The Bottom Line On The Dubster's Legacy

The latest Shi'ite sectarian nonsense in Iraq highlights our national tragedy as we have sacrificed thousands of our own and hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis for NOTHING. The perpetrators of 9/11 are at large. The perpetrators of our national tragedy are likewise at large. We cannot lay a finger on the Sunni perpetrators of 9/11, but we can lay a finger on the criminals at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and One Naval Observatory Drive. I think we ought to start by waterboarding The Dubster and The Dickster. After that warmup, we should lock them up for the rest of their days in the friendly confines of Guantánamo. If this is (fair & balanced) truth to power, so be it.

[x Boulder (CO) Fishwrap]

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Copyright © 2008 John Sherffius

[John Sherffius is the editorial cartoonist for the Boulder (CO) Daily Camera. He is the winner of the 2008 Herblock Prize for editorial cartooning.]

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I'd Laugh, But 'Tain't Funny

Richard Cavett's lagniappe in this disquisition on campaign humor (and the lack of it) is his characterization of The Dubster (and fellow Yalie) as

...the capering loon who does soft-shoe in the White House while young Americans are dismembered and splattered in Iraq. Sometimes when he speaks I can forget who he is momentarily and find myself actually pulling for him; probably from misplaced performer empathy. His speechifying has a strong odor of remedial reading about it, combined with an apparent fear that there might be some hard words ahead.

If this is (fair & balanced) snark, so be it.

[x NY Fishwrap]
Candidate, Improve Your Appearance!
By Dick Cavett

Hillary Clinton is just beginning a live speech as I type. And I just failed in my purpose.

I tried to reach the Clinton campaign to suggest that she could get a big, heartwarming laugh if she came onstage wearing a flak jacket.

I’m not sure the sight gag would have guaranteed her the nomination, but a laugh never hurts and is worth a thousand straight lines. And it’s certainly funnier than the leaden, anti-Obama Xerox line someone saddled her with a while back. If that gag came from a staff member, he or she should have been busted to the rank of gofer. Or gofeuse, I suppose.

If I were running a campaign, I’d urge taking the mountain of money reportedly squandered on pizza, coffee and bagels and spending it more wisely — on a talented young comedy writer. Remember Twain’s “Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand”? All candidates should post this on their shaving mirrors. Or make-up mirrors. (This clumsy gender thing has to stop.)

We keep getting articles and reports of how John McCain is adored, cuddled and all but fondled in the back of his bus by his devotees in the press; who are arranged, it sounds like, at his feet before his big, relaxing chair. His ability to create and maintain this camaraderie is surely a vastly valuable thing. One trait those “ink-stained wretches” of the press especially like about him is his candor and what’s been termed his risk-taking frankness and sense of irony. This affection for him may account for why they fail to do him the favor of pointing out how badly he delivers a speech.

By speech, I don’t mean his off-the-cuff appearances holding a hand mike and working the crowd, or his cool, entertaining guest shots with (the help of) Jon Stewart. Those are fine, and at those times you see the thing in him that makes people say he seems genuine and honest — a mensch saying what he believes, a real and intelligent person, as distinct from the vinyl Mitt Romney, or Boob of the Year contest winner — by a landslide — Congressman Steve King from Iowa, with his terrorists-“dancing in the streets”-if-Obama-is-elected line. In short, all the things conveyed by the now so very popular buzzword: authenticity. The newest must for candidates. (How did I get this far without resorting to “sine qua non”?)

I mean those speeches from behind the lectern, center stage, requiring the three teleprompters right, left and center. They are invisible to the audience and are supposed to create the illusion that you are not reading. And they do, when skillfully used. Ronald Reagan went to England with them when they were new. Armed with them and his acting ability he astonished the Brits with what they took to be his spontaneous speaking at length, sans text.

It’s a pleasure to watch Obama’s mastery of the technique. And Clinton — and I didn’t say “even Clinton” — uses it much better than McCain does. And just about everybody does it better than the capering loon who does soft-shoe in the White House while young Americans are dismembered and splattered in Iraq. Sometimes when he speaks I can forget who he is momentarily and find myself actually pulling for him; probably from misplaced performer empathy. His speechifying has a strong odor of remedial reading about it, combined with an apparent fear that there might be some hard words ahead.

But back to McCain. Does something in him rebel at the deception aspect of doing what, when done well, tricks people into saying, “Look at that. Not even using notes”? Our John seems to actually change personalities at the lectern. Something in him tightens. His voice even goes up several notes, and he seems bogus in a way that he never does in other settings. Like an actor stuck with a part he’s not comfortable in.

Politicians, if smart, would hire not just a comedy writer but an acting coach. Years ago, the gifted and classy film actor (and lieutenant commander in the Navy) Robert Montgomery pulled off a miracle in this regard. Hired as a public appearance consultant for the marginally articulate Dwight D. Eisenhower — a former president, should you be among the students who scored so abysmally on that general knowledge test a while back — Montgomery transformed the man.

First he hauled the president out from behind the massive presidential desk from which it was hard not to appear ponderous and had him stand in front of it. Shirtsleeves; no jacket. To cure the rigid, military upright look of a general, he had his illustrious client lean back slightly against the desk (without sitting on it) and cross his arms casually. The actor in Montgomery knew how important stance is to the way you talk.

The success of these seemingly minor adjustments was instant. Suddenly, turgid old President Eisenhower became “Ike.” A genial, avuncular fellow you might like to have over.

Although not quite considered as good an actor as Robert Montgomery was, I could still give McCain a few tips. (Few will ever be as good at it as Obama is. He has mastered the art of public speaking both off the cuff and while seeming not to use the prompter. Watch how rarely he says “uh.”)

If I were ever called in to coach candidates on how to give those awful stand-up speeches, here’s what I would say.

Tip #1. Change all “I wills” and “I shalls” from the speech to “I’ll’; Also, “I haves” and “I ams” to “I’ve” and “I’m,” etc. You’d be surprised how much this cuts down on the oratory tone.

Tip #2. Pretend you are speaking to one person. One single person. Because that’s what everybody is. No one watching or sitting in the audience is an “all of you” or an “everyone” or a “those of you” or a “Hi, everybody,” and no one is a “ladies and gentlemen.” You, out there, are a “you.” So, speaker, think of yourself as being viewed by only two eyes. (Presumably on the same person.) The most magical word you can use, short of a person’s name, is “you.”

The great Arthur Godfrey practiced this invariably. “How are you?” he said, is all-important. “Ladies and gentlemen of the radio audience,” he said, “is bull and reaches no one.” With emphasis on “one.” On radio he had millions of listeners, largely adoring women in the daytime, each convinced he was speaking to her personally. Including my grandmother. (You knew it worked because in a ruthless Nebraska summer, when all the windows were open, I could hear Arthur uninterruptedly as I passed one house after the other.)

Tip #3. I feel almost silly when I do this one, but it works. Grab a bunch of words off the prompter and, instead of staring straight ahead, glance down and to one side as you do — in real life — when thinking just what to say next. Then look back and deliver those snatched-up words to the camera. It works like a charm. (As a beloved childhood magic catalogue of mine used to say — with unintended ambiguity — “We cannot recommend this trick too highly.”)

If I were McCain’s adviser I would shock everyone by having him come out carrying his script, and saying — not “ladies and gentlemen,” as we just learned, but launch right into, “You know, I don’t use these teleprompters very well. I guess I’m just not one of those people who can fool you into thinking I’m making it up as I go along . . . which these things are supposed to do. I don’t even fool myself. I cringe when I watch myself trying to bring off that ‘electronic deception,’ you might call it . . . Anyway, here’s my speech [shows it] and I’m going to read the damn thing to you. Surely I can’t make even that look phony. [slight pause] Can I?” [laughter]

“Dick, what are you trying to do, get John McCain elected?” I hear you cry.
I keep re-liking McCain, because he seems honest. A prince among thieves.

If I were all out for him, though, I’d need to convince myself that his continued pursuit of those twin mirages of his in Iraq — “success” and “victory” — are merely necessary devices to woo the least desirable elements of his party. But I can’t be sure.

That’s why, at the moment, I like somebody else better. I guess I just can’t resist giving helpful tips to a fellow performer.

(Wait till McCain gets the bill for this.)

[The host of “The Dick Cavett Show” — which aired on ABC from 1968 to 1975 and on public television from 1977 to 1982 — Dick Cavett is also the coauthor of two books, Cavett (1974) and Eye on Cavett (1983). He has appeared on Broadway in “Otherwise Engaged” “Into the Woods” and as narrator in “The Rocky Horror Show,” and has made guest appearances in movies and on TV shows including “Forrest Gump” and “The Simpsons.” Mr. Cavett lives in New York City and Montauk, N.Y.]

Copyight © 2008 The New York Times Company

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Why Is The Geezer Wearin' Body Armor When The Surge Is Workin' So Well?

No, it's not the John Deere exhibit booth at some county fair. Instead, it's The Geezer aka "the presumptive GOP nominee" and his sidekick, Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) in the so-called Green Zone earlier this month. No, the two innocents abroad are not wearin' bib overalls. They're wearin' body armor. What's wrong with this picture? What are the Iraqis in view are wearing? No body armor! It's hard to tell a bigger exaggeration: sniper fire on the tarmac in Bosnia (the Queen O'Mean in combat) or the surge is working in Iraq (The Geezer in body armor in mid-March 2008).

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Copyright © 2008 The New York Times Company

What is the litmus test for Geezerdom? Here's a modest example:

[x Pickles]

Click on Image to enlarge/
Copyright © Brian Crane

[Brian Crane is the cartoonist who created the comic strip "Pickles." He received the National Cartoonist Society Newspaper Comic Strip Award for 2001 for his work on the strip. Mr. Crane is a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints and sometimes draws LDS temples or periodicals as background props in the "Pickles" comic strip.[2] Crane lives in Sparks, Nevada.]

Despite learning that "Pickles" is an LDS-toon, there is one more test of Geezerhood: wearin' body armor in the Green Zone while the surge is workin' so well. This all would be funny if the stakes were not catastrophoic. We can laugh our way to the polls in November. If this is (fair & balanced) gerontology, so be it.

[x Informed Comment]
The Iraq War and the Presidential Election
By William R. Polk

With all eyes fixed on the forthcoming election, we must consider the issues that will face whomever becomes our next president for these are issues that we – and perhaps even our grandchildren will have to cope. The urgent issue before our country in this time of great danger is the health of our society and the well-being of our country.

Foremost is the impact of the war in Iraq on our society, our constitutional system and our economy. Like many of you in the room, I have helped to see America through some dangerous times. For me, the searing experience was serving on the crisis management committee of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Then the deputy head of the National Security Council, the Assistant Secretary of Defense of International Security Affairs and I oversaw events during that perilous week. The scars are still with me. But one positive thing I learned then is that the most dangerous thing is to close one’s eyes to reality, to see only what one wants to see. Only in absolutely honesty and clarity is there hope. So please forgive me for laying out here today the cold hard facts with which we must live -- or die.

* * *

So, I want to talk with you today about three things;

First, what is our struggle in Iraq costing us;

Second, the nature of terrorism, guerrilla warfare and insurgency ; and

Third, what should we do now.

Here, I propose to skip over how we got into Iraq, the legal and constitutional issues posed by our policy. Not that these are unimportant, but they are relatively often discussed so I would rather focus on what is less known.At the end, if you will bear with me, I will project ahead on the implications of the thrust of current policy. I begin with the cost of our policy in Iraq:

* * *

As you will know from the press, the US has suffered nearly 4,000 casualties — as of last week, to be exact, 3,958 in addition to another 482 in Afghanistan. Our wounded cannot be so precisely counted as they fall into various categories. One hears or reads the figure 30,000 -- that was the figure given by Senator Obama last night, but he was wrong about it. It is only a small fraction of the total.

One of the most striking wounds is a direct result of the nature of guerrilla warfare — concussions. Concussions were not even noted until after 2003. Now it is believed that about 1 in 10 US soldiers and Marines — that is roughly 50,000 men and women — has been affected.Treating these wounded is a long-time task. Most will never fully recover. Meanwhile, they will be unable to function normally. So side effects will ripple through their communities —loss of jobs, inability to function as parents, divorces, anger, despair. And the cost of treatment will range from $600,000 to $5 million dollars a person.

The loss of limbs should be easier to count, but the figures are in dispute. A minimum is about 8,000. Most of these people will recover, but many of them will spend their lives in wheel chairs.

As far as I have been able to find, no statistics have been broken out for those paralyzed.

But 1 in 4 of the soldiers and Marines and the US Surgeon General put the figure at 1 in 3 — that is between 125 and nearly 200 thousand — has an illness we did not even know existed until 1980. It is PTSD or post-traumatic stress disorder.

And the Journal of the American Medical Association reported that 1 in 3 of the men and women who served in Iraq — perhaps 200 thousand needs mental health treatment. Some of these need help because they are either suicidal or could endanger others.

The most complicated and frightening “wound,”however, is result of the use of depleted uranium bombs and artillery shells. We used them because uranium is a very heavy metal and is better at penetrating armor. In itself, depleted uranium is not much more dangerous than steel. But upon impact, a shell generates intense heat which causes the depleted uranium to mutate into an aerosol of uranium oxide, U3 08. As Dr. Hans Noll, American Cancer Society Professor of Biology, has written to me, “It settles as a fine dust, which enters the body in a variety of ways. Uranium oxide is an extremely potent neurotoxin with a high affinity for DNA. This DNA fragmentation results in genetic defects like cancer and malformation in developing fetuses. Inhaled as dust, uranium oxide accumulates in the lungs, liver and kidneys and affects the nervous system.” It is inevitable that we face thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of cases of cancer as a result of the use of this weapon. As General Brent Scowcroft laconically put it, “Depleted uranium is more of a problem than we thought when it was developed.” It certainly is.

These "wounds" add up to very large numbers. We should not be surprised since 169 thousand of the 580,400 men and women who fought in the first Gulf War are on permanent medical disability at a cost of $2 billion a year. For this, the second Gulf War, the estimated medical costs equal the combat costs or roughly half a trillion dollars.

* * *

Leaving aside the armed forces, what is the war’s effect on America?

Consider first the standing of America in the world. This is much more important for our safety than all the weaponry and soldiers we can muster. And no one denies that the reservoir of good will that that great Republican candidate for the presidency, Wendell Wilkie, found so gratifying at the end of the Second World War is now a reservoir well drained.Everywhere you look, there is growing distrust and increasing anger at America. The most recent polls show an alarming decline even since last year and even in our closest ally, England. There our standing is down from 75 percent to just over 50 percent. In Germany it is down from 60 percent to 30 percent. And outside of Europe the numbers are unprecedented. Our NATO ally Turkey everyone thought to be rock solid.

As an aside when I was in government we asked the Turks to commit forces to NATO and they turned over their whole army. When we set up our supersecret spy bases — the National Security Agency (NSA) and CIA bases for monitoring Soviet missile activity and flying the U-2 — the Turks allowed us to put over 21 thousand officials in Turkey and never even asked to have a look inside the bases, so complete was their trust. Now only 9 percent of Turks favor America.

In Egypt and Jordan, the heavily touted props of our Middle Eastern policy, only about 1 in each 5 favors us. Polls indicate that nearly 8 in 10 Muslims worldwide believe our intent is to destroy their religion, that President Bush’s famous use of the word “crusade” to describe our policy was not just a slip of the tongue, and that the issue for them is defense of their whole way of life. Of course in Iraq itself, the feeling about America is sharper. All public opinion polls and all observations by our officials indicate that the one issue on which Iraqis of every sect, opinion and economic strata agree is that they want us out.

Why is this? First, of course is a truism that we all share: no people wants to be ruled by foreigners. Often we don’t even want them in our country. But from the American revolution onward, people all over the world have struggled to get foreigners to leave them alone. The Iraqis are not different from Americans on this matter.

But there are more pointed reasons. I won’t trouble you with all the details, but will say merely that we have destroyed the social fabric of Iraq. That sense of coherence is the most important attribute of any society. It dwarfs in importance physical things. Without it no society can exist. Consider your own city: it is possible for a small police force to keep order here because your neighbors accept the general order. Were this not the case, order could not be maintained by a whole army. That is the situation in Iraq. 160 thousand heavily armed soldiers plus what remains of the Iraqi army and police and about 20,000 mercenary security people cannot prevent mayhem because the social fabric has been shredded.

Other things matter — hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have been killed, many more have been wounded and still more have lost their homes and livelihoods. Practically speaking, there are very few Iraqis who have not lost a parent, a child, a spouse, a cousin or a neighbor. All observers agree that the Iraqis blame America for these things.

Not only in Iraq, but all over the world, the issue of torture runs like a dark stain on our reputation and has diminished America’s ability to speak with moral authority when we most need that authority to cope with a very dangerous world.

These new feelings — which did not exist when I lived in Iraq — have made possible schools of terrorism. Despite what we were told, there was no terrorism directed against America from Iraq before our invasion. Now it is a daily, almost hourly event. Even our heavily guarded Green Zone is more a target than a fortress. And despite all the talk about counterinsurgency, American troops have largely disengaged and pulled back into more or less safe havens. True, we have imprisoned about 20,000 Iraqis, and killed at least that many insurgents but new recruits join daily. By military means – even the much hyped new program of General David Petraeus – there is no end in sight. So the Pentagon is planning for an almost unending war.

Even if this dismal projection is wrong, it is striking that the current American policy’s most significant long-term effect on Iraq is precisely the opposite of what President Bush presumably wanted to occur: it put into power a government that is closely associated with the very country President Bush has targeted as part of the “Axis of Evil,” Iran.

This disheartening drift of affairs may, and most sober observers believe it almost certainly will, impact upon us by attacks on Americans and American facilities all over the world and eventually in America itself.

But one area where the impact is already evident is in energy:Oil has been much in the headlines for months. Access to it on acceptable terms has always been one of the three or four critical requirements of a successful American foreign policy — I know because years ago in the Kennedy administration I wrote the basic US policy paper on the Middle East.

How much does oil cost? If you are a broker, you can answer immediately, somewhere around $100 dollars a barrel. That should be alarming since it has risen from about $27 since the Iraq war began. And it is generally accepted that each $5 rise per barrel reduces our national income by about $17 billion a year. That is a total of roughly 200 billion dollars.

But, that is not a complete figure. Actually, factored into the price of oil are at least two other major costs: the first is what we have to do to create the environment in which we get access (often by bribing governments or nations) and the second is how we protect that access by stationing military forces in the neighborhood. Estimates vary of course but everyone who has looked into this matter agrees, I think, that they cannot be less than 100 billion dollars a year and is probably many times that amount. So the "national" cost of oil is probably already something like $150 or even $200 a barrel.

* * *

These economic figures amount to political poison so politicians do their best to disguise them.No one likes the idea of paying more taxes so the best way to ease the pain and disguise the costs is to borrow money.To shield the public, we have been borrowing at a staggering rate. Our national debt has grown about 70% during the last six years.

Domestic borrowing is one thing, but our government has borrowed vast amounts from foreign countries. As of November 2007, the Legislative Reference section of the Library of Congress reported that in government-to-government loans (that is US Treasury obligations), we have borrowed $2.7 trillion dollars since the war began in 2003 and private sector loans as of 2006 amounted to $5.8 trillion dollars. China alone owns over $1 trillion dollars in US government obligations. That is, China has lent us about 60% as much as its yearly income and the equivalent of nearly 10% of ours.

The yearly interest cost on our debt is about $300 billion.

We are currently borrowing at the rate of at least -- more recent total figures are not available -- $343 million dollars a day.

You probably heard that Alan Greenspan told The Wall Street Journal: “The Republican Party, which ruled the House, the Senate and the Presidency, I no longer recognize.”So, we are doing exactly what George Washington warned us in his Farewell Address not to do – we are as he said, “ungenerously throwing upon posterity the burdens we ought ourselves to bear.”The administration is projecting a $410 billion budget deficit this year. That perhaps is the most solid figure we have.

* * *

Other figures are elusive. It is virtually impossible to track down the exact numbers since there is a great deal of slight-of-hand in statistics on the monetary cost of the war in Iraq. It is impossible to track down exact numbers. The Bush administration claimed we made a small profit on the 1991 Gulf War. That is simply not true. It actually cost $80 billion in 2002 dollars. And to convince us that we could handle the costs of the 2nd Gulf war, the war we are in now, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld told us it would be less than $50 billion. Paul Wolfowitz even said it would cost us nothing because Iraqis would pay for it themselves.So far the Iraq war and Afghanistan have cost us – just counting the Congressionally approved expenditures — $535 billion plus a supplemental outlay of $300 billion, inching up at $380,000 a minute – that is growing 20% a year — toward $1 trillion. During the time I have been speaking to you, we have spent $14 million.And these figures are not complete; the Library of Congress Congressional Reference Section has complained that it has been unable to get complete figures from the Department of Defense. For example, the cost of the equipment used in Iraq is not included in the figure I just gave you for the cost of the war. Much of the cost is hidden in the Department of Defense budget. Then there is the “opportunity cost.” That is what we could have done had we not been fighting the war in Iraq. Opportunity cost estimates run to between $2 and $6 trillion that is up to $20,000 for every man, woman and child in America.

* * *

One consequence of these gigantic figures is the fall of the dollar.The dollar has fallen roughly 45% against the Euro. Three years ago, 80 cents bought a Euro. Today a Euro costs one dollar and forty seven cents. I speak with particular pain about this since I am spending much of my time now in Europe. What has happened is that business people and bankers in Europe have closely analyzed our economy and have lost much of their confidence in the “almighty dollar.” The numbers are so huge that one seeks concrete examples of what we are talking about: just the Congressionally allocated figure of $500 or so billion of direct costs of the war in Iraq would pay to build 4,000 new, well-equipped high schools or fund Medicare for a year or eliminate starvation all over the world.

* * *

Costs beyond the economy are particularly disturbing and are likely to last far longer. Polarization of our society is more striking than at any time since the Vietam war. These are alarming reports of neighbors, even family members who have stopped speaking over this issue and we are resurrecting the violent and vile language of the 1950s: just when we need for our own safety to think most clearly it is the hardest.

On a personal note: I have recently been asked by both Democratic and Republic members of Congress to help prepare legislation aimed at getting us out of Iraq safely, quickly and at minimum cost. So I have spent a good deal of time with our representatives. The first thing one hears from them is their fear of being thought “not to support our troops.” That has become a sort of mantra. It partly explains, I think, why the Congress is not playing the role in foreign affairs it is Constitutionally obligated to play. With few exceptions in either party, Congressmen do not even ask questions of key witnesses. For example, no one questioned General Petraeus on his counterinsurgency strategy for Iraq. It appears that they don’t want to hear the answers, only to be reassured that, hopefully, those in charge know them. This explains why no one asked Petraeus serious questions – such as where his strategy has ever worked or whether it is really new. The importance of this failure was long ago identified for us by that great Conservative, Edmund Burke, when he commented on the British inability to think clearly about the American Revolution. “No passion,” he said, “so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.”

A different kind of polarization of our society is shown in what we have had to do — since we are unwilling to conscript soldiers — to fill up our army: a high percentage of our soldiers come from the poorest, least educated part of our society. Only 71% have graduated from high school...that is down over 30%. One in 8 must get a waiver to join the army, over 1 in 10 has a criminal record and some 28,000 have been sent home for misconduct. As a senior army recruiter put it last year, “We’re really scraping the bottom of the barrel trying to get people to join.” In fact, not only are we taking people whom normally we would reject, but we are paying out bounties to get even them to join. The bounties amount to about a billion dollars a year.

And, at the same time, we are losing the “best and the brightest” of our officers: I am told that over half the graduates of West Point now quit the army. And this is true not only of the armed forces. The decline of morale in the civilian side of the government, particularly in the State Department and the Intelligence Agencies is both striking and disturbing. The critically important work of the National Intelligence Council has been disrupted and seasoned officers are resigning in alarming numbers.

* * *

If we are willing, as we have proven to be, to devote vast resources and blood to the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Somalia, we should make the effort to understand the nature and sequences of insurgency. I don’t think we have done a good job of this and in part for this reason much of what we have done, regardless of the legality or morality of our actions, is merely ineffective or to use that Washington word, “counterproductive.”

In my time in government, I was deeply disturbed by our actions and our lack of appreciation of the nature of the war in Vietnam. I had previously had an opportunity to observe, sometimes more closely than prudent, the wars in Palestine and Greece. Then shortly after I joined the Policy Planning Council I was appointed head of the government task force on Algeria and later had a close look at the war in Yemen. Comparing them to Vietnam, I began a quest that would lead me to study a dozen other wars and write the book before you, Violent Politics: Terrorism, Guerrilla Warfare and Insurgency from the American Revolution to Iraq. From these experiences and studies I have concluded that most are about shaking off foreign rule. Some, such as the Naxalite insurgency in India, are more about social unrest, or, as in Gaza today about a combination of anti-foreign feeling and fury at economic deprivation, but I will put them aside for the moment to concentrate on the more “normal” or at least common insurgencies.

They are motivated by the desire to get the foreigners So how do insurgents go about it? Almost all have miniscule origins. Half a dozen up to about 3 or four dozen insurgents – or as the French call them, militants — is the norm. So, being unable to field significant forces and usually having only light arms, they have to begin with terrorism. Their first aim is establish a basis to speak for the general public — that is, to acquire political legitimacy. Often, indeed usually, this is done by picking a target that the general public believes to be illegal, morally wrong, corrupt and oppressive.

By attacking these targets, they accomplish several objectives — first they demonstrate their own courage and do what many others would like to do but did not dare; second, they prove that action can be taken and that those who take it can survive; and third they acquire the tools to continue their struggle. So the insurgents attack the “oppressors,” the police, the landlords, the foreigners, with the ostensible but also real aim of acquiring arms. For them, the police and army are the hardware stores. This was certainly the case in Vietnam where the South Viet Nam army was the source of most of the arms for the Viet Minh.Then as a few arms are acquired, the original little little band grows bolder. As it does, it attracts followers so that soon it becomes several hundred. These groups often scatter to make themselves less vulnerable.

Some insurgencies never get beyond this stage. The IRA is an example. But, if they are lucky and smart, the begin to acquire safe havens to which they can retreat to rest, train and recruit. . Then, as their numbers and effectiveness grow, they begin to try to destroy the existing government. In Vietnam for example, the Viet Minh murdered the police, tax collectors and government-appointed village officials. The IRA tried to destroy Mrs. Thatcher’s whole cabinet. Often their most dreaded enemies are fellow citizens who cooperate with the government or the foreigners. We see that in Iraq today and it was evident in Yugoslavia where Tito fought Mikhailovic and the EAM/ELAS fought Napoleon Zervas. Next, successful insurgents begin to replace the old government so they themselves start to collect taxes, open schools, run clinics and manufacture or repair arms. Tito even ran a postal service on his own railroad. Tito manufactured cigarettes and even rifles — each stamped with the logo of his movement. And, Tito, the EAM/ELAS and the Viet Minh set up mini-governments in all the villages they could reach.

Finally, as they arm, train and grow in numbers they move from hit and run raids to formal confrontation. This is a very dangerous transition and often it is tried too early, as General Giap did against the French. But even if battles are lost, if the insurgents have done the other things right, they can regroup and rebuild, as the Viet Minh did and as Tito did.

But fighting is not the core of the struggle: it is to wear down the morale of the opponent, to make his task too expensive or too ugly to be sustained. This was the aim of the Battle of Algiers. The FLN lost the battle but won the war.When I laid out this scheme years ago to the “best and the brightest” of our soldiers, sailors and airmen at the National War College, it was fashionable to ascribe numbers to these various efforts. I guessed that about 80% of the insurgents’ task to establish political legitimacy, maybe 15% to wrecking and replacing administration and only 5% — the short end of the lever — was force. So most insurgencies are lost almost before the dominant power becomes engaged. I told my audience in 1962 that we had already lost the war in Viet Nam. Coincidently, one can say that we lost the war in Iraq just about the time when President Bush announced it a “Mission Accomplished.”

* * *

Let me interject here just a few words here about Afghanistan and Somalia:In my book Violent Politics I describe what the Afghans did to the British and the Russians. They inflicted the greatest single defeat the British suffered in the 19th century and the worst the Russians suffered in the 20th.We are not faring much better. As I mentioned, while we have not suffered as many casualties as in Iraq in “Operation Enduring Freedom” which we launched in October 2001, our actions further united the Taliban and al-Qaida. Now the Taliban is on the rise again and al-Qaida was never stopped. We are losing our allies (Germany and Canada and, according to today’s press, also the Dutch) and endangering what remains of NATO.

What we have left is not much: the government of President Hamid Karzai is weak and has tried to survive by bringing the drug lords into government — it is they, not Karzai who rule outside of downtown Kabul. In 2007, they produced some 8,200 tons of opium or over 90% of the world’s heroin. It is hard to find much solace there.If possible,

Somalia is a worse mess.If you remember the movie, "Black Hawk Down," the really bad guys were the warlords. The Somalis agreed. So when we got out, they threw out the warlords. The only replacements they could find were the religious leaders. The Muslim Fundamentalist are not our favorite people, but they were the only force that could stop the warlords’ extortion, rape and murder, and the Somalis supported them. Now we have encourage and paid the Ethiopians to invade Somalia and drive them out. We also committed our special forces and our Navy in this attack. It worked – temporarily and at the cost of great human suffering – and has made the Somalis hate us. Worse, it has brought no political solution that anyone thinks can last. The war has not been won, merely worsened.

* * *

So what can we do? Consider carefully our position in Iraq. President Bush has said we must “stay the course.” But also remember that we did that in Vietnam for nearly 16 years. Even after the Tet Offensive had shown that we were deluding ourselves with the hope of “victory,” and at least some of us realized that we could not “win,” we stayed and suffered an additional 21,000 casualties.Is there a lesson in this? General David Petraeus tells us there is. He says that what we have been doing in Iraq did not work, but that he has a new formula — Counter Insurgency — that will work. I agree with him that there is a lesson to be learned, but unfortunately it is not the one he identifies.

Why is this? It is simply that the “new” formula he prescribes is the same old one we tried in Vietnam and the same old one the Russians tried in Afghanistan. Listen to the editors of the Pentagon Papers. They had access to everything we learned about the war in Vietnam so their account is the most complete ever compiled on an insurgency. They commented (and I quote) our “program there was, in short, an attempt to translate the newly articulated theory [that was 40 years ago] of counterinsurgency into operational reality. The objective was political though the means to its realization were a mixture of military, social, psychological, economic and political measures. The long history of these efforts was marked by consistency in results as well as in techniques: all failed miserably.”

General Petraeus admits (and again I quote) that “Political power is the central issue in insurgencies and counterinsurgencies; each side aims to get the people to accept its governance or authority as legitimate.”

Can we do that? No, we cannot. In our age of politically conscious people, natives refused to be ruled by foreigners. That is why in our Revolution we threw out the British. The Iraqis today are following the trail we blazed. Napoleon bitterly remembered that his efforts at counterinsurgency cost him his army – Spain was a worse defeat for him, as he remembered in exile, that Russia. De Gaulle almost lost France because of the counterinsurgency of his army and the Secret Army Organization. Greece’s counterinsurgency gave rise to the bitter dictatorship of the Colonels. And so on.

* * *

So, should we just as President Bush says, “cut and run.” No, as he would describe such a policy, it would not be either to our interests nor to those of the Iraqis. I have laid out in the book that Senator George McGovern and I wrote, Out of Iraq: A Practical Plan for Withdrawal Now, a detailed, carefully costed out and phased program that Senator McGovern and I believe will work. Whatever faults the plan may have, it would start a process that leads out of Iraq with the least possible damage to us and to the Iraqis. I won’t go into it here as it is long, but I urge you to reach the plan in the book.

Here I will just mention two features: first, it provides for a replacement for our troops by a “multinational stability force” that the Iraqis could and would accept and, second, if the plan is followed it would save the lives of perhaps a thousand Americans, about $350 billion in direct costs and perhaps $1 trillion in indirect costs. More important, perhaps, it would staunch the hemorrhaging of good will for America throughout the world and, even more important to us, it would reduce the danger of terrorist attacks on us here at home.

* * *

Will we do it? That really depends on you and me. We cannot expect that the Congress will act unless we push them nor will this or any future president take any risks. Governments as most of us who have served know is like a freight train: it is very hard to start, but even harder to stop. We have already allocated money, devoted troops and committed resources to build the “infrastructure” of counterinsurgency. For the last seven years, the public has been told that the war is just, will be successful and is necessary. The terrible costs, which I have laid out to you are mostly obscured and made inaccessible to the public. Time after time, some “new” strategy is trotted out, as General Petraeus recently did and as General Westmoreland did long ago on Vietnam, so the decision is put off. To see their futility requires understanding and to act on that understanding requires courage. So, sadly, I have concluded that only after we lose a lot more soldiers and much more money is anyone apt to act.

Indeed, at the present time we are really moving in the opposite direction. We have developed a momentum that has nearly carried us into a new “Iraq” War – this time in Iran — and we have offered to begin operations in Pakistan. Both of which could literally dwarf the Iraq war.We were saved from a new catastrophe in Iran when, in November 2007, the 14 US intelligence agencies produced a National Intelligence Estimate that showed that Iran was not trying to build a nuclear bomb. President Bush allegedly knew the report’s conclusion from last summer when it was finished, but he kept on charging Iran with building a bomb — and so preparing the way for a war — right up to the time the report was published. We very nearly invaded Iran. On Pakistan, as you know, General Musharraf was pressed to accept an American force to fight on the Northwest frontier. He turned us down. But we are still pressuring him to let us commit this folly. These are not random events. Nor are they just shooting from the hip. There is a strategy behind them.

* * *

The strategy behind these operations is what the Neoconservative advisers to President Bush have called “the Long War.” A leading member of the Neoconservatives, James Woolsey, a former director of the CIA, said he hopes it will not last more than 40 years. The cost of such a generational conflict has been estimated at more than $17 trillion dollars.

More important, in the long period of stress, the American way of life would be severely challenged, perhaps irreparably damaged. The real cost could be the destruction of the world in which we live and the replacement of our civic, cultural and material “good life” by something like nightmare George Orwell predicted in his novel 1984.

At minimum it would greatly increase the risk to us of terrorism.

But we should be aware that what Woosley and others have discussed is not just rhetoric or speculation – it is given substance by operational plans, dedicated military personnel, operating from 737 — I repeat seven hundred and thirty seven — existing bases worldwide, with already constructed and positioned weapons, and sustained by an already allocated budget.

In the spring of 2006, before he left office, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld approved three plans to fight the “long war” beyond Iraq and Afghanistan. Among other actions that have now been implemented, the Special Operations Command — now made up of 53,000 men and working with an already allocated budget of $8 billion for fiscal year 2007 — has dispatched Special “Ops” forces to at least 20 countries in Latin America, Africa and Asia. These teams are loose cannons, not under the control of regular American embassies and allowed to engage in covert warfare not only against groups regarded as terrorists but even against states. Although they could involve us in war with any number of countries, they are treated as though not subject to Congressional oversight or decision.They are, as I said, loose cannons.

But they are not working on their own. Their use has been justified by the March 2005 “National Defense Strategy of the United States of America” which calls for the US (and I quote) “to operate in and from the global commons-space, international waters and airspace, and cyberspace...to surge forces rapidly from strategic distances [to where adversaries may seek to deny us access and] to deny adversaries sanctuary...[These campaigns]may entail lengthy periods of both major combat and stability operations [or] require regime change...”

Not surprisingly, the conservative journal, The Economist, editorialized, “the Neoconservatives are not conservatives. They are radicals. Their agenda adds up to a world-wide crusade. With all its historic, anti-Muslim connotations, it is precisely the word most calculated to perpetuate movement down the path desired by the Neoconservatives, permanent, unending war.

Is permanent war — one Iraq after another — to be our future?

That really depends on how much you and I care. If we don’t care enough to force our representatives to care, no one else will. As President Truman put it, in another context, “the buck stops here.”

Thank you.

[William R. Polk is senior director of the W.P. Carey Foundation. A graduate of Harvard and Oxford, he taught Middle Eastern politics and history and the Arabic language at Harvard University until President Kennedy appointed him a Member of the Policy Planning Council of the U.S. Department of State. He was in charge of planning American policy for most of the Islamic world until 1965 when he became professor of history at the University of Chicago and founded its Middle Eastern Studies Center. Later he also became president of the Adlai Stevenson Institute of International Affairs. Among his many books are The United States and the Arab World; The Elusive Peace: The Middle East in the Twentieth Century; Neighbors and Strangers: The Fundamentals of Foreign Affairs; Polk’s Folly, An American Family History and The Birth of America. He also wrote Understanding Iraq: The Whole Sweep of Iraqi History from Genghis Khan's Mongols to the Ottoman Turks to the British Mandate to the American Occupation (HarperCollins 2005). His most recent book is Violent Politics: A History of Insurgency, Terrorism, and Guerrilla War, from the American Revolution to Iraq (Harper, 2007)]

Copyright © 2008 Informed Comment

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The Queen O'Mean Under Fire (And A Shot At The Geezer, Too)

The Hillster (who's morphed into The Queen O"Mean) had her own moment under the microscope of public opinion when she claimed that her national security cred was earned under "sniper fire" during a trip to Bosnia. That's akin to the presumptive GOP nominee, The Geezer, who claimed the surge would work for the next 100 years while he cowered under the protective cover of gunships overhead and wore body armor. If this is (fair & balanced) dissembling, so be it.

[x Denver Fishwrap]

Click on image to enlarge
Copyright © 2008 Mike Keefe

[Mike Keefe has been the editorial cartoonist for The Denver Post since 1975. Throughout the nineties he was a weekly contributor to USA Today and a regular on America Online. Nationally syndicated, his cartoons have appeared in Europe, Asia and in most major U.S. news magazines and hundreds of newspapers across the country.

Keefe’s animations have appeared on broadcast TV, the internet and CD-Rom magazines.

He has won top honors in the Fischetti, National Headliners Club, Society of Professional Journalists and Best of the West contests. He was a John S. Knight Fellow at Stanford University and is a past president of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists. He was a juror for the 1997 and 1998 Pulitzer Prizes in Journalism.]


[x Boulder (CO) Fishwrap]
Click on image to enlarge
Copyright © 2008 John Sherffius

[John Sherffius is the Herblock Award-winning editorial cartoonist for the Boulder Daily Camera. The prize went to Sherffius for a package of cartoons that chronicled the Bush Administration over the past year. Included were drawings about subjects such as torture, wiretapping, the escalation of the war in Iraq, and the administration's approach to global warming.]

Copyright © 2008 Editor & Publisher/Nielsen Business Media, Inc.

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So? It's March Madness In More Ways Than One!

March Medness has mutiple meanings in these times. A diversion from the bloodshed, mayhem, and political acrimony is provided by Division I college men's basketball tournament games through this month and ending with the final game in early April. If this is a (fair & balanced) escape from reality, so be it.

[x Las Vegas Fishwrap]

Click on image to enlarge. Copyright © 2008 Mike Smith

[Mike Smith has been the edtiorial cartoonist for the Las Vegas Sun since 1983. His work is syndicated by King Features Syndicate. Smith also draws an editorial cartoon every Thursday for USA Today.]

Copyright © 2008 Las Vegas Sun

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So?"

The folly of this century will be marked by the melancholy image of people hanging from helicopter struts as we depart Baghdad (without the oil). The war criminals now in charge will do everything in their power to delay realization of our folly until they are out of office. Our departure, now or in 100 years, will not change the equation. Departure now means no more casualties. Departure in 100 years means thousands of our best people dead or maimed beyond repair. There is not a single Sunni, Shia, or Kurd worth one of our own. So, what will it be? If this is (fair & balanced) nonsense, so be it.

[x Foreign Policy In Focus]
The Iraqi Civil War Bush and the Media Don't Tell You About
By Raed Jarrar

While the majority of Iraqis know that the current Sunni-Shiites tension did not exist before 2003, no one can deny that after five years of U.S. occupation, sectarian tension is now a reality. Sectarianism is another disaster that was brought to Iraq by the war and occupation of Iraq.

The U.S.-led invasion did not only destroy the Baath political regime, it also annihilated the entire public sector including education, health care, food rations, social security, and the armed forces. The Iraqi public sector was a great example of how millions of Iraqis: Arabs and Kurds, Sunnis and Shiites, Muslims and Christians, religious and secular, all worked together in running the country. The myth that the former Iraqi government was a "Sunni-led dictatorship" was created by the U.S. government. Even the Iraqi political regime was not "Sunni-led," let alone the rest of the public sector. A good way to debunk this fairy tale is through a close look at the famous deck of cards of the 55 most wanted Iraqi leaders. The cards had the pictures of Saddam, his two sons, and the rest of the political leadership which most Iraqis would recognize as the heads of the political regime. What is noteworthy is that 36 of the 55 were Shiites. In fact, the two vice presidents were a Christian and a Shiites Kurd.

Sometimes I feel like Iraqis and Americans are analyzing two different wars happening in two different countries. In one narrative, there is a civil war based on ancient sectarian hatred where a U.S. withdrawal will cause the sky to fall. In the other, there is a country struggling under occupation to get its independence back where the occupation is not welcomed and it is causing political, not sectarian, splits and violence.

According to the Iraqi mainstream narrative, the foreign occupation is the major reason and cause for violence and destruction. Foreign intervention is not only destroying Iraq's infrastructure, but it is also splitting Iraq's formerly integrated society. In addition, Iraqis are fighting among each other over fundamental questions about the future of their country, but the central conflict is not between Sunnis and Shiites, it is between Iraqi separatists and nationalists. Unlike other countries in the region such as Lebanon, the Iraqi sectarian tension is still reversible, because it just started five years ago. More importantly, it isn't main driver fueling the Iraqi-Iraqi conflict. This "hidden" conflict is between separatists and nationalists.

The "Hidden" Conflict: Separatists vs. Nationalists

Loosely speaking, separatists favor a "soft partition" of Iraq into at least three zones with strong regional governments, similar to the semiautonomous Kurdish "state" in Northern Iraq; they are thriving on foreign intervention (Iranian, U.S. or other powers' influence); they favor privatizing Iraq's massive energy reserves and ceding substantial control of the country's oil sector to regional authorities. Nationalists reject any foreign interference in Iraq's affairs and they favor a strong technocratic central government in Baghdad that is not based on sectarian voting blocs. They favor centralized control over the development of Iraq's oil and gas reserves while keeping them nationalized.

This Iraqi-Iraqi conflict is in many ways similar to the U.S. civil war: Iraqis who are for keeping a central government are fighting against other Iraqis who want to secede. But the major difference is that the United States was not under a foreign occupation that was destroying nationalists and funding and training separatists. Numerous polls that were conducted over the past few years in Iraq show that a majority of Iraqis from all different backgrounds tend to be more nationalist than separatist. A majority of the population are for a complete U.S. withdrawal, for keeping a strong central government in Baghdad, and against privatizing and decentralizing Iraq's natural resources.

More surprisingly to U.S. audiences, this nationalist-separatist conflict is apparent inside the Iraqi government itself. The Iraqi executive branch (the cabinet and the presidency) are completely controlled by separatists (including Shiitess, Sunnis, Kurds, seculars and others). But the legislative branch (the parliament) is controlled by nationalists (including Sunnis, Shiitess, seculars, Christians, Yazidis, etc.) who enjoy a small but crucially important majority.

The last couple of years witnessed numerous examples of how the Bush administration systematically took the side of separatists in the Iraqi executive branch against nationalists in the elected legislative branch, repeatedly bypassing the Iraqi parliament. In each of these cases, there was the potential for reaching compromises that would have satisfied both nationalists and separatists. However, the aggressive support of the U.S. government for the separatist executive branch against the parliament has made it impossible for Iraqis to settle their differences.

Understanding these nuances of the Iraqi-Iraqi conflict reveals how the war is a political struggle that will end as soon as the U.S. withdraws, not a religious war that will intensify after Iraqis take their country back. The United States is not playing the role of a peace-keeping force, or a convener of reconciliation. It is seen by a majority of Iraqis as one side of the conflict and will never be a part of the solution.

How to Help

On this side of the ocean, the U.S. government has managed to convince large portions of the "right" that the war and occupation of Iraq is "good for our safety" because it's better to "fight the terrorists overseas so we do not have to face them here at home." Simultaneously, the government managed to manipulate many people on the "left" into believing that a U.S. withdrawal would cause unprecedented bloodshed. "The invasion was not a good idea" some would say, "but now that we are there, let's fix it before we leave."

From an Iraqi perspective, both groups promote interventionist foreign policies that have no respect for sovereignty, independence, or international law. On the one hand, the best way to guarantee that no al-Qaeda or other extremist organizations will exist in Iraq is to let Iraqis rule the country by themselves. They have been living in Iraq and ruling it for the last thousands of years, and unlike the occupation authorities, they have been successful in protecting Iraq from the intervention of foreign countries and organizations.

While many Iraqis appreciate the sense of responsibility to fix what the U.S. invasion has broken in Iraq, and it has broken a lot, prolonging the occupation is only making the situation worse. There are other appropriate venues to support Iraqis after the last U.S. soldier and the last mercenary leave Iraq. This might include paying compensation, the same way Iraq has been compensating Kuwait and its people for the last 17 years through the United Nations Compensation Committee.

The best way to help Iraqis is to end the occupation of their country and to believe in their right and capacity for self-rule and self-determination. Setting a timetable for a complete withdrawal is the first step to help Iraqis begin the long process of reconciliation and reconstruction.

The 21st Invader

Unfortunately, the two ruling parties in D.C. are not planning to leave Iraq any time soon. The Republicans are openly speaking about leaving troops indefinitely, while the Democrats want to start withdrawing "combat" troops soon but they have three exceptions that could maintain up to 75,000 troops indefinitely in Iraq. These three exceptions are: training the Iraqi military forces, counter-terrorism operations, and protecting the U.S. embassy in Baghdad.

Turning the current occupation into half or one-quarter of an occupation will not change anything on the ground in Iraq. Pulling out some of the troops and leaving some exceptions indefinitely is not a new strategy, it is a continuation of decades old military interventionism that will likely reduce some of the violence but it will keep the Iraqi people from starting the political, social, and economic reconciliation that is sorely needed.

Last November marked the 1245th anniversary of the construction of modern Baghdad by the Abbasid caliph Al-Mansur. During the last 13 centuries, Baghdad had been attacked and occupied 20 times before the U.S. army became its 21st foreign invader. Robert Fisk noted in one of his articles that in 1920 David Lloyd George, the prime minister of Britain, was facing similar calls for a military withdrawal. "Is it not for the benefit of the people of that country that it should be governed so as to enable them to develop this land which has been withered and shriveled up by oppression? What would happen if we withdrew?" Lloyd George would not abandon Iraq to "anarchy and confusion". The time is different now, but the politics of the invaders still sound the same.

[Raed Jarrar is Iraq Consultant to the American Friends Service Committee. He blogs at "Raed in the Middle."]

Copyright © 2008 Foreign Policy in Focus

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So? Even Helen Thomas Gets It!

Helen Thomas is an old lioness. However, she still has teeth. The Dickster's chutzpah in the face of the assertion that the people of this country have lost faith with the war in Iraq brought forth Thomas's snarl. Ol' Helen challenged her colleagues of the Fourth Estate "to nail the candidates on whether the views of the people on questions of war and peace will count with them." Like this blogger, Thomas wants no more arrogance from the war criminals at either 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue or Number One Observatory Circle. So, impeach and convict the war criminals now. Bring it (impeachment) on! If this is (fair & balanced) constitutionalism, so be it.

[x Salt Lake Fishwrap]
Cheney: War Not The People's Business
By Helen Thomas

WASHINGTON - Back in President Lyndon B. Johnson's worst days when he was grappling with the Vietnam quagmire and raucous anti-war protests at home, he said that in the big decisions about war and peace: "The people should be in on the take offs as well as the landings."

Tell that to President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, who apparently couldn't care less what Americans think — except every four years at election time.

Cheney made that clear in an intriguing interview with ABC News on his recent Middle East trip. Despite the difficulties surrounding the unprovoked U.S. invasion of Iraq five years ago, Cheney insisted, "It was the right thing to do."

When the interviewer told him that two-thirds of Americans say the war in Iraq is not worth fighting, Cheney scoffed. The administration would not be "blown off course by the fluctuations in public opinion polls," he vowed.

Cheney went on to claim that Abraham Lincoln would never have succeeded in the Civil War if he had paid attention to polls. White House press secretary Dana Perino later indicated that Bush was on the same page.

Asked about Cheney's remarks to ABC, Perino said the Bush administration realizes its popularity polls are very low (30 percent) "but largely that's because of people being unhappy about the war, about the fact that it has gone on five years...and we're aware of that."

She added that both Bush and Cheney have long believed the reason they are leaders is because they do "not chase popularity polls but...hold themselves to a standard that requires people not to like them."

She went on to explain that the administration would like people to support the president's decisions but that such a hope is "unrealistic" in time of war. "And while we're not able to change public opinion, we have to follow a principle," she said, "and stand on principle."

Reminded that she was saying, in effect, that the people had no say about the war, Perino replied that they have "input" every four years, adding: "And that's the way our system is set up."

As long as Congress cowers sheep-like and does not retrieve its constitutional power to declare war, an imperial Bush-style presidency will prevail.

The war against Iraq was built on falsehoods — weapons of mass destruction that did not exist and ties to al-Qaeda that were a fantasy. The administration used these phony rationales to scare the American people into fearing a threat from a third-world country.

Since the administration's original propaganda has now been revealed to be bogus, Bush has resumed his claim that it was necessary to rid the world of a tyrant, Saddam Hussein — a friend of the U.S., incidentally, in earlier times.

His aides remain loyal to their chant that Iraq is "the central front in the war on terrorism."

Any port in a storm seems to be the strategy of White House spin-masters.

Determined to ignore the reality that the war is a debacle and the killing will go on, Bush last year came up with the "surge" theory of dispatching 30,000 more troops to Iraq in hopes of bringing Iraqi submission.

There has been a lessening of violence in Iraq. Could it be that there are fewer attacks on American troops because we are paying huge sums of money to Sunni Iraqis to persuade them to stop attacking Americans and instead go after al-Qaida?

Gen. David Petraeus, the U.S. commander in Iraq, and Ambassador Ryan Crocker will leave Baghdad in May to report to Bush and Congress on the status of the war and talk about a timetable for a drawdown of more troops - or even propose a pause in withdrawals.

Next November, the American voters will decide on a new president. Before then, reporters will be remiss if they fail to nail the candidates on whether the views of the people on questions of war and peace will count with them.

[Helen Thomas, a Hearst Newspapers columnist, served for fifty-seven years as a correspondent for United Press International and, as White House bureau chief, covered every president since John F. Kennedy. She was the first woman officer of the National Press Club after it opened its doors to women members, the first woman member and president of the White House Correspondents Association and the first woman member of the Gridiron Club. In 1998 she received the International Women's Media Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award and was honored by President and Mrs. Clinton as the first recipient of the Helen Thomas Lifetime Achievement Award.]

Copyright © 2008 The Salt Lake Tribune

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"So?" Redux

So, impeach the war criminal NOW! The Dickster should be in a cell in the U.S. Penitentiary ADMAX (Administrative Maximum Facility) — Florence, Colorado (entirely Supermax). If this is (fair & balanced) outrage, so be it.

Copyright © 2008 Ben Sargent


[x ABC News]


[Posted on YouTube by "Mindisback."]

Martha Raddatz, ABC's "Good Morning America": Two-thirds of Americans say [the Iraq War is] not worth fighting.
Vice President Dick Cheney: So?

[Martha Raddatz was named ABC News Chief White House Correspondent in November 2005. As White House Correspondent, she reports on all aspects of the Bush administration for "World News with Charles Gibson," "Nightline," and other ABC News broadcasts. Raddatz was promoted to her current role in November 2005, after six years with ABC News. Raddatz began her tenure at ABC News in 1999 as the network's State Department correspondent and became ABC's senior national security correspondent in May 2003, reporting extensively from Iraq. From 1993 to 1998, Raddatz covered the Pentagon for National Public Radio. Prior to joining NPR in 1993, Raddatz was the chief correspondent at the ABC News Boston affiliate WCVB-TV.]

Copyright © 2008 ABC News

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So?

A plague on the Sunnis, the Shia, and the Kurds; the oil be damned. Iraqi oil has not done a thing for the price of oil in this country. Even more important is the fact that not a single member of any of the murderous Iraqi factions is worth a single one of the 4,000 fallen and the thousands and thousands of those maimed and injured by those murderers. The Geezer's crocodile tears over genocidal civil war are like the dog that won't hunt. The Geezer couldn't squeeze a statement of regret about the 4,000 fallen in Iraq in the midst of his rant about genocidal civil war in that small bit of hell on earth. So the callous response of The Dickster to the query about U. S. public opinion running against The Dubster's Folly really is an appropriate response to The Geezer's current concern over civil war in Iraq: "So?" Where there is oil, there will be blood. If this is the (fair & balanced) "politics of reality," so be it.

[x ABC News]
McCain Asserts Iraq Withdrawal Could Mean Civil War: Republican Contender Breaks With Bush, Blasts Clinton and Obama
By Ron Claiborne

GOP presidential hopeful John McCain on Wednesday cast America's commitment to Iraq as a "moral responsibility" to avert a genocidal civil war that could ensue if U.S. troops are withdrawn too soon.

In a major address in California on foreign policy, the presumptive Republican nominee said, "It would be an unconscionable act of betrayal, a stain on our character as a great nation, if we were to walk away from the Iraqi people and consign them to the horrendous violence, ethnic cleansing and possibly genocide that would follow a reckless, irresponsible and premature withdrawal."

McCain Sees Progress in Iraq

Speaking to the Los Angeles World Affairs Council, McCain, who has supported the war from the beginning, pointed to what he said were signs of progress: a decrease in violence and civilian and military deaths, Iraqis returning to work, markets open, and oil revenues increasing.

He also said there have signs of political reconciliation at the local level, but he acknowledges, "political progress at the national level has been far too slow. & but there is progress."

McCain spent two days in Iraq on a congressional visit one-and-a-half weeks ago.

He has previously said that to be elected president, he will need to convince American voters that whatever they think of the wisdom of having gone to war, the U.S. has a vital interest in keeping troops there long enough to quash the threat posed by Al Qaeda.

The Challenge in November

In his speech, he said he believes it is still possible for Iraq to become a stable democracy and it is in the geo-political interests of the United States to see that Iraq and Afghanistan attain that goal.

"Those who claim we should withdraw from Iraq in order to fight Al Qaeda more effectively elsewhere are making a dangerous mistake," he warned.

"Whether they were there before is immaterial. Al Qaeda is in Iraq now. If we withdraw prematurely, al Qaeda will survive [and] proclaim victory & Civil war in Iraq could easily descend into genocide, and destabilize the entire region as neighboring powers come to the aid of their favored factions. I believe a reckless and premature withdrawal would be a terrible defeat for our security interests and our values."

In his sole attack directed explicitly at Democratic presidential contenders Senators Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., and Barack Obama, D-Ill., McCain said, "[The] consequences of our defeat would threat us for years and those who argue for [withdrawal], as both Democratic candidates do, are arguing for a course that would eventually draw us into a wider and more difficult war that would entail far greater dangers and sacrifices than we have suffered to date."

McCain reiterated a prominent campaign theme of his: that radical Islam and terrorism are the transcendent threat of our time.

"Any president who does not regard this threat as transcending all others does not deserve to sit in the White House, for he or she does not take seriously enough the first and most basic duty a president has  to protect the lives of the American people," he said, in an oblique reference to the two Democrats vying for their party's presidential nomination.

Responding, Obama campaign spokesperson Bill Burton said in a written statement, "John McCain is determined to carry out four more years of George Bush's failed policies, including an open-ended war in Iraq that has cost us thousands of lives and billions of dollars while making us less safe. Barack Obama will change our foreign policy and renew America's leadership by responsibly ending the war in Iraq, finishing the fight in Afghanistan, and focusing on the 21st century challenges that conventional Washington has ignored for too long -- al Qaeda's core leadership and nuclear proliferation, poverty and genocide, climate change and disease."

Greater Cooperation, Revamped Foreign Policy

McCain went on to propose greater strategic co-operation with America's European allies and other democracies.

In a seeming rebuke to the Bush Administration, he said, "Our great power does not mean we can do whatever we want whenever we want, nor should we assume we have all the wisdom and knowledge necessary to succeed. We need to listen tot he views and respect the collective will of our democratic allies. When we believe international action is necessary, whether military, economic or diplomatic, we will try to persuade out friends that we are right. But we, in return, must be willing to be persuaded by them."

McCain called on the United States and international community to work to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons.

And the Republican contender demanded greater action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to combat climate change, proposed ousting Russia from the G-8 group of economic partners because it is insufficiently democratic, and he said as president he would establish the goal of eradicating malaria in Africa.

He also made an apparent effort to allay concerns that he is insensitive to the horrors of war, noting that his father and grandfather, both Navy admirals, served in the Pacific in World War II.

His grandfather returned exhausted from war and died the next day of a heart attack. He said he lost friends in the Vietnam War, during which he himself was held prisoner by North Vietnamese for more than five years.

"I detest war," McCain said. "When nations seek to resolve their differences by force of arms, a million tragedies ensue. Only a fool or a fraud sentimentalize the merciless reality of war."

McCain made no mention of the number of U.S. troop deaths in Iraq, which surpassed 4,000 earlier this week.

[Ron Claiborne is the news anchor for ABC News' weekend edition of "Good Morning America." Claiborne came to ABC News in 1986 and has been a general assignment correspondent based in Boston, reporting for "World News Tonight," "Nightline," and "Good Morning America." Claiborne earned an MS in journalism in 1975 from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He received a BA in psychology from Yale University in 1974. He is a native of San Francisco.]

Copyright © 2008 ABC News Internet Ventures

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Cartographic Mischief

Blood flowed in the Balkans. Blood flowed in Rwanda and Kenya. Blood is flowing in Darfur. All of the genocidal horrors of our time were wrought by long-ago superpowers who drew boundaries on maps without any regard to ethnic and racial enmity that antedates the nations created by those so-called superpowers. Our current insoluble problem, Iraq, was created by the Brits. Willy-nilly, the British Empire created Iraq out of territories controlled by Sunni Muslims, Shiite Muslims, and Kurds. Saddam Hussein took over in 1979 and kept the peace among these three groups through a reign of terror that lasted until the U. S. invaded in 2003. The Dubster's brain-trust eliminated Saddam Hussein. Now, the sole solution to our problem is a tripartite division of Iraq to give the Sunnis, the Shia, and the Kurds their own countries. When it comes to oil, "There Will Be Blood." Let the warring factions all go to the Hot Place in a Handbasket. Bring our troops home. Not a single Sunni, Shia, or Kurd deserves the sacrifice of more than 4,000 of our best people. So, as Marcy Shaffer proclaims, "Partition" is the only answer to our Mess O'Potamia. Let the Sunnis, Shia, and Kurds kill one another or, perish the thought, work things out peacefully. But, leave us out of it. If this is (fair & balanced) realpolitik, so be it.

VERSUS looks at Iraq five years after in a parody of "Tradition" from "Fiddler on the Roof" (Music by Jerry Bock/Lyrics by Sheldon Harnick). To view, click on "Partition".

[Marcy Shaffer is the most gifted musical parodist of our time. Move over, Tom Lehrer!]


Ⓟ © 2008 RMSWorks LLC.

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The Audacity Of Audacity?

Frank is rich today. He scores a trifecta with his triple meditation on the Queen of Mean (The Hillster), The Hopester (Obamarama), and The Geezer (McCain't). Woe unto us as our choices leave little room for optimism and even less likelihood of change, no matter the outcome of the campaign of 2008. If this is (fair & balanced) electoral despair, so be it.



[x NY Fishwrap]
The Republican Resurrection
By Frank Rich

The day before Barack Obama gave The Speech, Hillary Clinton gave a big speech of her own, billed by her campaign as a “major policy address on the war in Iraq.” What, you didn’t hear about it?

Clinton partisans can blame the Obamaphilic press corps for underplaying their candidate’s uncompromising antiwar sentiments. But intentionally or not, the press did Mrs. Clinton a favor. Every time she opens her mouth about Iraq, she reminds voters of how she enabled the catastrophe that has devoured American lives and treasure for five years.

Race has been America’s transcendent issue far longer than that. I share the general view that Mr. Obama’s speech is the most remarkable utterance on the subject by a public figure in modern memory. But what impressed me most was not Mr. Obama’s rhetorical elegance or his nuanced view of both America’s undeniable racial divide and equally undeniable racial progress. The real novelty was to find a politician who didn’t talk down to his audience but instead trusted it to listen to complete, paragraph-long thoughts that couldn’t be reduced to sound bites.

In a political culture where even campaign debates can resemble “Jeopardy,” this is tantamount to revolution. As if to prove the point, some of the Beltway bloviators who had hyped Mitt Romney’s instantly forgotten snake oil on “Faith in America” soon fell to fretting about whether “ordinary Americans” would comprehend Mr. Obama.

Mrs. Clinton is fond of mocking her adversary for offering “just words.” But words can matter, and Mrs. Clinton’s tragedy is that she never realized they could have mattered for her, too. You have to wonder if her Iraq speech would have been greeted with the same shrug if she had tossed away her usual talking points and seized the opportunity to address the war in the same adult way that Mr. Obama addressed race. Mrs. Clinton might have reconnected with the half of her party that has tuned her out.

She is no less bright than Mr. Obama and no less dedicated to public service. It’s not her fault that she doesn’t have his verbal gifts — who does? But her real problem isn’t her speaking style. It’s the content. Mrs. Clinton needn’t have Mr. Obama’s poetry or pearly oratorical tones to deliver a game-changing speech. She just needs the audacity of candor. Yet she seems incapable of revisiting her history on Iraq (or much else) with the directness that Mr. Obama brought to his reappraisal of his relationship with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

On Monday she once again pretended her own record didn’t exist while misrepresenting her opponent’s. “I’ve been working day in and day out in the Senate to provide leadership to end this war,” she said, once more implying he’s all words and she’s all action. But Mrs. Clinton didn’t ratchet up her criticisms of the war until she wrote a letter expressing her misgivings to her constituents in late 2005, two and a half years after Shock and Awe. By then, she was not leading but following — not just Mr. Obama, who publicly called for an Iraq exit strategy a week before the release of her letter, but John Murtha, the once-hawkish Pennsylvania congressman who called for a prompt withdrawal a few days earlier still.

What if Mrs. Clinton had come clean Monday, admitting that she had made a mistake in her original vote and highlighting her efforts to make amends since? John Edwards, arguably a more strident proponent of invading Iraq in 2003 than Mrs. Clinton, did exactly that also in the weeks before her 2005 letter. He succeeded in lifting the cloud, even among those on the left of his party.

Instead Mrs. Clinton darkened that cloud by claiming that she was fooled by the prewar intelligence that didn’t dupe nearly half her Democratic Senate colleagues, including Bob Graham, Teddy Kennedy and Carl Levin. Even worse, she repeatedly pretends that she didn’t know President Bush would regard a bill titled “Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002” as an authorization to go to war. No one believes this spin for the simple reason that no one believes Mrs. Clinton is an idiot. Her patently bogus explanations for her vote have in the end done far more damage to her credibility than the vote itself.

That she has never given a forthright speech on Iraq is what can happen when your chief campaign strategist is a pollster. Focus groups no doubt say it would be hara-kiri for her to admit such a failing. But surely many Americans would have applauded her for confessing to mistakes and saying what she learned from them. As her husband could have told her, that’s best done sooner rather than later.

It’s too late now, and so the Democratic stars are rapidly aligning for disaster. Mrs. Clinton is no longer trying to overcome Mr. Obama’s lead in the popular vote and among pledged delegates by making bold statements about Iraq or any other issue. Instead of enhancing her own case for the presidency, she’s going to tear him down. As Adam Nagourney of The New York Times delicately put it last week, she is “looking for some development to shake confidence in Mr. Obama” so that she can win over superdelegates in covert 3 a.m. phone calls. If Mr. Wright doesn’t do it, she’ll seek another weapon. Mr. Obama, who is, after all, a politician and not a deity, could well respond in kind.

For Republicans, the prospect of marathon Democratic trench warfare is an Easter miracle. Saddled with the legacy of both Iraq and a cratering economy, the G.O.P. can only rejoice at its opponents’ talent for self-destruction. The Republicans can also count on the help of a political press that, whatever its supposed tilt toward Mr. Obama, remains most benevolent toward John McCain.

This was strikingly apparent last week, when Mr. McCain’s calamitous behavior was relegated to sideshow status by many, if not most, news media. At a time of serious peril for America, the G.O.P.’s presumptive presidential nominee revealed himself to be alarmingly out of touch on both of the most pressing issues roiling the country.

Never mind that Bear Stearns was disposed of in a fire sale, the dollar was collapsing, job losses hit a five-year low, and the price of oil hit an all-time high. Mr. McCain, arriving in Iraq, went AWOL on capitalism’s meltdown, delegating his economic adviser to release an anodyne two-sentence statement of confidence in Ben Bernanke.

This is consistent with Mr. McCain’s laissez-faire approach to economic matters. In January he proposed tasking any problems to “a committee headed by Alan Greenspan, whether he’s alive or dead.” This witty salvo must be very comforting to the large share of Americans — the largest since the Great Depression — who now owe more on their homes than they’re worth.

In Iraq, Mr. McCain did not repeat his April 2007 mistake of touring a “safe” market while protected by a small army. (CNN tried to revisit that market last week, but the idea was vetoed as too risky by the network’s security advisers.) Instead he made a bigger mistake. As if to emulate Dick Cheney, who arrived in Baghdad a day behind him, he embraced the vice president’s habit of manufacturing false links in the war on terror: Mr. McCain told reporters that Iran is training Al Qaeda operatives and sending them into Iraq.

His Sancho Panza, Joe Lieberman, whispered in his ear that a correction was in order. But this wasn’t a one-time slip, like Gerald Ford’s debate gaffe about Poland in 1976. Mr. McCain has said this repeatedly. Troubling as it is that he conflates Shiite Iran with Sunni terrorists, it’s even more bizarre that he doesn’t acknowledge the identity of Iran’s actual ally in Iraq — the American-sponsored Shiite government led by Nuri al-Maliki. Only two weeks before the Iraqi prime minister welcomed Mr. McCain to Baghdad, he played host to a bubbly state visit by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Whatever Mrs. Clinton’s or Mr. Obama’s inconsistencies about how to wind down the war, they are both models of coherence next to Mr. McCain. He keeps saying the surge is a “success,” but he can’t explain why that success keeps us trapped in Iraq indefinitely. He never says precisely what constitutes that “victory” he keeps seeing around the corner. His repeated declaration that he will only bring home the troops “with honor” is a Vietnam acid flashback recycled as a non sequitur. Our troops have already piled up more than enough honor in their five years of service under horrific circumstances. Meanwhile, as Al Qaeda proliferates in Afghanistan and Pakistan, a survey by Foreign Policy magazine of 3,400 active and retired American officers finds that 88 percent believe that the Iraq war has “stretched the U.S. military dangerously thin.”

But as violence flares up again in Iraq and the American economy skids, the issues consuming the Democrats are Mr. Wright and Geraldine Ferraro, race and gender, unsanctioned primaries and unaccountable superdelegates. Unless Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton find a way to come together for the good of their country as well as their party, no speech by either of them may prevent Mr. McCain from making his second unlikely resurrection in a single political year.

[Frank Rich is an Op-Ed columnist for The New York Times. His weekly 1500-word essay on the intersection of culture and news helped inaugurate the expanded opinion pages that the paper introduced in the Sunday Week in Review section in April 2005.
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From 2003-2005, Mr. Rich had been the front page columnist for the Sunday Arts & Leisure section as part of that section's redesign and expansion. He also serves as senior adviser to The Times's culture editor on the paper's overall cultural news report.

Mr. Rich has been at the paper since 1980, when he was named chief theater critic. Beginning in 1994, he became an Op-Ed columnist, and in 1999 he became the first Times columnist to write a regular double-length column for the Op-Ed page.

From 1999-2003, he additionally served as Senior Writer for The New York Times Magazine. The dual title was a first for The Times and allowed Mr. Rich to explore a variety of topics at greater length than before. His columns and articles in each venue have drawn from his background as a theater critic and observer of art, entertainment and politics.

In addition to his work at The Times, Mr. Rich has written about culture and politics for many other publications. His childhood memoir, Ghost Light, was published in 2000 by Random House and as a Random House Trade Paperback in 2001. The film rights to Ghost Light have been acquired by Storyline Entertainment. A collection of Mr. Rich's drama reviews, Hot Seat: Theater Criticism for The New York Times, 1980-1993, was published by Random House in October 1998. His book, The Theatre Art of Boris Aronson, co-authored with Lisa Aronson, was published by Knopf in 1987.

Before joining The Times, Mr. Rich was a film and television critic at Time magazine. Earlier, he had been film critic for the New York Post and film critic and senior editor of New Times Magazine. He was a founding editor of the Richmond (Va.) Mercury, a weekly newspaper, in the early 1970's.

Born on June 2, 1949, in Washington, D.C., Mr. Rich is a graduate of its public schools. He earned a B.A. degree in American History and Literature graduating magna cum laude from Harvard College in 1971. At Harvard, he was editorial chairman of The Harvard Crimson, an honorary Harvard College scholar, a member of Phi Beta Kappa and the recipient of a Henry Russell Shaw Traveling Fellowship.

Mr. Rich has two sons. He lives in Manhattan with his wife, the author and novelist Alex Witchel, who is a reporter for The New York Times.]

Copyright © 2008 The New York Times Company

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The Terminator: Radical Islam?

Osama bin Laden just released another audiotape aiming threats at the European community for a Dutch film that portrays the Koran in a negative (Fascist) light. While our troops are bogged down in Iraq, which — thanks to our genius leadership — has become the central battleground against the Radical Islamists, the leaders of Radical Islam cavort somewhere along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. The most powerful nation on the earth can hit a target in outer space, but the United States cannot find bin Laden and his ilk. Paul Berman goes down the batting order of our chief executives over the past two decades (Radical Islam's gestation period) and it's small wonder that we have struck out. From the "amiable dunce" (Dutch) to the "smarmy frat-boy (The Dubster), we have fiddled while Rome was burning. Now, we confront an enemy that will not go away. The presumptive Republican nominee envisions a U. S. military presence in Iraq that will continue through this century. All that time, the Radical Islamists will be cavorting in the caves along the Afghan-Pakistani border. The presumptive Democrat nominees (She & He) talk of a troop pullout. That's fine and dandy, but the Radical Islamists will still be in those caves. The political scenario in the U. S. is akin to going to the dentist for a root canal and, instead, the dentist amputates your right leg. In the meantime, Osama bin Laden is at large and The Dubster and The Dickster will leave office in January 2009. Unfortunately, they should be perp-walked out of DC instead of riding out on Air Force One. If this is a (fair & balanced) indictment of war criminals, so be it.

[x NY Fishwrap]
Why Radical Islam Just Won’t Die
By Paul Berman

THE big surprise, viewed from my own narrow perspective five years later, has taken place in the mysterious zones of extremist ideology. In the months and weeks before the invasion of Iraq, I wrote quite a lot about ideology in the Middle East, and especially about the revolutionary political doctrine known as radical Islamism.

I tried to show that radical Islamism is a modern philosophy, not just a heap of medieval prejudices. In its sundry versions, it draws on local and religious roots, just as it claims to do. But it also draws on totalitarian inspirations from 20th-century Europe. I wanted my readers to understand that with its double roots, religious and modern, perversely intertwined, radical Islamism wields a lot more power, intellectually speaking, than naïve observers might suppose.

I declared myself happy in principle with the notion of overthrowing Saddam Hussein, just as I was happy to see the Taliban chased from power. But I wanted everyone to understand that military action, by itself, could never defeat an ideology like radical Islamism — could never contribute more than 10 percent (I invented this statistic, as an illustrative figure) to a larger solution. I hammered away on that point in the days before the war. And today I have to acknowledge that, for all my hammering, radical Islamism, in several of its resilient branches, the ultra-radical and the beyond-ultra-radical, has proved to be stronger even than I suggested.

A lot of people right now make the common-sense supposition that if extremist ideologies have lately entered a sort of grisly golden age, the Bush administration’s all-too-predictable blundering in Iraq must bear the blame. Yes, certainly; but that can’t be the only explanation.

Extremist movements have been growing bigger and wilder for more than three decades now, during that period, America has tried pretty much everything from a policy point of view. Our presidents have been satanic (Richard Nixon), angelic (Jimmy Carter), a sleepy idiot savant (Ronald Reagan), a cagey realist (George H. W. Bush), wonderfully charming (Bill Clinton) and famously otherwise (George W. Bush). And each president’s Middle Eastern policy has conformed to his character.

In regard to Saddam Hussein alone, our government has lent him support (Mr. Reagan), conducted a limited war against him (the first President Bush), inflicted sanctions and bombings (Mr. Clinton, in other than his charming mode), and crudely overthrown him. Every one of those policies has left the Iraqi people worse off than before, even if nowadays, from beneath the rubble, the devastated survivors can at least ruminate about a better future — though I doubt that many of them are in any mood to do so.

And each new calamity for Iraq has, like manure, lent new fertility to the various extremist organizations. The entire sequence of events may suggest that America is uniquely destined to do the wrong thing. All too likely! But it may also suggest that America is not the fulcrum of the universe, and extremist ideologies have prospered because of their own ability to adapt and survive — their strength, in a word.

I notice a little gloomily that I may have underestimated the extremist ideologies in still another respect. Five years ago, anyone who took an interest in Middle Eastern affairs would easily have recalled that, over the course of a century, the intellectuals of the region have gone through any number of phases — liberal, Marxist, secularist, pious, traditionalist, nationalist, anti-imperialist and so forth, just like intellectuals everywhere else in the world.

Western intellectuals without any sort of Middle Eastern background would naturally have manifested an ardent solidarity with their Middle Eastern and Muslim counterparts who stand in the liberal vein — the Muslim free spirits of our own time, who argue in favor of human rights, rational thought (as opposed to dogma), tolerance and an open society.

But that was then. In today’s Middle East, the various radical Islamists, basking in their success, paint their liberal rivals and opponents as traitors to Muslim civilization, stooges of crusader or Zionist aggression. And, weirdly enough, all too many intellectuals in the Western countries have lately assented to those preposterous accusations, in a sanitized version suitable for Western consumption.

Even in the Western countries, quite a few Muslim liberals, the outspoken ones, live today under a threat of assassination, not to mention a reality of character assassination. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-Dutch legislator and writer, is merely an exceptionally valiant example. But instead of enjoying the unstinting support of their non-Muslim colleagues, the Muslim liberals find themselves routinely berated in the highbrow magazines and the universities as deracinated nonentities, alienated from the Muslim world. Or they find themselves pilloried as stooges of the neoconservative conspiracy — quite as if any writer from a Muslim background who fails to adhere to at least a few anti-imperialist or anti-Zionist tenets of the Islamist doctrine must be incapable of thinking his or her own thoughts.

A dismaying development. One more sign of the power of the extremist ideologies — one more surprising turn of events, on top of all the other dreadful and gut-wrenching surprises.

[Paul Berman is the author of A Tale of Two Utopias: The Political Journey of the Generation of 1968 (1996), Terror and Liberalism (2003), and Power and the Idealists: Or, The Passion of Joschka Fischer, and its Aftermath (2005). A graduate of Columbia University, Berman is a writer in residence at New York University.]

Copyright © 2008 The New York Times Company

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