limit congressional oversight, the administration tried to restrict the number of members of Congress it would brief on such matters. According to a presidential directive issued quietly after September 11, officials were to discuss highly classified information with only the Republican chairman and the ranking Democrat on the Senate and House Intelligence Committees—committees that were established to conduct oversight on intelligence activities following the CIA scandals in the mid-Seventies—as well as the Republican and Democratic leaders of each chamber (a total of eight people) and not with the full intelligence committees. Under the new rules, the members of this small group of people weren't permitted to discuss the program with other members of the intelligence committees, or with their own staffs."

[Before the Hayden hearing and its accompanying uproar over the wiretapping program finally forced the White House to extend briefing rights over these matters to the entire Congressional intelligence committees, they had briefly reached a "compromise" to limit the additional members "to four Republicans and three Democrats, still leaving most of the intelligence committee members, not to mention other elected officials, in the dark," as Drew notes.]

All of this -- the cryptic signing statements, the abundant secrecy and lack of explanation -- creates a situation that is so unabashedly ridiculous that even Grover Norquist, the man who wants to shrink the government so he can drown it in the proverbial bathtub, is forced to say, "If you interpret the Constitution's saying that the president is commander in chief to mean that the president can do anything he wants and can ignore the laws, you don't have a constitution: you have a king."

All hail King George. Until next time, my friends...

There is an interesting article in the latest NY Review of Books on Israel and an academic paper from a pair of professors whose treatment of the subject has caused a bit of a stir amongst cognoscenti and pundits alike. The paper, written by a pair of Harvard and University of Chicago professors -- Stephen Walt for the former and John Mearsheimer the latter -- posits that "the centerpiece of US policy in the Middle East has been its unwavering support for Israel, and that this has not been in America's best interest."

Seems plausible enough. And yet this simple, rather obvious assertion, which incorporates evidence of the unparalleled power of AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobby here in Washington, as proof, has created a cacophany in both the political and academic worlds with people decrying the authors as amateurs, idiots, and borderline anti-Semitic. Some factual mistakes, decontextualized quotes, and narrow scope of focus -- the paper does little to address Palestinian transgressions during the previous decades of turmoil while lambasting the Israeli delegation for responding in kind, for one -- have bolstered critics' demands that the paper be dismissed out of hand.

And while these mistakes are as unfortunate and unexpected as they were avoidable, considering the article's esteemed pedigree, its core argument -- that AIPAC has a powerful, and many times negative, effect on US policy decisions -- is, as the above article states, "entirely correct." Their contention is more fully explained in the following:

"While other special-interest groups influence US foreign policy, Mearsheimer and Walt say, no lobby has managed to divert it 'as far from what the American national interest would otherwise suggest, while simultaneously convincing Americans that US and Israeli interests are essentially identical.' The result has turned the US into an 'enabler' of Israeli expansion in the occupied territories, 'making it complicit in the crimes perpetrated against the Palestinians.' Pressure from AIPAC and Israel was also a 'critical element' in the US decision to invade Iraq, they write, arguing that the war 'was motivated in good part by a desire to make Israel more secure.'"

And while the NY Review's article does a good job showing that this latter bit is not the only explanation for our involvement in Iraq -- another overstep by the authors that only serves to further diminish the work's overall impact -- it also nicely fills in a crucial gap that the authors neglected to deal with -- a lack of firsthand evidence of how, exactly, AIPAC functions on Capitol Hill. Despite a $47 million annual budget and a cadre of well-connected employees and supporters able to influence political votes and races with ease, Mearsheimer and Walt largely neglect the finer points of AIPAC's operations. Thankfully, though, the bulk of the NYBR article deals with this very issue and offers a fascinating look at how the lobby wields its weight in Washington, and does so so effectively.

But the most important point it raises, in my mind, revolves around how the paper has been received and how the lobby and its consituents have responded -- with cries of persecution and anti-Semitism on the part of the authors. This knee-jerk reaction that almost always accompanies the utterance of a cross or critical word against Israel and the ability of these people to drag the debate to these issues and not the merits of the original statement reminds me of how the current Administration has dealt with almost all forms of criticism in its six years in office.

From the war in Iraq to the war on Terror (and the myriad stepping stones in between), whenever it has been confronted with a sharp critique or a meager questioning glance, the Administration and its supporters have lashed out at the inquisitor by questioning their patriotism, their intelligence, and/or their character rather than the validity of their statements or the import of their uncertainty. This has created a climate where our political debates engage emotion over the issues and where opinion is formed (and the debates themselves won) on the basis of volume rather than intellect and argumentative rigor or persuasion.

And it is this point, which is the centerpiece of another interesting article in the latest issue of Harper's entitled, "Stabbed in the Back! The Past and Future of a Right-Wing Myth." (An admittedly unfortunate example of punctuational exuberance, to be sure.) In the article, author Kevin Baker shows how the long-running legacy of the Seigfried myth -- the Wagnerian hero who was betrayed by one of his own and fatally stabbed in the back -- has been implemented by Republicans in order to absolve themselves of criticism and blame for everything from the shortcomings stemming from the Yalta accord ending WWII to Vietnam and Iraq. By creating the notion of betrayal to explain falling short in their mythically heroic endeavors, Baker details how these men have to this day been able to reframe history and escape from accepting culpability for their part in it.

He writes,

"What Nixon and a few of his contemporaries did for the right was to make culture war the permanent condition of American politics. On domestic issues as well as ones of foreign policy, from Ronald Regan's mythical 'welfare queens' through George Wallace's 'pointy-headed intellectuals'; from Lee Atwater's characterization of Democrats as anti-family, anti-life, anti-God, down through the open, deliberate attempts of Newt Gingrich and Karl Rove to constantly describe opponents in words that made them seem bizarre, deviant, and 'out of the mainstream,' the entire vernacular of American politics has been altered since Vietnam. Culture war has become the organizing principle of the right, unalterably convinced as it is that conservatives are an embattled majority, one that must stand ever vigilant against its unnatural enemies -- from the 'gay agenda,' to the advocates of Darwinism, to the 'war against Christmas' last year."

Thus as a result, we are treated to conversations that employ logically specious claims -- that critics are being unsupportive of the troops, for example, and thus treasonously un-American when they speak out against the war in Iraq or its execution -- to defeat warranted examination and debate over government policy and oversight. (As Baker so aptly writes when describing one person's response to the above, "Again, the link was made. Soldiers of the most powerful army in the history of the world would be actively endangered if they even wondered whether the folks at home were questioning their deployment," the hint of incredulity and sarcasm unmistakable in his tone.)

The downfall of the myth this time around, though, as evidenced by the President's continuingly disintegrating poll numbers and the parallel mess in Iraq, is that Republicans have separated the public from the struggle, a distance that has divorced them from any sense of unity or ownership with its eventual outcome and led to diminishing levels of support. Baker explains:

"The Bush Administration has now become the first government in our nation's history to fight a major war without seeking any sort of national solidarity. Far from it. The whole purpose of the war in Iraq -- and the 'war on terrorism' -- seems to have been to foment division and to win elections by forcing Americans to choose between starkly different visions of what their country should be...

Bush and his advisers have sought to use the war not only to punish their enemies but also to reward their supporters, a bit of political juggling that led them to demand nothing from the American public as a whole. Those of us who are not actively fighting in Iraq, or who do not have close friends and family members who are doing so, have not been asked to sacrifice in any way. The richest among us have even been showered with tax cuts. Yet in demanding so little, Bush has finally uncoupled the state from its heroic status. It is not a coincidence that modern nationalism dates from the advent of mass democracy -- and mass citizen armies -- that the American and French revolutions ushered in at the end of the eighteenth century. Bush's refusal to mobilize the nation for the war in Iraq has severed that immediate identification with our army's fortunes."

And while Baker is quick to point out that all of this did not begin with the Bush Administration, the clear implication is that, as is usually the case when that particular qualification is offered, they are among the worst offenders in trotting this myth and its arguments out. A really interesting read.

We'll close, as always, with a couple of readers from my favorite neck of the woods, Latin America. The first is from the latest Foreign Affairs and deals with the much-ballyhooed shift to the left underway in much of South America. Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Venezuela, and Bolivia have already done so, while Mexico and Peru are flirting with doing so in the coming year's elections, which has made the five people in Washington still cogniscent of the southern continent's existence and importance a little nervous. Trotting out such time-honored fears of a Castro-led or -inspired revolution across the area (or a similar one led by his protege, Hugo Chavez), many have seized on the high levels of anti-American sentiment present in these countries (stoked so effectively by the aforementioned Chavez) and the shift in style of government to trumpet a total collapse of our interests in the area. But author Castaneda argues that, while superficially there has been a move to the left, it is by no means a uniform one, distinguishing between two distinct camps held within the Latin liberal sector.

One is a socialist, Castro-ist model as has taken hold in Cuba; the other is a populist, borderline authoritarian one as has consolidated power in Venezuela. The Castro model incorporates elements of Soviet-style Communism with grandiose, ideological rhetoric and symbolism; the Chavez model, on the other hand, has little in the way of ideology, instead relying on emotion and cult of personality, along with rigidly enforced calls for uniformity and token projects for the working class and poor, to maintain its hold on power. Castaneda explains the origins of the pair's allure, as well as a key difference affecting their hopes of doing so in the future, in the following:

"Democracy, although welcomed and supported by broad swaths of Latin American societies, did little to eradicate the region's secular plagues: corruption, a weak or nonexistent rule of law, ineffective governance, and the concentration of power in the hands of a few...

More recently, something funny has happened to both kinds of leftist movements on their way back to power. The communist, socialist, and Castroist left, with a few exceptions, has been able to reconstruct itself, thanks largely to an acknowledgment of its failures and those of its erstwhile models. Meanwhile, the populist left -- with an approach to power that depends on giving away money, a deep attachment to the nationalist fervor of another era, and no real domestic agenda -- has remained true to itself. The latter perseveres in its cult of the past: it waxes nostalgic about the glory days of Peronism, the Mexican Revolution, and, needless to say, Castro. The former, familiar with its own mistakes, defeats, and tragedies, and keenly aware of the failures of the Soviet Union and Cuba, has changed its colors."

Really interesting stuff. And it's worth noting that while Castaneda is correct in stating that Castro's links to the Latin left -- whether implicit or direct -- have had little effect on domestic elections, but long been an impediment to the community's stances on various individual issues, involvement with Chavez may be having the opposite effect, if recent developments in Mexico and Peru are any indication. At least in terms of the former, close ties to Chavez (in the form of political endorsements and public appearances by the Bolivarian) seem to have hurt both Mexico's Lopez Obrador and Peru's Humala in recent weeks as their poll numbers have steadily declined in light of their opposition's hammering on the connection between the two. It's uncertain if this is a sign of things to come across the continent or just an isolated, albeit effective, backlash engineered by the opposition camps at the end of their campaigns. Worth keeping an eye on, in any event.

The other two articles are a pair of profiles on the source of that dissatisfaction -- who else? -- Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, apparently the leader of the only country still in existence in Latin America judging by the articles published in the media. The first is by Michael Shifter, a professor over at Georgetown and the VP for policy at the Inter-American Dialogue, from the same issue of Foreign Affairs. It details how despite all of Chavez's political bluster and hemispheric influence, his social programs  -- the key to his wide and seemingly-unflagging popular support in the country -- are widely considered failures, as evidenced by low to no economic growth, continually dismal standards of living, and a trenchant gap between the haves and the have-nots. The other also addresses this issue, but from a more personal, human perspective. It's from last month's National Geographic and is by the inimitable Alma Guillermoprieto, one of the best writers on Latin American stuff out there. You can check out an excerpt here -- I wasn't able to find a full text version online, so you'll have to take a fieldtrip to the library to see it.

Until next time, my friends...

The events of the past week, beginning with Porter Goss' surprise announcement Friday that he would be resigning as head of the CIA after only 18 months on the job and leading to the President's nomination three days later of Gen. Michael Hayden as his replacement, has created an interesting debate here in Washington. Centering around the importance of civilian control of our country's intelligence agencies and the proper role of the military therein, the argument is over more than simply whether Gen. Hayden is qualified to run the Central Intelligence Agency once Goss departs, it's also over the issue of precedent -- both in the historical sense and whether we want to set a potentially dangerous new one here.

For the former question of Hayden's competence, clear answers are hard to find. He comes to the nomination a former head of the NSA (1999-2005) and the recent right-hand man to the director of national intelligence, John Negroponte, whom he would have to work closely with at his post in the CIA. He has held senior intelligence positions both at the Pentagon and abroad, serving in South Korea, Bulgaria, and Germany, the latter of which he worked during the Yugoslav civil war. He has served on the first President Bush's National Security Council with Sec. of State Condoleezza Rice and is said to have recently fought against Sec. of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's continuous attempts to exert more control over intelligence gathering and analysis during his tenure at the NSA.

Yet as the linked Times article notes, he has "almost no direct experience at the C.I.A.'s central task of recruiting and running foreign agents," which would be a major problem for an agency, embattled as it is, whose recently stated goals were to increase the caliber and quantity of human intelligence in hot spots like North Korea and Iran, a deficiency made profoundly important by the situation in Iraq. (Had we known more or had better sources inside that country, would the justification leading up to that war or its execution shortly thereafter been altered, thus bettering the final outcome? Can we afford to continue stumbling in the dark in the other two areas, especially when the option of doing nothing for either no longer seems possible?)

Also cause for concern is Hayden's aforementioned proximity to Negroponte and their rumored disdain of the job Porter Goss was doing, which led to his eventual ouster. This closeness, coupled with their displeasure for Goss' resisting their proposed changes -- to remove most of the analysis components of the CIA and move them to the DIA, leaving the agency to focus strictly on intelligence collection -- eventually engineered the latter's exit, leading many to fear Hayden would blindly do the bidding of his former boss and merely add another layer of bureaucracy to an already muddled picture, further downgrading the importance of the agency at home and abroad.

Finally, the fact that Hayden's reign at the head of the NSA coincided with the creation and expansion of the recently revealed domestic wiretapping program -- the same one we found out on Friday had compiled a massive database of every phone call made by customers of three of the largest phone companies in America,  AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth, since 9/11 -- is particularly alarming. The program, which has been decried by many as illegal since no warrants have been issued to justify the gathering of information, has allowed the NSA to spy on "tens of millions of domestic phone calls" and emails made by American citizens, according to reports, yet was still defended by Hayden in the press as late as February. To blindly approve the executor (and advocate) of a program whose constitutionality still has yet to be determined  -- or even discussed in front of Congress, for that matter -- seems extremely foolhardy, to say the least.

As I mentioned before, though, the issue at hand is not merely whether Hayden possesses the proper skillset and qualities to functionally do the job. Of primary importance, in my mind, is the matter of precedent -- what is the historic  justification for all of our major intelligence agencies to be run by former (or current, in this case, as Hayden has expressed a desire to remain on active duty) military officials? Contextually, the CIA has almost always been anomalous in this respect as all the other intel agencies -- the DIA, the NSA, the armed service branches' groups -- are run by current members of the military.

This makes sense when you consider where they fall on the government's flowchart -- all of the aforementioned organizations lie under the Department of Defense on the federal family tree and thus under its funding and command. The CIA, however, is an independent entity and has long had a history of civilian command. Of its 19 previous directors since its inception after WWII, only six have been former military commanders, the last being Adm. Stansfield Turner from 1977-81. Since that time, every director -- all seven of them -- has been a civilian without any military experience. (There were two deputy directors who briefly became acting directors --  Lt. Gen. Vernon A. Walters in 1973 and  Adm. William O. Studeman in 1993 and 1995, but these terms lasted a mere three months, two weeks, and four months, respectively.)

In fact, in the entire sixty-year history of the agency, only twelve of them -- including each of the first seven -- have been run by a military commander. Once the decision was made to lean towards civilian control of the agency with Gen. Bedell Smith's departure in 1953, there have been only two leaders with military experience for a total of five years --  Vice Adm. William F. Raborn, Jr., as well as Adm. Turner. The remainder of the directors came from a range of other professions and qualifications -- Director Schlesinger was an economist; Director H.W. Bush was an oilman and high-ranking Republican politician (and the first total outsider to be given the post); Director Casey was a political campaign director; Director Webster was a federal judge and head of the FBI. Even recent heads like Tenet and Goss came from non-military backgrounds -- Tenet was a deputy director in the CIA before being bumped to the top spot while Goss was a Florida Congressman.

To reverse this trend, and the bulk of this history, now is rather dangerous. The Pentagon and its intelligence agencies already control 80 percent of the resources devoted to intelligence gathering and analysis. The CIA, with its history of civilian leadership, has been seen as a check, albeit a small one, on the military-centric mindset and policies that prevail in the Department of Defense. When Jimmy Carter nominated Adm. Turner to the position in 1977, there was no public outcry over his doing so because the Democrats still controlled the White House and both chambers of Congress, providing balance to the political equation. To forgo this ability now -- with a Republican president, a Republican Congress, and an increasingly right-leaning judiciary -- would seal off one more outlet of critical opinion and edge us perilously closer to a monolithic, homogenous government where all organs of dissent are silenced or eliminated.

In a time where the administration is already criticized for its unflinching rigidity and resistance to change, establishing this new precedent should give the general public and politicians alike serious pause. The question that needs to be asked is whether we really want one of the last vestiges of independent, civilian control in this government to disappear when so many of the others -- the Pentagon and the White House, to name two of the largest and most egregious offenders -- have swayed so severely towards aggressive militarism and narrow analysis.Do we want to essentially destroy the CIA and its main function of intelligence analysis and instead shred it to pieces, scattering the remnants across an already bloated bureaucracy and hope they are able to sufficiently reconnect to protect us from coming threats?

Thankfully it appears that members on both sides of the aisle in Capitol Hill are as concerned with this prospect as I am and are speaking out about the President doing so. Major Republican leaders voiced concerns about the appointment last weekend -- Sen. Pat Roberts (R-KA), Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA), and Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-MI), to name a few. (Hoekstra said, "Our nation needs to maintain a balance between intelligence support to the military and long-term intelligence support to policy makers. By placing a military officer atop the CIA we risk losing this balance.") -- indicating that the confirmation hearing may be more of a struggle than recent ones for Judges Roberts and Alito, for example.

If nothing else, it's a sign of hope that there will finally be a serious debate over something of importance here in Washington; that the system of checks and balances our founders sought fit to include in the Constitution won't be further washed away and relegated to uniform obscurity.

-----

One of the things you won't find in the Constitution is the subject of this first reader, an op-ed from the Times last week. Dealing with presidential signing statements, the article explains how despite five years in office with nary a veto -- the longest reign without doing so since Thomas Jefferson -- the President has issued over 750 of these decrees stating that he will not abide by the edicts of various laws. He's done so for laws regarding the torture of prisoners, for those regarding the spying on of Americans and those requiring notification by the Justice Department of how the FBI is implementing the Patriot Act to make searches and seizures. He's even done so for those protecting people in the nuclear industry who report illegal activities to Congress.

His response to these products of the people and our political system? Nuh uh. Not if I don't feel like it. In essence it's an unofficial veto, one that is conveniently not subject to examination or review by the Congress and whose mere existence is rarely even acknowledged in public. It's the iron stamp of the emperor, the emphatic assertion of the most powerful Nike spokesman in the world -- just do it.

And while this product of the Reagan era -- the concoction of one of his lawyers to expand the power of the executive -- may not be the invention of President Bush, he's definitely its biggest proponent.  Quoting from the Times article,

"Since the Reagan era, other presidents have issued signing statements to explain how they interpreted a law for the purpose of enforcing it, or to register narrow constitutional concerns. But none have done it as profligately as Mr. Bush. (His father issued about 232 in four years, and Bill Clinton 140 in eight years.) And none have used it so clearly to make the president the interpreter of a law's intent, instead of Congress, and the arbiter of constitutionality, instead of the courts. Like many of Mr. Bush's other imperial excesses, this one serves no legitimate purpose. Congress is run by a solid and iron-fisted Republican majority. And there is actually a system for the president to object to a law: he vetoes it, and Congress then has a chance to override the veto with a two-thirds majority.

That process was good enough for 42 other presidents. But it has the disadvantage of leaving the chief executive bound by his oath of office to abide by the result. This president seems determined not to play by any rules other than the ones of his own making. And that includes the Constitution."

As life has intervened on my normally sunny existence these days -- not to mention my ability to think clearly or concentrate -- I'll try to keep this one short. (As short as is ever possible for me, that is.) In the wake of this weekend's White House Correspondents' Dinner, hosted by the inimitable Stephen Colbert (which if you haven't seen his speech yet, you owe it to yourself to do so. Pretty funny stuff that can be seen here at Ifilm.com -- parts one, two and three), we'll begin with the latest exploits of my favorite target, that of the Great Decider.

After just receiving his lowest poll numbers yet -- even lower than the ones mentioned here a few weeks ago -- the President embarked on a brief speaking tour to remind us why his numbers are so low -- his unflinching refusal to admit wrong or reality and his continued insistence to speak to the nation like we're a bunch of unintelligent, idiotic fourth-graders. Consider the following two examples. First, the President showed up to speak to the Renewable Fuels Association, a group of scientists, businessmen, and executives in the ethanol industry, to discuss his energy policy (the mesquite-powered cars Stephen mentioned?) and then proceeded to explain to them how hybrid cars work and where gasoline comes from, to name only two of most flagrantly stupid examples.

For the former, there's this -- "The easiest way to promote fuel efficiency is to encourage drivers to purchase highly efficient hybrid or clean diesel vehicles, which, by the way, can run on alternative energy sources. Hybrid vehicles run on a combination of a traditional engine and an electric battery. The twin sources of power allow hybrid cars and trucks to travel about twice as far on a gallon of fuel as gasoline-only vehicles. When people are driving hybrids, they're conserving energy." 

And for the latter, this -- "The truth of the matter is, the long-term strategy is to power our automobiles with something other than oil  -- something other than gasoline, which is derived from oil."

This is a speech given to the RENEWABLE FUELS ASSOCIATION. Does he honestly believe that they don't understand the intricacies of hybrid technologies or the origins of gasoline? It's their life's work! By explaining this to them, does he think that will solve the energy crisis? "OH! Gasoline comes from OIL, not the tears of fairies and leprechauns! NOW I know how to free us from the shackles of our crippling petroleum dependence..."

But that insult to our collective intelligence wasn't his only offering that week, but merely his opening salvo. That's because the next day, when announcing his newest press secretary, the Administration's talking head version 3.0, Tony Snow, to the press corps, the President proceeded to explain how that job functioned, too.

"My job is to make decisions," he said. (Uh-oh, again with the "I'm the decider" stuff.) "And his job is to help explain those decisions to the press corps and the American people."

This, while speaking to the press corps, the same people who have spent virtually every day of the last five and a half years with either Ari Fleischer of Scott McClellan, THE PREVIOUS TWO PRESS SECRETARIES! "Thank you, Mr. President, I think we've got it."

I'm sorry if this seems pedantic and trivial to some of you (that last paragraph sounds like a Lewis Black-ian rant in my head, my face all scrambled and arms a-flailing), but comments like this -- completely oblivious or disregarding of the audience and its members' intellects -- are insulting and incredibly counterproductive. If you want to engage an audience and maintain their interest, you talk to them, not at them, and especially not down to them. If you don't, you immediately lose them as they rightfully tune you out.

The American public, despite what comedians and cynics may say, are not a bunch of lobotomized troglodytes whose brains are only good for keeping the insides of their skulls warm. They can relate to an issue and debate it on its merits, if only given the chance. Unfortunately, this President -- and many other politicians, too -- seem to think otherwise and feel the need to speak in offerings that would even seem out of place at the back of an elementary school's short bus. Perhaps some of that's to blame for Congressional and Presidential approval ratings in the low thirties. But what do I know? I'm just one of the troglodytes.

Something else that undoubtedly factors into those dismal numbers are the President's actual policies -- the continuing debacle in Iraq, for example, and his aforementioned refusal to honestly discuss the issue. In Frank Rich's column in the Sunday Times, he adroitly lays out several of the ongoing flaws there that leave such a bleak offering of hope for the President's next (and final) thousand days in office. Consider the following:

"The demons that keep rising up from the past to grab Mr. Bush are the fictional W.M.D. he wielded to take us into Iraq. They stalk him as relentlessly as Banquo's ghost did Macbeth. From that original sin, all else flows. Mr. Rove wouldn't be in jeopardy if the White House hadn't hatched a clumsy plot to cover up its fictions. Mr. Bush's poll numbers wouldn't be in the toilet if American blood was not being spilled daily because of his fictions. By recruiting a practiced Fox News performer to better spin this history, the White House reveals that it has learned nothing. Made-for-TV propaganda propelled the Bush presidency into its quagmire in the first place. At this late date only the truth, the whole and nothing but, can set it free."

But Rich isn't so foolish as to believe that's going to happen anytime soon. That's because, as he goes on to explain, despite three years and enormous amounts of money, life, and effort, the situation on the ground in Iraq is scarcely better today than it was before we got started. Rich writes,

"Three years later we know, courtesy of the Army Corps of Engineers, that our corrupt, Enron-like Iraq reconstruction effort has yielded at most 20 of those 142 promised hospitals. But we did build a palace for ourselves. The only building project on time and on budget, USA Today reported, is a $592 million embassy complex in the Green Zone on acreage the size of 80 football fields. Symbolically enough, it will have its own water-treatment plant and power generator to provide the basic services that we still have not restored to pre-invasion levels for the poor unwashed Iraqis beyond the American bunker."

And while this is undoubtedly a disgraceful reality for the people who placed such hopes with us coming in and doing something -- anything -- right by them in our "preemptive-but-necessary" toppling of their government, Rich doesn't side with the growing number of dissenters calling for Rumsfeld's resignation of late. That's because the true fault, he feels, lies squarely at the top of the food chain and not, solely, with the DC Donald. He writes in his closing,

"Set against this reality, the debate about Donald Rumsfeld's future is as much of a sideshow as the installation of a slicker Fleischer-McClellan marketer in the White House press room. The defense secretary's catastrophic mistakes in Iraq cannot be undone now, and any successor would still be beholden to the policy set from above. Mr. Rumsfeld is merely a useful, even essential, scapegoat for the hawks in politics and punditland who are now embarrassed to have signed on to this fiasco. For conservative hawks, he's a convenient way to deflect blame from where it most belongs: with the commander in chief. For liberal hawks, attacking Mr. Rumsfeld for his poor execution of the war means never having to say you're sorry for leaping on (and abetting) the blatant propaganda bandwagon that took us there. But their history can't be rewritten any more than Mr. Bush's can: the war's failures were manifestly foretold by the administration's arrogance and haste during the run-up.

"A new defense or press secretary changes nothing. The only person who can try to save the administration from itself in Iraq is the president. He can start telling the truth in the narrow window of time he has left and initiate a candid national conversation about our inevitable exit strategy. Or he can wait for events on the ground in Iraq and political realities at home to do it for him."

Let's take a guess on which outcome he thinks is most likely. Interesting stuff.

Which leads us to one of the more interesting pieces from the last few weeks, this account from the latest Rolling Stone, which poses the question of whether George W. Bush is the worst president of all time. Relying on "an informal survey of 415 historians" in early 2004 and "conducted by the non-partisan History News Network," this piece -- written by well-respected historian Sean Wilentz (Dayton-Stockton Professor of History and the director of the Program in American Studies at Princeton University) -- explains just how poorly the President is viewed from a historical perspective.

Consider the statistics:

*** 81% of those surveyed considered the President's term in office a "failure"
*** 12% called him the worst president in history, almost as many as termed him a success
*** 10% of those who called him a "success" were doing so jokingly, rating him "only the best president since Bill Clinton -- a category in which Bush is the only contestant"

And as bad as this is, Wilentz points out that "these figures were gathered before the debacles over Hurricane Katrina, Bush's role in the Valerie Plame leak affair and the deterioration of the situation in Iraq. Were the historians polled today, that figure [that of the people rating him the worst in history] would certainly be higher."

That said, he goes on to explain how singularly bad our President is:

"A majority of voters in forty-three states now disapprove of Bush's handling of his job. Since the commencement of reliable polling in the 1940s, only one twice-elected president has seen his ratings fall as low as Bush's in his second term: Richard Nixon, during the months preceding his resignation in 1974. No two-term president since polling began has fallen from such a height of popularity as Bush's (in the neighborhood of ninety percent, during the patriotic upswell following the 2001 attacks) to such a low (now in the midthirties). No president, including Harry Truman (whose ratings sometimes dipped below Nixonian levels), has experienced such a virtually unrelieved decline as Bush has since his high point. Apart from sharp but temporary upticks that followed the commencement of the Iraq war and the capture of Saddam Hussein, and a recovery during the weeks just before and after his re-election, the Bush trend has been a profile in fairly steady disillusionment."

Wilentz attributes this to the President's poor performance in the key areas he and his colleagues examined while discussing the issue -- poor foreign and domestic policies, military setbacks, presidential misconduct, and deteriorations in public trust or credibility. What sets our current leader apart historically, though, is not just his exemplary ineptitude in one of these areas, but in all of them. He writes,

"Bush, however, is one of the rarities in presidential history: He has not only stumbled badly in every one of these key areas, he has also displayed a weakness common among the greatest presidential failures -- an unswerving adherence to a simplistic ideology that abjures deviation from dogma as heresy, thus preventing any pragmatic adjustment to changing realities. Repeatedly, Bush has undone himself, a failing revealed in each major area of presidential performance."

It didn't have to be like this, though. For as Wilentz explains, the president had "two enormous opportunities" to fulfill his claims to be "a uniter, not a divider" and save his presidency from the depths of history's cellar -- "in the noisy aftermath of his controversial election in 2000, and, even more, after the attacks of September 11th, when the nation pulled behind him as it has supported no other president in living memory."

Wilentz continues,

"On September 10th, 2001, he held among the lowest ratings of any modern president for that point in a first term. (Only Gerald Ford, his popularity reeling after his pardon of Nixon, had comparable numbers.) The attacks the following day transformed Bush's presidency, giving him an extraordinary opportunity to achieve greatness...

"Yet under both sets of historically unprecedented circumstances, Bush has chosen to act in ways that have left the country less united and more divided, less conciliatory and more acrimonious -- much like James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson and Herbert Hoover before him. And, like those three predecessors, Bush has done so in the service of a rigid ideology that permits no deviation and refuses to adjust to changing realities. Buchanan failed the test of Southern secession, Johnson failed in the face of Reconstruction, and Hoover failed in the face of the Great Depression. Bush has failed to confront his own failures in both domestic and international affairs, above all in his ill-conceived responses to radical Islamic terrorism. Having confused steely resolve with what Ralph Waldo Emerson called "a foolish consistency . . . adored by little statesmen," Bush has become entangled in tragedies of his own making, compounding those visited upon the country by outside forces."  

Referring to the President's actions after 9/11, Wilentz concludes,

"Yet even then, Bush wasted his chance by quickly choosing partisanship over leadership. No other president -- Lincoln in the Civil War, FDR in World War II, John F. Kennedy at critical moments of the Cold War -- faced with such a monumental set of military and political circumstances failed to embrace the opposing political party to help wage a truly national struggle. But Bush shut out and even demonized the Democrats. Top military advisers and even members of the president's own Cabinet who expressed any reservations or criticisms of his policies -- including retired Marine Corps Gen. Anthony Zinni and former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill -- suffered either dismissal, smear attacks from the president's supporters or investigations into their alleged breaches of national security. The wise men who counseled Bush's father, including James Baker and Brent Scowcroft, found their entreaties brusquely ignored by his son. When asked if he ever sought advice from the elder Bush, the president responded, 'There is a higher Father that I appeal to.'"

This narrow-minded vision and inability/refusal to incorporate anyone outside the innermost sanctum has led to the aforementioned rankings and poll numbers and to a messianic complex where the President believes he can act with near impunity. (On this, Wilentz's discussion is also quite interesting. Referring to those who argue that our war on terror is somewhat akin to Lincoln's situation during the Civil War with its need for the President to act however he deems fit to safeguard the fate of the nation, he writes,

"Bush seems to think that, since 9/11, he has been placed, by the grace of God, in the same kind of situation Lincoln faced. But Lincoln, under pressure of daily combat on American soil against fellow Americans, did not operate in secret, as Bush has. He did not claim, as Bush has, that his emergency actions were wholly regular and constitutional as well as necessary; Lincoln sought and received Congressional authorization for his suspension of habeas corpus in 1863. Nor did Lincoln act under the amorphous cover of a "war on terror" -- a war against a tactic, not a specific nation or political entity, which could last as long as any president deems the tactic a threat to national security. Lincoln's exceptional measures were intended to survive only as long as the Confederacy was in rebellion. Bush's could be extended indefinitely, as the president sees fit, permanently endangering rights and liberties guaranteed by the Constitution to the citizenry."  Very interesting stuff.)

It's time to demand some accountability from the leaders we elect into office and now, with the mid-term elections right around the corner, is the perfect time to start. Demand honesty, openness, and adaptability from the people you vote for, and don't accept that just because this is how things are (and have been, historically, in Washington, though rarely to this degree) that it is how they should or must be. 

It's time to stand up and scream, like Howard Beale from that old movie Network wanted -- "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!"

We'll close with a couple of readers. First, this one from this month's issue of Atlantic Monthly, a profile on Venezuela's Hugo Chavez. It's an interesting look at the man that has inspired such fear in Washington and such admiration in the southern hemisphere, though not an unhealthy amount of the inverse exists as well. Next is this piece from last month's Harper's, a phenomenal look at life on the ground in Congo, which is every bit as horrific and chaotic as you'd expect, if you were one of the five people in the country who'd heard of the ongoing conflict there. ("You mean Sudan isn't the only genocidal conflict we're ignoring in Africa? Jeepers!") Fascinating stuff -- highly recommended.

Finally, we'll close with another piece from Rolling Stone, this one on the debacle that is our federal rebuilding effort post-Katrina. ("Iraq? The Gulf? Are these guys doing anything right? They couldn't rebuild a sandcastle! Jesus!") Written by Matt Taibbi, it's a follow-up piece to his great earlier stuff when he was down there aiding in the rescue efforts and the chaos after the storm. This time he's detailing, despite glad-handing press coverage and ebullient White House reports, how little has actually been done -- "recent revelations by the General Accounting Office [show] that millions upon millions of dollars handed out in no-bid federal contracts had vanished down a budgetary rabbit hole of dubious reconstruction projects and inflated "aid" efforts" -- and how cumbersome and utterly ridiculous the federal requirements are to get money for reconstruction.

Here's a taste:

"The Katrina reconstruction effort has been one of the all-time masterpieces of bloodless institutional racism, a resounding tribute to America's unparalleled ability to fuck the poor under pressure...

"The scam in East Biloxi centers around flood maps, and it mirrors what is likely to be a similar fiasco in New Orleans. New guidelines called Advisory Base Flood Elevations, or ABFEs, issued quietly and unilaterally by FEMA late last year, place the average suggested elevation above sea level for house construction in most of peninsular East Biloxi at eighteen feet. In order to qualify for any federal assistance in rebuilding your home, you must rebuild according to these guidelines. Currently, most houses in the neighborhood are at about nine feet or less. Stallworth says the ABFE regulations add an average of $30,000 in new costs to those returnees who want to rebuild their homes -- homes that are mostly worth no more than $110,000.

"And that's not all. According to Stallworth, regulations for handicapped-access ramps require ten inches of run for every inch of rise. 'So what that means,' he says, 'is that if you have to raise your house up twelve feet, you need a 120-foot ramp. You're starting your ramp three houses down.'"

And if you think that's bad, wait until you get to his explanation of what has to be done to qualify for any reconstruction money. (A couple of paragraphs after the above, starting with "Compounding the ABFE dilemma...") Unbelievable.

Well, that's all I've got for now. So much for short. Apparently I'm as good at living up to expectations here as I am in my other relationships. Such a winner. Until next time, my friends... 

Mired in this town's weird political variation of a Save Ferris campaign, the non-stop onslaught by the Pentagon this week to save Donald Rumsfeld's job -- there's the flood of calls to talk radio stations, the relentless TV coverage, and the impassioned best wishes of some of his peers. I'm sure the T-shirts and parade are just around the corner... -- the man himself finally took the stand today, as it was, and said, when asked if he was considering stepping down, if only to help his beleaguered President and his Republican compatriots running in the fall...

"No."

Well, there's a shocker. In an Administration that prides itself on its maniacal refusal to accept culpability or admit wrong-doing (or even mere alterations to thought processes and decisions for its apparent reflection of weakness), this admission and the others that preceded it this week extolling the virtues of the job Rumsfeld is doing are merely more of the same. Gen. Richard Myers, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Gen. Tommy Franks, the head of central command for the Iraq and Afghanistan invasions, both reiterated their support of the DC Donald (though to the former's credit, he also said the Administration's public upbraiding of Gen. Shinseki over his comments on Iraqi troop levels before the war was wrong), as did Senator Richard Lugar (R-IN), head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee,  who called it "a good call" to keep him on, and Senator George Allen (R-VI), who said, "I think he's executed, obviously, to the extent that the President wants him to execute."

Obviously.

As for the President, he has come forward twice this week to express his undying support for the man at the head of Defense, eloquently stating today, " I'm the decider and I decide what's best. And what's best is for Don Rumsfeld to remain as the secretary of defense."

This is somewhat surprising. He only came forward once to defend poor old FEMA-boss Mike Brownie in the wake of his post-Katrina bombardment, and he was doing "a heck of a job," as we all know. To come to the rescue twice in one week? Rumsfeld must really be doing a good job.

Unfortunately, though, not everyone agrees with these rosy assessments, including several from the very organization Rumsfeld's decisions directly affect -- the military. In the past two weeks, several more retired generals have come forward to criticize the secretary and call for his resignation or firing, joining earlier critics like Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton, who was in charge of training the Iraqi security forces, and Gen. Anthony Zinni, another former CENTCOM chair, bringing the total number to six. The latest additions include Maj. Gen. John Batiste, former head of the First Infantry Division in Iraq and Maj. Gen. Charles Swannack, Jr., former commander of the Army's 82nd Airborne Division, as well as Lt. Gen. Gregory Newbold, the previous director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Newbold, who wrote in his blistering essay recently published in Time that he regrets his earlier acquiescence to the way the war in Iraq was being conducted, railed against the callous way the decision to go to war was made and the culture of casual criticism that is endemic in the officers corps of the military, preventing all active officers from publicly questioning current policy while privately taking issue. (All of the recent officers calling for Rumsfeld's ouster are retired and thus safe from any professional penalties for their expressing their views.)

Newbold writes, "I now regret that I did not more openly challenge those who were determined to invade a country whose actions were peripheral to the real threat — Al Qaeda.  I retired from the military four months before the invasion, in part because of my opposition to those who had used 9/11's tragedy to hijack our security policy. Until now, I have resisted speaking out in public. I've been silent long enough...

My sincere view is that the commitment of our forces to this fight was done with a casualness and swagger that are the special province of those who have never had to execute these missions--or bury the results.

Flaws in our civilians are one thing; the failure of the Pentagon's military leaders is quite another. Those are men who know the hard consequences of war but, with few exceptions, acted timidly when their voices urgently needed to be heard. When they knew the plan was flawed, saw intelligence distorted to justify a rationale for war, or witnessed arrogant micromanagement that at times crippled the military's effectiveness, many leaders who wore the uniform chose inaction. A few of the most senior officers actually supported the logic for war. Others were simply intimidated, while still others must have believed that the principle of obedience does not allow for respectful dissent. The consequence of the military's quiescence was that a fundamentally flawed plan was executed for an invented war, while pursuing the real enemy, al-Qaeda, became a secondary effort...

With the encouragement of some still in positions of military leadership, I offer a challenge to those still in uniform: a leader's responsibility is to give voice to those who can't--or don't have the opportunity to--speak. Enlisted members of the armed forces swear their oath to those appointed over them; an officer swears an oath not to a person but to the Constitution. The distinction is important."

Adding to this, though not heeding Newbold's challenge, somewhat ironically, is a veteran from the Times article on Newbold's essay who poignantly says, "The officer corps is willing to sacrifice their lives for their country, but not their careers."

And that distinction Newbold raises is important -- between an officer's allegiance to the Constitution and an enlisted man's oath to his superiors -- and all too easily forgotten these days. These men and women, if they truly have such serious doubts as reported (here and in other places like COBRA II, for example), are not out of line to speak out. They're, in fact, professionally obligated to do so. It's why challenges and critiques such as Newbold's and the others' are greeted with such serious consideration and praise -- it's what many already suspect, but have yet to have confirmed, in the face of the Administration's unrelenting positivity and denial of debate.

But before my reactionary conservative friends get too up in arms, Newbold is not advocating withdrawal. He is merely calling for "fresh ideas and fresh faces."

"That means, as a first step, replacing Rumsfeld and many others unwilling to fundamentally change their approach. The troops in the Middle East have performed their duty. Now we need people in Washington who can construct a unified strategy worthy of them. It is time to send a signal to our nation, our forces and the world that we are uncompromising on our security but are prepared to rethink how we achieve it."

George Packer, in his latest dispatch from Iraq in the New Yorker, explains why this last bit is so critical. As he details through his various interviews with military officials in the article, the continuing insurgency in Iraq has flourished because, among other things, Rumsfeld and his friends at the Pentagon refused to acknowledge (and still do, to a large extent) what the resistance really was -- not the work of foreign jihadists and Baathist "dead-enders," as we so frequently heard, but a true domestic insurgency.

Quoting Colonel H.R. McMaster, the leader of the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, Packer writes, "Militarily, you've got to call it an insurgency because we have a counterinsurgency doctrine and theory that you want to access," one that includes "offensive and defensive operations" (Packer's words now, not McMaster's), but "an emphasis on using the minimum amount of force necessary. For all these reasons, such a strategy is extremely hard to carry out, especially for the American military, which focuses on combat operations. Counterinsurgency cuts deeply against the Army's institutional instincts."

Packer continues, "'They didn't even want to say the 'i' word,' one officer in Iraq told me. 'It was the spectre of Vietnam. They did not want to say the 'insurgency' word, because the next word you say is 'quagmire.' The next thing you say is 'the only war America has lost.' And the next thing you conclude is that certain people's vision of war is wrong.'"

And so they did nothing.

"The refusal of Washington's leaders to acknowledge the true character of the war in Iraq had serious consequences on the battlefield: in the first eighteen months, the United States government failed to organize a strategic response to the insurgency... In the absence of guidance, the 3rd ACR adopted a heavy-handed approach, conducting frequent raids that were often based on bad information. The regiment was constantly moved around, so that officers were never able to form relationships with local people or learn from mistakes. Eventually, the regiment became responsible for vast tracts of Anbar province, with hundreds of miles bordering Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Syria; it had far too few men to secure any area."

So with mounting casualties for both Iraqis and American soldiers, the inability to resurrect public infrastructure and production or to secure a sense of stability and order, and dangerously low public approval ratings for the President, his Administration, and its policies, fledgling success stories like the town of Tal Afar where the aforementioned counterinsurgency protocols were independently implemented are in danger of remaining miniscule rays of hope in an otherwise bleak landscape of darkness. Packer explains:

"Speicher [Forward Operating Base Speicher, home of the 101st Airborne and one of the super-bases north of Tikrit] provides a more representative picture of the American military's future in Iraq than Tal Afar. The trend is away from counterinsurgency and toward what, in Washington, is known as an 'exit strategy.' Commanders are under tremendous pressure to keep casualties low, and combat deaths have been declining for several months, as patrols are reduced and the Americans rely more and more on air power. (During the past five months, the number of air strikes increased fifty percent over the same period a year ago.)

More than half the country is scheduled to be turned over to Iraqi Army control this year. This is the crux of the military strategy for withdrawal, and it is happening at a surprisingly fast pace. President Bush has always insisted that the turnover and 'drawdown' will be 'conditions-based' -- governed by the situation in Iraq and by the advice of the commanders, not by a timetable set in Washington. But everywhere I went in Iraq, officers and soldiers spoke as it they were already preparing to leave. A sergeant in Baquba, northeast of Baghdad, said, 'We'll be here for ten years in some form, but boots-on-the-ground-wise? We're really almost done.'

He continues,

"The Iraqi national-security adviser, Mowaffak al-Rubaie, who chairs a high-level committee in Baghdad on American withdrawal, gave the same forecast that was mentioned by a planner on General Abizaid's staff, at Central Command: fewer than a hundred thousand troops in Iraq by the end of this year, and half that number by the middle of 2007.

In other words, 'conditions-based' withdrawal is a flexible term. The conditions will be evaluated by commanders who know what results are expected back in Washington."

And this gets back to what Newbold was talking to -- if none of the active officers are willing to stand up and say what apparently is on a growing number of their minds, we will continue to operate under this deleterious system and lose, once and for all, our final opportunity for success in Iraq. (And while it would no doubt be flawed for me to imply all active officers are against this war's execution, so too is it negligent to assume, as Rumsfeld seems to, that of the 8,000 living active and retired general officers he mentioned in his briefing today, this mere handful that have come forward lately to criticize him are alone in their thinking.) Because the rush to retreat is already quietly well under way.

From Packer again,

"A President who projects a consistently unrealistic message of success to the public; a Defense Secretary who consolidates power in his office and intimidates or ignores the uniformed military; senior generals -- Tommy Franks, John Abizaid, Ricardo Sanchez, Richard Myers, and now Peter Pace, Myers's successor as chairman of the Joint Chiefs -- who appear before congressional committees and at news conferences and solemnly confirm that they have enough troops to win: the parallels between Vietnam and Iraq, in terms of the moral abdication of leaders, are not hard to see. In one sense, though, the two wars are inversely analogous: in Vietnam, Johnson claimed to be staying out while he was getting in; in Iraq, something like the opposite is happening...

In 1970, at the height of the pacification program in Vietnam, the US reconstruction teams included seventy-six hundred civilians and military officials; in a country the size of Iraq, that would mean eleven thousand people, but barely a thousand positions are planned for the provincial teams in Iraq. The Administration asked for just $1.6 billion in reconstruction funds for the coming year, which means that, though the output of electricity, water, oil, and other utilitites still falls well short of prewar levels, the major reconstruction effort in Iraq is now over."

But as I mentioned earlier, that isn't what many of these newly-surfaced naysayers are advocating. Newbold isn't, neither are Eaton, Zinni, nor many that Packer interviews throughout his article -- Major McLaughlin and Major Simmering, for example, from McMaster's 3rd Armored, among others. And yet still we're acting as though our knickers are on fire and relief -- be it at home, Iran, or our next proposed engagement site -- is anywhere but in the vicinity of Baghdad.

It's strange -- the President always professes to listen to his generals, yet somehow manages to act in the exact opposite manner they later tell advising. Perhaps this, plus the comments of those above, are why the military is such a well-respected institution, as Brig. Gen. Charles Dunlap, Jr., points out in Harper's fascinating forum on whether a coup d'etat is possible in the US. (Don't worry, the answer is no, and before my conservative mates get up in arms again, the magazine isn't advocating it, either. It's just an extremely interesting discussion of how our military really operates and what its role is in our society.)

He says, "Americans today have an incredible trust in the military. In poll after poll they have much more confidence in the armed forces than they do in other insitutions. The most recent poll, just this past spring, had trust in the military at 74 percent, while Congress was at 22 percent and the presidency was at 44 percent. In other words, the armed forces are much more trusted than the civilian institutions that are supposed to control them."

With the actions and explanations proffered by men like Rumsfeld and Bush, it's hard to see why. Until next time, my friends...

The memo released last week by the British government, detailing a meeting between President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair less than two months before the invasion of Iraq, is important for two reasons. One, it shows that despite public statements to the contrary at the time and repeated assertions since then, the President, as many already assumed, had decided to go to war with Iraq well before our bombs ever hit the ground there.

According to the memo, which was written by Blair's top foreign affairs advisor, Bush stated he was ready to go without a second UN resolution, he would go without arms inspectors discovering weapons of mass destruction, he would even go without allies, if need be, and he even set a date to begin the invasion -- March 10, 2003. This memo, mind you, was written five days before then-Secretary of State Colin Powell's vaunted speech to the UN and a mere six weeks after its inspectors first set down in Iraq, yet in the midst of all this uncertainty (or at least the public facade thereof), the mood expressed in the meeting was one of supreme confidence, according to both the memo and the Times write-up.

Both leaders expected "a quick victory," a "complicated, but manageable" transition to Iraqi governance, and no infighting amongst the Sunni and Shiite populations, the documents state. The men also "candidly expressed their doubts that chemical, biological or nuclear weapons would be found in Iraq in the coming weeks," the Times says, despite eventually using that precise reason as one of the key justifications for invading the country.

And while this delusion and negligence are interesting in their own right for what they say about our leaders, a second reason the memo is important is for what it reveals they intended to do about the above. Faced with an expected absence of illicit weapons and a date for the invasion's commencement, the pair realized they needed "a legitimate legal trigger" for invasion, several of which were bandied about in the meeting to solve their paradoxical situation.

There was the President's desire to "bring out a defector who could give a public presentation about Saddam's WMD." (Ahmad Chalabi, anyone? The man who "for years... had been America's staunchest Iraqi ally and... had helped the Bush Administration make its case against Saddam, in part by disseminating the notion that the Baathist regime had maintained stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons, and was poised to become a nuclear power," despite it all being "crap," as former UN weapons inspector liaison Scott Ritter notes in this old piece in the New Yorker.) 

There was his suggestion that Saddam could possibly be assassinated. (Perhaps it's just my background in Latin America that's getting in the way here, but when has this idea ever A) worked or B) been worth it in the long run? I'm thinking of Allende in Chile, Noriega in Panama, Aristide in Haiti, and the repeated vaudevillian attempts to kill Castro (exploding cigars?), to name a few, that have surfaced over the years, with alleged US ties and of dubious accomplishment.)

And there was the laughably audacious suggestion (not to mention embarrassing and unbelievably inappropriate) that we could paint a US surveillance plane in UN colors and fly it over Iraq to try and draw fire. "If Saddam fired on them," the President is quoted as saying, "he would be in breach."

Brilliant.

If this cornucopia of stellar ideas amidst a slew of other ignored documents -- State department assessments, CIA reports, and other similar offerings from the war colleges mentioned here the past two years, for example, with far more complex and realistic counsel -- doesn't reinstill confidence in you with our elected leader's competence, don't worry, you're not alone. Which reveals one final reason this memo holds so important.

Besides being the latest in an ever-growing litany of proof against the Administration, this memo and the unrelenting mess that has resulted from the way the war has been handled the past three years, have prompted defections from some of its staunchest supporters that are worth noting. There's George Packer, the liberal war hawk reporter from the New Yorker (no, that's not oxymoronic, I promise), who details his disillusion and disdain for Iraq's state of affairs in his latest book, The Assassin's Gate: America in Iraq.

As noted in last month's review in Foreign Affairs, Packer writes that the preparations for the war were "rushed...dishonest, unforgivably partisan, and destructive of alliances," but that invasion was still worth undertaking. Why? "I wanted Iraqis to be let out of prison," he writes, "I wanted to see a homicidal dictator removed from power before he committed murder again; I wanted to see if an open society stood a chance of taking root in the heart of the Arab world."

Yet through numerous interviews conducted in the intervening time, Packer realized that his initial hope and support had been misguided. Through the disarray that ensued in trying to establish a new form of government, the refusal by Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld and Vice President Cheney to alter their strategy or hear dissenting points of view, and the President's overriding lack of interest, a war that was once "winnable," in Packer's words, wound up a partial (and potentially complete) failure. "The Iraq War was always winnable," he writes. "It still is. For this very reason, the recklessness of its authors is all the harder to forgive."

Packer describes a situation where Rumsfeld and Cheney seem primarily to blame, as they were allowed to run away virtually unrestrained with their narrow, flawed ideas about the exercise -- "For Cheney and Rumsfeld, the war was about solving the Saddam problem rather than the Iraq problem, about bringing security rather than justice, about toppling a regime rather than building one," he writes -- but that the President's personal deficiencies compounded an already disastrous situation and helped lead to the chaos of today. (Quoting the FA review, "[Packer] points to Cheney as the evil genius behind the war (a belief that is now almost received wisdom) and suggests the condition that made Cheney's influence possible: Bush's chronic lack of curiosity even about matters dealing with the greatest gamble of his Presidency.")

Also among the defectors is Francis Fukuyama, the neoconservative political theorist, author, and essayist who sings his song of disenchantment in his latest, America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy. In the book, Fukuyama describes how the war in Iraq represents a set of values -- faux neoconservative ones, he posits -- that he can no longer support.

For Fukuyama, neoconservativism is based on four key ideas, as described in the book's review in last week's New Yorker -- that American power can and should be used towards moral ends; that the character of a political regime does, in fact, matter; that various international laws and organizations are often unable to achieve "security or justice;" and that "ambitious social engineering projects" -- Great Society, New Deal-type stuff -- are also typically failures to be avoided. And the Iraq war, with all its neoconservative posturing and bluster, betrays these ideals.

Fukuyama claims that Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld are not neoconservative intellectuals as often portrayed, but rather "right-wing messianists, and their prosecution of the war has been disastrous for American interests." (Quote from review.) He continues,

"We are fighting hot counterinsurgency wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and against the international jihadist movement, that we need to win. But conceiving the larger struggle as a global war comparable to the world wars or the Cold War vastly overstates the scope of the problem, suggesting that we are taking on a large part of the Arab and Muslim worlds. Before the Iraq war, we were probably at war with no more than a few thousand people around the world who would consider martyring themselves and causing nihilistic damage to the United States.

"The scale of the problem has grown," he says, "because we have unleashed a maelstrom."

The final set of those distressed by the war in Iraq and its handling is the military itself, as detailed in the myriad interviews quoted in Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor's book, Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation in Iraq. As noted in Steve Coll's column in this week's New Yorker, what is surprising in Cobra is the level of candor and openness these officers use in describing the war's "many errors of conception and execution."

Coll writes, "The Army and the Marines have paid an extraordinarily high price for the war's compounding blunders, and, presumably, the officers are speaking candidly now not just to settle scores but to avoid such bungling in the future." What's unfortunate, though, is that "as usual, this transparency and self-reflection does not extend to the White House. Bush and Cheney -- even with their approval ratings at historic lows and with Iraq veering toward open civil war -- and their staffs still apparently find it impossible to admit error."

They trot out the same speeches for the third anniversary of operations there that they've used over and over again the intervening years -- same misguided optimism, same unrealistic assessment of things on the ground, same "strategy for victory" and outlook for success. But if the above supporters for the war -- not to mention the glanced-upon public from the previous quote whose approvals for Iraq are at or near all-time lows -- can alter their perspectives in the face of insurmountable evidence, why can't its architects? As Coll writes,

"The President and the members of his war cabinet now routinely wave at the horizon and speak about the long arc of history's judgment—many years or decades must pass, they suggest, before the overthrow of Saddam and its impact on the Middle East can be properly evaluated. This is not only an evasion; it is bad historiography. Particularly in free societies, botched or unnecessary military invasions are almost always recognized as mistakes by the public and the professional military soon after they happen, and are rarely vindicated by time.

"This was true of the Boer War, Suez, and the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, and it will be true of Iraq. At best, when enough time has passed, and the human toll is not so palpable, we may come to think of the invasion, and its tragicomedy of missing weapons, as just another imperial folly, the way we now remember the Spanish-American War or the doomed British invasions of Afghanistan. But that will take a very long time, and it will never pass as vindication."

A well-known liberal hawk, a prominent neoconservative theorist, an increasing number of military officials and the public itself have done just that, all coming around of late to the realization that the war in Iraq has gone awry and that our leaders' "supreme confidence" in its planning and execution was horribly, horribly misguided. When, if ever, will we receive an indication that they've done so, as well?

Until next time, my friends...

On the third anniversary of the war in Iraq, the little operation that could, this weekend, the President and other members of his cabinet celebrated by giving us their optimistic outlooks on where we've been and where, exactly, we're headed. Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld said that "the terrorists seem to recognize that they are losing in Iraq" and that he believes "history will show that to be the case," adding that "now," much like most of the past three years, it seems, "is the time for resolve, not retreat." (You be sure and let us know when retreat -- or exiting, to use a less inflammatory and charged word -- is prudent, 'kay?)

Vice President Cheney said that his previous statements that we would be "greeted as liberators" and that the insurgency was "in its last throes" "were basically accurate and reflect reality," in much the same way that calling a bulldog a tuna fish or saying that a baseball game is almost over after the first pitch are basically true. While the President, in his expansive, multi-layered two-minute speech on the subject, merely said that he was "encouraged by the progress" and that "we are implementing a strategy that will lead to victory in Iraq."

This, despite the latest comments from some of the sources most directly involved with the affair. Take those of the former Iraqi prime minister, Ayad Allawi, who said the country was rapidly approaching "a point of no return" -- "It is unfortunate that we are in a civil war," he said. "We are losing each day, as an average, fifty to sixty people through the country, if not more. If this is not civil war, then God knows what civil war is."

And before you rush to rebut him -- like General George W. Casey Jr., the senior US commander in Iraq, who said we were "a long way from civil war" on CNN -- remember that just because they don't have snappy gray or blue uniforms yet doesn't mean they aren't experiencing some form of civil war. When over 1,300 Iraqis die in reprisals and violence the week after the Shiite temple's destruction a month ago, and hundreds more die in the intervening weeks, you know something serious is going on. 

Don't let the semantics get in the way here. Take the President's repeated declarations that we are in a war on Terror, for example. Quarrel, if you will, with his choice of language and whether we're actually in a war -- conflict, even -- that is winnable, but no one is denying that we are stuck in a situation that demands serious attention. Same holds true here -- call it a civil war, if you like, call it a friendly disagreement between centuries-old enemies. Either way, something bad's going on that warrants immediate attention.

But Allawi's not the only one -- Senator Biden, who has made repeated journeys to visit the country, said, "By any measure, in my view, we're worse off in Iraq today than we were a year ago" and retired General Paul D. Eaton, who was in charge of the Iraqi military's training from 2003-4, said last week that Defense Secretary Rumsfeld was "incompetent strategically, operationally and tactically and is far more than anyone else responsible for what has happened to our important mission in Iraq," adding that he "must step down."

And while it's taken forever, it seems like these, and the mass of similar criticisms that have been piling up the past five years, are finally -- finally -- having resonance with the general public. Maybe it's the vernal equinox and the dawning of spring -- new buds on the trees, new thoughts in the mind and hopes in the belly -- but it seems at long last that people are taking notice of the world around them. Bush's approval rating is at an all-time low, 33%, among all categories of people, but most interestingly among his supporters, too. 

Among self-described Republicans he's down from 89% in Jan. 2005 to 73% now; among conservatives he's down from 94% to 78; among Bush voters in 2004 he's down from 92% to 68; among white evangelicals from 72 to 54; among the rich (incomes over $75k) from 56 to 41, all changes of at least 15% in just a little over a year -- and it's interesting that Eaton used the term "incompetent" to describe Rumsfeld's performance on the job. That's because in the same Pew survey, when asked for their one-word description of the President, "incompetent" was the number one descriptor used by the respondents.

29 of the 710 people surveyed thought the President was "incompetent," 21 an "idiot," and 17 a "liar" when asked for the first thing that came to mind. (Somewhat humorously, "ass" pulled in 8, "jerk" 7, and "stupid" 6, as well.)  In fact, for the first time in three years they've been surveying this, negative one-word descriptors outranked positive ones for the President, this time severely. In May 2003, positive one-word descriptors (the top three of which are "good," "Christian," and "honest") outweighed negative ones ("incompetent," "idiot," and "liar") 52 to 27. Three years later the numbers are virtually reversed -- negative terms trump positive ones 48 to 28.

"Honesty" has gone from being the top choice in February of last year (38) to sixth this month (14), while "incompetent" has crawled from fifth (14) to first, as mentioned above. Things have gotten so bad that 56% of the people surveyed feel the President is "out of touch" with the government, more than the number who felt Ronald Reagan was (47%) at the peak of his asleep-at-the-wheel accusations post Iran-Contra in August 1987. This is a rather amazing downturn for the man who once enjoyed approval ratings over 80% after 9/11 and a rather resounding margin of victory in his reelection.

So where do we go from here? We have a President that nearly three-quarters of the country is unhappy with, who even his core supporters are deserting en masse, and yet still nearly two and a half years to go until the next presidential election. If the impeachment argument presented here recently is still unpalatable to you, maybe it's time to revisit electoral reform with the midterm elections bearing down on us next year.  

But if you thought the aforementioned numbers made you feel unrepresented, consider those quoted by Hendrik Hertzberg in last week's New Yorker in his piece on a recent legislative push to possibly eliminate the electoral college. 

"As has become increasingly clear over the past few general elections, with their red states and blue states, an American Presidential campaign is no longer truly national. It takes place almost exclusively in the purple states—the "battleground states," where neither party can be sure of a lock. In 2004, there were thirteen such states, accounting for twenty-eight per cent of the population (and thirty-two per cent of the ultimate vote, since turnout increases with the uncertainty of the outcome). In the final month, the candidates spent $237 million on advertising, $229 million of it in those thirteen states. (In twenty-three states, they didn't spend a dime.) At the same time, President Bush, Vice-President Cheney, Senator Kerry, and Senator Edwards attended a total of two hundred and ninety-one campaign events. Two hundred and sixty-eight of them were in the lucky thirteen."

This argument, which like that for impeachment becomes more plausible and compelling the longer you think about it, is to apply a section of the Constitution granting states the right to appoint its presidential electors -- its College votes -- in whichever manner their state legislature sees fit. So the plan, according to the  Campaign for a National Popular Vote, the idea's originators, would be for each state to sign a compact (after first passing a state law formally decreeing it) vowing to grant its College votes to the winner of the popular vote. Once enough states had done so -- enough to win a majority of the 538 total votes -- the College would effectively be dead and the popular vote -- the voice of the whole country, not a select portion of it -- would once and for all determine who is our President.

This would eliminate the lack of representation described above and lead, as Hertzberg writes, "to an improvement in the over-all health of [our] democratic order." He teases out the devil's argument below:

"In only one of the past twenty-nine Presidential elections has the winner of the popular vote not also been the winner of the electoral vote. So why not stick with an arrangement that, since 1888, has "worked" ninety-seven per cent of the time? Because the deepest argument for a national popular vote has nothing to do with who wins. It has to do with the over-all health of a democratic order...

There's a traditional view that without the Electoral College Presidential campaigns would simply ignore the small states. It hasn't worked that way. The real division that the Electoral College creates, in tandem with the winner-take-all rule, is not between large states and small states but between battleground states and what might be called spectator states. Of the thirteen least populous states, six are red, six are blue, and one—New Hampshire—is up for grabs. Guess which twelve Bush and Kerry stiffed and which one got plenty of love, long after the primary season? Size doesn't matter. At the other end of the spectrum, the three biggest states—blue California, red Texas, and blue New York—were utterly ignored, except for purposes of fund-raising."

This has resulted in a situation where a mere sliver of the country's voice is heard and to "the death of participatory politics in two-thirds of the country."

"If you live in a spectator state, it might be fun to persuade your neighbors to vote your way, or ring their doorbells, or hand them leaflets. But it can't make a difference. And it doesn't matter which side you're on or which color your state is. Widening your ticket's margin of victory or narrowing its margin of defeat is equally pointless. In this sense, our Presidential campaigns are not only not national; in most of the country they're not local, either."

And so steps are under way in the Illinois legislature -- my home state, I'm proud to say -- to address this. As Hertzberg notes, "For fifty years, polls have consistently shown that seventy per cent of the public favors direct election." It's time to see if our voice -- that increasingly marginalized three-quarters we've mentioned so much here today -- will finally be heard.

Until next time, my friends...

This past week brought to light the two latest installments in the long-running comedy of errors that is this Administration, two more nuggets of truth for the ever-burgeoning stockpile of evidence in the case prosecuting their relentless incompetence. The first is the videotape obtained by the AP of a pre-Katrina briefing where President Bush is told about the very real threat -- or "very, very grave concern," to quote one of the officials on the tape -- of the levees being breached in New Orleans once the hurricane hit. The tape, which features presentations and discussions among several federal and state officials, as well as the President, is noteworthy for several reasons.

One, it shows the President as a true man of action, as engaged and inquisitive a leader as we've been taught to expect. During the entire briefing, one that included representatives from DHS, FEMA, and other major agencies and a category five hurricane bearing down on the coast, the President asked zero questions. None. For a topic as complicated and a situation as dire as this was anticipated (and explained) to be, to have nothing to say -- nothing -- is inexcusable. I have questions when I look at the value menu at Wendy's. You're telling me the President of the United States has nothing come to mind -- nothing he'd like to add to, have clarified, hell, have translated into Spanish or just repeated -- when sitting through a briefing that details how one of the largest hurricanes in history is going to slam into a major metropolitan city? My conservative friends must be right -- he is smarter than I give him credit for.

Second, and most importantly, the tape shows that while the Administration's post-disaster activity implies an utter lack of understanding of how bad things were going to be, they were told repeatedly, in this briefing and others immediately after, precisely how damaging a storm Katrina would be. There was no hemming or hawing about it. Talk of it being a CAT5 storm was abundant -- in "the top 10 or 15 [of all-time] when all is said and done," according to the National Hurricane Center's Max Mayfield in a briefing the following day -- worries about the ability of the city and state to effectively respond to were aired, even "Heck of a Job" Brownie, the former-FEMA head (who looks surprisingly good on the tape -- yet another reason to take notice -- and more like a scapegoat as time goes on), got into the act, fretting about the safety of the Superdome as a place of refuge due to its thin roof and its placement below sea level.

Yet what is of primary importance here is the threat to the levees the President heard I mentioned earlier. This little occurrence, not surprisingly, contradicts earlier statements by the President on ABC News, only days after the warnings had proved valid, that no one could have expected such a thing to occur. Now this little fudging of the truth might be forgiveable if we hadn't heard it before, hadn't allowed six or seven other instances to slide by on similar arguments, but as we've seen far too many times now, if we give this Administration an inch, they're going to take five miles.

Consider a few of the song's previous incarnations -- 9/11. "Nobody could have possibly known bin Laden was trying to attack the US." (See the Presidential Daily Briefing section from Aug. 6, 2001 titled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US" for one contradicting instance.)

Iraq's insurgency and path towards possible civil war. "Nobody could have possibly known that we wouldn't be greeted as liberators and would be fighting an intensifying local resistance, compounded by our mere presence." (See the recent Knight-Ridder report that the newly declassified 2003 National Intelligence Estimate "concluded that the insurgency was fueled by local conditions - not foreign terrorists- and drew strength from deep grievances, including the presence of U.S. troops," for one rebuttal.) 

Saddam's lack of WMD. The absent connection between Al Qaeda and Saddam, between 9/11 and Iraq. The false assertions Iraq bought yellowcake from Niger. The denials that the main figures of the Administration started planning to invade Iraq before they even took power in 2000. That a system condoning, even encouraging, torture existed in Iraq or Guantanamo and all the other offenses I mentioned in last week's column and over the past two years. "How could we possibly have known they were untrue?"

This Administration has been caught in lie after lie -- or misstatement after misstatement if you still, for some reason, find yourself deferent to the esteem and honor the offices our elected officials hold should imply and unable to call a spade a spade --  and there have been no serious ramifications.

When does it stop, when does it change, and when do we finally demand it do so?

Time after time it has been shown that the members of this Administration had access to crucial information -- information they many times denied even having -- that should have significantly altered the decisions they ultimately made. They have consistently known what they should have, what in hindsight (or any logical, halfway intelligent digestion of the data) should have raised serious concerns or alerts, but didn't because they either didn't listen or didn't think important enough to warrant acting against their narrow self-interests. Serious debate and discussion of the facts in this Administration has become as passe as derby hats and brooches because to doubt the Infinite Ruler is to brand yourself as unpatriotic, unintelligent, and incorrect. (Not entirely surprising for a President who "equates disagreement with disloyalty," as Paul Krugman notes in his Friday Times column.) 

And this reality leads, as Krugman writes, to "our country...being run by people who assume that things will turn out the way they want. And if someone warns of problems, they shoot the messenger." (Wonder what Whittington was trying to tell the Vice President a few weeks back?)

He continues,

"Some commentators speak of the series of disasters now afflicting the Bush administration -- there seems to be a new one every week -- as if it were just a string of bad luck. But it isn't. If good luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity, bad luck is what happens when lack of preparation meets a challenge. And our leaders, who think they can govern through a mix of wishful thinking and intimidation, are never, ever prepared."

Absolutely right, but what do we do about it? Short of sitting on your hands and biding your time until the next national election in 2008, not much. Unless, that is, you consider much (or any) of what has transpired the past six years to be illegal -- unconstitutional -- and therefore an impeachable offense. That's the mindset of a growing number of people these days -- with nearly 70 percent of the country disapproving of the President, there's far more than there were even six months ago -- among them Representative John Conyers (D-MI) who has initiated House Resolution 635, a case for the President's impeachment on the grounds of fraud for his handling of the runup to the war in Iraq.

Detailed in Lewis Lapham's blistering account in the latest Harper's (an excerpt of which can be found here), you start to seriously consider it as an option when you consider the scope and degree of the offenses. Limiting his attack just to the topic of Iraq, Conyers and his staff on the Judiciary Committee created a monster of a case against the President that's as persuasive as it is detailed -- it's nearly 200 pages long and has over 1,000 footnotes, the contents of which can be found here. 

Besides laying out a damning account of the range of trangressions committed by the President and his men -- in the two-year span between March 2002 and March 2004, the report found that "various high-ranking administration officials made 237 false or misleading statements (55 of them from President Bush himself) connecting Saddam to Al Qaeda, exaggerating Iraq's biological and chemical weapons capabilities, [and] misprepresenting Iraq's nuclear activities" -- Conyers and Co. level some weighty criticisms, as well.

"In brief, we have found that there is substantial evidence the President, the Vice President and other high ranking members of the Bush Administration misled Congress and the American people regarding the decision to go to war with Iraq; misstated and manipulated intelligence information regarding the justification for such war; countenanced torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment and other legal violations in Iraq; and permitted inappropriate retaliation against critics of their Administration."

With this and the weight of the report's mountain of evidence behind it -- not to mention the other aforementioned offenses, not the least of which is the NSA wiretapping and its dubious legality -- maybe it's not so far-fetched to begin calling for impeachment. As Lapham admits, "Before reading the report, I wouldn't have expected to find myself thinking that such a course of action was either likely or possible; after reading the report, I don't know why we would run the risk of not impeaching the man."

Lapham continues:

"We have before us in the White House a thief who steals the country's good name and reputation for his private interest and personal use; a liar who seeks to instill in the American people a state of fear; a televangelist who engages the United States in a never-ending crusade against all the world's evil, a wastrel who squanders a vast sum of the nation's wealth on what turns out to be a recruiting drive certain to multiply the host of our enemies. In a word, a criminal -- known to be armed and shown to be dangerous."

This, in contrast to the far less meaningful offenses we tied Clinton to the rack for. (A man "whose penis was known to be aimless and shown to be harmless," in the words of Lapham.)

And while growing numbers of people may indeed support a move like Conyers', especially in light of the recent NSA revelations, they find "no strong voice of dissent [in the news media]," as Lapham states, and "in the Democratic Party no concerted effort to form a coherent opposition." Which means the onus of action falls squarely on the shoulders of Congress, a place Lapham argues is exactly where our country's freedoms should ultimately be protected.

Conyers agrees, in the report:

"While the scope of this Report is largely limited to Iraq, it also holds lessons for our Nation at a time of entrenched one-party rule and abuse of power in Washington. If the present Administration is willing to misstate the facts in order to achieve its political objectives in Iraq, and Congress is unwilling to confront or challenge their hegemony, many of our cherished democratic principles are in jeopardy. This is true not only with respect to the Iraq War, but also in regard to other areas of foreign policy, privacy and civil liberties, and matters of economic and social justice.

It is tragic that our Nation has invaded another sovereign nation because 'the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy,' as stated in the Downing Street Minutes. It is equally tragic that the Bush Administration and the Republican Congress have been unwilling to examine these facts or take action to prevent this scenario from occurring again. Since they appear unwilling to act, it is incumbent on individual Members of Congress as well as the American public to act to protect our constitutional form of government."

Because, as Lapham quotes at the start of his article, "A country is not only what it does -- it is also what it puts up with, what it tolerates."

It's time to decide what type of country we want to be now, and what, exactly, we are willing to tolerate. Until next time, my friends...