So It Goes

Another View on Misguided Diplomacy

BEYOND MANY OF THE EDITORIAL PAGES OF MAJOR WESTERN NEWSPAPERS, most of the public criticism of former President Jimmy Carter's meetings this past week with Hamas leadership came from largely from Israelis and most of Israel's Jewish supporters around the world. That's not to say that the criticism was any less valid. But I worry that, when Israelis and the Jews are once again fighting a battle like this on their own, many others around the world tend to discount their views as the same old intransigence.

So rather than rehearse many of the same arguments that other Jewish supporters for Israel are making about President Carter's misguided diplomacy, I thought it would be refreshing to look at a different source and see what his views are on the subject. In this case, I've chosen someone who has been in a good position to evaluate the role of violent extremism among Arab groups in the Middle East, someone who is not motivated necessarily by his embrace of Israel.

I'm referring to Farid Ghadry, a Syrian-born businessman who now lives in the United States and who founded and currently heads a group called the Reform Party of Syria.

RPS describes itself as a "Syrian opposition party to the Assad regime that has emerged as a result of September 11.  The party is governed by secular, peace committed American-Syrians, Euro-Syrians, and native Syrians who are determined to see that a 'New Syria' is reborn that embraces real democratic and economic reforms." And, with his frequent and vigorous speeches, testimonies in Congress, regular blog entries and various other public utterances, Ghadry provides anyone who will listen regular reminders to pay attention to the misdeeds of the Assad regime and to the courageous efforts of those who oppose it.

With that in mind and knowing of his longtime criticism of extremists (particularly those with strong ties to Assad), it's not entirely surprising that Ghadry would be critical of President Carter's meetings with Hamas. But, as with Jewish and Israeli responses to President Carter's meeting, Ghadry's  perspective still gives his arguments as much power as any.

In a blog posting yesterday, Ghadry wrote:

The direct and indirect effect of President Jimmy Carter's visit to Gaza, Egypt, and Damascus to meet with members of Hamas sends chills down the spine of every Arab and Muslim working for reforms in the Middle East because it legitimizes terror and violence and dilutes all the efforts that peaceful Arab reformers have committed themselves to. One such reformer told me: "Why are we working so hard for peace if the Americans prefer to deal with terror?.'" I could not utter but words of encouragement knowing deep inside that he is right.

He goes on:

Under the auspices of “seeking peace”, President Carter is reversing years of hard work by many Palestinians and Israelis who see the road to co-existence paved by true peaceful acts. For President Carter to meet with individuals with blood on their hands not only legitimizes terror but it also encourages it in two ways: It sends the signal to Hamas that its violence pays off but also inspires those who vacillate between violence and peace to surrender to violence.

Ghadry's most valuable message, then, is that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is, despite that terminology, not strictly between Israelis and Palestinians. Rather, it is between the forces of moderation and the forces of extremism on both sides of the conflict. My belief (and more knowledgeable people than I would probably agree) is that there are a large number of Israelis and Arabs, who if they had their way, could pretty quickly come close to resolving many of the issues that have divided them for so many years. The main obstacle, however, are those who see any such co-existence and cooperation between the two peoples as a threat and who will do anything to derail peace.

Ghadry is not saying (nor am I) that the forces of good should do nothing at all to deal with groups like Hamas and extremist regimes like Iran and Syria. As he writes:

Part of the blame for Carter’s trip falls on this administration as well. The policy of “no policy” towards Syria and Iran has fostered this sense of mid-air suspension that inevitably encourages people like president Carter to apply the laws of physics. Had the US foreign policy been more forceful than simply attempt to isolate Hamas and Syria, the US may had seen faster pace to peace than what the molasses isolationist policy can deliver.

I'm not completely sure what Ghadry means when he says "more forceful." I hope he means it in the diplomatic sense and not through military action against these groups. That's my preference, and one only needs to look at the mess in Iraq to understand why.

But we need diplomacy that's more careful and evenhanded than what President Carter, who has vilely compared Israel to the South African Apartheid governments of years past, has to offer. Ghadry's right that someone with the stature of Jimmy Carter -- a Nobel Peace Prize laureate and tireless advocate for peace and human rights -- frustrates the careful (and probably not-so-careful) efforts of those on both sides of the Israeli-Arab divide who are trying to solve this problem of extremism. It allows the good guys to look like the obstructionists to peace and the bad guys look like great statesmen willing to compromise without really having to compromise.

If you have any doubt that Hamas really doesn't want to compromise, by the way, just read what Mahmoud al-Zahar, Hamas's "foreign minister," wrote in an Op-Ed in the Washington Post three days ago:

A "peace process" with Palestinians cannot take even its first tiny step until Israel first withdraws to the borders of 1967; dismantles all settlements; removes all soldiers from Gaza and the West Bank; repudiates its illegal annexation of Jerusalem; releases all prisoners; and ends its blockade of our international borders, our coastline and our airspace permanently. This would provide the starting point for just negotiations and would lay the groundwork for the return of millions of refugees. Given what we have lost, it is the only basis by which we can start to be whole again.

This is not compromise, especially when you know that Hamas has repeatedly called for the destruction of Israel. Rather, it is like one boxer telling another to tie his hands behind his back so the first boxer can finish the other off -- with knives and bullets.

And these are the guys to whom President Carter decides to lend his prestige? Does President Carter have any prestige left to give?

Jeff

"What is the Matter With You People?"

Yesterday's Sunday comics section included a Doonesbury strip that I think says a lot about the relationship between the Islamic world and the West.

The strip (which is a "Flashback," meaning it ran once before, I think in 2007) shows two soldiers -- one of them American, the other Iraqi -- in an armored vehicle patrolling through a tough neighborhood in Iraq. Their dialogue begins:

American soldier: "Ready to do this, partner?"
Iraqi soldier: "ZZZ."
AS: "Great!... Okay, that's the safe house -- the big white building at the end of the street."
IS: "I know this house. The owner is Sunni scum."
AS: "Oh, yeah?... Well, intel wants us to capture the guy alive."
IS: "This will not be possible. I am sworn to vengeance!"
AS: "Why? What'd he ever do to you?"
IS: "A member of his family killed a member of mine."
AS: "What? When did this happen?"
IS: "1387"
AS: "What is the matter with you people?"

Whether or not this exchange reflects reality, Garry Trudeau is saying, within only a few frames and with only few words, that cultural differences between the Islamic world and the West are immense. Trudeau reflects not a "clash of civilizations," as so many of us want to believe exists, but rather the first-time encounter of two people who don't really know or understand one another.

The American in the strip views Muslims as one big, backward and dysfunctional family that is trapped in the past and unprepared for the present. He finds the Iraqi's talk of sectarian revenge -- based, no less, on something that happened more than 600 years ago -- incomprehensible. The Iraqi does not understand the cultural vocabulary of the American or fully grasp the reality of the moment. He sleeps through his patrol and is willing to ignore what sounds like a reasonable command, possible triggering a dangerous showdown.

For his part, the Iraqi embraces history as something truly meaningful and relevant today, even if it means ignoring the realities of the present. Americans tend not to look back too much on the past, or to understand why it stands for so much to other cultures.

I'm not knowledgeable enough to say how fair these characterizations are generally of people on both sides Muslim/Western divide. But I'm glad that Trudeau gets us thinking at least about what we all don't know. That's precisely what Akbar Ahmed, a professor of Islamic studies at American University, does, though he can fill in the gaps for us. Ahmed (about whom I have written before and for whom I have done some p.r. work) is foremost a translator between people who do not know each other and who literally and cultural speak completely different languages.

In other words, he occupies a critical role at a time when Islam and the West needs people like him the most. Through his many books, documentaries, lectures, diplomacy (he was Pakistan's High Commissioner to the U.K.) and plays, he has been a prime interpreter of Islam to the West, helping us get past the misguided shorthands we have about Muslims. At the same time, he interprets the West to the Islamic world, which swirls with myths and downright bizarre assumptions about Westerners.

If there is one message that Westerners would do well to take from Ahmed, it is that Islam is more complex than we truly comprehend. In his recent book, "Journey Into Islam: The Crisis of Globalization," which was the product of anthropological visits to eight or nine Islamic countries in the Arab Middle East, South Asia and East Asia, Ahmed leaves no doubt that Islam expresses itself in countless ways, often within a single country or region and even within a single family.

Moreover, he argues that the very encounter with the West -- lately through the fast-moving, border-busting phenomenon of "globalization" -- has brought about many different challenges and responses in many parts of the Islamic world that were previously mostly insulated from the outside.

Islamic reactions to that encounter with the outside world are mixed, Ahmed shows, describing them using three broad typologies. "Islam's response to the forces of globalization... takes at least least three distinct forms: mystics reach out to other faiths, traditionalists want to preserve the purity of Islam, and modernists attempt to synthesize society with other non-Muslim systems" he writes in "Journey Into Islam." "Because most people in the West do not understand the complexity of Muslim society through models such as [these], they reduce understanding of U.S. relations with the Muslim world to good versus evil, and divide Muslims crudely into moderate versus extreme."

These three models "have been in play for the last two centuries," Ahmed  told an audience at the Brookings Institution last June when discussing his book. "This is an ongoing dynamic, an ongoing dialectic within Muslim society. Since the first impact with Western colonization in the middle of the 19th Century, and you are seeing, in a sense, the drama being played out right now. 9/11 was a catalyst. It escalates the drama, but it does not create the drama."

America's and the West's failure to understand the complexities of the Islamic world, Ahmed writes in the book, has led to much of the miscalculation and disaster that is the Iraq war. The U.S., he says, "needs to quickly appreciate the nuances of these societies. Muslims widely complain of the lack of justice, widespread corruption and collapse of law and order. Too frequently, the United States backs strong military intervention, unaware of how this support encourages turmoil and how negatively this support is seen within a country."

At the Brookings event about "Journey Into Islam," scholar Stephen P. Cohen seconded Ahmed's analysis by pointing out that a "wonderful euphemism that is circulating around Washington is kinetic solution, that is, beating up somebody or shooting them. Kinetic solutions don’t work. If you have to use a kinetic solution, that is, shoot them, you have already lost the war especially the war of ideas."

"America’s great strength," Cohen continued, "its practical approach to problem-solving, has really become a weakness of ours. We don’t take the time to listen, to understand, if not to respect, at least to understand other cultures and civilizations. The policy implications here are really get out and talk, meet with people, reestablish the libraries around the world. We used to be culture centers for many countries. I know in Pakistan when I first went there I think there were eight different American centers. There are zero now. In Pakistan and other countries, the American center, the American library was often the cultural and intellectual center point of local and national dialogue about their states as well as relations with the U.S. These kinds of institutions have disappeared around the world. They are still relevant. They are still powerful. We really need to rebuild them to be able to compete in the world."

Ahmed's criticisms of the Muslim world are the mirror image of those he has of the West.

• "Muslims need to recognize that the most effective 'weapons' for addressing their grievances are knowledge and reason, rather than brute force...."
• "Muslim leaders must [also] strive to live up to their own vision of the ideal society. Too many Arab rulers use the crutch of Israel directly or indirectly to avoid working toward democracy until that 'problem' is solved."
• If Muslims had reacted to the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq with restraint rather than violence, it "would have impressed people in the West and created sympathy for Muslim causes. As it happened, the beheadings, the suicide bombings, and the hyperbolic rtheroric of violence... confirmed already existing steteotypes of Muslims. Very soon, people in the West began to equate violence and terrorism with Islam itself... and see all Muslims as inherently bloodthirsty...."

So, to paraphrase the American soldier's question in the Doonesbury strip: What is the matter with all these people? "Ignorance of other cultures leads to serious policy mistakes, whether conducting warfare of peace negotiations," Ahmed answers.

The real task, then, is to accelerate the pace with which we eliminate that ignorance among as many people on both sides of the divide as possible.

Jeff

Military Publications Say "Rumsfeld Must Go"

A joint editorial has appeared in the current issue of Army Times, Navy Times, Air Force Times and Marine Corps Times that calls for Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to resign.

"Rumsfeld has lost credibility with the uniformed leadership, with the troops, with Congress and with the public at large," the editorial reasoned. "His strategy has failed, and his ability to lead is compromised. And although the blame for our failures in Iraq rests with the secretary, it will be the troops who bear its brunt."

The Pentagon did what it could to deflect what may be the most credible assault on the Secretary to date (this is no longer coming from the peaceniks, who would allow the terrorists to run amok in the streets on Main Street, USA). It released a statement in response saying, in part: "Iraqi security forces are making slow but measurable progress. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have made themselves and their families targets and put their lives at risk for their new country. They are increasingly taking the lead in operations. The disparagement of these forces is completely unfounded.... This country and the leadership of the Defense Department are going to ensure that our military forces have the resources to successfully carry out their mission and to suggest otherwise is simply wrong."

According to a BBC report this morning (interestingly, I'm not seeing a lot of coverage of this from American media), White House spokesman Tony Snow referred to the editorial as a "shabby piece of work". Apparently, he was miffed about the timing of the piece, one day before the midterm elections. "If they didn't want to influence the election," he said, according to the BBC, "they could have published it Wednesday."

Right, we don't want any of the voters to think anything is amiss.

Meanwhile, two of the biggest cheerleaders of the war in Iraq, at least it seemed like it at the time, Richard Perle and Ken Adelman, are now saying that had they known then what they know now, they would have opposed the invasion of Iraq.

Not only that, this administration "turned out to be among the most incompetent teams in the postwar era," said Adelman, who infamously predicted that liberating Iraq would be a "cakewalk." "Not only did each of them, individually, have enormous flaws, but together they were deadly, dysfunctional." Thanks for telling us now, Ken.

Meantime, the President has expressed his steadfastness to keep Rumsfeld in place (I wonder if Rumsfeld wouldn't even want a break by now. He's been there longer than almost all the Cabinet secretaries, but he probably has no choice.) And Vice President Cheney, appearing on ABC's "This Week," said that  “The president has made clear what his objective is: It’s victory in Iraq. It’s full speed ahead on that basis, and that’s exactly what we’re going to do.”

In other words, we don't care how crazy it may appear to everyone else, but we're driving this tank over the cliff.

Jeff

(Photo above: Defense Dept. photo by U.S. Air Force Staff Sgt. D. Myles Cullen)

"The Mission is Going Well"

REPUBLICAN MEMBERS OF CONGRESS RUNNING FOR REELECTION THIS FALL have gotten themselves into such a bind over the war in Iraq, not to mention many other issues. Senator Jim Talent's performance on "Meet the Press" yesterday is a good case in point.

Talent, the Republican from Missouri, just can't bring himself to own up to any bad news. Apparently, that's just not something a politician, especially an incumbent running for reelection, is supposed to do. He'd much rather insult the intelligence of his constituents (and the honor of the U.S. military men and women who have been killed and wounded in Iraq) by saying that "the mission [in Iraq] is going well" and that his opponent, Claire McCaskill, is weak on security. (He also kept talking about her "supporters in Paris." What's that about, and why would anybody pay attention to it?)

Result: Polls are showing that Talent, the incumbent, is in a dead heat with McCaskill, the challenger, and, according to others, possibly even trailing her. 

Here's the exchange between Talent and Russert from  "Meet the Press." One could accuse me of taking it out of context, but I assure you that if you read the whole transcript, which is part of a debate between Talent and McCaskill, you'll likely agree with me even more that Talent seems to be trying to paint a different reality than the one the rest of us seem to understand.

Fittingly, Bob Woodward appeared right after this segment, plugging his book "State of Denial." Denial seems to be the leitmotif of the season.

MR. RUSSERT: All right. Let’s focus specifically on the war in Iraq. And Senator Talent, this is what you said just three short months ago. “I think the mission is going well. I think we’ve made an awful lot of progress.” Do you believe, in Iraq, the mission is going well?

SEN. TALENT: I think we have made progress. I think we have a level of sectarian violence now that’s unacceptable short term, and unsustainable long run. But let, let’s go back and look what...

MR. RUSSERT: But when you say to the American people the mission’s going well, is that not misleading the American people?

SEN. TALENT: Oh, well, I don’t—no, I don’t think so. Let’s go back and...

MR. RUSSERT: Here’s the headline in today’s paper: “U.S. Casualties in Iraq Rise Sharply.” The number of people, American troops being killed and attacked every 15 minutes, and you’re saying it’s going well?

SEN. TALENT: Let’s go back and look at what the mission was, OK? The mission was to remove Saddam, and the threat that he represented, replace him with a democracy in Iraq that would be an ally in the war on terror, that would be able to defend itself alone, as we—it now has to defend itself in partnership with us, and whose very existence would be a rebuke to the terrorist vision of—for the Arab-Islamic world. Well, Saddam is gone, and the threat he represented is gone. The government in Iraq is not threatening Kuwait, it’s not trying to restart a nuclear weapon program, it’s not using oil revenues to sponsor terrorism throughout the Mideast, it’s not competing with Iran to dominate the region. We do have a government of national unity that represents all sections. We have trained up a highly capable army.

Now, what part of the mission remains to be done? That’s the progress. The part of the mission that remains to be done, that requires large numbers of American troops, is finishing the seasoning of the Iraqi army and appropriately sizing it so they can defend themselves alone, or without large numbers of American troops, without having to defend themselves in partnership with us. So yes, we have made progress in getting this far. But we have to finish the mission, then we’ll be able to come home. And what the national intelligence estimate said was that if we complete the mission in Iraq, it’s going to be a huge victory for us, and a huge setback for the terrorists....

...MR. RUSSERT: Knowing what you know today, knowing what you know today, that Saddam did not have the weapons of destruction that our intelligence agencies thought he had, if you knew that today, would you still vote for the war?

SEN. TALENT: Well, yeah, I mean, I think...

MR. RUSSERT: You still would?

SEN. TALENT: ...it was the—I think it was the only possible strategic choice. Look, Saddam had been an organic threat in the region for a long time. He represented a threat to us. That threat is now gone. Tim, look at what’s not happening.

MR. RUSSERT: But Senator, isn’t it an important question: if, if, if the CIA said to you, “Saddam does not have weapons of biological, chemical, or a nuclear program,” you would still vote for the war?

SEN. TALENT: Well, he wanted them. He was trying to get rid of economic sanctions. He would’ve had $70-a-barrel oil. He’d have been competing with—I mean, if action had not been taken to remove Saddam, the same people who are being critical of what’s going on in Iraq now would be screaming that we’d left him in power. We’d have another Iran there. That threat’s been removed.

Jeff

Tuning In the Long-Term Losses of War

I PROBABLY PASS WALTER REED ARMY MEDICAL CENTER in Washington, D.C., about ten times a week on my way to and from work, but I have no real clear picutre of what goes on within its pastoral grounds. But I’ve probably gotten the best sense of the plight of one of the soldiers who have passed through it recently from nothing less than a cartoon strip.

It’s not just any cartoon strip, of course. It’s Doonesbury, which defies categorization so much that it shows up on opinion pages in some papers, comics pages in others and on lifestyles pages in still others.

Doonesbury, created and produced by Garry Trudeau, also defies ideological categorization, as far as I’m concerned, though most people – probably those who haven’t read it for years – assume it is a “liberal” strip. I’ll have to agree that, on many issues, Doonesbury probably shades more liberal than conservative when it is pressed to have a political point of view. But Doonesbury’s commentary is more far observational than political, and it lampoons the left as much as the right (for example, check out the shot Doonesbury took at the anti-war posturing of John Kerry as early as 1971).

Longtime readers of the strip know the character B.D., who started out as a star college football player, who later expressed his strong patriotism (and desire to get out of writing a college term paper) by volunteering to fight in Vietnam, where he got a Purple Heart from cutting his finger on a beer can. He later served in Operation Desert Storm (later suffering from Gulf War Syndrome), was a member of the California Highway Patrol and managed the career of his wife Barbara Anne “Boopsie” Boopstein, a B-movie actress and former Playboy model. In recent years, he had returned to his alma mater to coach the football team for which he had once quarterbacked. And then the war in Iraq came along, and off he went to fight again, leaving the coaching responsibilities in Boopsie’s hands.

B.D. is also the one who, for the life of the strip, had always worn his football helmet –- at least until a fateful day on the outskirts of the fictional Iraqi town of al-Amok. There, the unit he led was attacked in a firefight. B.D. was badly wounded and part of one of his legs had to be amputated as a result. For the first time in the history of strip, we saw B.D. shorn of his signature helmet and exposed in more ways than one. (Since I don't have the rights to show it here, click here to see one of the most dramatic combat strips.)

Trudeau took B.D. (and us) through the army hospital system, including, for a stretch, Walter Reed, where he spent a considerable amount of harrowing time rehabilitating his mind and body and painfully learning to use a prosthetic leg.

Later, we followed his reentry back home, to his wife and daughter, to a life of bitterness and dark anger. He took to drinking and became impossible to live with. Something had to give. Friends tried to intervene, and for a while with no success. Finally and stubbornly, B.D. found his way to a therapist, a veteran, who like B.D., had a prosthetic leg (though he earned it in a civilian motorcycle accident). Now, he is making his way back to his job as coach, and, just this past week, he has decided to have his spare prosthetic leg painted in loud designs and colors by one of those car detailers. (He asked the detailer to "pimp my gimp.") B.D. will wear it on game days. Something tells us that B.D.’s on his way back.   

The picture Trudeau paints of B.D.’s progress -– and of his family’s -– is painful, poignant, slow and, of course, bitingly funny –- that is, probably a lot closer to real life than the Norman Rockwell depictions we get from our political leaders or from those who want to make war sound more gallant than it really is. That’s why Trudeau has called a compiled book of many of the strips, The Long Road Home: One Step at a Time. A sequel to the book called The War Within: Another Step at A Time, just came out, too. (All proceeds fro these books to to Fisher House, which provides housing for families while service members receive treatment at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., and other major military medical centers.)

In an Army Times interview earlier this year, Trudeau talks about how he visited Walter Reed several times and stayed in touch with soldiers with ordeals similar to B.D.'s. Trudeau wanted to be sure he got this story right, not to make a political statement, and Army Times reported that "the troops who have met him or read his book say he captures the way they feel — that he 'gets it' — even if they don’t always agree with his politics."

Trudeau is, of course, not the only one telling the story of what’s happening to these soldiers. There are other media, such as NPR, which has a regular serious of reports that it has compiled on its Web site under and area called The Span of War.

I also get quick glimpses of young men with missing limbs at a retail mall near my house, men who must surely have lost them in attacks in Iraq because this mall is only a short couple miles away from Walter Reed and a natural place to rehab patients there to go for a meal and a movie. For me, these men are the concrete reminders of the devastation happening in the world right now. As Trudeau said elsewhere (I think in The Long Road Home): "Whether you think we belong in Iraq or not, we can't tune it out; we have to remain mindful of the terrible losses that individual soldiers are suffering in our name."

These men need no reminders, of course. Like the fictional B.D., they would probably like to forget but have wounds -- physical and emotional -- that won't let them.

Jeff

On the 9/11 Anniversary: Trust

LAST NIGHT TED KOPPEL AND THE DISCOVERY CHANNEL provided a gift the nation needed on the eve of the anniversary of 9/11: a chance to grapple seriously and candidly with the tension between upholding security and protecting privacy and civil liberties.

It’s not that there’s been no discussion of these issues until last night. On the contrary, hardly a day has gone by since the attacks of exactly five years ago today that people have debated these issues. There have been many books written, lawsuits filed, documentaries produced and God knows how many of those polemical shouting matches between partisans on the other cable news outlets, the kind of programs that leave you more nauseated that enlightened.

Up until now, two camps – one representing hard line security and the other hard line civil liberties – seem to have talked past each another, emboldened themselves, drawn caricatures of one another, campaigned and raised money on those caricatures and widened the gulf of misunderstanding between them. (To be fair, there are some serious, thoughtful people in the middle who have not sullied themselves with these games, but most media find them boring and don’t bother with them.) In addition to death, destruction and fear and trembling, this is what the terrorists have given us.

But last night’s town hall forum, broadcast on Discovery and NPR and which followed Koppel’s documentary called “The Price of Security,” felt like a good first step away from all that nonsense. My only problem with it was that is was too short. These issues are too big to discuss in less than two hours.

But the program began to show that there may just be reasonable minds disagreeing about a difficult, but not necessarily irreconcilable dilemma. Indeed, I think we can find the right balance.

For example, and in the spirit of full disclosure, I have a U.S. government client responsible for developing and operating a portion of border security processes. One of the fundamental and openly stated goals of this program, in addition to enhancing security, is protecting personal privacy.

I can say without hesitation that the professionals who run this program give the goal of privacy far more than lip service. It is embedded in everything they do. And they have shown that security and privacy are not mutually exclusive. We can have both, though that requires hard work and vigilance. Happily, major privacy groups have taken notice and been impressed with the program’s privacy practices.

But of course there are some groups –- mostly those that really have not taken the trouble to learn about how this program works –- that continue to question whether a government can be entrusted with the information about people. Some seem to suggest that any government program that collects information from people is, by definition, too great a threat to civil liberties. To them I would ask: what then would you do to protect the nation? How would you solve this riddle?

That’s what several administration officials (current and former) profiled in the Koppel program were faced with right after 9/11. This was no parlor game or law school case study. Lives could very well be on the line. They offered the rationale for the controversial security policies they wrote. Whether one might agree with them or with their judgments, they seemed quite credibly motivated by the need to protect the nation from future attacks. 

Jamie Gorelick, a Deputy Attorney General in the Clinton Administration and a member of the 9/11 Commission, allowed as much when she acknowledged the awesome responsibility these administration officials must feel. She said she would have expected them to do everything they can within the law to protect us from further attacks.

Gorelick, though, did not stop by sympathizing with the current administration officials. She added that it seems we have not as a society had a chance to speak aloud and thoughtfully about how we balance these two essential needs.

What Gorelick didn’t say, perhaps to avoid the appearance of a partisan jab (but I will) was: one has to wonder why the administration for its part has pushed through many measures – such as domestic surveillance, aggressive interrogation practices (call them torture, if you wish), the denial of basic due process for detainees – without asking Congress or the courts for their permission or oversight.

Here again the question of trust arises. The administration, apparently, did not think that the other two branches of government would give it the discretion to do what it needed to do to protect the nation, and in some cases would disagree with the administration thought it might need to prosecute this very unique war.

Maybe. (As Churchill once snootily said, “The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.” But, then, he also said, “It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government, except all the others that have been tried.”) In the case of torture and indefinite detention of prisoners without trial, we now know that Congress and the courts would not have agreed with the administration. I personally would say, thank goodness for that. In the case of NSA surveillance, I’m not so sure. I think what really shocked people was that the administration would not so much consult a FISA court – even under a special, expedited procedure. Doing so might have eased many Americans’ consciences.

The administration’s harshest critics have to understand that this government –- and the next one, whether it is run by Republicans or Democrats – has a tough job defending us against a real, dedicated enemy. The administration has made some bad judgments, in my opinion, that will take many years for us and many other nations to recover from. But this is hard stuff.

Likewise, the administration can’t act as though the rest of us don’t matter –- not only because it doesn’t have all the answers but also because it can’t expect the rest of us to sacrifice for its bad decisions.

Without sounding a little too much like a  Burt Bacharach lyric, I think we need a little more trust here. Trust in the government to try to do the right thing, and trust from the government that its critics might actually have good ideas. The trouble is that the atmosphere has been poisoned so badly (I blame the Republicans for that mostly) that giving the administration the benefit of the doubt means giving them a blank check. And that in turn has given its critics any reason to trust its motives as anything but sinister or focused on undermining the Dems before the next election cycle.

Boy, am I glad Koppel’s back.

Jeff

"I’m not sure what part you don’t understand here.”

NOW THAT I’VE GONE OFF ON the inflexibility of liberal ideologues, it’s only fair that I devote equal time to conservative ideologues, who do the same from the opposite end of the spectrum (though this won’t be the first time in my blog musings).

And who better to use as Exhibit A than Vice President Richard Cheney, who appeared this morning on NBC’s “Meet the Press?” It is he, more than any, who has turned the current administration (and the Congress that has rubber-stamped virtually everything it asks for) into an echo chamber of extremist conservative ideology. And don’t just take my word for it. There are others within the conservative establishment who have said that same thing.

This morning, under the punishing questioning of Tim Russert, the Vice President showed one of the central tenets of an ideologue: don’t let the facts get in the way of your point of view. The other is that rest of us are idiots, and we should just leave it up to Cheney and his people, who know what they’re doing (and the V.P. lets his arrogance slip for a second when he says below “Tim… I’m not sure what part you don’t understand here.”). Let’s go to the videotape:

MR. RUSSERT: All right. Now the president has been asked, “What did Iraq have to do with the attack on the World Trade Center?” and he said “nothing.” Do you agree with that?
VICE PRES. CHENEY: I do. So it’s not...
MR. RUSSERT: So it’s case, case closed.
VICE PRES. CHENEY: We’ve never been able to confirm any connection between Iraq and 9/11.
….MR. RUSSERT: Then why, in the lead-up to the war, was there the constant linkage between Iraq and al-Qaeda?
VICE PRES. CHENEY: That’s a different issue. Now, there’s a question of whether or not al-Qaeda, or whether or not Iraq was involved in 9/11. There’s a separate—apart from that’s the issue of whether or not there was a historic relationship between Iraq and al-Qaeda. The basis for that is probably best captured in George Tenet’s testimony before the Senate Intel Commission, an open session, where he said specifically that there was a pattern of relationship that went back at least a decade between Iraq and al-Qaeda.
MR. RUSSERT: But the president said they were working in concert, giving the strong suggestion to the American people that they were involved in September 11th.
VICE PRES. CHENEY: No. There are, there are two totally different propositions here, and people have consistently tried to confuse them. And it’s important, I think—there’s a third proposition, as well, too, and that is Iraq’s traditional position as a strong sponsor of terror.
So you’ve got Iraq and 9/11, no evidence that there’s a connection. You’ve got Iraq and al-Qaeda, testimony from the director of CIA that there was indeed a relationship, Zarqawi in Baghdad, etc. Then the third...
MR. RUSSERT: The committee said that there was no relationship. In fact...
VICE PRES. CHENEY: Well, I haven’t seen the report; I haven’t had a chance to read it yet, but the fact is...
MR. RUSSERT: But Mr. Vice President, the bottom line is...
VICE PRES. CHENEY: We know, we know that Zarqawi, running a terrorist camp in Afghanistan prior to 9/11, after we went in to 9/11, then fled and went to Baghdad and set up operations in Baghdad in the spring of ‘02 and was there from then, basically, until basically the time we launched into Iraq.
MR. RUSSERT: The bottom line is, the rationale given the American people was that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction and he could give those weapons of mass destruction to al-Qaeda and we could have another September 11. And now we read that there is no evidence, according to the Senate Intelligence Committee, of that relationship. You’ve said there’s no involvement. The president says there’s no involvement.
VICE PRES. CHENEY: No, Tim, no involvement in what respect?
MR. RUSSERT: In September 11, OK. The CIA said, leading up to the war, that the possibility of Saddam using weapons of mass destruction was “low.” It appears that there was a deliberate attempt made by the administration to link al-Qaeda in Iraq in the minds of the American people and use it as a rationale to go into Iraq.
VICE PRES. CHENEY: Tim, I guess—I don’t—I’m not sure what part you don’t understand here. In September—or in 1990, the State Department designated Iraq as a state sponsor of terror. Abu Nidal, famous terrorist, had sanctuary in, in Baghdad for years. Zarqawi was in Baghdad after we took Afghanistan and before we went into Iraq. You had the facility up at Kermal, poisons facility, ran by Ansar Islam, an affiliate of al-Qaeda. You had the fact that Saddam Hussein, for example, provided payments to the families of suicide bombers of $25,000 on a regular basis. This was a state sponsor of terror.  He had a relationship with terror groups. No question about it. Nobody denies that.
….Now this was the place where, probably, there was a greater prospect of a connection between terrorists on the one hand and a terrorist-sponsoring state and weapons of mass destruction than any place else. You talk about Iran, North Korea, they’re problems, too, but they hadn’t been through 12 years of sanctions and resolutions by the U.N. Security Council and ignored them with impunity.”

Now, I’m no expert on this, but I seem to understand that Iran had been one of the most egregious sponsors of terrorist groups, especially Hezbollah. North Korea had long been a scourge because of it had exported missile technology to other states for years. But seemed not big rush to invade either Iran or North Korea, which is a relief.

I’m not saying that Iraq was the Great Humanitarian of the bunch. But from everything we’ve heard about even the pre-9/11 rumblings within the Bush Administration, there was a curious and disproportionate fixation on Iraq that, again, no facts were going to dislodge.

Also, there seemed to be a sense that military intervention was the only way to challenge the growing threat of Iraq. Now, let us stipulate that we should never rule out military options when trying to deal with rogue nations (like, say, Israel’s recent attempts to eliminate Hezbollah’s missile capabilities in Lebanon), though I would hope they would be rare acts. And let us also agree that economic sanctions are, as they say, “blunt instruments” that often do not have the effects we intend.

But I need not rehearse for the world that the Bush administration seemed to have little patience for anything but a military option –- also a blunt and bloody instrument that can (indeed, has) backfire. It is an extreme option, and it says something about the character of a government that used it (in Iraq) almost as a first resort. 

There could have been many other ways of protecting the U.S., as Russert suggests. Back to the videotape:

MR. RUSSERT: Three hundred billion dollars spent so far. The Congressional Budget Office says if we stay in Iraq through the end of 2009, it’ll be a half trillion dollars. In all candor, could that $300 billion we’ve spent so far in Iraq not have been better spent securing Afghanistan, improving airline security, having technology for gels and liquids so people can get on without being nervous? Our cargo in our ports. Could that $300 billion have not been better spent securing our nation against terrorists rather than in Iraq?
VICE PRES. CHENEY: Well, Tim, I think we’ve done a pretty good job of securing the nation against terrorists. You know, we’re here on the fifth anniversary, and there has not been another attack on the United States. And that’s not an accident, because we’ve done a hell of a job here at home, in terms of homeland security, in terms of the terrorist surveillance program we’ve put in place, in terms of the financial tracking program we put in place, and because of our detainee policy, where we, in fact, were able to interrogate captured terrorists to get the kind of intelligence that has allowed us to disrupt...
MR. RUSSERT: But could it have been better spent?
VICE PRES. CHENEY: Well, I’m not sure that it could have been. I don’t know how much better you can do than no, no attacks for the last five years.
MR. RUSSERT: But the Commission on 9/11 says that we get D’s and F’s.
People with...
VICE PRES. CHENEY: Well...
MR. RUSSERT: People with radios in police departments can’t—in D.C. cannot talk to Alexandria. Four-fifths of the mayors say they can’t communicate with their localities. People can’t carry toothpaste and shampoo on planes. The administration cut $6 million—or tried to—out of funding to screen those kind of things...

The prepondence of death, destruction and failure, as well as the sagging poll numbers, seem to have rendered the Vice President a bit more demur than we've seen him in the past. But he's still not about to admit that if he had to do it over, knowing what he knows now, he would do it any differently. He says he won't, of course. That's just the usual political bravado, which we can expect from either party. But it's also the sort of ideological stubbornness that has gotten this country, and many others, into a terrible mess.

And now, in retrospect, Mr. Cheney's only options are to rationalize all the bad decisions he made in the past and say that everything's just fine. That's another attribute of an ideologue: self-delusion.

Jeff

Will They Reenact the War In Iraq Someday?

THIS PAST WEEKEND, THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE converged on Manassas, Virginia, just a short drive outside of Washington, D.C., to participate in or watch the reenactment of the First Battle of Bull Run. This is the 145th anniversary of the battle, which concluded with the surprise retreat of the Union Army, and represented the first real dose of reality that the nation was in for more than a small rebellion that would be put down in short order. (To get a better view of the photos, taken at the 2004 First Bull Run reenactment, click them.)

So confident were the Northerners that this would be a “cakewalk” (to use the terminology that some Americans employed before the U.S. entered Iraq in 2003), that many Washingtonians traveled to Manassas in July 1861 with picnic baskets to watch the spectacle as if they were spending a day at the race track.

What they saw was a bloody rout of the Union Army, which suffered nearly 3,000 casualties (killed, wounded, captured or missing) of its 35,000 total troops in the field, at the hands of the Confederates, who sustained about 2,000 casualties of the 32,500 in the field.

I have to confess to some mixed feelings about what the reenactors do.

On the one hand, I'm sure they believe they are performing a great tribute to the people who died on and off the American battlefields during the Civil War, which shaped our nation in perhaps more ways than any other event in our history. It is hard for me to fathom that the nation’s identity crisis was so profound that men were willing to walk in ranks (shoulder-to-shoulder lines), in the hot sun facing almost point-blank rifle fire, and that after thousands had already fallen before them, still more soldiers (some of them after recovering from earlier wounds) would go back to the fight.

Perverse as it may sound, I have often tried to imagine myself in their place, or in the place of others who found themselves in other fierce battles, in unspeakable torture chambers that have existed in many places and times or in the maw of the Nazi machine to exterminate Jews and others. I’m attracted to reading military histories and to sitting mesmerized (until my wife can pry the remote control away) by TV documentaries on any war, you name it.

And I cannot think of even one moment of my life that comes at all close to what those experiences must have been like.

Maybe that’s why I can sort of see why some might grow their beards and side whiskers long and layer on heavy wool uniforms in the muggy air of Northern Virginia to get a taste of the discomfort, if not the terror, those soldiers felt 145 years ago. (I think this is one of those instinctual guy things, by the way.)

But, on the other hand, is this really a proper tribute? Is dressing up like soldiers and pretending to shoot and be shot what the troops who truly suffered would want? We all know well about those World War II veterans and Holocaust survivors who would not, for an ultimately unknowable complex of reasons, speak of their experiences for decades and might upbraid someone who presumed to know what only they could about that their ordeal. Are we really honoring them by recreating what these soldiers and victims, sometimes by the skin of their teeth, escaped and hoped to keep locked in a box forever? Isn’t that a bit like throwing a party honoring someone who has just survived a terrible bout with a deadly disease and then recreating blow, by terrible blow, that horrible experience. And why do we want to reenact –- and glorify, albeit unintentionally –- the ugliest experiences man has to offer?

I HAVE SOMETIMES THOUGHT, really more as a joke than anything, about whether anyone will reenact the more recent military conflicts of our history in the same way they do the Civil and Revolutionary Wars, and, more recently, World War II.

It seemed a joke on the face of it because today’s wars rely so heavily on sophisticated and prohibitively expensive technology. Surely reenactors of tomorrow cannot muster the funds or the advanced training to operate, say, a stealth bomber, which today costs more than $2.2 billion to produce and requires, presumably, the best pilots to fly. That may be the extreme case, but even the more conventional fighter jets and sophisticated tanks present the same problem.

But if we can get past that impediment (though I don’t know how), what about it? Will they ever reenact our war with Iraq 145 years from now?

I don’t see it happening. Maybe that’s because I’m too close to the wars in Iraq and Vietnam. I suppose that over time, as the survivors die off and the ferocity and pain of the wars are forgotten, their glory and gallantry of war rises to the surface, and maybe that’s what got those guys to go out to Bull Run this past weekend.

I think there’s something else, though. I think many are drawn to wanting to be part of the reshaping of history –- especially for the better. Even the defeated Southerners can now say that the Civil War reshaped the fate of their region of the U.S. and of an entire nation for the better. No doubt the same can be said for the Revolutionary War and World Wars I and II, which set lives and whole societies on a different course than they would have traveled otherwise. People like to be a witness –- and better yet a contributor –- to history.

I’m not saying history isn’t being made right now in Iraq, or that there was no historical impact from America’s military conflicts in Vietnam and the Gulf in 1991. But those impacts seem more ambiguous and certainly less glorious in comparison to those other great and terrible wars.

I mean that not as a slight to the people who fought in those wars. On the contrary, I have all the more respect for them for sticking with a difficult and sometimes unclear cause (and, to be fair, there were times during the Civil War when people asked Lincoln if this wasn’t a misadventure).

But it doesn’t feel like this war in Iraq will have been fought for such unassailable goals as independence, the four freedoms, the end of slavery or the fundamental existential identity of our nation.

We entered Iraq in 2003 with the promise –- or at least the hope –- that doing so would be one of the watershed moments of recent history, that it would remake the politics of a whole region, and possibly the world. The story of our war in Iraq is not yet over, but it does not yet feel like it will someday be worthy of reenactment, if any war is ever worthy of that.

Jeff

A Slam Dunk

The PBS FRONTLINE DOCUMENTARY "THE DARK SIDE," which aired last night, didn't contain a lot of previously unearthed information about Vice President Cheney's extraordinary influence on our post-9/11 "War On Terrorism" policy. But the preponderance of evidence the program collected and the thorough corroboration from former top military and national security officials who witnessed firsthand what Cheney (pictured above just after the 9/11 attacks; click it to see a bigger vesion) and his surrogates did ought to end any argument about whether the Vice President bears significant responsibility for waging a disastrous war against Iraq based on weak and manipulated evidence. As former CIA Director George Tenet might say, this is a "slam dunk" case.

To me, the most important question this documentary raises by implication is, where was the President? True, the piece focused primarily on Cheney. But you get the impression that the President was almost irrelevant to the decision making, or a rubber stamp to it. He comes across as anything but the wise and decisive leader his campaign ads reputed him to be. He doesn't appear in control of the process that Cheney was cooking.

And, as one of the highly placed former officials, who personally witnessed Tenet's infamous and disengenuous statement to the President that it was a "slam dunk" that Iraq had WMDs, pointed out, neither did then National Security Advisory Rice challenge Cheney and the intelligence agencies he pressured to produced more definitive evidence of Iraq's capabilities. It appears that, like many others, she was either cowed or duped (or both) by Cheney and his people. And it is eminently obvious from the program that then Secretary of State Colin Powell was misled and manipulated to deliver his influential February 2003 briefing to the U.N. Security Council showing "evidence" of Saddam's evil designs. His Chief of Staff, Lawrence Wilkerson, said that he, Wilkerson, had composed but never had the guts to deliver a resgination letter over this outrage, and he appears remorseful now that he didn't.

Even though many senior intelligence analysts maintained that meeting between hijacker Muhammad Atta and Iraqi officials in Prague never occurred, that Niger was not supplying Iraq with yellowcake plutonium and that the metal tubes detected in Iraq were not for building missile, there is no question that Cheney continued to state otherwise publicly and and frequently, that the President did so in his 2003 State of the Union Address, as did Powell, who was deliberately misled by Cheney's people. There is no doubt that Cheney was determined to go to war with Iraq and would not allow any facts to get in the way of that conclusion.

The consequences are, to say the least, staggering, not just in lives lost and destroyed, which is bad enough. But we see it also in lost opportunities (military officials and others interview in the show last night insisted that we could have stabilized Afghanistan if we had not deverted troups and resources to Iraq) and lost prestige and respect (the Pew Global Attitudes Project, a survey of people around the world, shows that unfavorable views of Americans have intensified, and surely the war and our government's arrogance about it figures greatly into that).

Again, nothing here is new. But it ought to stop the unfounded and offensive attacks on the patriotism of those who question whether or not we were right to go to war against Iraq. In fact, one has to wonder about the patriotism of those who cooked the books to mislead us and an entire nation and wreak unnecessary havoc on the world.

Jeff