Hope

2009 will close out the most fundamentalist Christian, right-wing, and philosophically authoritarian White House in U.S. history.

Signs are that it will be followed by the administration of a man whose political inner circle could become the most America-skeptic, left-wing, and statist kitchen cabinet in U.S. history. All built around a personality cult.

No wonder a secular, traditional, patriotic political independent like me feels this just is not my millennium.

We come from an administration where political loyalty and a sheepskin from Pat Robertson's law school was the ticket to authority in the Justice Department. Political loyalty and a skepticism about the universe being more than 10,000 years old was a ticket to blue-pencil authority over government science reports. Political loyalty and a correct position on Roe v. Wade, for pity's sake, was the ticket to getting a job overseeing the desperately essential work of building up Iraq after we took control of it.

We head for an administration where -- we'll see. At least one odious, unrepentant '60s rich boy radical friend of Barack won't be making policy decisions in the Department of Education or channeling millions of tax dollars to his pet causes. But only because the accidental searchlight of scandal happened to light on Bill Ayers. Every week or so seems to bring up another like him. Even at this rate and with seven months left, some are bound to get through.

Obama, in his short political life, seems to have been in a MoveOn-colored cocoon, so that when he sits down at a Pennsylvania farm wife's kitchen table he might as well be the leader of another country. Benevolent visionary or not, that difference remains.

McCain doesn't matter. I like him well enough, but this election isn't going to be about him.

I keep thinking of Harold Macmillan's quip that watching the Kennedies come to power in Washington, D.C., was "like watching the Borgia brothers take over a respectable North Italian city." This election is really about Hope: I hope the real Obama is more in his rhetoric than his friends.

Worst President ... Again

The polling of historians to name "the worst president" has become a bi-weekly event, since it's become clear they'll pick George W. Bush every time. This one is even more dishonest than most, since it's not even a poll, though it calls itself one. The historian posted up the question on his blog, which showcases his contempt of Bush, and asked people who read his site -- who presumably find it worth reading -- to answer. Presto! "61% of Historians Rate the Bush Presidency Worst."

Read the quotes snipped from some of the votes, and you'll see MyDD and DKos without the cussing.

While he acknowledges some could take exception to his "poll" because "[t]he participants are self-selected," he touts the fact that "Among those who responded are several of the nation’s most respected historians, including Pulitzer and Bancroft Prize winners."

And we morlocks down here should just shut up and be told, because "Historians are in a better position than others to make judgments about how a current president’s policies and actions compare with those of his predecessors."

Christ, do they let anyone be a historian these days?

In an informal survey of 109 professional historians conducted over a three-week period through the History News Network, 98.2 percent assessed the presidency of Mr. Bush to be a failure while 1.8 percent classified it as a success.

My first question is, how do these people define "worst" or "failure?" They are not, after all, the same thing. The questioner doesn't attempt a definition, and none of the respondents he quotes seem to consider it worth trying. That strikes me as a likely sign this is just a call-and-response exercise among people who call themselves thinkers.

Historians, for instance, routinely rate James Buchanan the "worst" president. Which I can understand, if you look at the country a certain way. But was he a "failure?" That is, did he fail to do what he had sworn to do on his oath ("preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the Republic") and did he accomplish the policies he applied to governance?

On that basis, you'd have to rate him a success. Buchanan defended the federal government's property where he was able to do so, principally at Fort Sumter. He made clear that he considered it his duty to collect revenues in Southern ports. He stared down the South Carolinans time after time when they demanded its surrender. At one point, Buchanan wrote to Gov. Francis W. Pickens of South Carolina, "If South Carolina should attack any of these forts, she will then become the assailant in a war against the United States. It will not then be a question of coercing a State to remain in the Union, to which I am utterly opposed, ... but it will be a question of voluntarily precipitating a conflict of arms on her part ...."

He hardly had the resources to do more than hold the line: The entire U.S. Army numbered barely 16,000 men, mired in red tape, scattered across the Indian frontier. The Constitution did not allow the president to call out a huge American army and impose his will on any place that displeased him. That is a modern view. It was invented, in part, by Lincoln.

To dismiss Buchanan's adherence to the Constitution as a cover to allow treason, as some historians do, is to write off the foundation of the American republic and the genius of the Founders. It overlooks the seriousness with which Americans once regarded their balanced government and its institutions.

Any active step Buchanan might have taken would involve the incoming administration in inextricable complexities. Declare war on the Confederate States of America? Then that would acknowledge them as a sovereign power, and invoke international laws. Declare martial law? And throw Maryland and Virginia into turmoil, which would have made Lincoln's inauguration difficult, if not impossible? He had to sneak through Maryland after dark, as it was.

When Buchanan turned the government over to Lincoln, on March 4, 1861, only seven states had seceded. Virginia and Tennessee had confronted secession and rejected it at that time. Buchanan's policies let that happen. Together, Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas represented half the future CSA's population and resources and held key military installations and armories. Thanks to Buchanan's touch, Lincoln still had a chance to hold them.

Even more important, Maryland, without which the North would have had to abandon Washington, D.C., remained in the Union. Secession sentiment ran strong there. Lincoln in his turn only managed to hold the state's loyalty by martial law.

By contrast, I'd classify John Quincy Adams as one of the best presidents ever. His vision of America was rooted in the Founders' vision, but reached for a truly great national future that carried all our virtues into the modern world. It was a tremendous plan for national self-improvement.

And it was a total failure. Because Adams was a compromise president chosen by political deal-making after a vicious knotted election, and all his chief rivals (and their lackeys) held important and powerful positions in the federal government, and they made it their business to ensure that his proposals were buried deeper than the score in a New York Times sports story. They wanted to make sure he was a one-and-done chief executive, so they could get their next shot in four years, not eight. Great president, failed president. It would be hard to discover a more complete failure in the record of U.S. administrations.

Sometimes "worst" and "failure" do go together. I'd combine them to describe John Tyler, who spent his entire administration trying to surmount his accidental presidency, and bribe various voter factions into a party built around himself that could elect him to a real term in the White House. The consequences for American history in the succeeding 20 years were dreadful. For some reason, however, historians routinely skip past him in their rush to dogpile on Bush and Buchanan.

But if you read the comments the historians sent in in response to the "poll" above, clearly they believe George W. Bush intended all along to overthrow Saddam, turn the country over to his corporate cronies, sweep aside troublesome constitutional rights, pack the Supreme Court with troglodytes, etc., etc. So ... shouldn't he be a "success" in their lights?

I think Ross Douthat puts it strongly, if essentially correctly:

All of which is to say that sixty-one percent of the historians' sample are ax-grinding fools whose nitwittery dishonors their profession. Judge Bush a failure by all means, but the fact that his legacy is only beginning its long unspooling ought to give anyone with even a glancing knowledge of history's cunning passages - let alone a so-called "professional" - pause before pronouncing his administration the worst in American history.

This is a 'Moderate Voice?'

Americans. How dare they speak to Cuba about democracy!

While the US administration’s priority in Pakistan seems to be to safeguard the position of President Pervez Musharraf (unmindful of the fact that the ex-military dictator has been humiliated in the recent polls), it delivers a homily to a country in its backyard (with whom it has been at the ‘original’ unending ‘war’ for the past 50 years) about the virtues of democracy. There has to be some limit to blatant hypocrisy.

And, of course, as is always the case when anyone gets a bee in his bonnet about something, the REAL QUESTION is, why doesn't the entire Big Media machine have the same revelation as I have just had, and write about it as single-mindedly as I intend to do?

Where is the great American tradition of responsible journalism? Is the media/blogosphere scared of presenting the facts? Who will harm them if they do? What happened to the famous tradition of investigative journalism? What else could be the reason? An interesting subject for research.

What set him off? This:

“As Fidel Castro’s 49-year-rule ended formally, the Bush Administration urged Cuba to move towards ‘peaceful, democratic change’ and let its 11 million citizens become ‘masters of their own lives’. ‘We urge the Cuban Government to begin a process of peaceful, democratic change by releasing all political prisoners, respecting human rights and creating a clear pathway toward free and fair elections,’ Condoleezza Rice, the Secretary of State, said in a statement shortly before Raúl’s accession."

He's appalled that the world will think Rice and Bush speak for Americans! That any of us might agree with that. "Please remember that, for the world, President George W. Bush and Ms Condoleezza Rice speak on behalf of the American nation/people. Those, including the media/journalists, who maintain a silence and overlook their remarks, would appear to be in agreement with what their leaders have been saying/doing."

He'd be glad to know that at least some journalists in my newsroom found the end of Castro's long rule "sad." But he's right; they never got to actually say that in print.

No, I guess what we really wanted Rice to say was, “As Fidel Castro’s 49-year-rule ended formally, the Bush Administration urged Cuba to stay exactly where it was, on the path to ‘heroic socialist utopia’ and let its 11 million citizens complete ‘the destruction of the Yankee empire’. ‘We urge the Cuban Government to persist in its struggle to thwart dissent and personal expression among its people, and to cooperate with anti-American governments and groups throughout the world. And build more political prisons, too,’ Condoleezza Rice, the Secretary of State, said in a statement shortly before Raúl’s accession."

So what's the reason this blogger wants to damn Bush administration officials for urging democracy on Cuba?

The past record of the present US administration’s policies and actions in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan does not inspire confidence that the motive was to allow democracy to flourish in those countries.

Pardon my ignorance, but is it not arguable that Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan are enjoying more democracy now than they had in the summer of 2001? And that Bush Administration policies may have had something to do with that? For all the things you can blame on this administration, anti-democratic foreign policies seem the one thing they get credit for -- especially compared to every other American administration since the start of the Cold War.

Witness

"Democracy needs support, and the best support for democracy comes from other democracies." -- Benazir Bhutto, 1989

She was a complex leader, and it is difficult for me from this distance to disentangle her socialist personality cult side from her sense of herself as part of a dynasty, or her commitment to her vision of her nation and to a strong, democratic, secular Pakistan. Some people say the democracy movement in Pakistan may stand a better chance now that the glare of her charisma cast shadows over everyone else.

I don't know what will happen in Pakistan. If you're looking for that answer, go read the other ten thousands bloggers who will tell you that, even though they don't know either. But her death, and the dramatic weeks that preceded it, remind me of what I admire about the Bush Administration. [I don't think the American domestic political angle is the most important part of the Bhutto tragedy. It just happens to be the one I'm fit to speak about.]

Through most of my youth, no American administration would have sent a Bhutto back to Pakistan when a Musharraf was in control. Some might have fantasized such a world, where American governments once again favored the troublemaking champions of democracy against cozy military dictators.

But after 1950 or so, none would have seriously suggested it as policy. We had a dangerous enemy, and the end of the world, through all of my youth, was never more than 20 minutes away. From what we've learned since the fall of the Soviet Union, our situation was as perilous as the most frightened among us believed it was. The military leadership of the USSR was convinced a nuclear exchange with the West, in which cities would blaze into pyres and hundreds of millions would die, would end in the victory of the Soviets. That their nation would still have enough left to function, and ours would not. Given their preparations for that and our lack of them, probably the marshals in Moscow were right about that.

That world lacked a place for niceties like a Mrs. Bhutto. Many ugly and necessary foreign policies prevailed in America. Many more prevailed that were ugly and ultimately unnecessary, but no one could know at the time which were which.

No president who was alive in my lifetime, from Truman through Reagan, would have sent a Mrs. Bhutto into a nuclear-armed and fundamentally unstable Pakistan to topple a Musharraf in the name of popular sovereignty.

I protested and wrote against many aspects of American policy during the Cold War. I was one who thought much of what we were doing was unnecessarily ugly. I may have been wrong about some of that; but I based my protest not on dislike of America but on reverence for what she ought to be.

Even before the Soviet Union fell apart, the Cold War pressure relaxed. And to his credit, President Reagan, who committed many excesses, began the process of backing away from the necessary evil of dictator-allies. He let Marcos fall when another president, in another time, might have dispatched the CIA to save him.

With Bush, this has become policy, with breathtaking idealism and absolute assurance, after 9/11 pointed out the awful consequences of letting old Cold War battlefields fester and ooze.

Another president in another time would have kept up Saddam's game of footsie. Or would have replaced him with a more predictable generalissimo.

He wouldn't have made trouble for Mubarak over elections and political prisoners.

He wouldn't have withdrawn U.S. troops from a crucial air base during wartime over a massacre of civilians, as the U.S. did in Uzbekistan.

After so many years of enduring detestable compromises during the Cold War, I finally got to see the country I love behave according to what ought to be its principles. And the administration that charged into that policy did it fecklessly, without any sense of the urgency or difficulty of the task, with the wrong people in charge, and with no broad and consistent attempt to rally the nation or its allies for a job more difficult than the Cold War.

What's wrong with Bush is not what's being done in our name. It's that it's being done so poorly that it will make the old short-sighted and cold-blooded cynicism that drove the coups in Guatemala and Iran look like the best foreign policy. It vindicates every Kissingerite shrug at the anonymous torture of some noble soul in a prison of one of our bad bargain anti-communist allies. Old enemies of the American experiment, from right-wing dictators to left-wing academics, are delighted at all the new "proofs" of the limitations of Western-style liberal democracy that tumble out of each new day's newspaper headlines.

The fact that the rest of the world professes to fear us more now, when we back popular democracy in Pakistan, and to urge us to return to ways that will revive the high esteem they had for us then, when we quietly paid to silence democracy activists in Latin America, shows me how much people choose to misunderstand, or forget.

Carrots, Sticks, Poisoned Apples

[posted by Callimachus]

If you read the left-side blogs, the steady screech is that Bush and Company are marching America headlong into police-state fascism.

If I could lay a bet with any chance of collecting on it, I would wager the Bush II administration will be remembered as a temporary step back from that poisoned apple in America's garden of temptations. Because it tried to advance that game so recklessly, and managed every aspect of governance so poorly, it exposed the trick.

The goal is to advance the authority and control of the federal government and especially the executive branch. The game is to concentrate power there. The trick is to do it in such a way that it seems to be the only way to solve urgent problems, or to do it with such concessions to individual liberties and the popular sort of freedoms that it masks the power creep.

As some of the more awake left-siders note, the drift is much older than George W. Bush. Some pick one 20th century date, some another, for when it began. This is the fallacy of the Golden Age. There never was one; the danger is original. The warnings are woven into the fabric of everything the Founders wrote that was meant for us to still read. But we've stopped reading.

And the Founders were the first to succumb. The first crisis came in John Adams' reign, when America was not sure yet what it was, when it might have bloomed at once into an authoritarian, centralized state. The Federalist clamp-down on the brink of an undeclared war looks clumsy only in retrospect. And it is a false model of how authoritarianism comes to America. The right people learned the lesson at once -- Monroe, for instance -- and rarely has anything so naive and naked ever been attempted again.

Thomas Jefferson did it in spite of himself when tempted by sweet Louisiana and adventures in the Mediterranean. He turned back the Alien and Sedition Acts of the previous administration (but one of them remains on the books today) and pardoned those prosecuted under them, and thus the people felt more secure in their liberties because they felt they could say any bad thing they liked about the government. But Jefferson's use of executive power left footprints that presidents after him followed. It left the federal executive that much stronger.

He had luck. The acquisition of the Great Plains for American settlement turned out to be undeniably a good thing to the people. No one today would wish it otherwise. But only Andrew Jackson's victory at New Orleans in 1815 cemented the ownership in the eyes of the world and spared the United States the agony of having to fight to keep what it purchased so, seemingly, cheaply.

Every president felt the temptation; most surrendered to it at some time. Jackson understood the game intuitively and was a master at it: Expand democracy at the same time you ramp up executive potency. Polk in forty-six figured out a key strategy: how a president personally can steer America into a war in spite of checks and balances. Lincoln, then in Congress, scorned him for it. Fifteen years later, President Lincoln did exactly the same.

The Civil War that followed burst the dam. In the name of saving a union still alive and flourishing, the federal government took on enormous unintended authority. Under the silken purr of Lincoln's rhetoric and trembling with rally-round-the-flag patriotism, the people handed over every right they held. After the war, the courts handed back most of the visible personal ones -- habeas corpus, press autonomy -- but the federal government now controlled the banks and had the power to tax every income and draft men directly into military service.

Those who saw it coming and warned of it were tangled in the partisan issues and personalities of their time. They also too often believed the social and economic relations between the races in the United States ought to be ordered and ordained. (Many people today still think so, in a different sense.) They did not foresee that within a few generations this unobjectionable -- at the time -- view would taint all their opinions and make them untouchable. Their vicious partisan obsession with Lincoln and the Black Republicans was a great gift to their enemies, over time.

And so on through the 20th century -- Wilson, FDR, Truman, Eisenhower, abetted in most cases by pliant or partisan Congresses.

Every now and then a clumsy player takes the White House and overplays the game -- Andy Johnson; Nixon; the late, leaderless, stroke-crippled Wilson Administration. Then the alarm sounds for certain individual rights, and the courts or the Congress advance them. In some cases it's a genuine advance: Americans on the whole now are more free to say and do as they wish on a day-to-day basis than at any time in history. But in the matter of reigning in federal and executive authority, what's restored is often a fraction of what was taken.

George W. Bush is shaped in the Andy Johnson mold. The Congressional Republicans today are the Federalists of ninety-nine. Bill Clinton at the height of his persuasive skills and with a more capable team than he actually had (thanks to too many years of Democratic wandering in the wilderness) could have gotten away with all this and more, and made you want to thank him for it.

Americans still yearn for legal pleasures, favors for their own sects, tax structures that lean harder on someone else, and savvy politicians know the use of the carrot as well as the stick when they drive the mass of voters enfranchised in Andy Jackson's day. More of us can vote than ever before -- some even clamor to allow illegal immigrants into the polls. More can vote, but the votes matter less and less.

Tweedle

[posted by Callimachus]

Much is made this week of conservatives "abandoning" Bush. Some of what is said about it makes sense. Most of it is nonsense.

I'm not a conservative, so I can't speak for them. Who I can speak for are people who are not doctrinaire and locked into eternal opposition to someone or something or some party or some nation. People, in other words, who try to navigate the real world as it happens around them, guided by principles but not ossified by them, aware of ideologies and also of their limitations. Such a person's course of actions is bound to look like a drunken stagger when you only watch the walker, not the pitching deck of the world as it goes on around him.

In some sense, everything is a necessary evil -- from abortions to zoos -- with equal emphasis on both parts of the clause. Often you accept the bad for the sake of opposing the worse. And your rough measure of "bad" and "worse" is always being re-calibrated, unless you're stupid.

Bush and many of his inner circle were a bad lot I hated to see get power in 2000. But al Qaida, and the Taliban, and Saddam, were worse. The U.S. military rushing into difficult nations to fight uncertain wars was bad. But the failure to support them as they did so was worse. The temporary crippling of ancient civil rights and national ideals in the name of a fight was a short-term evil, not new in our history, and tolerable only in the light of the two above "worses."

Always it is a two-handed act. The easy-answer people never have to do balancing acts. Both hands grip firmly the sweat-soaked handle of the sledge they use to beat on their political or class enemies. They come at you like street gangs from both sides, Tweedledum and Tweedledee.

At various points for different people, the "this is bad" of the Bush Administration rose up and the "that is worse" of the Islamist threat subsided. The "this is bad" of battering the military against a hard job changed places with the "that is worse" of not giving it moral support in its work. The "this is bad" of getting our noses bloodied in Iraq for the sake of giving people a shot at freedom got overtaken by the "that is worse" of suspecting the whole region was playing us for suckers.

Which has the accidental effect of making some thinking people seem to agree with some unthinking extremists.

Who now proudly proclaim, in their unblinking puritanism, that they will never welcome or accept converts. They have an absurd tendency to see and write in terms of high school. I've seen the edgy, literate, articulate conservative blogger Jeff Goldstein derided in an extended metaphor as "the geeky kid who wants to sit at the lunch table with the artsy kids but they reject him, too," and so on and so on. Now Peggy Noonan is, I forget, "the intellectual girl who got to date the football captain but then he dumped her and now she's discovering she's not so special" or something. As though their opponents lived in the same juvenile "my parents and teachers suck" world as the fever swamp anti-war left.

News flash: Nobody wants to sit at your table. Nobody who wants to be part of your political psychodrama isn't there already.

Bloody Marvelous

[Posted by reader_iam]


I think the bushwinkqueen interlude was funny, though maybe not as funny as all the pomposity of commentary it has inspired.

I think it has absolutely no greater import, no larger meaning and no deeper symbolism.

My favorite quote from the YouTube comments section?

Lighten up! She's human just like the rest of us - I mean, she snorts her cocaine one nostril at a time, just like any other world leader!

So there!

The Other Dowd

[posted by Callimachus]

Matthew Dowd, the one-time Democrat who crossed over to work for George W. Bush's campaigns as a top strategist in 2000 and 2004, re-rats ( in the Churchillian sense).

He criticized the president as failing to call the nation to a shared sense of sacrifice at a time of war, failing to reach across the political divide to build consensus and ignoring the will of the people on Iraq. He said he believed the president had not moved aggressively enough to hold anyone accountable for the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, and that Bush still approached governing with a "my way or the highway" mentality reinforced by a shrinking circle of trusted aides.

I think Matthew Yglesias probably didn't read the entire NYT piece, however.

Reading Matthew Dowd's tale of lost faith I'm left curious as to what he could have been thinking during Bush's 2004 re-election campaign. Given what he thinks now, what about the situation in 2004 made him feel so differently that he wanted to quite literally dedicate his life to perpetuating Bush's hold on power. Pretty much all the factors Dowd cites were perfectly clear by the time of the election. One can imagine it taking a while for the message to sink into the head of someone as invested in Bush as Dowd was, but shouldn't there be a momement when you're not exactly ready to jump off the bus but aren't comfortable driving the bus either?

That sounds about right to me. I had the same question. But if you read through the NYT piece far enough, you get to this:

But it is also an intensely personal story of a political operative who at times, by his account, suppressed his doubts about his professional role but then confronted them as he dealt with loss and sorrow in his own life.

And if you read even further, it gets even more specific:

His views against the war began to harden last spring when, in a personal exercise, he wrote a draft opinion article and found himself agreeing with Kerry's call for withdrawal from Iraq. He acknowledged that the expected deployment of his son Daniel was an important factor.

I don't doubt the man's sincerity. Andrew Sullivan, who knows this path personally, recognizes it and describes it in romantic terms, which seems to me to be the right context for Sullivan's disillusionment, if not for Dowd's:

Many of us backed Bush in 2000 with the thought that we were supporting a moderate, inclusive Republican with a pragmatic small-c conservative domestic policy, and a humble approach to the rest of the world. We were wrong, but we bonded with the president we'd picked through the trauma of 9/11, and it took many of us time to come to terms with what it was we had ultimately enabled. It was in front of our noses, of course. But what Dowd calls a "love-affair" is sometimes hard to walk away from cleanly or even recognize as a nightmare before it is too late.

Me, I never much liked Bush and cast my lone vote for him very unwillingly. So I can't follow the love-affair model. But I've had a few love affairs that lasted longer than they should have, and I do recognize that wake-up moment, triggered perhaps by something trivial in itself.

I would not criticize Dowd because that moment happened to be when his own son faces the reality of battle. That would be a test for any father. It may await me, too. I think, too, it explains the anomaly in his list of Bush's faults: "the president’s refusal, around the same time that he was entertaining the bicyclist Lance Armstrong at his Crawford ranch, to meet with the war protester Cindy Sheehan, whose son died in Iraq."

The faults and failures listed elsewhere in the article -- failure to rally Americans in their moment of willingness after 9/11, the bungling of Abu Ghraib, a general political high-handedness -- are all of a piece and many of us share them with Dowd. The Cindy Sheehan line item, however, sticks out like a sore thumb. That's generally the exclusive province of the tinfoil hat brigade and those whose political style is performance anger. Its resonance with Dowd might be a clue to his emotional evolution.

[Neither Dowd nor the NYT seems interested in describing this correctly, by the way. Bush did meet with Sheehan. It was before she got galvanized into a one-woman anti-Bush missionary. What she's been demanding ever since is a second meeting, a mulligan, if you will. And FWIW, I thought it would have been a brilliant idea for the prez to just pop out and meet her sometime, with cameras rolling, and be patient and let her do her nasty little schtick on him, thank her on behalf of the country for her son's life and service, and walk away.]

Baited and Hooked

[posted by Callimachus]

Armed Liberal discusses the recent apologies for Iraq War support by two notables from the center-left: Peter Bienert and Bjorn Staer. He respectfully finds their answers wanting, but I'll let you read that in his own words.

I don't often read such writing. I understand the writer's need to explain himself, but that's his need, not mine. I got snookered, too: Not by the Bush Administration's pre-war arguments about Saddam's armaments and his likely threat to America and its friends (I never trusted the White House on that and got my opinion about that by watching Saddam himself -- and he was a much more artful and convincing liar than anyone in the White House). But by the Bush administration's seeming intention to do this job with full attention to leaving Iraq better than we found it and to righting a regional record of humanitarian wrongs with our flag on them that goes back longer than my life. For that, I gave my personal support to a war led by a guy I never wanted to see in the White House in the first place.

So I fell for the bait. So what? It doesn't seem to me the betrayal of my little ideals is such a damned serious thing in the world. It doesn't require an anguished prose apologia. A lot of people now are being publicly flogged over this, and a few are pre-emptively self-flogging.

I'm far more interested in what we do next, because however we got here, we are undeniably here, and time, as far as I can tell, still moves forward, not in reverse. I've also got that Pyrrhonic streak. If this weren't happening, something else would be. If the U.S. had not invaded Iraq in 2003, that doesn't mean "March 2003" would be frozen in place forever. What would the "something else" be? You'll never know. Neither will I.

Patriot Tax

[posted by Callimachus]

Over the years since 9/11, I don't think any columnist I've read has more consistently said things I wanted to hear said than Tom Friedman. I don't say that with swollen breast, because there's a whole lot of people on every side of the question who will sneer at anyone who tends to agree with Friedman.

But it's a fact, in my case. Not that I always think he has the right answer or the right tone. But I have never yet read him and thought, "Well, that was totally off base." Which I can't say about anyone else.

His latest column is just right on the mark. It's about the lack of effort put forth in this war, by all of us except those actually over there doing the job. It starts with the Walter Reed scandal, but moves rapidly from there, firing as it goes. If it has a topic sentence, this is it:

Bush summoned the country to D-Day and prepared the Army, the military health system, military industries and the American people for the invasion of Grenada.

From the start, the Bush team has tried to keep the Iraq war “off the books” both financially and emotionally. As Larry Diamond of Stanford’s Hoover Institution said to me: “America is not at war. The U.S. Army is at war.” The rest of us are just watching, or just ignoring, while the whole fight is carried on by 150,000 soldiers and their families.

In an interview Jan. 16, Jim Lehrer asked Bush why, if the war on terrorism was so overwhelmingly important, he had never asked more Americans “to sacrifice something.” Bush gave the most unbelievable answer: “Well, you know, I think a lot of people are in this fight. I mean, they sacrifice peace of mind when they see the terrible images of violence on TV every night.”

...

If you want to compare Bush in this regard with Presidents Roosevelt or Wilson, pick up a copy of Robert Hormats’ soon-to-be-published book: “The Price of Liberty: Paying for America’s Wars.”

“In every major war that we have fought, with the exception of Vietnam, there was an effort prior to the war or just after the inception to re-evaluate tax and spending policies and to shift resources from less vital national pursuits to the strategic objective of fighting and winning the war,” said Hormats, a vice chairman of Goldman Sachs (International).

He quotes Roosevelt’s 1942 State of the Union address, during which FDR looked Americans in the eye and said: “War costs money. That means taxes and bonds and bonds and taxes. It means cutting luxuries and other nonessentials. In a word, it means an ‘all-out’ war by individual effort and family effort in a united country.”

Ever heard Bush talk that way? After Pearl Harbor, Hormats noted, Roosevelt vowed to mobilize U.S. industry to produce enough weapons so we would have a “crushing superiority” in arms over our enemies. Four years after the start of the Iraq war, this administration has still not equipped all our soldiers with the armor they need.

As retired Army Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton pointed out last year, because of spending in Iraq, the Army had a $530 million budget shortfall for posts, so facilities got squeezed.

If Americans had been asked to pay a small tax to fill that gap, they would have overwhelmingly checked that box. They would have also paid a “Patriot Tax” of 50 cents a gallon to raise the money and diminish our dependence on oil.

Remember after 9/11, when Americans gave so much blood the Red Cross didn't know what to do with it all? Remember all that energy and will to sacrifice? What if that could have been harnessed and put to work.

Instead of that future, we have this reality. One thing we still can do is take care of those who did make the sacrifices. Friedman's column lists a few places to do that, which I hereby pass on to you:

• Coalition to Salute America’s Heroes
  
• The Intrepid Fallen Heroes Fund
  
• The Fisher Houses
  
• The Walter Reed Society
  

Speaking of Germany ...

Pretty funny. They do this every year over there. Sort of a Mardi-Gras-with-politics. And usually a ton of "butt" jokes. It's a German thing.

Let's Talk About Bush

[posted by Callimachus]

People love to talk about Bush. Love it like a babe, love it like it was all that mattered on earth. Being able to talk disgustedly, mockingly about Bush is the only bona fide that will pass muster with half of America and nine-tenths of the world. Otherwise, you're a "fascist." Global warming? All Bush's fault! He single-handedly started the industrial revolution, you see. Alternate answer: Nothing contributed to climate change that didn't happen in America AND after January 2001.

Pretty good work, wouldn't you say, for a "failed businessman?" That was one of the few things I knew about him in 2000. I wasn't studying him closely then. I had seen enough to know I thought he'd be a terrible president, and I had no inclination to cast a vote for him, even though I was a registered Republican.

Not that "failed businessman" was one of those reasons. American history features a long list of private-life mediocrities and failures who became wonderful presidents and statesmen. Ditto men who don't read a lot of books. Of course, failing with your own money and failing with other people's are two different things.

Now I know more about him. Now I think I see what kind of failed businessman he is. He's the kind of boss you'd love to have -- if you don't really care about your job. He's loyal to his people, not matter how bad they screw up.

He reminds me of Ernie, the amiable rotund Peruvian immigrant who managed the books-and-electronics department of an Abraham & Strauss store where I took a job in the early 1980s. It was all about the workday. You came in, you were cheerful, you tried to not screw up, but if you did, oh well, we'll fix it somehow. Tomorrow's another workday. It was great if you were only in it for the dope money, not a career, and you knew you were moving on eventually to something better. Abraham & Strauss is long gone.

There were, and are, many aspects of my dislike of George W. Bush as a president. In retrospect, the ones I weighted most in deciding whom to vote for in 2000 turned out to be the least important. His scary social conservative qualities turn out to not amount to a hill of beans, and were about as authentic as Reagan's -- thank God. Who would have thought his biggest positive legacy so far would be "spent more money on AIDS in Africa than Clinton did"?

But those qualities, if taken sincerely into the brain, might have served him better. So many social conservatives shuddered to their core when they saw what had happened at Abu Ghraib. They did it quietly, as is their way in such matters, and they didn't pour out of their homes to pick up the picket signs and slogans that International A.N.S.W.E.R. was ready to hand them, as some fools did. But they felt it, and they felt it as a betrayal of something essential. Would that Bush had felt that, too, when he had the chance to prevent it.

In retrospect, I should have paid less attention to how he prayed and more attention to his business history. And in retrospect, Bush wasn't too much of a Christian patriot: He wasn't enough of one.

What else did I know about him then? The Bushes were ruthess campaigners. They won, and they won dirty, and they surrounded themselves with the sort of characters -- Roger Ailes, Lee Atwater, Karl Rove -- who fight ruthless, scorched-earth wars against their opponents and bring them down hard.

I hated that quality in American politics, and it might have been the biggest reason I rejected Bush as a candidate. But in part that helped turn me around on the notion of toppling Saddam in 2002. I knew Bush was going to war for a different mix of reasons than I would use to justify it. But it seemed if there was one thing he knew how to do it was win, at all costs, with the help of an intense and creative team of generals. Paradoxically, one of the reasons I didn't want him as president in 2000 became one of the reasons I assented to his leading the country into a risky war.

Perhaps I should have paid more attention to Bush the First, and 1992. How, in spite of the aggressive team, he seemed to just lack the will to win. His fire was gone and he waged a desultory campaign, whose few sparks were nasty but feeble ones.

Yet there it was, in early 2003: The chance I had been waiting all my adult life for: To see America use its power and good will to clear a path for millions of people who had done nothing to earn the suffering that had been visited on them as a side-effect of the Cold War. To give them a chance to take hold of part of our lucky legacy of wealth of freedom. I had watched the grimy experience of Carter and Reagan's late Cold War policies around the world, seen and read the results of Kissingerite realism. I had traveled behind the Iron Curtain and had no illusions about our enemies. Yet I never resigned myself to a lifetime of simply backing our bastards, with guns and money and from a safe distance, just because I knew theirs were worse.

We ought to be better than that, or give up the notion and name of "America" and just settle for being Belgium or something. I don't think I'll see the chance again in my life. How that came about and how I feel about it is a matter between me and a great many people -- including Bush. How much I choose to say about it in public is my choice; it's not a sign of how I think you ought to live, it's how I choose to live.

But turn my back on all I've stood for, since I first followed the fall of Saigon in the "Inquirer" at age 13? Since I heard Desmond Tutu, then little known outside South Africa, speak at a college graduation? Since I saw the crosses at the Berlin Wall and drank with Kurdish refugees hiding out and waiting for black market passports? Just because some fool president also embodies the other great American virtue of mental laziness and screwing up a lot?

Patton Medicine

[posted by Callimachus]

Stephen Green noticed it while watching the State of the Union address Tuesday:

All this "surge" talk strikes me as unnecessary and probably unwise. I don't remember any stories about FDR talking up D-Day before the fact, and trying to weasel support out of Congress for it.

Neurotic Iraqi Wife, writing from the Green Zone in Baghdad and hearing the insurgent mortar blasts and the tears of the survivors, noticed essentially the same thing:

One thing I also dont get is why advertise the security plans to the whole world? Word in the Iraqi street is that Muqtada told his followers, the ones high up in the hierarchy to leave to Syria or Iran. Until things calm down. I have also heard from people here, that some militia members are hiding their cache of weapons and moving down South. Hmmm, so basically everyone is gonna be gone. Then reappear once again when the offensive is over. Wowwww. Great planning, I must say.

Many in the U.S. military have noticed it, too. The administration's unseriousness about this whole operation has become so pervasive we hardly notice it anymore. Yes, the political opposition, left intelligentsia, and legacy media are unserious about it, too, if not committed emotionally to American failure (as a necessary tonic to hubris and a rebuke to Republicans). But it's the president who runs the show.

But this goes deeper than the White House. Can open democracies win long and desperate wars against fundamentally undemocratic powers? Do the feet of the war-makers tangle in democracy's freedom and openness and transparency of government? This is not an argument for the opposite -- anything but. I've written a great deal elsewhere damning the Lincoln Administration and its fellow travelers; what they did to the Constitution and the political structure of the republic was worse than what they did to Atlanta, and has never been totally undone. [No doubt I'll be called a "fascist" anyhow.] But just because the question points to a possible ugly answer doesn't mean you shouldn't ask it. It's a question bigger than Iraq.

It also suggests another question. Rumsfeld, if I am to believe the pundits, convinced Bush to fight a "light" war in Iraq and indeed it seems to be the president's tendency to treat the whole response to 9/11 as something that needn't much trouble the popular mind. Go shopping and let the Marines sort it out. Some people have pointed out that this is alarmingly naive (and have been called warmongers for their trouble).

While the administration talks loudly about what it's going to do with troops in the field -- the thing that ought to be kept secret -- it has been quietly retooling the executive branch for a permanent state of shadow war -- the thing that ought to be done deliberately and collectively by the nation, if it is to be done at all.

If you don't like war, good. It's inhuman and illiberal in the extreme. But unless you want to be an outright pacifist, get some muscle by wrestling with the questions this one raises. Don't expect to be taken seriously if all you are capable of is hiding behind funhouse caricatures of Bush.

Would we have, did we ever have, what it would have taken to show up in Iraq with the kind of aggressive force and homefront unity that would have snuffed out every tendency toward insurgency, every temptation of neighborly meddling, every instinctive nationalist instinct to IED the invader? Would it have been endured here at home? (I think we can agree on how it would have been welcomed in foreign capitals.) What price, ultimately, would we have had to pay for the kind of victory that would have allowed a reconstruction a la Germany and Japan? Or Appomattox?

Is that who we are anymore? Osmar White, the Australian journalist who rode into Germany with the U.S. 12th Army group as it smashed up the dying Reich in the last weeks of World War II, foresaw the problem. He was, in many ways, a modern war correspondent: Certainly closer in intellectual style to Peter Arnett than to Ernie Pyle. He disliked the average American soldier's crude self-righteous confidence, as he saw it, and was sympathetic to the Soviet authorities and thus misguessed a great deal of what was going on in 1945.

But he wrote well and saw some things clearly. The Americans already were using their industrial and technological advantages to win the war. At the time, the marriage of hardware and aggression made them unstoppable, but already they were coming to rely on the machinery and on air power to do the old and brutal business of killing and dying in battle.

Patton was the only general who really got the most out of being able to deliver ten shells to the enemy's one. Disliking Patton as I did -- his childish love of notoriety, his foul mouth, his preoccupation at his periodical press briefings with corpses -- it was distasteful to admit that the man's genius as a commander in the field overshadowed that of his fellow generals. Yet the admission had to be made. The lesson seemed to be that to be a good general one must enjoy the corpses as well as Patton did; that if Britain and America ever had to fight a war without an overwhelming industrial 'edge' on the enemy, they would almost certainly lose it. Anglo-Saxon civilization was reluctant, even in dire peril, to give its Pattons their proper stature."

Or, he might have added, had he foreseen it, if they had to fight a war where all the mighty advantage in technology could be effectively neutralized by the enemy's tactics.

White, by the way, wrote that about Patton for a book ("Conqueror's Road") he compiled after the war. He did not write that way in the "Melbourne Herald." In the original introduction to the book, he described his work as a war correspondent during wartime as "that of seeking out the truth, recognizing it, and telling as much of it as could be told without giving aid and comfort to the enemy."

Legacy Schmegacy

[posted by Callimachus]

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Bush is planning to name a new ambassador and military commanders for Iraq as he prepares to make a fresh start on a worsening problem that has mired his administration and threatens his legacy.

...

Particularly after all the tributes to Gerald Ford in the past few days, President Bush may be pondering his own legacy and obituary.

...

Headline: Bush legacy hinges on plan, which gets bonus dead-tree fuckwit points for also using "grim milestone" in the lede.

...

So, the more modest escalation of up to 20,000 soldiers would appear to represent what might be called “Operation: Save Bush’s Legacy,” with the goal of postponing the inevitable until 2009 when American defeat can be palmed off on a new President.

Can anyone tell me where the media gets these ideas? Where is the slightest shred of evidence that Dubya ever gave a moment's thought to a legacy? Look at the last six years. Does this look like an administration that loses sleep over what historians, who hate him now, are going to say in the future. Dubya's not a legacy type president. Kennedy obsessed over his legacy. Nixon obsessed over his legacy. Reagan didn't care. Bush? Pooh. Do people really think about anything -- even their own stereotypes of the man -- before they write this stuff?

Choice Time

[posted by Callimachus]

I'll say this much for Bush, he forces an issue to a decision. Clinton would have been melting into a compromise weeks ago. Bush wants a yes-or-no. This time, he's right about that; sometimes life is a matter of morality and demands clarity. This is such a case.

He's not afraid, either, to go up against John McCain, John Warner, Lindsey Graham, Colin Powell, and the Pentagon itself on a military matter. That's right, too. The civilian leadership of this country has to have the final say in the face of military opposition -- even if in the issue at hand, the president is wrong.

The easy thing for anyone put off by Bush's White House, which is most people these days, is to say, "I'd rather be wrong with Powell and McCain than right with Cheney." That might work for you, but it's not really a good habit of thought.

Quotes on either side haven't been much help in clarifying anything. I should qualify that, though, by saying I'm reading this through mainstream media coverage, not actual transcripts, and by now I am well aware of the MSM's ability to make anyone sound like a twit, to juxtapose A to Z as though Z was said in response to A, and to present information that it wrung out of someone by a tortuous line of trap-door questions as though it is that person's official and pronounced policy.

Powell said Bush's proposals would encourage the world to "doubt the moral basis of our fight against terrorism." Colin, they need no encouragement. The world's media and cultural elites have been telling them Americans are a pack of murderous thugs for the past 50 years -- 70 years, if you limit it to Germany; 230 if you limit it to Britain.

Our domestic contrarians have been broadcasting the worst sins of American soldiers to the world since 1965 and suggesting they are official policy. And the Middle Eastern media and religious leaders aren't even constrained by factual exaggeration. When the real story isn't there, they just make one up.

So, no, the reason to do this isn't that, if we don't, people won't like us. They hate us. They don't believe our stated motives. They believe us incapable of any unselfish act. And they think we're always the real bad guys, no matter who is ranged against us. As long as we're the superpower, that will be true. Get used to it.

So then Bush comes back today with, "It's unacceptable to think that there's any kind of comparison between the behavior of the United States of America and the action of Islamic extremists." But that isn't a response to Powell, who didn't say that. He said other people will think that. If it's unacceptable, what do you do about it, Mr. President?

Well, something like a revived and vigorous Voice of America might be a good answer, I suppose, but given the abyssmal ability of this administration to communicate its messages even to people who agree with them, I'm willing to wait for the next set of incumbents to try that route.

Graham responded that Bush's version weakened protections for prisoners of war under the Geneva Conventions that could come back to haunt the United States.

Well, the Geneva Conventions haven't done us much good so far, when we've been on the other side of them, at least since 1929.

American forces have been engaged in five major armed conflicts since 1945: Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf War and the current conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. At no time in any of these wars have our adversaries accorded captured Americans the legal rights of POWs under the 1929 Geneva Convention, the 1949 Geneva Convention or customary international law. Moreover, during this entire period, the ICRC's contribution to the welfare of captured Americans was negligible.

Some 7,245 Americans were captured in Korea, and more than a third died in captivity. Throughout the Vietnam war, "American POWs were treated with unspeakable brutality," even though the U.S. in 1966 had begun treating captured Viet Cong as POWs, and according to the international rules, regardless of whether they legally merited such a designation. In Iraq today, of course, any American, civilian or military, unlucky enough to fall into the hands of the "insurgents" can expect to quickly end his or her life in a filthy basement somewhere, and have his decapitation be the most downloaded video on the Internet for about a week.

Like the Captain says:

If Powell and Levin and McCain can name one modern conflict where our enemies gave POWs treatment in accordance with the GC, I'd be glad to post it right here on my blog. Don't expect that kind of an update any time soon.

McCain, a former POW in Vietnam who presumably knows all this, said in a statement, "Weakening the Geneva protections is not only unnecessary, but would set an example to other countries with less respect for basic human rights ... that put our military personnel and others directly at risk in this and future wars."

Countries like Taliban Afghanistan, Saddam's Iraq and contemporary Iran? I wouldn't think they'd need us to set a bad example. I certainly don't expect them to follolw us in a good one.

So ignore the debate as its presented in the media. It's a headache waiting to happen. Stand back, get yourself into an open, quiet place, and just think: What kind of people do you want us to be? What kind of people do you want our sons and daughters in the military to be? What do you want that flag to stand for? What makes us right -- not perfect, but right -- and Saddam wrong? What would Washington or Lincoln do? Frame it any way I try, I always seem to come to the same answer.

ADDENDUM: I needn't add, but will anyhow, that I find the Democrats' tactics today of watching this essential national debate on the sidelines and toasting it as mere "GOP infighting" that will boost their own pathetic political fortunes contemptible and another indication of a party unworthy and unwilling to lead right now.

Things Can Always Get More Weird

[Humor link added Monday at bottom.]

It's old news now, I suppose, that President Bush tucked into a copy of Albert Camus' The Stranger during his summer vacation. My connectivity problems have permitted me sketchy, at best, access over the past several days, but there's been enough intermittent dip-ins to get a general grasp of the reaction--or, at least, to extrapolate what it's been. My favorite? Ann Althouse's call for her visitors to "read/reread "The Stranger" today", which, had the day unfolded differently, I might have done--assuming, of course, that I could have unearthed my ancient volume, along with my copy of Exile and the Kingdom as a companion read, specifically for "The Growing Stone." My own curiosity is not so so much about why President Bush is reading Camus just now, thought that surely intrigues me, but why "The Stranger" in particular. And is it a first-read or a re-read? The president's introduction to the Camus canon or a filling-in? As the Breitbart article to which I linked indicates, Bush has certainly quoted Camus previously in a speech, but one can't make assumptions based on that.

Before I could muse much on the topic, I unexpectedly was faced with the necessity of processing 40 pounds of fresh tomatoes into sauce, or something (this happens when you go away for a long time, which naturally means that a) for the first time in a number of years, a bumper crop of tomatoes survives and b) ripens all at once and a bit earlier than previously). Between coping with that and fighting tech issues, I get back on line--we'll see how briefly and successfully--only to be confronted with this gem:

Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has started a blog on his life and times (politics).

THE President of Iran has launched a web log, using his first entry to recount elements of his life story and ask visitors if they think the US and Israel want to start a new world war.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad described how he was angered by US meddling in Iran even when he was at school. His origins as the son of “a hard-bitten toiler blacksmith”, may have been humble, but he excelled at school where he came 132nd out of 400,000 in exams to enter university.

Well, I'll be. You know it had to happen sooner or later. Why should world leaders be the last on the block to get into the action?

Strikingly, I had to do a search and then skim through a number of stories before I found an example of one that actually provided a link to President Ahmadinejad's blog, though I personally haven't been able to get it to load yet, despite an extended period of trying, in background. This could very well be related to my tech issues. (HEH! I'll bet Ahmadinejad doesn't have router, or whatever, problems. Or does he? What happens when he does, I wonder? And to whom?) Or perhaps his blog has already attained stunning popularity throughout the world. Or a gazillion people are trying to participate in the (stacked?) poll he reportedly included in his post: “Do you think that the US and Israeli intention and goal by attacking Lebanon is pulling the trigger for another world war?”

(By the way, the news stories indicate that the blog is available in an English version, but from what little I can tell from the "loading...loading...loading" menu bar in my browser tab, the link I include does not go to that version.)

In any case, Ahmadinejad reportedly indicates that he has some fine-tuning to do with regard to his blogging techniques:

He concludes by admitting that his opening blog, which runs to more than 2,300 words in the English version, was too long. “From now onwards, I will try to make it simpler and shorter,” he wrote.

Pithy--keep it pithy, Mahmoud, as some of the most notable bloggers always say. I must say that I find that to be a tough one myself. Good grief! Who knew that I would ever be able to say, in connection with the president of Iran, "I can relate." Yikes!

Then again, do we really believe that Ahmadinejad is actually going to sit down and post on a daily, or even regular, basis, all on and by his lonesome? Surely he's a little busy these days (and possessed of many minions, writers undoubtedly among them).

Or maybe it's just a stunt?

The mind simply boggles at the strangeness of the world and all its dancing diversions and side shows, but that not withstanding, I really must get back to the tomato sauce(s). One thing's for sure: I wish I'd reserved more of that Nice Little Red for sipping, instead of raiding it for cooking. Sometimes it's better to toast the bizarre rather than curse it.

Update: Just out of curiosity, what world leaders would you most like to see blog (this could be seriously or because you think it would be the biggest joke)? Which would get the best visitor stats? The most links? The best ones? The most and least predictable?

This could be fun.

Added, Monday: The Garlic comes up with a top-ten list of things you must know about our newest blogger. My favorite is #3, followed by #1. Yours?

Hat tip.

Bush Admits Mistakes

You know we made mistakes in the war on terror. They know we made mistakes. Everybody knows we made mistakes.

The President knows it. Hell, he knows about mistakes we don't even know about yet. He just doesn't talk about it.

And so the mem grew and grew: "President Bush never admits mistakes."

It was another symptom of the Madness of King Chimpy. As though being aware of mistakes and adjusting to them was inseparable from constantly and publicly flagellating yourself for them.

Which, gods know, Bush could do all day long if he chose to. My beef with him is the same as a lot of neo-cons'. But what good would come of yapping about it? Bush would be stating the obvious, and he'd only encourage his (and in some cases our) enemies and discourage his (and in some cases our) friends.

Admitting mistakes, in the current political and global environment, would win you no friends you don't already have and only would whet the appetite of those who long to see you fall. Good or bad, Bush's fault or not, that's just the way it is.

It would be politically stupid and strategically unhelpful. The "he never admits mistakes" mantra was ginned up on the domestic left. You don't see many moderate Muslims saying, "I'd like to stand up for freedom in my homeland, but gosh, that Bush never admits mistakes! So fuck it."

So, now, Bush admits mistakes.

"Despite setbacks and missteps, I strongly believe we did and are doing the right thing," Bush said Thursday evening in a White House news conference with Blair. "Not everything has turned out the way we hoped."

And elsewhere:

In unusually introspective comments, Bush said he regrets his cowboy rhetoric the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks such as his "wanted dead or alive" description of Osama bin Laden and his taunting "bring 'em on" challenge to Iraqi insurgents.

"In certain parts of the world, it was misinterpreted."

He also cited the mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners at the U.S.-run Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad. "We've been paying for that for a long time," Bush said.

And what's the reward for that blunt honesty? Within minutes, the Associated Press was breathlessly announcing on its newswire an alert to editors to save some space, because:

Upcoming in about an hour:

WASHINGTON — President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair looked less like cheerleaders for the latest milestone of democratic political progress in Iraq and more like world leaders who had met their match. An AP News Analysis by AP Diplomatic Writer Anne Gearan.

Emphasis added. Gee, who could have seen that coming?

Wow

New Sysiphus is one of my guys. He's one who writes things I almost always can answer with a "ditto." As a veteran of the Foreign Service Office, he's especially tapped in to American global policies. He's more devoutly conservative than I am, and an uncompromising believer in the universality of Western freedoms. He's one of the bloggers I've had on my roll even before I joined the Watcher's Council, where he holds a chair.

On Monday, he published The Breach. It's one of the most powerful indictments of the Bush Administration I've ever seen. Not just for the writing, which is sufficiently potent, but because of the moral authority -- if you will -- of the writer.

He begins with the President's own words, in the two key speeches Bush made that form the core of what has come to be called the "Bush Doctrine." Like New Sisyphus, I fully subscribe to the idealism and high purpose and humanity of that doctrine. New Sisyphus then writes a history of American policies and campaigns in the war on terror that opened on Sept. 11, 2001. And he comes to a conclusion:

Along the way, the President has not advanced the American issue in a direct, forthright way. Instead, his Administration has bumbled along, pretending we are at peace. The very real fact of a very real war is not even discernable among the American population at large. No sacrifices are asked, not even doing without "American Idol." No mobilization has been ordered. Life goes on as before, creating a severe and hurtful disorientation between those families who have lost sons and those who don't even know there is a war on.

This is not the War on Terror the President sold us on in 2001. Not even close. We are not serious and everyone knows this, especially our enemies. I look into the eyes of my sons and I know that I would rather die-I would rather die-than let them fight in a war to establish the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan or to hand power over to the crazy Shi'ites of Iraq.

The leading Iraqi political figure, the Grand Ayatollah al-Sistani, has on his website instructions for how to determine what is unclean and what is clean. Among his definitions of "unclean" are things like shit, entrails of animals and, oh yes, the dead bodies of infidel soldiers.

Our policy is to die for a man and a people who literally think the dead bodies of our soldiers are literally shit.

That is our policy.

There are little quibbles I could make with his minor points. But they do not affect the thumping force of his statements. He concludes with:

I cannot support President Bush any longer. Can you?

I agree with N.S. about the infuriation of seeing the same president say the right words in his official addresses, then do all the wrong things when it comes to implementing them. I agree with him that the mound of evidence that this administration doesn't care, or doesn't care enough, about the expressed ideals of the Bush Doctrine, is too high to dismiss.

I've said for a long time that the problem wasn't that there were too many neo-cons in the administration -- as the opposition says -- but that there weren't enough of them. The neo-cons had a vision. But it was left to be implemented by old-school Kissinger-ish realists like Condi Rice and Don Rumsfeld. And Bush? He's a CEO, not a visionary. The neo-con ideas were like a management model to him; something he could pick and choose from to cobble together his policies. The rhetoric was useful because it held certain players in place long enough, but I don't believe any more he feels any commitment to it.

If I ever did. I thought in 2000 he was about the worst major party presidential candidate I'd ever seen. The calculus of the post-9/11 world and the suicidal fixations of the anyone-but-Bush faction backed me into voting in 2004 for the same man I held in contempt in 2000. I supported him against the BDS lunacy. But on his own, it's like rooting for my old college football team. You knew they were going to fumble on every possession. But they were the home team.

But what does it mean to "support" a lame-duck president in his second term? Where are you going to take your support if you withdraw it? My thoughts are, if we can get through to 2008 in one piece, we get another chance to put someone at the top who has an honest foreign policy vision and a commitment to American virtues and a firmness in purpose in advancing them, and a willingness to make the sacrifices that will bring out the spirit of this people.

I don't support Bush. I don't oppose him. Mostly I ignore him. And wait for the next chance. Iraq always was, for me, a long-term gamble. I said before it started, "20 years till we know if it's a good idea." The outcome will be nothing we intended at the start; unintended consequences will rule, but it seemed to me, and still seems to me, that the chance of those consequences being to the benefit of Iraqis, Americans, and the world in general remain good. In that context, I can wait out George W. Bush's feeble fading years.

Executive Power

Executive power is the new states' rights. In the first 70 years of American self-government, just about every politician and faction came down on one side or the other on the rights of states against the federal government, when that position suited his goals.

In modern times, presidents discover abilities and authorities for himself in what Congress or the Courts have done. In the 1950s, Eisenhower claimed executive privilege to rebuff the inquiries of Congress. In that case, it was the McCarthy investigations, and the New York Times and the Washington Post applauded, editorially. In structurally identical cases today, they scold the Bush Administration.

Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson all used executive power to advance the cause of minority civil rights in America, and again the media establishment applauded. Bush uses it in cases no less open to constitutional objection, and he gets slammed.

On the other hand, it would be much easier to accept his claims of executive power in the interest of prosecuting the war on terror if, all along, his administration had behaved like a nation at war more often. In the rush of enthusiasm after 9-11, the president told us to go home and live our lives. In subsequent political sessions he has made no move to form a "War Cabinet" or show a bipartisan front. The economic policies pursued by the administration make no sesne for a nation in a long and deadly fight.

Could we at least have a scrap drive or war bonds or something?

It becomes impossible to deny the cry of the Bush critics that the war on terror is treated by this administration as a convenience, and some color begins to creep into even their more paranoid assertion that the White House has succumbed to the temptation to use concerns about terrorism to advance other agendas.

Bush's Speech

The AP story -- the news story -- gives it the big slant in the lede and then turns the story over to Bush's critics for the rest of the top:

President Bush, in the most forceful defense yet of his Iraq war policy, accused critics Friday of trying to rewrite history and charged that they're undercutting America's forces on the front lines.

"The stakes in the global war on terror are too high and the national interest is too important for politicians to throw out false charges," the president said in his combative Veterans Day speech.

"While it's perfectly legitimate to criticize my decision or the conduct of the war, it is deeply irresponsible to rewrite the history of how that war began," the president said.

Bush's defense of his policy came at a time of growing doubts and criticism about a war that has claimed the lives of more than 2,050 members of the U.S. military. As casualties have climbed, Bush's popularity has dropped. His approval rating now is at 37 percent in the latest AP-Ipsos poll, an all time low point of his presidency.

Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., who ran unsuccessfully against Bush last year, quickly challenged the president's charges.

"I wish President Bush knew better than to dishonor America's veterans by playing the politics of fear and smear on Veterans Day," said Kerry, who voted in 2002 to give Bush the authority to wage war but later voted against additional funds for Iraq and Afghanistan reconstruction. Kerry argued at the time that Bush didn't have a solid plan to restore peace.

"This administration misled a nation into war by cherry-picking intelligence and stretching the truth beyond recognition," Kerry said.

Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., said, "It's deeply regrettable that the president is using Veterans Day as a campaign-like attempt to rebuild his own credibility by tearing down those who seek the truth about the clear manipulation of intelligence in the run-up to the Iraq war."

AP also dished up a Ron Fournier sidebar saying essentially the same thing:

President Bush seems to be turning the clock back to Election Day 2004, parrying with ex-rival John Kerry and harshly questioning his critics' commitment to U.S. troops.

You can't blame him for being nostalgic for better political times, when most Americans felt he was a strong, honest leader and gave him the benefit of the doubt on Iraq.

That's certainly not the sentiment these days. With his approval ratings plunging, even some Republican leaders are showing signs of abandoning Bush's listing ship.

The New York Times went the AP one better and actually buried the speech, making Bush's woes, not the speech, the lede of its main story.

WASHINGTON, Nov. 10 - Faced with a bleak public mood about Iraq and stung by Democratic accusations that he led the nation into war on false pretenses, President Bush is beginning a new effort to shore up his credibility and cast his critics as hypocrites.

In a Veterans Day speech on Friday in Pennsylvania, Mr. Bush will take on a new round of accusations by Democrats that he exaggerated the threat posed by Saddam Hussein's weapons programs, a senior administration official said Thursday, conceding that the Democrats' attack had left more Americans with doubts about Mr. Bush's honesty.

Reuters, naturally, rode hard on the same angle:

President George W. Bush ripped into Democratic critics of the Iraq war on Friday, charging them with trying to rewrite history by accusing the White House of manipulating intelligence before the war.

Bush, facing waning public support for the war that has helped push his approval ratings to new lows, hit back at critics who have said his administration misused intelligence on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction to justify the war.

Democrats responded to Bush's Veterans Day speech by accusing the president of exploiting the holiday to try to shore up his faltering political standing.

Oh, and Helen Thomas piled on, too. No surprise there:

In a Veterans Day address in Tobyhanna, Pa., on Friday, President Bush — obviously feeling the heat from growing opposition to the war and his low standing in public opinion polls — lashed out at Democratic critics, saying more than 100 congressional Democrats voted to support the war against Saddam Hussein.

Now, look. I rarely encourage you to go read a whole speech, especially one of Bush's. But go read this one, and tell me if you think the reporting accurately reflects the totality of what Bush said. I think it was a pretty good speech, for him. Stirring at points. Here are a few sections that rang true to me:

Over the years, these extremists have used a litany of excuses for violence: the Israeli presence on the West Bank, the U.S. military presence in Saudi Arabia, the defeat of the Taliban, or the crusades of a thousand years ago.

In fact, we are not facing a set of grievances that can be soothed and addressed. We're facing a radical ideology with unalterable objectives to enslave whole nations and intimidate the world.

No act of ours invited the rage of killers and no concession, bribe or act of appeasement would change or limit their plans for murder. On the contrary, they target nations whose behavior they believe they can change through violence.

Against such an enemy, there is only one effective response: We will never back down, we will never give in, we will never accept anything less than complete victory.

The murderous ideology of the Islamic radicals is the great challenge of our new century. Yet in many ways this fight resembles the struggle against communism in the last century.

Like the ideology of communism, Islamic radicalism is elitist, led by a self-appointed vanguard that presumes to speak for the Muslim masses. Bin Laden says his own role is to tell Muslims, quote, what is good for them and what is not.

What this man who grew up in wealth and privilege considers good for poor Muslims is that they become killers and suicide bombers. He assures them that this is the road to paradise, though he never offers to go along for the ride.

Like the ideology of communism, our new enemy teaches that innocent individuals can be sacrificed to serve a political vision. And this explains their cold-blooded contempt for human life.

We have seen it in the murders of Daniel Pearl and Nicholas Berg and Margaret Hassan and so many others.

In a courtroom in the Netherlands, the killer of Theo Van Gogh turned to the victim's grieving mother and said, I don't feel your pain, because I believe you're an infidel.

And in spite of this veneer of religious rhetoric, most of the victims claimed by the militants are fellow Muslims.

Recently in the town of Huwaydar, Iraq, terrorists detonated a pickup truck parked along a busy street lined with restaurants and shops just as residents were gathering to break the daylong fast observed during Ramadan. The explosion killed at least 25 people and wounded 34.

When unsuspecting Muslims breaking their Ramadan fast are targeted for death or 25 Iraqi children are killed in a bombing or Iraqi teachers are executed at their school, this is murder, pure and simple: the total rejection of justice and honor and morality and religion.

These militants are not just the enemies of America or the enemies of Iraq, they are the enemies of Islam and they are the enemies of humanity.

And we have seen this kind of shameless cruelty before, in the heartless zealotry that led to the gulags, the Cultural Revolution and the killing fields.

Like the ideology of communism, our new enemy pursues totalitarian aims.

Its leaders pretend to be an aggrieved party representing the powerless against imperial enemies. In truth, they have endless ambitions of imperial domination and they wish to make everyone powerless except themselves.

Under their rule, they have banned books and desecrated historical monuments and brutalized women. They seek to end dissent in every form, to control every aspect of life, to rule the soul itself.

While promising a future of justice and holiness, the terrorists are preparing a future of oppression and misery.

Like the ideology of communism, our new enemy is dismissive of free peoples, claiming that men and women who live in liberty are weak and decadent.

But let us be clear: It is cowardice that seeks to kill children, and the elderly with car bombs and cuts the throat of a bound captive and targets worshippers leaving a mosque.

Toward the end, there's this:

By standing for hope and freedom of others, we make our own freedom more secure.
America is making this stand in practical ways. We're encouraging our friends in the Middle East — including Egypt and Saudi Arabia — to take the path of reform, to strengthen their own societies in the fight against terror by respecting the rights and choices of their own people.

We're standing with dissidents and exiles against oppressive regimes because we know that the dissidents of today will be the democratic leaders of tomorrow.

We're making our case through public diplomacy, stating clearly and confidently our belief in self-determination and the rule of law and religious freedom and equal rights for women; beliefs that are right and true in every land, and in every culture.

As we do our part to confront radicalism and to protect the United States, we know that a lot of vital work will be done within the Islamic world itself. And the work's beginning.

Many Muslim scholars have already publicly condemned terrorism, often citing Chapter 5, Verse 32 of the Koran, which states that,

Killing an innocent human being is like killing all of humanity, and saving the life of one person is like saving all humanity.

After the attacks on July 7 in London, an imam in the United Arab Emirates declared, Whoever does such a thing is not a Muslim nor a religious person.

The time has come for responsible Islamic leaders to join in denouncing an ideology that exploits Islam for political ends and defiles a noble faith.

Many people of the Muslim faith are proving their commitment at great personal risk. Everywhere we've engaged the fight against extremism, Muslim allies have stood up and joined the fight, becoming partners in this vital cause. Afghan troops are in combat against Taliban remnants. Iraqi soldiers are sacrificing to defeat al-Qaida in their country.

These brave citizens know the stakes: the survival of their own liberty, the future of their own region, the justice and humanity of their own tradition. And the United States of America is proud to stand beside them.

With the rise of a deadly enemy and the unfolding of a global ideological struggle, our time in history will be remembered for new challenges and unprecedented dangers.
And yet this fight we have joined is also the current expression of an ancient struggle between those who put their faith in dictators and those who put their faith in the people.

Throughout history, tyrants and would-be tyrants have always claimed that murder is justified to serve their grand vision. And they end up alienating decent people across the globe.

Tyrants and would-be tyrants have always claimed that regimented societies are strong and pure, until those societies collapse in corruption and decay.

Tyrants and would-be tyrants have always claimed that free men and women are weak and decadent, until the day that free men and women defeat them.

We don't know the course our own struggle will take or the sacrifices that might lie ahead. We do know, however, that the defense of freedom is worth our sacrifice. We do know the love of freedom is the mightiest force of history. And we do know the cause of freedom will once again prevail.

Thank you for coming. May God bless our veterans, may God bless our troops in harm's way and may God continue to bless the United States of America.

Too bad you won't hear any of that on your nightly news.

P.S.: I think Bush is basically wrong about politicians grandstanding against the war being a drag on troop morale. I think most troops in most American wars don't give a damn what politicians rant about, unless it's pay raises for troops. By the time they're in battle, the soldiers are fighting for one another, and for personal reasons. E.g. here.

I think he's right, though, that it's an encouragement to the enemy. But Zarqawi seems to be having P.R. troubles of his own these days.