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Monthly Archives: April 2009

An Iraq of Lights, Tunnels and Oncoming Trains

“Oh boy, this is gonna get worse before it gets better.” – Chief Wiggum

Getting out of Iraq was never going to be easy and the last couple of weeks have shown us a hint of what’s in store as the stated American withdrawal date inches ever closer.  The most pressing date is the June 30th deadline for American forces to be out of Iraq’s cities.  In this case, “cities” is a fairly loosely defined term, but the practical realties, near as anyone can tell beforehand, would seem to be the serious reduction in the number of American troops patrolling Iraqi streets (and all that that entails).

It goes almost without saying that the pushback has already begun.  This is from Monday’s New York Times:

The United States and Iraq will begin negotiating possible exceptions to the June 30 deadline for withdrawing American combat troops from Iraqi cities, focusing on the troubled northern city of Mosul, according to military officials.

[...]

But because of the level of insurgent activity in Mosul, United States and Iraqi military officials will meet Monday to decide whether to consider the city an exception to the deadline in the Status of Forces Agreement, or SOFA, between the countries.

Note the source, “military officials”.  The story goes on to describe how our military is generously offering to stay just a bit longer in certain places, you know, if the Iraqis want us to.  This is precisely the kind of malingering attitude that remains the only real threat to our long needed exit from Iraq.  American foot dragging has been indulged for years when it comes to Iraq, but however persuasive the immediate tactical case seems to be the conclusion is as unchanging as it is false.  Our presence there is itself destructive, and if the Shiites and the Sunnis and who knows who else are determined to fight it out, there is very little we can do about it.

Witness another New York Times story, this one from Sunday: Iraq Resists Pleas by U.S. to Placate Baath Party.  Nouri al-Maliki is walking a very fine line, between us, his Shiite allies, and the still dangerous Sunni minority which was in power until we invaded.  We want everyone to just get along for a couple of years so we can slip out of the country with a little dignity, but our dignity is completely irrelevant to the Iraqis and many of them will not hesitate to do whatever they can to advance their own interests, whether we’re still there or not.  This is the bloody trap we’ve gotten ourselves into in Iraq: the locals aren’t done fighting, however much we’d like them to be.

The good news, though, is that the withdrawal timetable has so far proved impervious to distraction or disruption.  The same day that meeting about altering the Iraqi-American agreement about troops took place, al-Maliki sat down with the BBC:

“No, no, it hasn’t changed it at all,” he said.

“As we agreed at the beginning when we signed the withdrawal agreement, these deadlines are final and absolute and not open to postponement.

[...]

“But so far there is no thought or intention on the part of the government to ask for an extension of those forces. On the basis of a field assessment we don’t need them, and there is no request.”

Those are very reassuring sentiments.  So as disturbing as it can be to see our Secretary of State using Bush-style neoconservative newspeak like, “I think that these suicide bombings are, unfortunately in a tragic way, a signal that the rejectionists fear Iraq is going in the right direction,” it ultimately amounts to very little so long as the Iraqi government and Barack Obama remain committed to our removal.  Deadly bombings and hubristic thoughts of staying just a little bit longer (and there will be plenty of both) are to be expected.  It was never going to be easy, but so far, so good.

It’s So Obvious

“Tomorrow we were gonna find out who the dish ran away with.” – Bart Simpson
“The spoon, Bart.” – Lisa Simpson
“Of course!” – Bart Simpson

As the American torture story continues to metastasize like the foul cancer that it is, no one seems quite sure what to do when it comes to the thorny yet vital issue of putting a close to this dishonorable period.  Other than not prosecuting the low-level CIA officers who were, in the famous formulation, just following orders, the White House hasn’t staked out a clear position.  Congress seems to be all over the map; though it usually is so that comes as no surprise.  One thing is clear: the increased scrutiny that began with Mark Danner’s Red Cross piece in the 9 April New York Review of Books has elevated the story to levels of public attention it hasn’t seen in five years (when the first harrowing photographs from Abu Ghraib became public).  That outcry reached a public conclusion with the conviction of the lowest of low hanging fruit and a White House stonewall effort that was second to none.  Something of similar magnitude will be needed this time.  The big difference is that this White House doesn’t want it to just go away for the sake of going away.  Rather, this White House seems willing to see it through to the end, provided that it goes away for six months to a year while it focuses on other things.

Barack Obama is, here in the spring of 2009, heavily politically invested in getting two major domestic pieces of legislation passed: health care reform and energy/carbon reform.  Obama and those around him also appear cognizant, in the way only master political operatives with access to the real inside information can be, of just how politically fraught cleaning up Bush the Younger’s torture mess is going to be.  Those of us in the audience were given a taste of that this week with this bombshell revelation from McClatchy, “Report: Abusive tactics used to seek Iraq-al Qaida link“.  The story begins:

The Bush administration applied relentless pressure on interrogators to use harsh methods on detainees in part to find evidence of cooperation between al Qaida and the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s regime, according to a former senior U.S. intelligence official and a former Army psychiatrist.

Such information would’ve provided a foundation for one of former President George W. Bush’s main arguments for invading Iraq in 2003. In fact, no evidence has ever been found of operational ties between Osama bin Laden’s terrorist network and Saddam’s regime.

The use of abusive interrogation – widely considered torture – as part of Bush’s quest for a rationale to invade Iraq came to light as the Senate issued a major report tracing the origin of the abuses and President Barack Obama opened the door to prosecuting former U.S. officials for approving them.

And just like that we find ourselves a little bit deeper down the rabbit hole dug by Bush the Younger and his cadre of fanatical incompetents.  There is a forehead slapping obviousness to the above story that is quite humbling.  Anyone paying the least bit attention has known for years that a) the government spent a lot of 2002 and 2003 attempting to manufacture a non-existent link between Iraq and al-Qaeda and b) that was about when we start torturing people as a matter of policy.  Line up those two facts next to each other like that and it couldn’t be more apparent that the next logical conclusion is that torture was used as part of that manufacturing process.

(Imagine what little sense that must have made to the prisoners.  This would be like an American prisoner of 1942 Imperial Japan being asked, repeatedly and under torture, about secret American connections to Nazi Germany.  It would make so little sense, be so transparently insane, that, at least at first, you’d probably think it was some kind of trick.)

This is the latest revelation about the depths to which the Bush Administration sank (it will not be the last), but what hasn’t yet been remarked upon is the fantastic expansion of the political calculus that comes with it.  Cleaning up their moral cesspool was never going to be easy, but what this latest development makes clear is that even those of us who long assumed the political costs would be significant grossly underestimated them.

The genesis of the Iraq war, from its earliest rumblings through the October 2002 Congressional vote and right up until the bombs started to drop, was one of the most shameful and dishonorable periods of American politics.  One would not be surprised to see people fifty years from now shake their heads about it the same way we do about the McCarthy era.  So while our shiny new President was opposed to the war from the start, the same cannot be said for much of the staff of his Administration (starting most prominently with his Vice-President and Secretary of State) and large swaths of his party.  When one brings torture and surveillance into the mix things get even dirtier on the Democratic side.  Those are wounds no savvy Democratic operator wants to reopen, particularly with not one, but two enormous legislative battles looming.

The health care and energy bills are both major overhauls to longstanding American problems and they represent threats to existing orders which are powerful, entrenched and well funded.  Passing either one of them in a form that amounts to more than window dressing would be a legislative achievement unequaled in perhaps forty years.  Not only are they of tremendous importance when it comes to policy and outcomes, but if they do succeed they will also strengthen Obama politically.

When looked at from his perspective, the fights over health care and energy are battles he can ill afford to lose.  If they fail, or if they pass in toothless forms that will not show obvious benefits to ordinary Americans, Obama will be exposed as weak, just another pretty boy in a long line of empty suit reformers.  On the other hand, extending health care to millions of Americans and retooling the economy in such a way as to prevent (or at least mitigate) global warming while creating untold numbers of new jobs will have enormous benefits, for the 2010 midterm elections as well as Obama’s own re-election in 2012.  Those are not petty concerns.

As a Friday article in the Washington Post made clear, Obama’s decision to release the four torture memos was not arrived at lightly, nor was it done without significant internal objection.  An Administration concerned purely with politics could’ve easily kicked the decision down the road and made the ACLU force its hand in court, if only to buy itself a few precious months to work on other things.  But they didn’t do that, they made the right call and the country is better off for it.

Obama isn’t opposed to prosecuting these violations of the law; if he were he wouldn’t have released the memos.  But he is aware of just how enormous the political costs are going to be (witness the right wing noise machine going to ludicrous speed the last ten days or so).  As important as it is that the architects of American torture face justice, preferably in the form of a jury being asked to render a verdict, it can wait.  It’s not as though “prosecute now” and “prosecute never” are the only two options; let John Conyers and Patrick Leahy chew on things for a while, they’re only going to shake even more shit loose.  Come Thanksgiving and Christmas the men responsible for one of the greatest disgraces in American history will still be guilty, and the evidence of their deeds will still be there.  In the interim the pressure must be kept on, but for political reasons it’s entirely understandable and defensible for Obama and his people to want a clean shot at heath care and energy first.

The thought of these flagrant crimes going unpunished simply because the perps were high government officials is enough to make one physically ill, and postponement carries a real danger of letting them walk.  But it may not be an avoidable danger; recognizing that and digging in for the long haul is likely the best course of action.

Books Are Different

“Finally a copy of Ethan Frome to call my own.” – Lisa Simpson

This article about xkcd releasing an old fashioned book in Monday’s New York Times got me to thinking about something that’s been rattling around my head since that Ars Technica piece about the history of e-books I wrote about a couple of months ago.  Namely, what is the likely future of print books?  The future of physical storage for audio and video looks bleak, Blu-Ray could very likely be the last storage device for movies and television shows ever mass produced.  But books, and the text within them, last a hell of a lot longer than anything that stores audio or video.

Audio and video frequently change formats, from wax cylinders, vinyl records, CDs and now mp3s to Beta, VHS, DVD, and now Blu-Ray.  Simply possessing the hardware necessary to play things become problematic after awhile to say nothing of the short life span and inherent frailty of the discs/cassettes/things themselves; whereas the basic technology of the book is centuries old.  That lends it an important distinction: it lasts (probably longer than you will).  Provided it’s kept somewhere dry, a mass produced hardcover book can easily last a century or longer (who really knows?); even a cheap paperback, again kept dry, is good for decades.

There is another factor that argues in favor of the survival of books.  A CD, even one loaded with liner notes and music videos, probably doesn’t require more than an hour or two to get through.  Even a feature laden Blu-Ray with all kinds of on-line activities and special features probably won’t require more than a few hours of your time.  But even a short, relatively fluffy novel can take ten hours to read and a thick non-fiction book can take considerably longer.  This may seem like a trivial distinction, but in a world where you can get almost anything free or close to free on-line, getting you to spring for the physical copy means making you feel as though you’ve gotten your money’s worth.  In terms of time spent per dollar spent a book that takes you fifteen hours to read blows away an album on which you may only like a couple of songs or a movie you might end up watching twice.

E-books are still pathetically underdeveloped.  Even Amazon’s vaunted Kindle 2 is suffering at the hands of the foolish emphasis placed on Digital Rights Management, most prominently the text-to-speech function, and the much publicized DRM related disabling of many of it’s features should your Amazon account come under scrutiny, even for non-Kindle related reasons.  Despite those type of first-generation technical problems the future of the e-book seems assured, after all you can carry a whole library under your arm.  But the digitization of content doesn’t spell doom for ink and paper the way it does for audio and video.  Books, after all, are pretty hardy.  It’s probably going to be a niche, but it will survive and the sooner publishers realize that and change their marketing accordingly, the better off they’ll be.

A Good Day

“Bailiffs, place the mayor under arrest.” – Judge Snyder
“What?  Oh yes, all that stuff I did.” – Sideshow Bob

It was a good week for America.  The release of four odious torture memos on Thursday was an important step towards healing one of the most severe of the many wounds Bush the Younger inflicted upon our government.  Thursday also saw the publication of a story in The New York Times reporting extensive, and quite likely ongoing, NSA abuses of eavesdropping authority on American citizens.  Taken together the two disclosures, one voluntary by the government the other ferreted out by the Times, are a stark reminder of the healing yet to be done and also the progress that has been made.

Authoritarianism runs through all societies; mature and stable democracies such as ours have powerful safeguards in place to guard against it and these two stories are crystal clear reminders of what happens when those safeguards are weakened.  Recall that the horrifyingly un-American Patriot Act of 2001 and its subsequent revisions fall under this category.  The Patriot Act didn’t materialize in a frenzy of typing on 12 September 2001.  It was cobbled together from existing proposals that, absent a national panic, were too intrusive or too expansive to have made it through even a Republican Congress.

Obama has begun to unravel that tangled mess, but it isn’t going to happen overnight.  Aside from what appears to be his very short sighted decision on the state secrets privilege (though admittedly not all the facts are in on that one) he’s done an enormous amount for civil liberties and justice in this country in just three months.  Glenn Greenwald, the internet’s premier civil liberties advocate and a man who was right pissed at Obama over the state secrets thing, summed up just how impressive this is:

I think the significance of Obama’s decision to release those memos — and the political courage it took — shouldn’t be minimized.  There is no question that many key factions in the “intelligence community” were vehemently opposed to release of those memos.  I have no doubt that reports that they waged a “war” to prevent  release of these memos were absolutely true.  The disgusting comments of former CIA Director Mike Hayden on MSNBC yesterday — where he made clear that he simply does not believe in the right of citizens to know what their government does and that government crimes should be kept hidden– is clearly what Obama was hearing from many powerful circles.  That twisted anti-democratic mentality is the one that predominates in our political class.

In the United States, what Obama did yesterday is simply not done.  American Presidents do not disseminate to the world documents which narrate in vivid, elaborate detail the dirty, illegal deeds done by the CIA, especially not when the actions are very recent, were approved and ordered by the President of the United States, and the CIA is aggressively demanding that the documents remain concealed and claiming that their release will harm national security.  When is the last time a President did that?

This is all the more head spinning coming hot on the heels of a president and his minions who spent most of the decade pursuing these mad policies and lying about it in public.  Without the awesome stonewalling powers of the Executive Branch the ugly realities of a government that dabbles in lawless surveillance and torture are beginning to see the light of day.  Politically that is tremendous because anyone advocating for a return to the old ways is now waging an uphill battle full of uncomfortable questions like whether or not it’s torture to repeatedly slam a bound man into a concrete wall.  Reactionary lunatics like Dick Cheney and Michael Hayden can slur these disclosures all they want, but they can no longer do it behind a smokescreen of official euphemisms that conceal the bloody realities of their actions.

Unsurprisingly, a Washington Post poll taken right at the inauguration indicated that not only do a large majority of Americans oppose torture under any circumstances, but that most of us want the policies of Bush the Younger investigated.  And that was before the gory legalistic details became public.  The onus is now on Congress to begin investigations which are going to be as ugly as they are vital.  We aren’t there yet, but things are going in the right direction.  John Conyers is on it:

“If our leaders are found to have violated the strict laws against torture, either by ordering these techniques without proper legal authority or by knowingly crafting legal fictions to justify torture, they should be criminally prosecuted,” Mr. Conyers said in a written statement.

Amen to that and godspeed.  A good day like Thursday deserves a little praise and if Conyers gets his way there will be more of them.

Unarmed and (Not Immediately) Dangerous

“You don’t even have a trigger on that thing.” – Homer Simpson
“Yeah, I had to sell the trigger and most of the handle to feed my family.  C’mon, gimme the dough, I can throw this pretty hard.” – Clancy Wiggum

North Korea has been back in the news the last couple of weeks.  The most recent development came just yesterday as the hermit government ordered international nuclear inspectors out of the country and announced that it was restarting its nuclear facility.  Predictably, the story was international news and resulted in the usual hand wringing and diplospeak, however the more reasoned approach is probably some variation of, “So what?”

Over the last six years, North Korea has tested three ballistic missiles and one nuclear device.  All were failures.  The missiles either splashed down thousands of miles from their intended locations or, in the latest case, spectacularly failed to reach orbit.  The nuclear device (it isn’t a bomb until it can be put into something small enough to fit on an airplane) fizzled and barely registered as nuclear test.  All facts to the contrary each event was greeted with international dismay at the unpredictability and dangerousness of North Korea and hailed within the DPRK (that’s the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, aka North Korea) as a sterling triumph.

Those events, and North Korean problems more generally (it’s not a good thing when the route out of your country is both highly dangerous and well worn), point toward a somewhat comforting conclusion however: the DPRK is mostly talk.  The rockets and the nuclear device weren’t deliberate failures; these were the best efforts of a paranoid and meticulous government that simply doesn’t have the technical capacity to match its sterling propaganda efforts.  The North Korean government has consistently proved that it can repress and bullshit its own people and make the outside world nervous, but a flair for language and domestic surveillance causes neither the rockets fly true nor the atoms split.

It is the very dysfunctional nature of the government which makes it both inept and threatening.  Try to imagine the paranoia and secrecy it must take to become a high ranking North Korean official, now imagine how many secrets within secrets, hidden agreements and personal agendas pervade that organization.  Even if the CIA had half the Supreme People’s Assembly and Kim Jong-Il’s personal chef on the payroll we still wouldn’t have a good idea of what’s going on in that country because they probably have no idea themselves.  Parts of that government are rigidly concealed from other parts and the true internal power structure is quite likely a mystery to even the most senior and inside players.  The Dear Leader himself probably has significant plans and information being withheld from him by subordinates who would be fools not to at least think about what might happen should he die.

(None of the above changes the fact that the United States hasn’t exactly been a model actor here.  After the fall of the Soviet Union, North Korea found itself on its own in a world that increasingly saw it as an irrelevant and anachronistic throwback.  The Agreed Framework from 1994 was broken on both sides and the Bush Administration didn’t exactly do a lot of good when it spent eight years alternately threatening the DPRK and then sullenly speaking with it.)

The only reasonable course of action, for us, our allies, the Russians and the Chinese is to sit down and say, as calmly and repeatedly as possible, that war isn’t an option for anyone and where would you like to go from here?  Otherwise we’re just left with absurdities like analyzing grainy video and doctored photos for evidence of the health of a sixty-eight year old man.  The DPRK can be trusted not to outright start a war, they aren’t suicidal.  In the meantime the rest of the world can safely ignore them until they are ready to talk about more than an on again off again nuclear program that doesn’t even work.

The Last Redoubt

“Damn long hairs never learn, chief.” – Eddie

Amidst the many dreams that have been given hope by the election and subsequent enthroning of Barack Obama is the idea that the foolhardy war on drugs may finally begin releasing its deadly grip on government policy.  Mostly this takes the form of eminently reasonable objections to the wasteful reality of the drug war (see Glenn Greenwald at Salon and Kelley Vlahos at @TAC for recent examples).  That’s all well and good, but our government’s drug policies have never been informed by facts and rational thinking; fear and hysteria underpin the drug laws and reasonable objections are dismissed out of hand.  The good news is that the fear and the hysteria have faded considerably and that trend shows no signs of stopping.

The drug war is and always has been a subset of what we generally term the culture wars, and the culture wars are, fundamentally, about increasing the social acceptability of personal freedom.  This includes the freedom to fuck anyone who will have you, regardless of whether or not you’re married, are the same color or even have the same internal plumbing.  It also includes the freedom for women and men to work jobs traditionally associated with the other gender, and for non-whites to ascend to the commanding heights of society, and all manner of personal choices.  The objection to those expansions of individual freedom has always been based on fear, specifically the fear that by allowing and embracing behaviors which were once considered taboo we risk the stability of our society.  Drug war rationales have, right from their very beginning, always played on that fear and they’ve done so overtly.

The pitch, and you can see it in everything from 1936′s Reefer Madness all the way up to today’s anti-drug commercials, is always pretty much the same; if your sons use drugs they’ll become shiftless, unaccomplished and poor; if your daughters use drugs they’ll become wantonly promiscuous and never have a proper family.  Recreational drug use is easy to portray as threatening America’s future: no more barbeques on Saturdays, no more packed church pews on Sundays and no more earnest workers punching in on Mondays, just broken people squandering the gift of life.

Of course, the same fears were used to object to all kinds of other culture war battles, things like interracial marriage, girls wearing pants and boys wearing earrings.  Those affronts to Mom, God and Apple Pie are now widely accepted and haven’t ruined us.  Quite the opposite, the America where more people can express themselves and love whomever they want is a wealthier, happier and more powerful one.  Rigidly enforced gender norms and the separation of the races are now fringe positions because the fears used to justify them proved to be wildly overblown.

And that is the real reason drugs are inching their way towards legalization.  The social and sexual panics that explicitly underlie prohibition are waning, aided in no small part by the success of other parts of the culture war and generational turnover.  Let’s take the most potent example, the racist and sexist image of dangerous minorities and their threateningly large genitals coming for Caucasian vagina.  This affront to traditional values is still a powerful enough symbol that it was one of the main plots in the stultifyingly simple minded movie Traffic, which caused a brief focus on the drug war just nine years ago.  The patrician white guy had to rescue his blond daughter from the sexual depredations of her black drug dealer.  You almost couldn’t have a drug movie without it.

Today that image, effective for more than a century, is visibly losing its power.  This is most obvious in the current occupant of the Oval Office who is the result of black dick penetrating white pussy, but the change is more general than that.  Not only is inter-racial coupling and breeding no longer considered taboo, but expressing disapproval of it is considered impolite and morally wrong.  Even showing something as harmless as surprise for a multi-colored couple is grounds for embarrassment.  We’re certainly not living in a world of free hugs and racial sunshine just yet, but there’s no denying the enormous progress the country has made and that greatly undermines the fear that has long supported the drug war and justified its massive costs.

So while prohibition on certain recreational drug use remains the last bastion of conservative strength in the culture war, it’s not an impregnable fortress.  Rather it’s a Berlin bunker, intimidatingly secure in and of itself, but take away the supporting territory and it’s just another hole in the ground.

A Really Bad (NATO) Idea

“What do we care?  We live in the United States.” – Fry
“The United States is part of the world.” – Leela
“Wow, I have been gone a long time.” – Fry

On Monday Armchair Generalist had a link to an Andrew Bacevich op-ed that ran in last Thursday’s Los Angeles Times.  Bacevich’s piece advocated for an American withdrawal from NATO, Jason Sigger (the Armchair Generalist) agreed.  Acknowledging that both men know more about military affairs than I, and that this is rarely the case when I read something either of them has written, I must strenuously disagree.  An American withdrawal from NATO would be an almost unmitigated catastrophe and a terrible waste.

Bacevich’s criticism of American participation in NATO breaks down into two main parts; first that NATO harms its credibility and integrity when it tries to justify its existence by acting outside of Europe, particularly when it comes to Afghanistan.  Second, that Europe, particularly Western Europe, is more than capable of defending itself from any Russian threat but that it refuses to do so as long as America is committed to doing it anyway.

That NATO has no business trying to project power outside of Europe is possibly a valid criticism.  NATO certainly hasn’t done itself any favors in Afghanistan and it’s equally true that NATO may be the wrong framework to continue whatever the hell it is we’re still trying to do there.  But to deem that a failure of NATO ignores a lot of vital and important context.  The alliance’s initial purpose in Afghanistan was a reaction to an attack on a member country that, had it been perpetrated by a nation state, would’ve met any definition of a casus belli.  It was entirely appropriate and correct for NATO to be involved in that war.

The problem is that Afghanistan, a legitimate mission, was quickly subsumed into a much broader, and largely foolish, American “war on terror”.  Afghanistan became a festering war because of a failure of leadership in Washington, not Brussels.  The last seven and a half years of the Bush Administration did not happen in a vacuum and the lesson to be drawn from NATO’s participation in Afghanistan to this point isn’t that NATO is obsolete or riven with divisions; it’s that NATO cannot function if American leadership is both strategically incompetent and diplomatically tone deaf.

(Incidentally, this is the real reason Obama has had so much difficulty convincing the Europeans to send more troops to Afghanistan.  Obama tries to paint Afghanistan as it was before the invasion of Iraq; the Europeans don’t see it that way.)

Bacevich’s second criticism, “that present-day Europe is more than capable of addressing today’s threat, without American assistance or supervision” is true in terms of men and materiel.  And his assertion that Europe has been free riding on the benefits of enormous American defense expenditures is also basically accurate.  But to end the analysis there is to seriously discount the enormous strategic and political benefits that come from the widespread belief that the trans-Atlantic alliance is a permanent fixture of global affairs.

I would suggest that NATO’s primary purpose in 2009 is not, as Bacevich writes, “the defense of Europe.”  Rather, it is the binding of Europe and North America, two regions which are quite separate geographically but are very close in almost every other way.  There are no major conflicting priorities between the allies, either in terms of territory, access to resources or ideology.  “Europe” roughly defined and “North America” (meaning the U.S. and Canada) form an economic, political, military, and cultural bloc, run by governments which are (for the most part) stable, relatively uncorrupt and democratic.

Even better, NATO is part of a self-reinforcing and beneficial loop.  Countries, like Spain and Germany, which were once nouveau members are now strong contributors.  It takes decades, but it happens and there’s no reason to believe that the same won’t be true of more recent entrants.  Aren’t Poland and the Baltic republics significantly friendlier and more receptive to the West than they would be if they were constantly trying to appease Russia, especially in light of last summer’s little war in Georgia?

It is beneficial to all of these countries to stand united in a world which is still very dangerous.  I’m not one who believes that a serious war between America and China is in any way shape or form inevitable (it certainly isn’t anything either country’s leaders want), but it would be historically naive to think that such a war is impossible.  It would be far better to have a place as wealthy, populous and sophisticated as Europe on our side than not.  The same goes for an increasingly nationalist and authoritarian Russia.  It isn’t hard to imagine a mishandled crisis quickly turning into a truly dangerous situation where American-European solidarity would be a tremendous asset.  Or, to put it another way, the EU could probably win a war against Russia, but why subject the world to that terrible cost when an EU-US alliance makes that war both less likely to ever happen and more likely to have a favorable outcome?

Bacevich is right to say that NATO isn’t doing well in Afghanistan, and he may even be right that NATO shouldn’t be in Afghanistan at all, but it wasn’t NATO that botched that war, it was us.  What NATO is good at, binding Europe and North America, it continues to be good at, and that is an absolutely vital function.  Communism, as an economic and political ideology, is largely dead, but the marriage of capitalism to authoritarianism (dressed in nationalism) is alive and well as a competitor the idea of liberal democracy joined with capitalism.  Throwing the Atlantic alliance away over a bungled mission in Afghanistan would be a tremendous waste and a dangerous mistake.

(And nevermind the fact that if American withdrawal from NATO even made it to the level of a semi-plausible rumor there would be something approaching a panic in a lot of Eastern European capitals, a panic which Russia (and Russian nationalists) would be more than happy to exploit and encourage.  Such uncertainty would also very likely be accompanied by serious negative economic consequences as well.)

Setup to Fail

“You know, I gotta be honest with you.  I only have another week and a half here and I have completely checked out.” – Job Placement Center Employee
“Oh.” – Peter Griffin
“Yeah.” – Job Placement Center Employee

Benjamin Netanyahu became the Prime Minister of Israel for the second time this week.  Two and a half months ago Barack Obama became President of the United States.  Both men were replacing disgraced right wing leaders that their respective countries were more than happy to be rid of.  The difference is that in America the new government is vastly to the left of the one it replaced; in Israel the new government is further to the right than the old one (especially when it comes to the all important issues of Gaza and the West Bank).  In terms of outlook, worldview and simple ideology the two could scarcely be farther apart.  But Obama is going to be around for at least four years, and possibly eight.  Israeli governments tend to have shorter life spans and this new one has all but assured itself of failure before it even gets started.

Netanyahu’s first premiership, which ran from 1996-1999, was, by almost any measure, a failure.  Reconciliation with the Palestinians had been making tremendous progress right up until 1995 assassination of Yitzhak Rabin.  The election the following year brought Netanyahu to power and three years of perfunctory negotiation.  Netanyahu had inherited a peace process that had already gone father than he would’ve liked, but he could not walk back what had already happened.  (The Clinton Administration hated his guts.)  So he sat on his hands for three years, became increasingly unpopular and was soundly turned out of office.  Now Netanyahu once again finds himself in the big chair and once again finds an American Democrat on the other end of the telephone.

The most prominent disagreements between the two men are the issue of Israeli settlements in the West Bank and the question of relations with Iran.  Netanyahu has always been a proponent of the settlements and there probably isn’t much that Obama can do about it.  When it comes to Iran though, Obama has a lot more freedom to act.

Amidst the usual hysterical bullshit about Iran in this country (e.g. the ridiculous letter from House Democrats to Obama) there have been signs of progress.  It’s clear as day that Obama is determined to make a good faith effort at seriously improving relations with Iran.  This stands in stark contrast to the way Iran is viewed by the new Israeli government, as this Haaretz article makes abundantly clear:

Upon taking office this week, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has indicated that a nuclear-armed Iran would pose a strategic threat to Israel, and that neutralizing that threat is a top priority of his new administration.

In the interview with the Financial Times, Gates said he believed that Iran would not cross the nuclear threshold, or “red line”, this year. He estimated that it would take Tehran between one to three years to reach the point it possessed enough know-how to produce nuclear weapons.

Gates’ assessment is at odds with that offered by Israel’s defense establishment. Last month, Military Intelligence chief Amos Yadlin told lawmakers that Iran has “crossed the technological threshold” for making a nuclear bomb.

Iran is such a preoccupation in Israel that the new government is more or less openly talking about airstrikes, a plan of action so lunatic and counterproductive that the even Bush Administration didn’t go through with it.  Of course, for Israel to bomb targets in Iran they’d need to fly over Iraq and to do that they’d need Obama’s permission.  But he isn’t going to give it to them; doing so would cause enormous and violent reaction in Iraq, wreaking havoc with his plans to extract US forces by the end of 2011.  To put it another way, which of the following two things does Barack Obama care more about, successfully getting America out of Iraq, or paranoid Israeli fantasies about Iran?  Netanyahu can wail all he wants about Iran, but he cannot actually do anything except watch Obama try to negotiate with them and hope for the worst.

Meanwhile, Avigdor Lieberman, his controversial right-right-right-wing Foreign Minister, is off to a pretty bad start.  He’s pissed of Egypt, far and away Israel’s most important Arab non-enemy.  He’s openly dismissive of the Palestinians, which aggravates the American government.  And he’s about to be charged with corruption, which may or may bring the government down (depending on whether or not his party leaves the coalition if he’s forced to give up his cabinet position).

Netanyahu’s government is, in other words, starting out in a terrible position and it has almost nowhere to go but down.  So long as he’s willing to pay the price in terms of international scorn he can continue to hurt the Palestinians as much as he likes.  But he cannot do anything about Iran other than try to undermine Obama’s diplomacy.  Nor can he force Hamas from power in Gaza or make the world sympathetic to Israeli settlements in the West Bank.  He’s stuck and he hasn’t even started yet.

Israel is in a more difficult position than it was when Netanyahu assumed power thirteen years ago.  He didn’t do much then, and, given the current situation, he looks unlikely to do much now.  Barring a big surprise* or a change of character, the only real question is how long his government will stagger forward until it collapses under its own weight.  A year?  Two?  Three?  Who knows?  Israel doesn’t have any good options at the moment, but the least bad one, embracing the two state solution and radically curtailing the settlements, is pretty much the opposite of what Netanyahu stands for.

So sit back, sports fans, for an Israeli government that’s going to be both lethal (mostly to Palestinians but to a few Israelis as well) and boring (because no substantive changes are likely to be made, other than further expansion of the settlements).

*Note: I read Seymour Hersh’s article about Syrian-Israeli negotiations in The New Yorker, but it would be wildly out of character for Netanyahu to agree to any proposal that would relinquish control over the Golan Heights.  Moreover:

Netanyahu himself-in what was widely seen as a plea for votes-declared two days before the elections that he would not return the Golan Heights.

Daniel Levy, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, who served on Israeli peace delegations in 1995 and 2001 and also as an adviser to Prime Minister Barak, said that Netanyahu “may have huge coalition problems, not least within his own Likud Party,” and that he “may have to publicly disavow any land-for-peace agreement, given his political position. Can the Syrians swallow that? If they can’t, it means that the only option left will be secret talks.”

This is the fundamental problem with the idea that Netanyahu could have a Nixon-to-China moment with the Syrians.  His coalition partners might abandon him if he even publicly spoke with the Syrians; it’s very unlikely that they trust him enough to go along if he showed up one morning with an agreement in hand.  Besides, Netanyahu doesn’t seem like the type to fall on his political sword in order to advance peace with Syria.

This Country Deserves a Better Class of Criminal

“Surely you knew as you were writing your own name in forty-foot high letters on the field that you would be caught.” – Principal Skinner

There has been much comment recently about the popular anger over Wall Street bailouts, executive bonuses, and financial fraud.  Particularly galling is the image of our freshly elected president seemingly impotent in the face of it all.  There have been calls for the Treasury Secretary’s head even though he’s been on the job less than two months.  What’s driving this extreme anger when Barack Obama and his merry men seem to be getting either pretty high marks or an outright pass on just about everything else?  More importantly, what can be done to placate the mob?

In the most recent issue of the New York Review of Books, Michael Tomasky has a review of So Damn Much Money: The Triumph of Lobbying and the Corrosion of American Government by Robert Kaiser.  (Sadly it’s not available on the Review‘s website.)  The article chronicles the rise of big money lobbying in Washington, which didn’t really begin ramping up until after Watergate.  It’s a tale that’s been told before, but that doesn’t make the numbers contained within any less eye popping.  In 1974 the total amount spent by all candidates for House and Senate was $77,000,000, by 1982 that number had risen $343,000,000, and for 2008 it was a whopping $1,400,000,000.  That is a staggering increase in the amount of cash it takes to successfully run for political office; it had to come from somewhere.

That’s a useful thing to bear in mind while reading Matt Taibbi’s AIG story in Rolling Stone.  Basically, Taibbi takes the incompetent and amazingly arrogant AIG apart, and while his piece can come off as extremely harsh, if anything he’s much too soft on these people.  They were, after all, taking money that wasn’t theirs and using it in what amounted to an elaborate confidence scam.  Not only are a lot of these financial wizards criminals, in any semi-honest definition of the word, but they aren’t particularly good criminals.  They aren’t even tough criminals:

The bonuses are a nice comic touch highlighting one of the more outrageous tangents of the bailout age, namely the fact that, even with the planet in flames, some members of the Wall Street class can’t even get used to the tragedy of having to fly coach. “These people need their trips to Baja, their spa treatments, their hand jobs,” says an official involved in the AIG bailout, a serious look on his face, apparently not even half-kidding. “They don’t function well without them.”

To cite our most prominent recent example, Bernard Madoff (fuck anyone who calls him Bernie) was not a very good criminal.  Good criminals may not always get away, but they at least have an escape plan.  Ditto buffoonish Texan also-ran, Allen Stanford and now, it appears, American International Group’s Joseph Cassano.  Cassano may not have been running a straight up Ponzi scheme, but the fact remains that he got people (in this case his bosses) to trust him with a lot of money by misrepresenting what he was able to do with it.  Then he played with it for awhile (rewarding himself handsomely for doing so) and now has nothing to show for it.

In other words, these guys stole a shitload of money by lying to the rightful owners, that’s what makes them criminals; but they did so in a way that virtually guaranteed that they’d someday be caught, and that is what makes them bad criminals.  This is, from a logical and decision making point of view, almost the exact same shit that Andrew Fastow pulled at Enron: take the cash, hide the bullshit, pray for luck.  Of course, luck eventually runs out and in a time of endless e-mails, searchable databases and terabyte hard drives it’s next to impossible to hide all the bullshit.  The only thing that remains is missing money.

But the missing money is not the cause of the public anger.  The real cause is that this is now the third time in just over twenty years that Wall Street, broadly defined, has come screaming to the government begging for help lest the economy implode.  In the late eighties it was the Savings & Loans, in the late nineties it was Long Term Capital Management, and now it’s big name banks and insurance companies.  These crises have been occurring like clockwork at the end of each of the last three decades.  Each time it happens, doom and gloom scenarios are raised (some of which are now coming true) and the public at large is reminded that the people who run the economy are just as short sighted and stupid as the rest of us.

That is a very disconcerting feeling and what’s worse, this is now the third time it’s happened.  Fool us once, shame on you; fool us twice shame on us; fool us three times and . . . well, the widely circulated image below says it all, doesn’t it?

That pretty much sums it up.

That pretty well covers it.

What the public wants, and it’s really the only thing that will genuinely soothe public anger, is an honest and credible statement that this will never happen again.  Granted, never is a long time, but this country made it from roughly the mid-thirties to roughly the mid-eighties without a major crisis in banking, and at this point it seems safe to say that most people would gladly take fifty years of stability.

The populace is aware, on a gut level, that a lot of that money Tomasky mentions, that $1.4 billion that we spent to elect this Congress, came from the same people who now have their hands in the government’s pockets.  The same people whose scams seem so utterly stupid when exposed to the light of day.  The same people whose greed and foolishness is being rewarded instead of punished.  Right now, the White House is doing very little in the way of reassuring people that is won’t happen again.  Take a look at the transcript from Obama’s financial/economy prime time press conference last week.  Regulations appear in only two questions and neither is what you’d call a strong statement.  The word “never” appears only twice, once about the budget and once about the Israeli-Palestinian mess.

One of the operating assumptions of our society is that most of the people who live substantially above the median in terms of income and wealth do so for reasons which are in some basic way just.  Instead, some of the most prominent of those people appear to be, despite the scale of their theft, nothing more than middling con artists.  That is where the anger comes from; that is the main nerve that runs through all of the public outcry and disgust over the ever widening economic mess.  Having Timothy Geithner ask Congress for more powers is probably a step in the right direction, but it needs to be done with much greater fanfare, much greater force, and a hell of a lot more conviction.

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