Progress is just another word for nothing left to kill
This deserves a lot more attention, I think. On September 10, General David Petraeus presented the slideshow that's fast becoming the 2007 version of Colin Powell's presentation to the UN back in 2003 -- flashy, high stakes, and more than a little misleading.

One of the catchiest slides was the fourth one, titled "Ethno-Sectarian Violence." Along with a standard frequency against time plot, it showed a series of map of Baghdad with "violence hot spots" -- density plots of violent incidents -- flaring pre-"surge" and then dying down. Visually, the effect was pretty much like watching a fire going out, and the implication was that Bush's brilliant surge was the fire truck that did it.

But there's another reason fires die down: they run out of fuel. Matthew Yglesias points to a post by Ilan Goldenberg ("Democracy Arsenal") that compares Petraeus's maps to very similar maps presented by General David Jones to Congress a few days earlier. The difference? The Petraeus maps show a Baghdad with neighborhoods that never change -- this one's majority Sunni, that one's majority Shia, the other one's mixed.

The Jones maps show that the Pentagon knows better: in July 2006, most of Baghdad was colored light brown for "mixed Muslim." By July 2007, however, most of the city has been transformed into large swathes of dark green (75%+ Shia) and blue (75%+ Sunni).

In other words, there wasn't much left to fight about; ethnic cleansing was nearing completion in Baghdad's neighborhoods. As smintheus ("unbossed") -- possibly the first to report this on Monday -- put it:

The maps falsify one of the most delicate of issues: The failure of the "surge" to stem ethnic/sectarian cleansing of Baghdad. If that information were brought to the fore, it would call into question the claims by Petraeus and other spokespeople for the Bush administration that the "surge" is responsible for an alleged drop in violence in Baghdad. If there is any such drop, it may be due in large part to the success of Shia attempts to drive Sunnis from their homes and into exile.

Raising, in turn, other delicate issues: if ethnic cleansing in Baghdad has run its course to this extent, what good are U.S. soldiers doing there -- and how much harm is left to prevent? Can they come home now -- all of them?

And will Congress ever get truthful testimony about Iraq from those responsible for beginning and waging this war?

And does anyone working there care?


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UPDATE, 9/14: Incredibly, that's not all just for this one slide. Robert Waldmann noticed that the ethnic-sectarian killing levels almost certainly ignore the horrific August truck bomb attacks on the Yazidi minority that killed 572 people.
EDIT, 9/14: Link to Jones report ("Independent Commission on the Security Forces of Iraq") added, map images (via Yglesias) added. posted by Thomas Nephew at 1:15:00 AM -- |    

 
QOTD

Our troops are stuck between a President without a plan to succeed, and a Congress without the courage to bring them home.

--John Edwards, rebutting George Bush on MSNBC tonight (video, transcript). posted by Thomas Nephew at 11:48:00 PM -- |    

 
FISA since 9/11 -- color-coded for your convenience
Thanks to the latest advances in technology, we can now not just be subject to electronic surveillance without warrant, but can also examine with great precision the laws allegedly permitting the government to do so. Surveillance law expert David Kris has helpfully provided a color-coded document showing just how much FISA has changed since 9/11/2001.



Orange underlined and strikeout font show additions and deletions due to the "Protect America Act" cave-in from earlier this summer, red edits are for those due to the 2001 "USA PATRIOT Act", and so forth. A key is provided at the top of the document.

Via Kim Zetter at "Threat Level," a WIRED Magazine blog. posted by Thomas Nephew at 6:30:00 PM -- |    

 
Petraeus: surge has failed, might not do any good anyway
As is well known, outgoing Senator John Warner stumped General David Petraeus with the simple question whether the surge, if continued, was going to make America safer. Via The Huffington Post:

WARNER: I hope in the recesses of your heart that you know that strategy will continue the casualties, stress on our forces, stress on military families, stress on all Americans. Are you able to say at this time, if we continue what you have laid before the Congress, this strategy, that if you continue, you are making America safer?

PETRAEUS: Sir, I believe that this is indeed the best course of action to achieve our objections in Iraq.

WARNER: Does that make America safer?

PETRAEUS: Sir, I don't know actually. I have not sat down and sorted out in my own mind. What I have focused on and been riveted on is how to accomplish the mission of the Multinational Force in Iraq.

Back when I was more reasonable and fair and balanced, I'd have said, "Of course he doesn't know. That's not his job, Senator, it's yours and the President's, you lazy s.o.b.'s." Generals decide how to take a hill, occupy a city, or run a hopeless counterinsurgency while the local pols take the month of August off. As I once understood it, politicians are for deciding whether any of that makes America safer.

But that's all changed, because (1) the White House and Congress have outsourced their Iraq responsibility to Petraeus, hoping he can Powerpoint all of them out of this debacle, and (2) Petraeus is always, always willing to help with timely rosy assessments from Iraq. Why? I don't know; maybe he's got visions of 2012 or 2016 dancing in his head, maybe it's on page 259 of some brainiac counterinsurgency manual he wrote -- "Enhance domestic political support infrastructure with routine prevaricational propaganda (Figure 27-6). "

So tough beans, General. You screwed up and admitted you haven't thought an inch ahead of your nose about whether anything you're doing does, you know, any good. And these days that's your job, because it sure as heck isn't President Bush's job, Senator Warner's job, or anybody in Washington's job. Not any more -- they may be stupid, but they're not crazy.

Meanwhile, here's a September 7 message from the general to people he suspected he couldn't spin -- his own troops:

Many of us had hoped this summer would be a time of tangible political progress at the national level as well. One of the justifications for the surge, after all, was that it would help create the space for Iraqi leaders to tackle the tough questions and agree on key pieces of 'national reconciliation' legislation. It has not worked out as we had hoped. All participants, Iraqi and coalition alike, are dissatisfied by the halting progress on major legislative initiatives such as the oil framework law, revenue sharing, and de-ba'athification reform.

Therefore, the surge hasn't worked and hundreds of your buddies died so Bush can tell himself he didn't lose Iraq, Petraeus understandably failed to add. He did spin 'em a little; political progress wasn't one of the justifications for the surge, it was the only reason for the surge that made any kind of sense at all.

Petraeus Week has truly been another low in American democracy, and that's saying something. It will no doubt be capped with a "debate" leading to a bipartisan "compromise" that might get Iraq troop levels back to where we were just before the 2006 elections... if we're lucky... just in time for the 2008 elections. Much fundraising will ensue. Brilliantly played, everyone. posted by Thomas Nephew at 1:30:00 AM -- |    

 
Tell the DC Establishment: Enough!
Glenn Greenwald, Firedoglake, and Open Left are asking for people to support this statement:

In 2006, the Americans elected a new Congress to end the occupation of Iraq. Despite this mandate, the political leadership in both parties have refused to heed the public will. Worse still, these leaders, as well as various reporters and think tank 'experts' have been rolled by a PR campaign to justify the military surge by General David Petraeus, a man who has consistently touted progress in Iraq since 2003. By signing this petition, you are demanding that reporters acknowledge Petraeus's long record of errant judgment in Iraq. You are also demanding that politicians to heed the public will and vote against this occupation, by refusing to vote for any bill that funds the war that does not contain binding timelines for withdrawal that compel Bush to remove troops. Anything else enables the occupation of Iraq until at least the end of Bush's Presidency. Enough is enough. The noxious stew of DC 'experts', journalists, and political leaders of both parties that keep troops in Iraq needs to hear our anger.

You can add your name here. I did. posted by Thomas Nephew at 1:20:00 AM -- |    

 
9/11, the salience of mortality, and the future of American democracy

1. PLEASE BRIEFLY DESCRIBE THE EMOTIONS THAT THE THOUGHT OF YOUR OWN DEATH AROUSES IN YOU.
2. JOT DOWN, AS SPECIFICALLY AS YOU CAN, WHAT YOU THINK WILL HAPPEN TO YOU AS YOU PHYSICALLY DIE AND ONCE YOU ARE PHYSICALLY DEAD.
   

These two questions are part of one kind of psychological experiment* designed to measure the difference in subsequent behavior between people confronted with thinking about their own death, and those not so confronted. Using methods like these, psychology researchers are zeroing in on a truth that is still not well enough, or widely enough, understood about events like 9/11: they really do change everything -- that is, they really do change the way people, in the aggregate, think about everything.

Mortality salience
In "Death Grip: How political psychology explains Bush's ghastly success," John Judis of The New Republic provides an overview of this research, called variously "mortality salience theory" or "terror management theory." Judis recalls going door to door in West Virginia in the June and then just before the 2004 election, and being struck by how skeptical voter attitudes towards Bush had reversed and solidified into Bush support. In contrast to "rational choice theory" which presupposes, well, rational choice, Judis explains that

[t]here is, however, one group of scholars -- members of the relatively new field of political psychology -- who are trying to explain voter preferences that can't be easily quantified ... the research that is perhaps most relevant to the 2004 election has been conducted by psychologists Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, and Tom Pyszczynski. In the the early 1980s, they developed what they clumsily called "terror management theory." Their idea was not about how to clear the subways in the event of an attack, but about how people cope with the terrifying and potentially paralyzing realization that, as human beings, we are destined to die. Their experiments showed that the mere thought of one's mortality can trigger a range of emotions -- from disdain for other races, religions, and nations, to a preference for charismatic over pragmatic leaders, to a heightened attraction to traditional mores.

(Links added.) Judis goes on to explain how the three researchers were influenced by the work of Ernest Becker, whose final book, "The Denial of Death," won a Pulitzer Prize in 1974. Based on Judis' explanation -- but without having read Becker's book -- I'd venture to say the fear of death is a subsurface foundation of Maslow's "hierarchy of needs."

Judis describes remarkable and apparently widely reproduced results indicating that people recently confronted with thoughts of their own death or death in general are more likely to

• take a negative view of essays critical of the United States (American respondents),
• take a negative view of essays by "outsiders" (such as Jews, in a survey of Christians, or Turks, in a survey of Germans)
• favor a "charismatic" leader telling them they were not ordinary, but part of a special nation
  

Moreover, the effects remained when the respondents were unconscious of what was going on -- and they were readily extended to the effects of reminders of 9/11. Similar to how subliminal exposure to the word "death" caused respondents to complete "coff-" as "coffin" rather than "coffee", subliminal exposure to the phrases "9/11" and "WTC" did so as well.

How to hack a presidential election
In a key 2004 experiment, Rutgers students were subjected to mortality reminders, and then compared to a control group for their likelihood to vote for Bush. The control group favored Kerry by four to one -- while those reminded of death favored Bush by two to one. Judis:

This strongly suggested that Bush's popularity was sustained by mortality reminders. The psychologists concluded in a paper published after the election that the government terror warnings, the release of Osama bin Laden's video on October 29, and the Bush campaign's reiteration of the terror threat... were integral to Bush's victory.

It certainly didn't hurt.

What remains unclear from Judis' article is why not everyone responded the same way to 9/11, or to reminders about it. Of course, not everyone in the classic "mortality salience" experiments reacted the same way either; maybe it's some uncharted psychological predisposition, maybe it's a difference in what happened to them the morning of the experiment.

Likewise, maybe Americans with an actively hostile stance towards Bush at the time of 9/11, or thereafter, were "immunized" from the "mortality salience" effect Pyszczynski et al describe. Or maybe the "mortality salience" effect was enhanced for people with deeper empathies for the victims, higher exposure to TV broadcasts about the attacks, or being part of a crowd or a group co-experiencing the attacks or their aftermath. Looking overseas, maybe repeat exposure to mortality reminders dulls the effect -- after all, the IRA or the Red Army Fraction terror campaigns in the U.K. and Germany didn't result in the same kind of "ghastly successes" that Bush, Rove, and Cheney celebrated.

But maybe that's also because the peoples involved still remember far worse than a band of criminals on a terror spree -- and because their political systems made it harder for a 'commander in chief' to exploit fear the way our current rulers have.

"Nobody jumped."Similarly, certain elements of the American reaction to the deaths of 9/11 hint at a particular American vulnerability. The national allergic reaction to the "Falling Man" photo is Exhibit A. Under guise of outrage, concern for privacy, and the welfare of children reading newspapers, to name a few, that photo -- arguably the Tomb of the Unknown 9/11 Victim -- was "airbrushed from history," as the Falling Man documentary film by Henry Singer and Richard Numeroff put it.**

The need to deny that people in extremis had to choose one nightmarish death over another was widespread, as writer Tom Junod found when he set out to investigate who the iconic falling man was:

I talked to the coroner's office in New York; I asked them for a count of how many people jumped that day. And what the woman from the coroner's office said was 'Nobody jumped that day. They were blown out, they were forced out... we don't say that they jumped. Nobody jumped.'

That just made me feel that there was just something going on that was not familiar American territory about dealing with tragedy. There were just things about that day you weren't supposed to say, you weren't supposed to see, you weren't supposed to talk about."

Fear itself
We are frequently reminded that the next terror attack is a matter of "when, not if." We should see such reminders for what they are: the self-serving comments of those who need American citizens to remain in a defensive crouch, dreading the next blow, applauding whatever is done to ward it off.

It's prudent to identify threats and reduce or eliminate them; it's prudent to calmly and quietly prepare for what may come, so attacks are thwarted and those that aren't are survived by as many as possible. But it's also prudent to steel ourselves for what happens after an attack: anger, grief, and fear -- and the exploitation of that anger, grief and fear, then or later, by whatever unlikely figures (Dubya, Rudy, etc.) happened to be on hand to simulate leadership in our hours of need.

Because if Pyszczynski et al are right, it's not just the Roves, the Bushs and the Cheneys I'll need to be on my guard against -- I'll need to keep a close eye on myself as well. It's not that there's nothing to fear but fear itself -- it's that fear, particularly the fear of death, preys on us in ways that predictably distort and damage the way we live.


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* From the "Research Materials" section of the Terror Management Theory site maintained by TMT researcher Jamie Arndt (University of Missouri).
** Tellingly, the US debut of the film is only today, on the Discovery Channel; it's already been seen in Britain and Britain, in March and September of last year.

NOTES: I first wrote about Pyszczynski, Greenberg, and Solomon in August, 2004: "Fear works. What works better?" A documentary -- "Flight From Death: A Quest for Immortality" -- has been made about the issues raised by their work and that of Ernest Becker; judging by the trailer on YouTube, it looks extraordinary. A more recent post of mine -- "The Illuminated Crowd" -- is also an attempt at discussing the political psychology of 9/11, in reaction to a remarkable sculpture of the same name in Montreal, and the famous work "Crowds and Power" by Elias Canetti.

EDITS, 9/10: final sentence, "applauding" line, 2d footnote added; "American citizens" for "country."
UPDATE, 9/10: Surprisingly, there've been only a few other reactions to Judis's article so far. Among them, Kim Sbarcea ("Thinking Shift") notes that Giuliani is ringing the changes on death reminders; Alan Bock sees something perverse in seemingly celebrating events like 9/11 or Katrina, rather than simply commemorating them. After having written a five part series in 2006 on fear and environmentalism, David Roberts ("Gristmill") uses Judis' article to argue that "fear of death leads to authoritarianism, not sustainability"; many comments followed. (Via Ken Stokes of "SusHI"). Via her blog, Rachel Maddow discussed it on her Air America radio show on 8/31.
2D UPDATE, 9/10: OK, a lot more reactions to the accessible online version of "Death Grip," including Avedon Carol and (via her) Kevin Maroney.
posted by Thomas Nephew at 1:10:00 AM -- |    

 
Edwards on terrorism, Pakistan ...and Iraq
I've had a look now at John Edwards' speech on terrorism from late last week -- particularly the part about going into Pakistan if there was "actionable intelligence about imminent terrorist activity and the Pakistan government refuses to act." Vishnu be praised, he didn't even discuss nuclear weapons in that context like Barack Obama -- let alone decline to rule them out, like Hillary Clinton. But frankly, Edwards' specific scenario itself isn't all that likely; if it's attacks on the U.S. or Europe we're talking about, I don't think "actionable intelligence of an imminent attack" will be available in Karachi or Peshawar , nor will action there matter very much in the short run.

But something like this needs to be raised; Pakistan may not want the job of, say, catching OBL & Mr.Z., but some preparations need to be made in that case so that the job can be done without exchanging fire with Pakistani troops or planes.

That may be a long shot, but it's worth bearing in mind. We're often reminded that there's not going to be some "surrender on the USS Missouri" moment in our current wars that proves to everyone "OK, we're done now." But OBL in plasticuffs might be one of the very closest analogues to that we can envision; even if it's just one millionaire terrorist, it could finally give many Americans some room to reconsider where we are and what we want after the Bush years. Sometimes I wonder if that's precisely why it hasn't happened yet. Edwards:

The world stood united behind America after 9/11. But instead of leading a truly visionary campaign against global terrorism, our president led America down a garden path. He used the attacks to justify a preconceived war against a nation he now admits had no ties to Al Qaeda. He then offered belligerence and hostility to the world community, and we have been rewarded in kind.

President Bush, like the Republicans following him today and even some Democrats, was stuck in the past, and he still is. He had no grasp of the new threats we faced, so he failed to offer a vision to keep us safe in a world that had changed. Saddam Hussein was the threat he knew, so Iraq was the war he waged.

We needed new thinking and a bold vision to protect the world for our children; instead, George Bush literally gave us his father's war—but without his father's allies or his father's sense of decency. What's more and what's worse, the so-called "war on terror" he used as his excuse for war in Iraq became his excuse for trampling our Constitution and, most perversely, for ignoring the demands of the actual struggle against terrorism. Because in George Bush's reality, disagreement is called weak, challenge is suspect, and opposition downright unpatriotic.

There's more; I think it's a good speech that gives me confidence Edwards gets it about how counterproductive and, shall we say, geographically confused this administration's "war on terror" has been.

Meanwhile, Edwards' comment about Pakistan may remind a lot of people: "oh yeah, this guy hasn't forgotten I still want OBL's rear end -- and that 6 years on I still haven't got it from George Dubya "dead or alive" Bush." With the follow-on thought, "Instead we're stuck in g****m Iraq for reasons I've never been clear on, and nobody seems to really want to get us out of there."

And that's where Edwards diverges from Obama and Clinton, if the American people only knew it. * Edwards wants all U.S. troops all the way out of Iraq (if not necessarily the region). By contrast, last I checked both Obama and Clinton are still talking about a "residual force" of 40,000-50,000 -- and they haven't been urging the Democratic leadership to hang tough about Iraq the way Edwards has. It's hard to improve on Edwards' statement on Thursday about Congress possibly granting more funding for Iraq without any withdrawal timelines:

In 2006, the American people elected a Democratic Congress to change course and end this war. It's the whole reason the American people voted for change. Yet, 10 months after the election, we still have the status quo and Congress has still failed to do the people's will. That might be the way they do it inside the Beltway, but it's not the American way. It's time to stand up for the American people and against President Bush's failed, stubborn policy. Without a firm deadline, a small withdrawal of only some of the surge troops won't cut it—that's not a solution, it's an excuse. Congress must not send President Bush any funding bill without a timeline to end this war. No timeline, no funding. No excuses.

No timeline, no funding. No excuses. Nancy? Harry? -- that may be your next President on the phone.


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* To their credit, Bill Richardson (WaPo, 9/8, although he mischaracterizes Edwards) and Dennis Kucinich are two more Democratic presidential candidates advocating complete withdrawal from Iraq.

NOTES: "if the American people only knew" -- Chris Bowers, "OpenLeft"; Edwards' Thursday statement via Matthew Yglesias, who also links to a number of other Edwards statements on Iraq. posted by Thomas Nephew at 12:12:00 PM -- |