Rocky Top Roundup
"Gunner" is hosting a Rocky Top Roundup of Tennessee (and ex-Tennessee) blogger posts. Have a look -- if only for the "Mooning Pumpkin Man" photograph.

I like these Rocky Top Brigade postfests because the RTB is full of people and opinions I probably wouldn't have encountered any other way -- SayUncle the gun enthusiast, Jim Pfaff the 16th Amendment skeptic, and so on. As Mao-Tse Tung might have said: let a thousand irises bloom!
posted by Thomas Nephew at 11:50:00 PM -- |  

 
John Kerry for President
There have been a number of excellent "Kerry for President" pieces over the last few weeks. The most notable and surprising one was by erstwhile Bush-fan Andrew Sullivan, which you should read immediately if you haven't already. But other evaluations by Dan Drezner, Phil Carter, and Matthew Yglesias stand out as well (several links via Gary Farber). See also the Slate staff endorsements and Matt Welch's admirably brief statement, which ends simply, "I think Bush needs to be fired."

Needless to say, given the button at the top of this blog and my posts about volunteering for Kerry, I agree with them. My top 10 reasons, off the top of my head:

10. I'd like an administration that doesn't just pretend to be compassionate towards the sick to score political points, and doesn't choose health programs for their political correctness. Also, I like Kerry's health care plan.
9. I think the alliance between Bush and the religious right poses a threat to American democracy and civil rights, from the FMA to jurisdiction stripping to the right to choose. It's time to take them both down a couple of notches.
8. I think Bush will continue to be a disaster for the environment, for labor, for education.
7. I'd like the phrases "arrogance" and "United States foreign policy" not to be synonymous any more.
6. Abu Ghraib -- don't get me started.
5. The Supreme Court and the future of the Constitution.
4. I want a President who doesn't seek untrammeled power, and doesn't hire advisors to split hairs about torture.
3. Stand up for democracy -- the Republican Party leadership barely understands the idea any more ... and I'm not so sure about a lot of the base either. (Oh, and while I'm at it, Karl Rove is a prick.)
2. John Kerry is a man I trust to seek out expert counsel and differing viewpoints to get to the truth, and a man I trust to take responsibility for mistakes made on his watch. George W. Bush is not.

And finally:

1. If over a thousand Americans can die for a screwed up war waged on false premises, at least two should be fired for it.

I'm sure I've left out stuff, and could have said it better, but it's a start. posted by Thomas Nephew at 1:01:00 PM -- |  

 
A screwed up war
Absent the two main legitimate justifications for the war, it could only be hoped that the occupation and reconstruction of Iraq would be run professionally, competently, and successfully.

Wrong again. Before this administration, I would have had that confidence; even in this one, whole departments like the State Department labored toward this end, only to have their advice ignored. But the primary fault lies again with Bush and Rumsfeld, who failed to support the occupation with anything near the troop levels it needed early to succeed. My authority for this is again someone who ought to know -- Paul Bremer, chief of the Coalition Provisional Authority. From the New York Times article "Bremer Critique on Iraq Raises Political Furor":

At DePauw University, Mr. Bremer said that "the single most important change -the one thing that would have improved the situation - would have been having more troops in Iraq at the beginning and throughout" the occupation. He said that he raised his concerns a number of times within the administration, but that he "should have been even more insistent."

In August of 2003, George Will noticed:

Paul Wolfowitz, deputy secretary of defense, was wrong in congressional testimony before the war. Although he said "we have no idea what we will need until we get there on the ground," he insisted that Gen. Eric Shinseki, a veteran of peacekeeping in the Balkans, was "wildly off the mark" in estimating that several hundred thousand troops would be needed in occupied Iraq.

Fellow traveller Andrew Sullivan made a good point a couple of weeks ago:

We were lucky in retrospect that Saddam didn't have any WMDs. The way this war has been run, it would have actually increased the chances of such weapons getting to America via terrorists rather than reduced them. At least, that seems to me to be the logical inference. Am I somehow wrong? Why did the administration leave weapons sites unguarded for so long? Why did they not send enough troops to secure the borders?

And that was before this week's revelation of the missing 300+ tons of high explosives at the Al Qaqaa site. I see now that George I. ("Idiot") Bush is arguing at least Saddam doesn't now "control all those weapons and explosives." No, probably a bunch of insurgents, decapitators, and God knows who else control them. Nice work, moron.

Pentagon/Bush administration fecklessness with arms sites was obvious from the beginning -- the looting of uranium back in the early aftermath of the war should have triggered Rumsfeld's immediate firing or resignation by itself. The attitude was pervasive; in June Patrick Graham reported Iraqi insurgents telling him they practically had permission to loot their weapons. "[The American soldiers] thought we were thieves. They watched us taking RPGs [rocket-propelled grenades] and other weapons and said, 'Are you Ali Baba?'" This was what the G.I.'s called thieves and looters. "We said yes, so they let us in. They thought we were destroying the Iraqi army."

This kind of operational cluelessness is a failure of planning, not of the soldiers on the scene who had enough on their plate without creating new security objectives on the spot. It's no wonder numerous military experts inside and outside the armed services feel Iraq is now a disaster. In a September Guardian article with the cheery title "Far Graver than Viet Nam," Sidney Blumenthal quotes retired general and former NSA chief William Odom, among many others:

"Bush hasn't found the WMD. Al-Qaida, it's worse, he's lost on that front. That he's going to achieve a democracy there? That goal is lost, too. It's lost." He adds: "Right now, the course we're on, we're achieving Bin Laden's ends. [...]

"This is far graver than Vietnam. There wasn't as much at stake strategically, though in both cases we mindlessly went ahead with the war that was not constructive for US aims. But now we're in a region far more volatile, and we're in much worse shape with our allies."

But even if the reasons for the war were mistakes, and the war itself was being waged incompetently and even counterproductively in the short term, I was at least confident that the coalition occupation would bring reliable decency and fairness to a dark corner of the world, and set an example recommending our system and our values to Iraqis. And then came Abu Ghraib.

As I wrote at the time, I have rarely been so ashamed of this country, and I will never, ever forgive this commander in chief or his advisors for it. Even Karl Rove was reported to think that it will take decades for the United States to recover. Once it became clear there would be no consequences at the top, I finally and irrevocably parted ways with this administration and its supporters; I believe that if you're considering voting for Bush, regardless of your party, this should be the final straw.

Believe it or not, I'm as much of a patriot as anyone -- I just seem to be more willing than many so-called patriots to see when we've done wrong; that's part of the deal, I think. And there are no two ways about it: Abu Ghraib was a stain on this country and on the administration that oversaw it. Rumsfeld and Bush signed off on policies at Guantanamo, signed off on their transfer to Abu Ghraib and elsewhere in Iraq, fobbed the whole thing off on the insufficiently staffed and trained units they sent over to do these jobs, and then pretended it was all just a few bad apples when the chickens came home to roost.

Even if you think -- against all evidence -- that Bush and Cheney are the best terror fighters in the world, this should make you wonder about their character and their fitness to serve this republic.

I don't know what should be done in Iraq. I do know who shouldn't get another chance to do it.

posted by Thomas Nephew at 2:00:00 AM -- |  

 
False premises
In the immediate aftermath of the war in Iraq last year, a poll by the University of Maryland's Program in International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) showed that Americans overwhelmingly advanced two reasons they believed the war had been waged: Iraqi WMDs and Iraq's possible links with Al Qaeda.*

It's worth repeating before the election: both of these reasons were dead wrong. First, WMD -- my own primary reason. From the Key Findings of the Comprehensive Report of the Special Advisor to the DCI on Iraq's WMD (the Duelfer report):

Nuclear
Iraq Survey Group (ISG) discovered further evidence of the maturity and significance of the pre-1991 Iraqi Nuclear Program but found that Iraq’s ability to reconstitute a nuclear weapons program progressively decayed after that date.
• Saddam Husayn ended the nuclear program in 1991 following the Gulf war. ISG found no evidence to suggest concerted efforts to restart the program.
• Although Saddam clearly assigned a high value to the nuclear progress and talent that had been developed up to the 1991 war, the program ended and the intellectual capital decayed in the succeeding years. [...]

Chemical
While a small number of old, abandoned chemical munitions have been discovered, ISG judges that Iraq unilaterally destroyed its undeclared chemical weapons stockpile in 1991. There are no credible indications that Baghdad resumed production of chemical munitions thereafter, a policy ISG attributes to Baghdad’s desire to see sanctions lifted, or rendered ineffectual, or its fear of force against it should WMD be discovered.

Biological
In practical terms, with the destruction of the Al Hakam facility, Iraq abandoned its ambition to obtain advanced BW weapons quickly. ISG found no direct evidence that Iraq, after 1996, had plans for a new BW program or was conducting BW-specific work for military purposes. Indeed, from the mid-1990s, despite evidence of continuing interest in nuclear and chemical weapons, there appears to be a complete absence of discussion or even interest in BW at the Presidential level.
(first emphasis in original)

Thus, neither WMD (including chemical or biological ones, which I considered sufficient) nor WMD programs (a fallback I insisted on) were present to any significant degree. The Duelfer report found plenty of intent to reconstitute WMD programs, but little-to-no ability to do so. True, containment was being undermined, but apparently not in ways serious enough to give Saddam what he wanted.

On to the purported Iraq/Al Qaeda links. If the 9/11 Commission's conclusion -- "no credible evidence" -- seemed too partisan and biased for you, no less an authority than Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld has permanently discredited the idea. According to a Defense Department press release,

Rumsfeld said he has not seen any strong evidence that direct ties existed, he stressed that he does not work in the intelligence field and that then-CIA Director George Tenet had presented solid evidence of ties between Iraq and al Qaeda.**

As Rumsfeld observes, Iraqi officials were clearly not "Little Sisters of the Poor." But mere contacts do not rise to the level of a casus belli when we should have been keeping our powder dry for stopping more serious threats -- like North Korea, A.Q. Khan, or -- remember them? -- Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda.

It wasn't just Bush
I was no better at reading the tea leaves. I was swayed from a conservative to a liberal evaluation of the available evidence -- not in the partisan meanings of those words, but in their fundamental meanings: how to evaluate risk.

Sure, I wasn't alone in my belief that there were WMD and/or WMD programs in Iraq. I thought the German BND intelligence agency, for example, was a reliable second opinion about Iraqi nuclear weapons development. But the BND, too, was probably just another victim of Chalabi "curveballs." And there was never any clinching, definitive evidence -- after all, how could there be? Others noticed; see most notably "RonK"'s summary "Operation Desert Snipe."

I let my fears influence me towards a "better safe than sorry" view of Iraqi WMD. I still feel a recurring, low-level variety of those fears here in D.C. -- I think you're either crazy or lying if you claim you don't think about the next 9/11-squared around here. (It was noticeable to me how it went away while I was in Germany, and returned by about the time I was wending my way through customs at Dulles Airport.)

But I did myself no favor on that score by supporting getting into the war as much as I did. Given the smug dunces in charge who apparently aren't even aware there's a problem, with huge weapons caches missing, with terror groups gaining recruits and experience, with the U.S. military tied down in a war that could have waited, and with even more serious threats gathering elsewhere, I'm worse off than I was before.


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* 60% said WMD were the main justification for the war, and 19% said Al Qaeda links were; the two reasons also combined for 66% of respondents' next most important choices. The poll was taken May 14-18 among 1265 respondents, the margin of error was +/- 3% for questions posed to the entire sample.
** Rumsfeld subsequently tried to backpedal, saying that "linkages" were observed, but the notion that these were operational allies instead of "let's do lunch sometime" contacts was clearly never one that Rumsfeld or his administration colleagues shared. posted by Thomas Nephew at 1:25:00 AM -- |  

 
Lunar eclipse heralds end of curse
Congratulations Boston Red Sox! With the suitably occult omen of a lunar eclipse, the "Curse of the Bambino" was lifted, and lo, the Hub rejoiced.

Congratulations also to long suffering fans like Brett Marston. There was so much talk of the 86 year drought you got the impression there are Red Sox fans dying as we speak, allowing their respirators to be turned off or just peacefully passing on, nothing left to wait for.

That 7th game win over the Yankees from three games down is truly one of the most satisfying wins I've ever witnessed. I'm glad it was followed by a surprisingly quick Boston World Series win. Tough for the Cardinals, though -- they ran into America's team and got shredded. Better luck next time.

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UPDATE, same night: A local sports announcer pointed out that in the 86 years since the Red Sox last won the pennant, the Soviet Union rose and fell. Reminds me of the Tom Lehrer line, "By the time Mozart was my age, he'd been dead for five years." All hail the mighty Red Sox! Older than empires, slayer of Yankees!
posted by Thomas Nephew at 11:58:00 AM -- |