"Well, at least I make strong decisions, I lead"
Joseph Biden, in a Rolling Stone panel discussion of Iraq:

About six months ago, the president said to me, 'Well, at least I make strong decisions, I lead.' I said, 'Mr. President, look behind you. Leaders have followers. No one's following. Nobody.'

To be honest, I think Biden may have inserted the 'at least' as a paraphrase of the context of Bush's remark, it's hard to imagine anyone saying "at least I make strong decisions." ("Like, yeah, they're stupid, but I make 'em and they're strong."?) But Biden's rejoinder was on target regardless.

Via Kevin Drum, who also cites another juicy quote from Biden telling Bush and Cheney to their faces in the Oval Office: "Mr. Vice President, I wouldn't keep you if it weren't constitutionally required." There's more brutally critical stuff in the panel discussion, which included Generals Zinni and Wes Clark, Fouad Ajami, and Bob Kerrey, to name a few. posted by Thomas Nephew at 10:34:00 PM -- |  

 
Mission accomplished
The Center for American Progress thinks it's dredged up something to embarrass Dick Cheney with again:

During the 2000 campaign, Cheney said he wanted 'to change the tone in Washington, to restore a spirit of civility and respect and cooperation,' and that he was 'absolutely determined [to] restore a tone of civility and decency to the debate in Washington.'

But Cheney knows he has his critics beat again: strictly speaking, he has changed the tone, and he's taking the first steps to restoring a long-gone spirit of civility.

Incidentally, for the New York Times' Sheryl Stolberg to end this piece with a bunch of unsubstantiated complaints against Senator Daschle (especially after he specifically suggested ways to improve the climate in the Senate) is a species of howler all its own. posted by Thomas Nephew at 9:50:00 PM -- |  

 
Better late than never
Credit where credit is apparently due: The New York Times reports "Bush Backs Condom Use to Prevent Spread of AIDS":

President Bush said on Wednesday for the first time that the United States should 'learn from the experience' of countries like Uganda in fighting AIDS and embraced the use of condoms to prevent its spread, a sensitive issue among conservative groups that have fought the adoption of any strategy that does not focus on abstinence.

Announcing some modest changes to government financing for antiretroviral drugs in front of a church-affiliated group here, Mr. Bush also argued for sexual abstinence. But in his comments, he appeared to be offering something to both sides in the debate: his base of social conservatives as well as moderates in crucial election states like Pennsylvania, who have argued that Mr. Bush has been too slow to embrace effective methods of preventing AIDS.

'We can learn from the experiences of other countries when it comes to a good program to prevent the spread of AIDS, like the nation of Uganda,' Mr. Bush said. 'They've started what they call the A.B.C. approach to prevention of this deadly disease. That stands for: Abstain, be faithful in marriage, and, when appropriate, use condoms."

A while back I posted an item, "Condom Sense," getting after Bush for seeming to ignore or drop condoms from the Ugandan A.B.C. approach he liked to tout. This marks an important reversal, it seems to me. It's a shame it took so long, but -- barring some kind of retraction or 'clarification' -- it's important for all but taking this non-issue off the table for the foreseeable future. posted by Thomas Nephew at 2:07:00 AM -- |  

 
What's at stake
Professor Jack Balkin on why the 2004 elections are so important:

The Constitution we are likely to inherit from a second Bush Administration will be a bit like the famous New Yorker cartoon of the New Yorker's vision of the World, with the Commander-in-Chief Clause dominating the page in powerful, large letters, and the rest of the Constitutional text shrinking away into tiny, barely readable prose.*

Professor Balkin has several other posts recently -- in my blogging time scale, that's over the past 3 or 4 weeks -- dealing with the Pentagon and OLC torture memos, including Above the Law? and Arguments That Make You Ashamed to be a Lawyer. So does Jim Henley (Better Angels, Now is the time, The Fish Rots from the Head but the Whole Fish Rots), and so does Brett Marston (Relevant and not).

One reason for my recent two week hiatus was the sinking feeling that I've been like a poorly oiled weathervane, slowly shifting with the wind. 9/11 continues to loom large in my thinking: there are people out there who want to kill me and my family and my fellow citizens in their thousands. That seems like war to me, and that means that the essential definition of war pertains: if German soldiers manning the guns at Normandy were, so to speak, guilty until proven innocent, to be killed before learning of their inner worth or views on the Third Reich, so certainly are Al Qaeda terrorists -- assuming you can identify them.

So yes, fight them where you find them, but no, don't torture even them. For one thing, and not the main thing, it doesn't work, except to admit you're so defeated you have no other clue. Those 'ticking bomb' scenarios are constructed to presume plenty of knowledge about the bomb and its makers, yet will inevitably be used to justify 'fishing expedition' torture (a point well made by the indispensably hilarious fafblog).

I confess some things like verbal haranguing, rewards/loss of privileges, or "good cop/bad cop" don't rise to my instinctive definition of torture -- things like rape, dogs, hooded mock electrocutions, and "stress positions" do. But at any rate law and the expectation of reciprocal good or ill treatment aren't matters of instinct. It's better that we err on the side of civilization than on the side of barbarity. The occasional scrap of information isn't worth the lasting moral burden of any prisoner mistreatment, defined loosely as "that which you wouldn't want done to yourself." It certainly isn't worth the threat to our society of institutionalized prisoner mistreatment, and it rises to the level of grounds for impeachment or rebellion to have that happen via lawyerly hairsplitting of laws clearly intended to do the opposite.

I'm don't think all arguments for Commander-in-Chief prerogatives are bad on their face. But an important point to me now is that I'm quite sure this is not the "leadership" I want making them. Henley:

Since September 11, 2001, this country has faced not an existential threat, but an essential one: who will we have the courage to be? Lately, abetted by an administration gone mad with vainglory, we have begun to fail that test. We take it as our right to commit the abuses we condemn in others. Worse, we take it as our right to transgress ourselves, and continue to condemn those who trespass likewise. (link from original)

I'd differ in calling the threat both existential and essential, but even so Henley's point remains valid. We shouldn't let even legitimate security concerns trump every other consideration every time -- let alone spurious ones based on the utility of torture, whether "consistent with military necessity" or not, to use President Bush's weasel wording in his February 7 memorandum.**

We need a Commander-in-Chief who knows in his bones that he is subject to the laws and Constitution of this country -- and doesn't seek 50 page memos to get around those requirements. We don't have one. We'll have to get one. We need a Congress that will fulfill its role as a check on the executive. We don't have one. We'll have to get one.

Most of all, though, we need to be the citizens who insist on these things. We may have fallen out of the habit, whether out of a misplaced (or illusory) sense of bipartisanship, sheer laziness, or something else. But there's no one else to to do our job for us.


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* A graphic version of this vision has been produced by Ernest Miller.
** Acrobat document, via the Washington Post "Bush Administration Documents on Interrogation" site collecting the June 22 document dump. posted by Thomas Nephew at 1:25:00 AM -- |  

 
Stills from lost Hitchcock version of "Make Way for Ducklings"
... discovered by Jens Scholz

posted by Thomas Nephew at 11:23:00 PM -- |  

 
Wild Blue Yonder
I suppose the blog name will change now: congratulations, TSgt. Stryker! And after a lot of hard work, too. posted by Thomas Nephew at 11:16:00 PM -- |  

 
Optimist club
On June 10, Charles Krauthammer wrote a Washington Post column objecting to what he called "Reagan Revisionism" -- selling Reagan short as a sunny, optimistic, 'amiable dunce.' In the process, he engaged in a little revisionism of his own:

In the early '80s, the West experienced a nuclear hysteria -- a sudden panic about imminent nuclear destruction and a mindless demand to "freeze" nuclear weapons. What had changed to bring this on? Reagan had become president. Like George W. Bush today, the U.S. president was seen as a greater threat to peace than was the enemy he was confronting.

The nuclear freeze and the accompanying hysteria are an embarrassment that liberals prefer to forget today. Reagan's critics completely misunderstood the logic and the power of his nuclear posture. He took a very hard line on the Soviets, who had broken the nuclear status quo by placing missiles in Europe. Backed by Margaret Thatcher and Helmut Kohl, Reagan faced the Soviets down -- despite enormous "peace" demonstrations throughout the West, including the largest one to date in U.S. history (New York City, 1982) -- and ultimately forced the Soviets to dismantle the missiles and begin their overall retreat. [...]

Reagan understood that the key to peace was never arms control. Security had nothing to do with the number of weapons; it had everything to do with the intention and power of those who possessed them.

That's one way to remember it, and as a frontline opponent of the nuclear freeze political movement since its inception, it's not surprising that's how Krauthammer saw it.

I think the reality was more complicated. Reagan may ultimately not have been the apocalyptic cowboy many (like me) feared he would be, and deserves credit for a pragmatism I hadn't suspected in his first and much of his second term in office.

But the Reagan administration played a game of nuclear brinksmanship that recalls the pre-World War I dreadnought arms race that led directly to World War I -- and unlike that war, the weapons themselves were not merely the instruments of war but potentially the very object of war.

That was because those weapons were frequently best understood and therefore potentially used or targeted as "first strike" weapons -- weapons designed to threaten and perhaps achieve an overwhelming first strike that would destroy the enemy's ability to retaliate.

The MX missile -- misleadingly called "Peacekeeper" -- was a case in point. It combined 10 multiple independent reentry vehicles -- MIRVs in the jargon of the field -- with highly precise targeting with estimated "circular errors probable" (CEP) of 400 feet or less. That is, 50% of the time these warheads would land within 400 feet of their target. At 475 kilotons apiece that wasn't just good enough for government work, that was a sentence of destruction to any Russian missile silo the MX was aimed at.** And the arithmetical "genius" of the MX MIRVs was that 1 launched missile could hope to destroy 10 tardy peaceful ones.**

Under these circumstances -- and the more so as more offensive and defensive weapons systems, from Star Wars to attack submarines to Tridents to Pershing missiles were inexorably added to Pentagon shopping lists -- Soviet behavior during a crisis would have been under tremendous pressure to use their own missiles first or risk their destruction: "use 'em or lose 'em." And as ever more "demonstrations of national resolve to preserve deterrence" were developed, the effectiveness of every part of the entire system the Reagan administration proposed did not even need to be proven. "Star Wars" technology was best understood as a long term threat to be added to the very real threats already in good working order.

It was as part of the nuclear freeze movement that I became familiar with these home truths about the nuclear arms race of the 1980s. Quite the opposite of Krauthammer's claim, it was one of the most well-informed, unhysterical citizen political movements the country had ever produced, not just creating mass demonstrations, guerilla theater, and cute bumperstickers about bombers and bake sales, but eventually wielding real political muscle as well.

That muscle led to political donnybrooks like the MX missile votes of 1984 and 1985,*** Senate and House votes that dragged on for weeks and took every ounce of commitment the Reagan White House on one side and nuclear activists on the other could muster. Even though those missiles were ultimately approved, these knock-down, drag-out, embittered political trench wars became evidence in themselves that limits were being reached.

Together with demonstrations and actions across the country, the MX votes and other Capitol Hill confrontations ultimately convinced both Reagan and Gorbachev that there was substantial political will in the United States to seek a way out of what seemed like a hopeless drift towards nuclear war. It's to the credit of the nuclear freeze movement, to Gorbachev, and -- I'm willing to concede -- to Reagan as well that the two superpowers began to step away from the abyss with the second Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START II). It's less clear though that Reagan's arms buildup had as much effect as his later pragmatism did; as Richard Ned Lebow and Janice Gross Stein argue, Soviet military spending was flat during the Reagan years -- not the ideal evidence for some kind of Communist heart attack caused by overindulging in military hardware. (Lebow/Stein link via Aziz Poonawalla)

While the MX missile is now soon to be 'scrapped', a closer reading shows that the missiles will remain intact, while the warheads will be stored rather than scrapped or used as fuel. The specter of MIRV missiles remains undead.

Meanwhile, Krauthammer and other Reagan enthusiasts are due their days of Reagan remembrance and nostalgia, but not at the expense of forgetting the risks the Reagan administration ran for all of us with its nuclear weapons policies. Reagan was right to emphasize that the Soviet Union was an evil empire, and deserved the scorn of liberals and conservatives alike. But another of his insights -- that the Kremlin was on its last legs, that Soviet communism would fall of its own weight -- makes it less than clear why the West needed to court nuclear Armageddon with that doddering evil empire quite so strenuously.

Krauthammer objects to calling Reagan a mere optimist -- "every other person on the No. 6 bus is an optimist." He's right -- Reagan was optimistic on an altogether different level: he bought 50 MX missiles and called them "Peacekeepers."


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* Estimates of the force of the Hiroshima bomb vary between 12.5 to 15 kilotons.
** To be sure, as Fred Kaplan, Alexander Cockburn, and others pointed out back in the 1980s, CEPs calculated from missile tests in the Pacific by either superpower might not have come true in wartime launches on different trajectories over the polar ice cap, and other factors like wind and blast might have degraded accuracy further. But soldiers on either side are paid to plan for the worst the other side can do, not to gamble that the other side will fail.
***Library of Congress queries of 1983-84 and 1985-86 House and Senate action, search for "M-X". As I recall, bills by Mavroules, Hart, and Leahy were among the most bitterly contested; the www.thomas.loc records give little context, unfortunately. posted by Thomas Nephew at 2:07:00 AM -- |  

 
Shorter John Paul Stevens on the Pledge
Even shorter John Paul Stevens opinion on the Pledge of Allegiance:

Irrelevant questions give us the chance to avoid doing our job, especially if the job makes us uncomfortable.*

I can only hope there's no parental custody issue for the Hamdi and Padilla cases.


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*In the original mealymouth: ''When hard questions of domestic relations are sure to affect the outcome, the prudent course is for the federal court to stay its hand rather than reach out to resolve a weighty question of federal constitutional law."
Post written 6/15. posted by Thomas Nephew at 1:17:00 AM -- |