McCain will win the election by saying Obama will lose the war.

Obama may lose the election because McCain has changed the conversation about the war. Obama’s huge strength as a candidate is that he had the courage to oppose the worst U.S. foreign policy mistake of the past fifty years, and possibly of all time. Yet, McCain paints Obama as naïve and inexperienced in foreign policy and military affairs. McCain keeps saying that Obama wants to let the U.S. lose the war in Iraq, but Obama is not really answering this charge, except to defend his patriotism and repeat that he will impose a timetable.

What Obama needs to repeat with all is oratory skill is that the war was never really designed to protect American interests. It was a blind spasm by a misguided President, a Wag-the-Dog diversion erected by his neo-con Vice-President who was determined to simultaneously subvert the constitution and destroy many of the noble values for which this country has stood. It has given a blank check to military contractors to whom the Republican Party is beholden, and to an unstable and dependent government in Iraq that will never step up and unless we are serious about stepping out. We financed the entire multi-trillion dollar war on credit and we can't fix our economy until we stop pouring money into this sinkhole. The only way to preserve American dignity, our stature in the world and our national treasury is to get on a timetable. Unlike Bush and McCain, Obama can show that as a leader, he has the discipline to get us out of the mess.

The public tolerated the war for a long time, even as facts mounted that the evidence for it was rigged, because people assumed the war was really about ensuring reliable and affordable fixes for our addiction to oil. Stratospheric gas prices exploded that myth.

Obama has already said these things, but in his quest to be seen as a uniter, he now seems afraid to offend any potential supporter. But unless he steps up, he risks losing the enthusiastic support of those who were passionate about his courage to lead, and worse, being unable to shake McCain’s tagging him as a weak leader. Today, he seems to have moved far away from his bold criticisms in 2002:

What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war. What I am opposed to is the cynical attempt by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and other armchair, weekend warriors in this administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne. What I am opposed to is the attempt by political hacks like Karl Rove to distract us from a rise in the uninsured, a rise in the poverty rate, a drop in the median income, to distract us from corporate scandals and a stock market that has just gone through the worst month since the Great Depression.

Tortured logic.

A number of journalists, as well as witnesses at recent U.S. Senate hearings, have described how the U.S. came to adopt torture as a so called "weapon" in the war on terror. After 9/11, the military reverse engineered techniques that had been intended to harden U.S. military personnel against interrogation methods North Korea used in the early 1950's to elicit false confessions.

The problem is that most professional intelligence officers don't believe that torture is the best way to get reliable information from a suspect. Persons being tortured often will say whatever they think their torturers want to hear. This is the reason U.S. courts do not allow the admission of confessions obtained by torture in criminal trials. It's not about compassion for the tortured - it's about ensuring that the criminal justice system is based on truth. If there is one place where we need facts rather than fiction, it's in fighting terrorism.

A determined criminal facing life in prison or death from a military tribunal knows he only worsens his situation by confessing while being tortured. He gets nothing in return other than a certain conviction. He is more likely to cooperate if he gets something of long term value in return, such as better food, reading material, a cell with a view, a shorter sentence, life rather than execution, etc. Indeed, that is exactly how the CIA "broke" the alleged mastermind of 9/11, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed.

What about the "24" scenario? Some believe the Hollywood scripted nightmare that the U.S. might capture a terrorist who knew the location of a nuclear bomb set to explode in a few hours inspired the adoption of torture after 9/11. With no time for tried and true psychological interrogation methods, desperate officers might attempt the Jack Bauer approach. Even Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia has said that no one would convict a torturer of a crime in such a scenario. We don't need a national policy permitting and encouraging torture in order to deal with this extremely unlikely situation.

As is clear from Jane Mayer's book, The Dark Side, a few powerful people in the Bush Administration made the decision to use torture without a careful analysis of its potential effectiveness for eliciting true information. The sudden adoption of torture might have been because Vice-President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld wanted false confessions from alleged terrorists in order to justify the invasion of Iraq and the civil rights of U.S. citizens. Indeed, a false confession about an imaginary link between Al Qaeda and the regime of Saddam Hussein was a key element in the case the administration made for the invasion of Iraq.

Now come calls for a general amnesty or pardons for those who illegally justified the use of torture and did the torturing. One of the arguments made for amnesty is that it is the only way to learn whether torture in obtained accurate information about terror plots. Finding out whether torture provided any useful information is pointless because there are more effective methods to obtain the truth that rely on psychology alone.

No other single proposal could be more damaging to the health of our democracy and our credibility in the world. We need to ensure that this cancer is rooted out of our institutions, and that we send an unmistakable message that systematic torture and abuse of prisoners will never be tolerated again. Otherwise, we risk again being dragged into a war abroad or at home on false pretenses, and being forever compromised in our ability to end human rights abuses by our post 9/11 image as hypocritical fascist nation. Oh yes, and we would have no standing to demand that our soldiers not be tortured if captured by an enemy. We and the rest of the world deserve much better from our democracy.

Are Republicans victims of battered person syndome?

Here and elsewhere, the long sad story of how the Bush Administration has abused the average U.S. citizen has been well documented and publicized.

• The disastrous war in Iraq is now understood to have been continuously marketed on false pretenses since Bush first proposed it. Opposition to continuing the lie and war is widespread - even among moderate Republicans (except those who are getting rich as private contractors in Iraq). Citizens will pay trillions of their tax dollars and sacrifice the blood of many of the nation's young people for this horrific mistake.
• Even teenagers understand that for the rest of their lives they likely will be paying off Bush's unprecedented, gigantic federal deficits - so far increasing the national debt by more than a four trillion dollars and nearly doubling it. The "free" money people get from Bush's tax cuts and rebates is not free (see my previous post). Today, nearly a tenth of taxes go just toward paying the interest on the national debt, with Bush's deficits responsible for half of that. (Many voters remember that Bill Clinton's fiscal discipline created four years of surpluses. Fewer realize that under Republican Presidents since 1948 we have been subjected to average annual increases in the national debt three times higher than under Democrats.) (Here's an even scarier analysis by a conservative economist.)
• Nearly everyone, except determined hermits, realizes that the Bush promise of getting government out of our lives was a lie regarding civil liberties. Sadly, it was true concerning protecting most of us from the consequences of natural disasters such as hurricanes and global climate change, and from greed and exploitation (a prime example being the subprime mortgage meltdown).

Yet many Republican voters support that party's nominee in 2008, John McCain, who promises very little change from present policies (see my previous post). Could they be suffering from battered person syndrome? A victim of this condition:

becomes depressed and unable to take any independent action that would allow him or her to escape the abuse. The condition explains why abused people often do not seek assistance from others, fight their abuser, or leave the abusive situation. Sufferers have low self-esteem, and often believe that the abuse is their fault. Such persons usually refuse to press criminal charges against their abuser, and refuse all offers of help, often becoming aggressive or abusive to others who attempt to offer assistance. Often sufferers will even seek out their very abuser for comfort shortly after an incident of abuse.

Slum lords and pimps.

The three elected Republican administrations of my politically conscious lifetime - Nixon, Reagan/Bush and Bush II stand out for their corruption. Nixon was impeached and forced to resign for masterminding the commission of crimes while spying on his political opponents, for obstruction of justice in trying to cover them up, and for lying about that. Reagan appointed scores of crooks to cabinet and administrative positions, who set about using their power to line the pockets of friends and party loyalists or to look the other way while others did so. The Reagan administration set a still unbroken record for the number of its officials indicted or officially investigated for criminal acts – 138. The Savings and Loan scandal alone cost taxpayers $150,000,000,000.

George W. Bush started a war on false pretenses, and then set about awarding billions in no bid contracts to his friends. Now it appears that many of the Iraq infrastructure projects built by U.S. firms are crumbling and stand mostly as monuments to billions of wasted U.S. tax dollars. Iraq’s infrastructure resembles a scene from the recent dystopian satiric film Idiocracy.

The recent resignation of the head of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is a typical example of the rampant corruption in George W. Bush’s administration here at home. She violated federal rules by giving internal agency documents to industry lobbyists that in some cases were used in lawsuits against the agency challenging its conservation policies. She changed the reports of agency scientists to make their findings more favorable to private and corporate interests, and in one case, her own ranch.

The conduct of the Deputy Secretary of State, director of U.S. Foreign Assistance and administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development illustrates the administration's hypocrisy. He pushed for funding to promote abstinence at the expense of funding for condom use in AIDS prevention, but resigned last month after it was alleged that he frequented prostitutes. He also was in charge of enforcing a U.S. requirement that aid recipients swear they oppose prostitution and sex trafficking.

It is also worth mentioning that Paul Wolfowitz, an architect of the Iraq war, and subsequently appointed as head of the World Bank by Bush II, insisted that the greatest problem facing the World Bank is corruption. He now will likely have to resign because of his own corruption at the bank: using his office to obtain a promotion and a hefty raise for his girlfriend.

Perhaps the best illustration of the pervasive corruption under Bush II is the fact that for the first time in history, four Inspectors General simultaneously are under investigation for corruption. These "watchdogs" are appointed by a President to ferret out waste, fraud and abuse. This follows the resignation of three other Inspectors General appointed by Bush II after they were accused of abusing their offices.

Under Bush II, good government always takes a back seat to advancing the power of the G.O.P. Part of this strategy is a widespread effort to "purify" government agencies so that staff, even those in career civil service jobs, are party loyalists. This brings two analogies to mind. The first is the McCarthy era of the 1950's, when Senators McCarthy and Nixon went on a witch hunt for suspected Communists in government. (Watch Good Night, and Good Luck if you want to learn about it.) The second was the practice, during the Communist heydays in the Soviet Union and China, of appointing political officers in every government office and military unit, even in those with as few as a dozen people. The political officer often had more authority than the director or commander, and was responsible for ensuring that policies were in line with party doctrine and that persons suspected of being anything but absolutely loyal were fired or imprisoned. (See The Hunt for Red October for an example.)

As Frank Rich says in his May 13 opinion piece in The N.Y. Times, the focus on party loyalty is the result of Bush II giving his politic strategist Karl Rove free "reign" to remake government. According to Ron Suskind, White House staff have a name to describe their mission: "strategery." This was taken from a Saturday Night Live skit about George Bush in the 2000 election, and reflects the belief that public policy is a farce and politics is all that matters. In Suskind’s January 2003 article, he quotes John DiIulio, an academic who ran the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives for Bush II. "There is no precedent in any modern White House for what is going on in this one: a complete lack of a policy apparatus. What you’ve got is everything – and I mean everything – being run by the political arm. It’s the reign of the Mayberry Machiavellis." DiIulio added that under Bush II, "policy analysis is just backfill to support a political maneuver."

DiIulio's observation has been borne out in the Iraq "reconstruction" effort. In part to bolster the party’s unholy alliance with the religious right, many of the Americans hired by both government and private contractors to rebuild Iraq were hired primarily for being G.O.P. loyalists and staunch religious conservatives, and often were otherwise unqualified for their positions. Most knew nothing about Middle Eastern culture and had never traveled outside the U.S.

The most recent exposure of Bush/Rove strategery, and how it has been implemented by political officers, comes from the story of Monica Goodling, who took the fifth amendment rather than testify before Congress about her role in the firing of eight U.S. Attorneys. (See my previous post.) A 1999 graduate of a law school founded by televangelist Pat Robertson, she began as an opposition researcher (dirt finder) for the Republican National Committee in the 2000 presidential campaign. Meteorically, she rose to become deputy director of the executive office of the Justice Department, and then became liaison to the White House. She stands accused of using political criteria when interviewing applicants for civil service jobs and for the department's honors program for recent law school graduates. Posing as the anti-Clinton, she even asked some applicants if they had cheated on their spouses. At the age of 32, she received hiring and firing authority for all political appointments in Justice headquarters, including the heads of the various enforcement divisions. (Readers will be relieved to know that she is currently under investigation by the Justice Department’s Inspector General, a political appointee.)

Republican control of Congress over the past twelve years brought a level of corruption unprecedented in past seventy-five years. Ethics and their enforcement were put on hold by Gingrich, Army, DeLay and their cronies. You have to go back to the time of Warren G. Harding to find anything comparable.

Why this pattern? It’s really quite simple. When a basic tenant of your political philosophy is that government is evil and wasteful, it becomes easy to view government as nothing more than a means to power and an exploitable asset. (See Paul Krugman’s March 19 opinion piece in The N.Y. Times.) As Reagan defined it in his inaugural speech, "Government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem." The leaders of the Republican party have treated our government as a slum lord treats an apartment building, as a pimp treats a whore, or as a corporate raider treats an acquired subsidiary. The G.O.P. has no respect for government, except as a tool in the party’s crusades for permanent power and as a means to increase the personal wealth of its elites. This has been consistent across four decades of G.O.P. Presidencies.

Postscript: Those who argue that the Clinton administration was similarly corrupt have been getting their news from right wing talk radio. Republican Ken Starr, the special prosecutor who spent most of Clinton’s time as President investigating him, spent more than 50,000,000 tax dollars to prove nothing more damaging to the administration than that Clinton cheated on his wife and lied about it. Clinton did let some big political donors spend the night in the Lincoln bedroom, which was not illegal. Republicans castigated him for this, but in the hypocrisy that comes so easily to them, recently rewarded their big donors with seats at the official state dinner for the Queen of England.

Update: The book, The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule, describes how conservatives have set about destroying government from within for the reasons described above.

Democratic blunder on Iraq.

There's been lots of cheering, applause and praise for Senator Webb's speech for the Democrats last night, responding to Bush's State of the Union speech, but I was dumbfounded at the sheer stupidity of the ending. The final mental image that lingers in viewers' minds is key to the success of any important speech and Webb sent exactly the wrong message. I'll lay out the dots and then connect them as I saw it.

It's become politically fashionable of late to use the words and actions of the other side's heroes to make big points, a trend that seems to grow more prevalent as the national discourse has become further partisan and polarized. Republicans cite FDR and Democrats cite Reagan, which they imagine makes them sound more reasonable. So, some genius speechwriter decided that Webb should refer to Teddy Roosevelt and Ike Eisenhower. He ended his speech by reminding us that Ike quickly ended the Korean War because it had become a "bloody stalemate."

The main justification Bush gave in 2002 and 2003 for the invasion of Iraq was that some crazy dictator in a country with a culture Americans don't understand was about to get nuclear weapons and use them against the U.S. As Condi Rice said, "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud." Of course, the nuclear weapons and WMD claims weren't true. Now, most people believe that the Bush administration cooked the intelligence information to get public support for the war, but the WMD fear is still there. We've heard a lot in the past two years about the nuclear ambitions of Iran, Iraq's neighbor and likely participant in the Iraq civil war meltdown that could follow if the U.S. were to withdraw from Iraq.

So what do people think of when they think of the legacy of the Korean War? Most likely, it is North Korea, a nation with a culture Americans don't understand, ruled by a crazy dictator who has nuclear weapons and missiles that he may use against the U.S. If Jim Webb and the Democrats want to convince the American public that we should get out of Iraq, I can't think of a worse example to use than the Korean War.

If any of the New York Times reading, latte drinking, sushi eating liberals that Webb surely consulted for his speech had bothered to see Team America: World Police, they would have realized what a blunder it would be to end a pullout-from-Iraq speech with a reference to Korea. If the Democrats want to lead us out of Iraq, they'll have to be a lot smarter in making their case.

Bush spins himself as a stunned onlooker of events in Iraq.

Today President Bush added his own voice to the chorus seeking to increase public perception of the administration’s distance from the policies of Iraq government. (See earlier posts 1 & 2) His verbal imagery took me back to a scene from my own past. I crashed a hang glider I was piloting into a parking lot full of cars. By the time onlookers could get over to the me, I had already unhooked myself from the craft and was standing up– although very dazed. As curious people arrived, I simply blended into the crowd–too numb to accept the role of either perpetrator or victim.

That’s what Bush seems to be doing with Iraq. He’s now pretending to be just one of the crowd of stunned on lookers at a crash scene. On the PBS News Hour, he said, "If you were to take it and put me in an opinion poll and said ‘Do I approve of Iraq’ I’d be one of those that said, ‘No, I don’t approve of what’s taking place in Iraq."’ Bush also criticized the Iraq government’s execution of the Saddam–the man the U.S. handed over to Iraq to be hung and that Bush has called the man who "tried to kill my father." (See earlier posts 3 & 4) Ironically, given his personal issues with Saddam, Bush said the hanging "looked like it was kind of a revenge killing."

Eventually, someone will remind Bush that he’s been piloting the ship of state.

U.S. to Iraq: "You just can't change your evil ways..."

As I said in my previous post, the Saddam execution is serving as a focal point for the Bush Administration's efforts to distance itself from the new regime it created in Iraq, so as to smooth the way for an inevitable abandonment. According to a new New York Times article, U.S. officials are saying:

• The hanging reveals "how the 'new Iraq' is starting to resemble, the repressive, vengeful place it was under Mr. Hussein, albeit in a paler shade."
• "The way it has come out with the hanging, we’ve substituted one dictatorship for another.”

My previous post also scoffed at U.S. claims that it was compelled to bow to Iraqi sovereignty on the timing and manner of Saddam's execution, and the New York Times article contains more U.S. spin on this. However, the article also notes that the American military fort ironically named "Camp Justice" completely encloses the Istikhbarat prison in which Saddam was executed, and where thousands of hangings occurred under Saddam's regime.
(A Carlos Santana song inspired the post title)

The light at the bottom of the gallows.

Against the backdrop of recommendation by a New Jersey legislative commission that the State abolish the death penalty because it does not serve "a legitimate purpose" and "is inconsistent with evolving standards of decency," the U.S. government appears to be spinning the story that it bowed to the wishes of the sovereign nation of Iraq as to the timing of Saddam’s execution. Not turning Saddam over "would have involved riding roughshod over the Iraqi leaders’ insistence on their sovereignty in the execution," says an unnamed source in the New York Times. Balderdash – American taxpayers bought the Iraq government and are still paying for it.

It’s just a coincidence that the execution happened on the Friday evening before New Year’s weekend, 10:10 PM, Washington Time, the beginning of a non-religious holiday, when, for the next three-and-a-half days, the fewest number of people in the U.S. were reporting, reading or viewing the news. And, that the preparations for national mourning over the death of President Ford three days before were dominating what little news bandwidth there was. The White House claims that President Bush went to sleep without knowing whether the execution had been carried out, which would have been just after 9 PM Texas time, because he "knew that it was going to happen." If Iraq really is "sovereign nation," how did he "know" with such certainty?

A more likely explanation for U.S. insistence that Iraq is operating independently is that the Bush administration has now written off the whole affair as a bad investment, and wants to be in a position to wash it hands of it before the President’s term expires. The more opportunities Washington can give the Iraqi government to screw up before then, the easier it will be for Bush to blame the failure on them. Here is how the administration is using the New York Times to weave this theme:

For the past three years, the United States has attempted to lay the foundations in Iraq for a civil society and a nation under law. American officials say privately that the Maliki government, by allowing the Hussein execution to be conducted as it did, signaled more powerfully than ever before that it was unwilling or incapable of surmounting the deep sectarian divisions here.

Expect to hear "We gave them a great shot, and they blew it" repeated many times before the last American flies on the last flight out of Baghdad. Nobody in the current administration fought in Vietnam, but they surely remember the mockery of the "light at the end of the tunnel" promises when that last helicopter lifted away from the American embassy in Saigon, and they want to avoid it this time.

Exporting democracy to Iraq: First execute the previous administration.

Aside from how the timing of yesterday's news that Saddam was sentenced to die by hanging (two days before U.S. Congressional elections) was an obvious demonstration that the U.S. government directs the Iraq justice system, what is the message for fledgling democracies? What precedent was set? Should democracies hang former government leaders who used force to put down rebellions? If so, how will that choice motivate members of the current regime in Iraq a few years down the road when the U.S. is gone or nearly so and they are facing a violent rebellion or possible defeat in an election? Will they worry that they may face the same fate as Saddam if a different party were to take power? Could that motivate them to use any anti-democratic means at their disposal to stay in power?

Citizens and leaders of other democracies also might do well to ponder whether democracies ought to hang former government leaders guilty of violating domestic or international laws banning torture or killing of innocent civilians. (To see the editorial in the November 11 issue of The Economist, click here.)