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Heraclitus' River

President Obama's address Tuesday night was as expected, a call for 30,000 more troops to go to Afghanistan, to try to stabilize the situation there and return the resources that were withdrawn when the Bush administration decided to go to war in Iraq. He described in general terms the review that his foreign policy and national security team had undertaken, and he reiterated his conviction that US national security interests are at stake in Afghanistan and best served by this escalation.

He made a thoughtful case, and was clearly appropriately cautious about the consequences of sending thousands more Americans into harm's way and spending billions of dollars we don't have in order to do it. As it was for many progressives and anti-war citizens, that case was unconvincing for me, but we must recognize that it was the fulfillment of a campaign promise, and that he at least reviewed the situation before proceeding blindly out of some misplaced sense of national machismo (a sentiment in far too prominent evidence over the last few years, and still clearly carrying a lot of weight in some circles).

So those who are calling this escalation a betrayal of his principles are guilty of selective hearing, but that doesn't mean they are wrong as regards the policy itself. The essence of Obama's thesis is that with this increase in resources, the military can return us to the spring of 2003 and resume the establishment of a functional government in Afghanistan. While that thesis is consistent with keeping one's campaign promises, it's deeply flawed, magical thinking. As Herclitus said, almost 2500 years ago, "You could not step twice into the same river; for other waters are ever flowing on to you."

As many have pointed out, Al Qaeda isn't much in Afghanistan any more, and haven't been since we decided to let them go at Tora Bora in 2001. In the intervening years, the government that took power with such high hopes and expectations has proven itself totally corrupt and has lost all legitimacy with its own people. That has left a power vacuum, and just as they did after the US ignored the country after the Soviets left, the Taliban has moved back in to fill the empty space. Several analysts with experience on the ground have pointed out that if there was ever any chance at making what has been for a thousand years a tribal or clannish political structure into a functioning central government, it has long since vanished, as those clan leaders have reasserted control of their own fiefdoms.

Finally, the US Army, once seen as a liberation army, is now seen as an occupying force, and what it contends with is not so much an ideologically driven enemy as a nationalist and even more local insurgency. The Afghanis, and particularly the Pashtun tribesmen that make up the majority of the insurgent forces, are fiercely independent, and even more protective of the dignity of their homes and families. That US troops are finding themselves in conflict with such people is inevitable, and the country is too rural, too difficult to move around in, and too fragmented to present any real possibility of success. There's no central leader to negotiate a peace with - the one we supported is a crook, and there was no tradition in place that inclines the Afghani people to replace him with anyone else.

Meanwhile, the real trouble is in Pakistan, and while that country is also unstable, fighting in Afghanistan is doing nothing to stabilize it - indeed, the fighting is driving large numbers of angry, anti-American troops into its wild lands, making an ungovernable region even more of a powder keg.

President Obama is to be commended for his careful analysis of the problem, but it seems that analysis has produced a plan unlikely to provide success. He's trying to unscrew a pooch that was well and truly screwed before he got there, and while the valor of the troops in the field is beyond dispute, he appears to have set them an unachievable task. Let's hope he has the sense to recognize its impossibility in time to prevent him from getting sucked into another Asian quagmire - one in a lifetime is enough, and we're less well equipped to waste either the blood or the treasure it will consume than we were for the last time.

Moyers' Journal

Bill Moyers announced his retirement from weekly journalism last week, and as part of a rather melancholy journey through what we'll be missing when he does retire, I found this archived show from this last October 30th. I had missed it when it aired, but I'm incredibly grateful that I have the chance to see it on the web. It's a tour de force of news variety; a great interview with James Galbraith, an interesting retrospective on William F. Buckley with Richard Brookheiser, and a great essay from Moyers himself about President Obama's (still upcoming) decision on whether or not to send more troops to Afghanistan. All three are well worth watching, but this quote about the sanitization of war and the way to make politicians and the public at large grasp the real costs of fighting struck me as Moyers at his best.

"Bring back the draft, and then watch them dive for cover on Capitol Hill, in the watering holes and think tanks of the Beltway, and in the quiet little offices where editorial writers spin clever phrases justifying other people's sacrifice. Let's insist our governing class show the courage to make this long and dirty war our war, or the guts to end it."

Amen.

Vietnam & Afghanistan

Last Friday, Bill Moyers Journal aired a remarkable program of clips from LBJ's conversations about reluctantly getting deeper and deeper into Vietnam. The most startling thing about these tapes is the extent to which they make clear that LBJ new from the beginning that he was sinking into an unwinnable quagmire, but did it anyway.

The parallels between Vietnam and Afghanistan have certainly been much discussed, but this program adds perspective that is gripping, both because the tapes are moving in themselves, and because Moyers was one of Johnson's aides at the time, and knows exactly whereof he speaks. The comparison is jaw-dropping in its accuracy - if you missed it, take the time.

Nationalism and US International Policy

Foreign Service officer Matthew Hoh resigned in protest from the State Department in September, saying he had lost confidence in the policy he was helping to implement in Afghanistan, according to an article by Karen DeYoung in this morning's Washington Post (read the article, it's very good work).

Hoh, a former Marine who served in Iraq as part of a reconstruction team, has a personnel file that's full of glowing reports, and the article includes comments from several of his colleagues in Afghanistan that indicate that they hold him in the highest regard. Indeed, when he first sent his letter of resignation, they were so interested in not losing him that both the US ambassador to Afghanistan and Special Envoy Richard Holbrooke tried to talk him out of resigning. They offered him a promotion to senior embassy staffer, a job which he initially accepted, and then declined a few days later, as he realized that he wouldn't be able to support the mission in which he no longer believed.

Two things about this turn of events are significant. The first is that when someone of this caliber sacrifices his career and submits a principled resignation, we owe it to them and ourselves to pay close attention to what they're protesting with their resignation. In 2003, a diplomat named John Brady Kiesling resigned from the foreign service over our developing  jingoistic fervor about Iraq. Had anyone that resignation the attention it deserved, we might have saved ourselves the loss of tragic amounts of blood, treasure, influence, and national prestige. Unfortunately, Kiesling worked in Athens, not Iraq, and his resignation went unnoticed by the public at the time. At least he did better than Scott Ritter, the UN weapons inspector who protested publicly that there were no significant WMD in Iraq, and was savaged for his trouble by the Bush administration and accused of treason by its Greek chorus in the press.

That the Obama administration isn't attempting any similar slander of Mr. Hoh is encouraging, and I hope they give his protest and its reasons their full attention. (As a side note, if Dick Cheney should decide to unburden himself of any opinion concerning Mr. Hoh that isn't laden with a huge measure of respect for a man who was willing to make sacrifices that Cheney's own "other priorities" prevented him from considering, someone should horsewhip him back to whatever rock he's currently living under.)

The more important aspect of Hoh's resignation, though, is the reason behind it. He's become convinced that the Afghan people have turned against the US troops in their country out of national pride, and that our continued presence there is only inflaming a nationalist resistance that we'll never overcome. His analysis draws on having spent most of this year doing what his superiors recognize as great work at winning hearts and minds in Afghanistan, after doing a good deal of the same thing as a Marine in Iraq.

Hoh's resignation letter alludes to the non-existence of any central authority to support in Afghanistan. The largest coherent political unit in much of the country is the local valley's tribe, and in each of these valleys, that tribe's interest in working with NATO troops is losing out to its interest in driving foreign invaders from its territory. Winning them over would be a valley by valley proposition, and Hoh considers it impossible. Apparently it was the failure of the Afghan election that was the straw that broke the camel's back, but even if we had a central government that we could trust, the NATO support that government relies on would deprive it of legitimacy in the eyes of its people.

It's become cliche to say so, but we've seen this movie before. We confused what was essentially a nationalist revolt in Vietnam with a communist conspiracy to overthrow the French colonial government there, and involved ourselves in 15 years of supporting a corrupt government which had no credibility with its people, at the end of which we'd lost over 50,000 lives and gained nothing except our first military defeat as a country. We got into that war in exactly the same way we're getting into this one - slowly, a little bit at a time. If Matthew Hoh's resignation prevents us from repeating that mistake, he will have augmented an already impressive career with a service to his country that few can provide.

If there's any justice, though, this should not be the end of his career in government. I understand he is due to meet with VP Biden's advisers on Afghanistan today, and it would be both just and a wise use of human resources if Hoh were retained as one of those advisers by Biden or some other part of the administration's policy apparatus. John Brady Kiesling's bravery and Scott Ritter's were "rewarded" by wrecking their careers. It would be a great change if we didn't lose Hoh's services as a result of his principled objection to a dangerous policy.

Rethink Afghanistan

Robert Greenwald's Brave New Films has produced a documentary about the Afghan war that makes a strong case for disengagement. This is the first of six parts, all available online at Brave New Films' site, RethinkAfghanistan.com.

The documentary includes interiews with a large number of experts in the mechanics of the region, and considering the decisions facing us about getting further mired in this conflict, this is a point of view that we need to see:

"...delight in each other, make others' conditions our own..."

Most of the time, this blog's name alludes to shouts of "NO!" that spring unbidden from the viewer (at least, this viewer) at the inanities, banality, sloppy reporting, and outright lies that appear nightly on our TV screens. Every now and again, though, the same screen produces shouts of "YES!", and it would be both silly and churlish not to acknowledge them.

Last night was such a night. First, Keith Olbermann delivered an hour-long "special comment" about the need for health care reform that drew upon his own recent experience in caring for his father, who was stricken by serious illness last month. In that editorial, Olbermann made reference to the fears that inform the craziness that has been prominent among opponents of reform, the failure of the supporters of reform to allay those fears, and the high stakes that raise the pressure and the volume on both sides of the argument ("it's about pain and death").

Olbermann's special comments have become legendary (or infamous, depending on who you talk to), and I had my doubts about whether he could keep one going for a full hour, but he did it, in spades. If you have time, click the link and have some - it's great television and a service to the republic.

Olbermann's show was followed by the always interesting Rachel Maddow, who provided a characteristically informative and provocative hour, but the last segment of her show was the cherry on top of the evening's offering - an inteview with Sarah Vowell about her history of the Puritan settlement of America, The Wordy Shipmates, which is newly out in paperback.

Vowell's take on our history is layered with both pride in our country's principles and and ambivalence about our shortcomings, and so provides a much richer assessment of the subject than most. Unsurprisingly, her history of the Puritans runs true to this form. She compares the experience and writing of John Winthrop and Roger Williams as two poles of the Puritan experiment, and makes an interesting case that much of our national character is both represented by and was established in the conflict between these two men.

What made the segment on Maddow's show so compelling, though, was a discussion of Winthrop's famous sermon, "A Model of Christian Charity", written while Winthrop was on his way to become governor, and famous because of its exhortation that the Massachusetts Bay Colony should rise to its destiny as a "city on a hill", the city that Ronald Reagan referred to as "shining" in his paean to American greatness three hundred years later. Vowell pointed out that unlike Reagan's speech, WInthrop's sermon takes much more account of the fact that we can fail at this task, and that if we do so, it will be from a lack of the communitarianism that he calls for.

I expect that it was a coincidence, but coming as it did after Olbermann's personal and impassioned plea that we fix the glaring hole in our community represented by the health care system in this country, it was particularly moving and appropriate. Vowell points out that in making reference to the "shining city on the hill", Reagan buried the lede of the sermon itself. Instead, she commends to us a much more poetic and much less triumphalist passage, which comes just before the city on the hill reference:

"We must be willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities, for the supply of others’ necessities. We must uphold a familiar commerce together in all meekness, gentleness, patience and liberality. We must delight in each other; make others’ conditions our own; rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, as members of the same body."

I'm not a believer, but even I can say "amen" to that.

Head Scratcher du Jour

Hmmmm...

I heard a Memorial Day episode of Tom Ashbrook's NPR "On Point" program on Monday that had Andrew Bacevich on, discussing our policy in Iraq and Afghanistan. For those who aren't familiar with Bacevich, let's just say that his scholarship and his experience demand our respect. He served in two wars, retired as a colonel, lost a son in Iraq, and has been a scholar of American military policy in several places, including West Point and now Boston University. His book, The Limits of Power, is an important piece of work that levels a withering criticism of US military policy over the last few years, the essence of which is contained in its subtitle (the End of American Exceptionalism).

Bacevich suggests that President Obama has made important changes to American policy, in reducing our commitment in Iraq, shutting down Guantanamo (assuming the chickenshits in the Senate will let him do that) and so forth, but he says that Obama's own policy suffers from a failure to conceive a strategy that is consistent with what we can achieve on the middle east and takes into account root causes of the enmity toward the US that we have seen explode in that region over the last decade or more.

He is careful to emphasize that he's not trying to suggest that we caused or should feel guilty for the attacks of September 11th, 2001, but that we should think carefully about where the anger that causes them comes from, and should take the sources of that anger into account as we form a strategic response that governs our middle east policy.

Bacevich rejects the strategic assumptions of the Bush administration as wildly unrealistic and anchored in flawed assessments of the real situation, but he does say that the anger we are seeing in the middle east is in significant measure a function of our intemperance in trying to make the rest of the world fit and acquiesce to our own thirst for oil and our insistence that the societies in the middle east function in ways that we approve of, regardless of whether those ways are satisfactory to those people in them who must live with the consequences of our choices for them (hint: they're not).

In that sense, depite his condemnation of Bush's policy, Bacevich's critique raises an interesting question. Bush was fond of saying (and every member of the right-wing Greek chorus that sang us into war was fond of echoing) that "they hate us for our freedom". It occurs to me that while taken as it was offered (i.e., that "those people" hate freedom per se), the assertion that they "hate us for our freedom" is nonsensical on its face, it may be closer to the truth than I have given it credit for in the past. If our "freedom" is freedom to consume absurd amounts of oil and monkey around with their societies with reckless abandon in order to continue that profligacy, then the people who have attacked us may indeed hate us for our freedom, because that freedom has direct and unhappy impacts on their lives. If that's true, then in an odd way, even though what he proposed to do about it was disastrous, Bush's base assertion was right.

"Criminalizing a Policy Difference"

Joe Scarborough is missing from Morning Joe this morning (he called in to make the questionable point that 50% of the American people agree with Dick Cheney about torturing people, but he was not sitting in the chair when he did it). If, however, he had any concerns that his absence would leave a lack of people parroting right wing talking points or cheering on right wing apologists without any semblance of journalistic efforts to correct the record, he can now sleep easy.

The right wing apologist du jour this morning was Liz Cheney, and her primary task, when she's not spouting the same sort of slanders in which her father specialized, was carrying her father's water on the subject of torture. 

Apparently, it's bad form to question an interviewee on the batshit insanity of what she's saying if what she is saying is a defense of her father. Using this bit of unwritten protocol to its best advantage, Cheney made a whole host of unsupported assertions, and those assertions went completely unchallenged by two journalists (Adam Ross Sorkin and Mike Barnicle) and whatever it is that Mika Brzezinski and Willie Geist call themselves. Sorkin and Barnicle were apparently there to demonstrate why the New York Times company is going broke (the times owns the Boston Globe, Barnicle's employer and fellow newspaper basket case), which they did in spades.

I can understand why it's uncomfortable to say to someone who is sitting in front of you that they're spouting nonsense, and I can certainly understand that it's difficult to challenge someone defending a parent of other family member without coming off as overbearing or combative, but if you can't do that in search of the truth in a story, you need to turn in your journalist's union card. It's just not an excuse on a news program to neglect to question a guest on what he or she says, particularly if it flies in the face of a great deal of other people's comments.

The bullshit was thick and furious, but the leading offense was the assertion, which Cheney made repeatedly, that those who want to see this stuff investigated are trying to criminalize a policy difference, and that bodes ill for the future of democracy. That argument is complete bullshit - the policy in question was a crime before Liz Cheney's daddy decided to implement it, a crime that we have prosecuted people for ourselves and condemned in others. 

And yet, nobody saw fit to mention that small point at all for most of Cheney's conversation on the show. In fairness, at the end of her considerable segment, the Washington Post's Eugene Robinson came on and at least challenged some of what she said, but Cheney interrupted him so many times that that point was buried.

You can't have it both ways, boys and girls. If you want to do a puff piece on the ex-VP's daughter, that's fine (if uninteresting), but if you're going to have her on to defend her father's policies, it's professional misconduct to fail to challenge that defense. If you can't issue such a challenge, you have the wrong guest on. If you don't know that, you're blind to the requirements of tour own profession, and if you do know it and do it anyway, you're not a journalist, you're a PR flack.

Update: It gets better. According to this piece on TPM, Cheney asked to stay longer than her allotted time, in order to get into an argument with Robinson, who wrote an unflattering assessment of her father in this morning's Post. Her intention was clearly to make it impossible for robinson to make his case clearly, and it worked, in no small part because Morning Joe's producers allowed (in fact, encouraged) it to happen.

Quote of the Day

Considering that the discussion about Bush administration torture techniques has become increasingly focused on whether or not those techniques were effective, and on what the political ramifications of investigating and debating the matter publicly, this pair of interview segments bears repeating. The fact that the quote comes from Fox News is certainly surprising, but in fairness, Fox anchor Shepard Smith deserves high praise for getting to the heart of the matter.

The highlight is in the second clip on the page:

"We are America!" he shouted, slamming his hand on the table. "I don't give a rat's ass if it helps. We are AMERICA! We do not fucking torture!!"

Bravo!

It is not a partisan matter to prosecute crimes, and whether they helped or not, these were crimes (ratified treaties carry the force of law). The efficacy arguments are unprovable either way, and in some sense, so is the perfectly valid belief that the payoff is not worth the cost even if torturing someone does work (certain episodes of "24" to the contrary notwithstanding).

What is not a gray area is that we have already decided that these are war crimes, and no number of legal memos can stop them from being crimes (imagine the reception a memo that opined that murder wasn't a crime would get!)

We have both prima facie evidence of and confessions to these crimes. There is no partisan issue here whatsoever. Try them.

Update: We already know that the FBI had opted out of all these interrogations because Judge Mueller believed the program was illegal and would "end badly". Now the Levin report reveals that the FBI wasn't the only entity who thought so. So did the Army, Air Force, Navy, and Marines.

Update II: Here's another HuffPo piece about the silliness of the argument about torture's efficacy. Efficacy is irrelevant. Murder works like a charm at getting rid of a rival, but that doesn't serve as a defense if you murder your rivals. Neither should it serve as one here.

Disgusting and Frightening

I almost missed this must read article in yesterday's NY Times. It details a propaganda operation run out of the Pentagon to sell the war in Iraq to the American people, involving the "military analysts" we see on television all the time. The article notes a preponderance of these "analysts" who worked for Fox News, but there are many who work for all the other main news outlets as well, both broadcast and print.

Those "analysts", it turns out, are mostly lobbyists for military contractors with a strong vested interest in toeing the administration and the Pentagon's line in their "analysis" of what's been going on in Iraq, from the lead up to the war, right through the present day. The article also reports details from contemporary e-mails (secured through FOIA requests) that make it clear that the Pentagon worked that vested interest very specifically and very consciously, in an organized program that involved special access, tailored "fact-finding" trips, regular conference calls, and overt appeals to the "analysts" in question to act as administration "surrogates" in getting the "good news" about Iraq out to the public.

Not only has the professional judgment of the Pentagon been subverted in the same way that the Justice Department has by this administration and its water carriers, but in this case, it has managed to co-opt and dramatically twist coverage of the war by supposedly independent media sources, who appear to have completely failed to recognize or even look for the conflicts of interest at the heart of the cadre of "analysts" giving the "authoritative analysis" (astonishingly, considering their influence, the article notes that these people don't have the same rules about disclosing conflicts that reporters do).

It's a thoroughgoing disgrace, and I'm at a loss to describe the magnitude of the deception it involves. Read the article.