The more I think about this Turkish rejection of US troops the bigger a deal it looks like.
Perhaps it can be salvaged next week, though that seems unclear.
But if you want some evidence of this administration's diplomatic incompetence, consider this. We publicly sold out the Kurds to get this deal. We really should have made sure we had a deal before we tipped our hands to the Kurds about the price we were willing to pay for it.
Now we have no deal and no Kurds. I don't think we should have sold out the Kurds regardless. But if we were going to do so we should have been clearer with ourselves about who we were in bed with, the Turks or the Kurds.
The administration has a stiff wind of anti-anti-Americanism at its back which has thus far allowed it to weather each of these storms. Every one of the administration's diplomatic debacles is the fault, not of the administration, but of our conniving friends: the Germans, the French, the Turks, the Canadians, Gerhard Schroder, Noam Chomsky, Bono, Elmo, you name it. (The dog ate my homework, and so forth.) But the list of #$&@-ups is really becoming mind-boggingly long.
--Josh Marshall
So far our experiment with Middle Eastern democracy-building isn't going so well. We've just sold out an 
incipient democracy in Iraqi Kurdistan. And now we can't get an existing democracy in Turkey to go along with our war plans ("Turkey rejects U.S. troop plan").
Meanwhile, we've got some very good news in the war on terrorism, the arrest of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the suspected mastermind of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. This isn't just some capo in the organization. He's about as high up the food-chain as you can get without being bin Laden himself.
This is great news. And I've got no problem with how we pulled it off. But in the democracy-building context, we should bear in mind that we accomplished this by continuing our long-standing policy of using autocratic governments in the Muslim and Arab worlds to do our bidding notwithstanding public opposition.
All of which is to say that exporting democracy and getting everyone to agree with you at the same time is a rather difficult proposition.
And this is the easy part.
--Josh Marshall
Kucinich responds! Or at least to Salon. Jake Tapper has a new interview with Congressman Dennis Kucinich in Salon. In it he has this question and response ...
A rival's campaign has brought an April 1972 Cleveland Magazine article to my attention in which you are accused of using racial politics. The story says that after you arrived in the city council in 1967 you began "playing confrontation politics with the city's black administration as if [you] had invented the game." Care to comment?My political career goes back to the '60s and those were times of vigorous debates. But race was not a factor in those debates. The debates were on issues, not about race -- there may have been differences of opinion. But they were never about race. When I was running for mayor I said that half of my major appointments would go to members of the African-American community, and they did. I could cite a long, deep connection with the African-American community. I have a very strong constituency in that community. So in the '60s was it possible that there were some differences of opinion? Yes. But it was never based on race. Never. Not a chance. Not even the people I clashed with in major ways would ever say that.
Also of interest is this list of three people's accounts of Kucinich's career. One friend, one foe, one a bit of each.
--Josh Marshall
We have our traffic statistics in for February 2003. Unique Visitors 138,279; Visits 368,900; Page Views 1,000,258.
Thanks so much to all who've visited the site, those who keep returning and those who spread the word. Thank you.
--Josh Marshall
Okay, a number of intrepid TPM readers have gotten to the bottom of the Coldline mystery, noted in the earlier post. (Actually, what am I thinking? No one in his right mind in DC wants to offend the newsgods at the Hotline. They can make buzz or break buzz with a stern look. I just imagine them sitting in some smokey nightclub, with 
fancy suits and pinky rings, telling me "All I need is your respect and none of this ugliness has to happen.")
Anyway, here's what seems to have transpired. As we speculated in the last post, the story of the Georgia state legislators objecting to the musical South Pacific because it "justifies intermarriage of different races" is true. It really did happen. Only it didn't happen yesterday. It happened fifty years ago yesterday.
Apparently the Columbus Ledger-Enquirer, the paper that ran the item the Hotline picked up, often runs fifty-years-ago-today filler-items. Here's one from last week, for instance. Only this time they forgot to add the "Fifty Years Ago Today" moniker and it ran with the appearance of a normal news item. "Georgia Senators Attack 'South Pacific' Themes"
Apparently, the folks at the Hotline caught wind of it and, not surprisingly, thought it was a new story.
Thanks to TPM readers TFW and JS for some above-and-beyond-the-call-of-duty sleuthing.
--Josh Marshall
Well, I'm always up for a good story about unreconstructed Republicans making themselves look stupid with racial wackiness. And I thought maybe I had one. The Hotline picked up a story from the Columbus Ledger-Enquirer today which said that two members of the Georgia state legislature had some problems with a certain musical. ("The Broadway musical "South Pacific" is 'offensive to Southern tradition,'" said two GA legislators 2/27".) Here's the item from the Ledger-Enquirer website.
Georgia Senators Attack "South Pacific" Themes"South Pacific," smash Broadway musical hit, is "offensive to Southern tradition," two Georgia legislators charged yesterday.
Rep. David C. Jones of Sylvester and Sen. John Sheppard of Ashburn said in a written statement they would ask the next legislature for a bill to prevent the showing of "theatricals which have an underlying philosophy inspired by Moscow."
Jones said the play "justifies intermarriage of different races" which "produces half breeds which are not conducive to the higher type of society... We in the South are a proud people and have pure blood lines. We want to keep it that way."
Now, as regular readers know, TPM likes nothing better that ridiculing these sorts of yahoos.
But, I'll be honest: this one just seemed a bit too good to be true. So I picked up the phone and called the Georgia House Information Office and the same office on the Senate side. According to them, neither of these men exists. At least, neither is a member of the Georgia House or Senate.
The other items on the page at the Ledger-Enquirer website are from the early 1950s so it seems like this is maybe something that actually happened back then. From the site, it's just not clear. Whatever the case, on this one the Hotline looks like the Coldline.
TPM, preserving the good name of the South one step at a time.
--Josh Marshall
I had intended to write more about Iraq yesterday but I ended up spending the entire evening working through several years worth of notes to come to a final determination about how many English settlers and Indians there were in New England in 1675 and, equally important, how many -- particularly how many Indians -- were left by the end of 1676. As regular readers will understand, this is part of revising the draft of my dissertation which I've mentioned several times over the last few months.
The headline, if you can call it that, is that 1675 and 1676 went really badly for the Indians. But finding out just how badly, and precisely how it went badly, and for how many people, is a complicated matter. At least a thousand New England Indians, and probably many more, were shipped overseas as slaves that year. Most went to the Caribbean. But I've spent a great deal of time trying to piece together as many details as I can about what happened to about 200 of these deportees, from what is now southeastern Massachusetts, who ended up, of all places, in Morocco.
Specifically, in Tangier.
In any case, that took the place of Iraq last night. But back to Iraq.
First a few observations.
I'm struck by how few people have made this point. For about a year the administration's line was that we did not need nor even particularly care if we got support from our European or Arab allies. Then, when we finally went to them for support, they either said 'no' (French, Germans, et al.) or gave it grudgingly (Turks). And this we're supposed to see as a betrayal. That doesn't make any sense. A betrayal implies some earlier agreement, formal, tacit or implied. Not only did we not have this, we spurned it.
Now, I know this is a sort of simplified version of events. But I think it captures the essential truth of what's happened. And I think it gets to the problem some us -- or, I'll speak for myself, I -- think we're facing.
I don't have much truck with those who don't believe Saddam is a threat. He is. Not an imminent threat, but one we needed to face sooner rather than later. A number of readers have sent me this link to a response to Ken Pollack published on the Carnegie Endowment website. Some of its points are good. Others turn on detailed knowledge of intelligence estimates which just aren't available to the public. But the key error I see in the argument is about our ability to sustain containment over time.
I think the authors are right when they say that as long as we've got Saddam under the gun, and with a bunch of inspectors running around the place, he's not going anywhere. He is contained. I'm not worried about him developing nukes as long as those inspectors are there and they're able to work in concert with the leads our intelligence agencies are able to produce. What I doubt is that the current situation is sustainable. I'll say more later about why I doubt it's sustainable. But, for the moment, that's my criticism.
But some necessary actions can be done so disastrously and foolishly that it becomes a serious question whether or not to do them at all.
We're in one of those situations.
If we could turn back the clock a year and we had the choice of a) doing exactly what we've done or b) waiting a year or two for a more favorable moment or until a new team was in place who knew what they were doing, I think option 'b' would unquestionably be the better choice.
Unfortunately, we don't have that choice. The administration has already done massive damage to our standing in the world. And they've managed to create facts on the ground -- intentionally and unintentionally -- which make pulling back arguably more dangerous than pushing ahead. The question is no longer what the ideal thing to do is. It's more aptly described as which of the really bad alternatives is best to choose given the jam the administration has backed us into.
More soon on what the damage is to our standing in the world and what those facts on the ground are.
--Josh Marshall
I'm currently writing a long article about the administration's grand designs 
to democratize the Middle East. And the subject is getting a lot of play today after the president's speech last night at the American Enterprise Institute. But the deal we've just cut with the Turks belies much of the democratization argument. Now, for reasons I'll try to get into later, I'm something of a turkophile. But the administration's apparent decision to allow the Turkish army to range at will through Iraqi Kurdistan -- the one place in Iraq where something like democracy is taking root -- doesn't bode well for any grand democratic experiment. As this piece in the Philly Inquirer put it yesterday, "Although the White House cites the democratic institutions of Iraqi Kurds as proof that Iraq can become a democracy after Saddam, Bush officials seem ready to sell out the Kurds in pursuit of [Turkish] bases."
Keep in mind, of course, that the stuff that happens before the bullets start flying is the easy part.
--Josh Marshall
I'm sitting here listening to Bill Maher on Larry King Live arguing against going to war in Iraq. And he makes a pretty damn good case.
--Josh Marshall
Okay, so here's the story.
The Democratic candidate we're talking about is Congressman Dennis Kucinich. And the article in question is this one which 
appeared in Cleveland Magazine in 1972. I strongly recommend reading it yourself to make your own judgement about what it says.
As those who are familiar with Kucinich's career know, he's been in and out of elective office almost literally since he was a kid. Now, some folks have written in to tell me that Cleveland Magazine has a long-standing beef with Kucinich. But I've read a good bit of press coverage on Kucinich from the 1970s. And the point about racial politics is not limited to that article or publication.
Basically, in the early days -- before he was running citywide, let alone nationwide -- Kucinich's political schtick was posing as the champion of the 'forgotten' white ethnic voters over against the rising force of black political power. Sort of a great white hope type, or great Slavic hope, if you will.
There was plenty of acrimony between blacks and white ethnic voters in Northern cities in the late 1960s and early 1970s. So it was fertile political ground. And playing on that divide for political gain was not at all uncommon. That fissure, after all, was one of the things that broke apart the Democrats' coalition in the North. Kucinich didn't create it. But at the time some pols chose to play to it while others didn't.
Now, what does it mean? This was a long time ago. And at the time Kucinich was, almost literally, a kid. When he was elected Mayor later in the decade I think he was still only 31. Plenty of folks from the South who are still active in politics today -- many of whom now get lots of black votes -- were still segregationists in the early 1960s. So people do change their stripes. And bygones often get considered bygones.
But people have been scrutinizing the backgrounds of a lot of politicians from the South, particularly Republicans -- I have as much as anyone. So I don't think it's unfair to raise this point. This is particularly so since Kucinich is now putting himself forward as a candidate for national office as the champion of the progressive wing of the Democratic party.
People do 'evolve' politically -- and not just in the euphemistic, wink-wink kind of sense. People really do change. And they change their style of politics too. But usually, for this to work, or be legitimate and believable, the pol in question has to make some sort of public accounting for why circumstances changed or why he or she did.
Given that Kucinich is now making a play for the votes of dyed-in-the-wool liberals, a bit more of such an accounting seems in order.
P.S. For some reason, as of late this afternoon, the Cleveland Magazine website seems to be down. Here's a cached copy maintained by Google.
--Josh Marshall
Who is the mystery Democratic presidential candidate? The one tagged in the previous post as having his own history of rough-n-tumble race politics?
Well, not to paraphrase a certain former senator from Wisconsin, but I have in my hand a copy of an old magazine article covering an earlier point in the candidate's political career. And here's one choice tidbit. It's a quote from a John Metcalf, one of the candidate's campaign workers at the time ...
"[Candidate X] has gotten a lot smarter in the last couple of years," says Metcalf. "He learned to play dirty pool. Hell, there are a lot of ethnics out there who want to keep the n----rs on their side of the river. It's a racial issue. There are a lot of bigots in that district and someone has to represent them, let's face it."
Let's be clear: that's not a quote from the candidate, but from one of his campaign workers. But the rest of the article paints a similar, if less inflammatory, picture of the style of politics in question.
More soon.
--Josh Marshall
Does one of the Democratic presidential candidates have his own history of rough-n-tumble race politics? No, I'm not talking about Al Sharpton. And, No, I don't mean what Republicans call race-politics or race-baiting (i.e., accusing racists of actually being racists.) No, I mean the real thing. The genuine article!
--Josh Marshall
Here's my new column in The Hill. This week: the price we're paying for the White House's decision to piss off everyone in the world at the same time.
--Josh Marshall
Hmmm. That's not a great sign.
Ayatollah Mohammed Baqir al-Hakim tells MSNBC that a prolonged US military occupation of Iraq could be met with a "religious war." And he's one of our guys, the head of one of the Iraqi exile groups we're relying on to help rebuild the place.
One could jump from this to a few good whacks against the Bush administration. But I think that would miss the point. al-Hakim's statement just underscores the sheer immensity of the task we're setting ourselves up for.
First, a little background. al-Hakim is the head of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), an Iranian-backed Shia exile group which the Bush administration has cautiously courted in its efforts to bring some unity to the Iraqi opposition.
The MSNBC article, I think, overstates al-Hakim's and SCIRI's importance. "Among the half-dozen Iraqi opposition groups," says the author, "Hakim’s council is the most significant." This may be true in one respect. Some of the opposition groups we support are so pitiful that they have little if any actual presence in Iraq. But though Shias make up the majority in Iraq, it's not at all clear that al-Hakim's brand of Iranian-backed fundamentalism has a big audience.
However that may be, his statements point to a big problem. Even our would-be supporters in regime change don't want to be associated with an occupation by a foreign (and non-muslim) power. And yet there's almost no way we're going to achieve our objectives without a long occupation which is deeply-entrenched and so overwhelming numerically that it can throw a blanket of enforced peace over all the tensions, divisions and rage that Saddam's tyranny has both created and held in check for three decades.
The real problem is that we're embarking on an enterprise which does not admit of half-measures. As Fouad Ajami notes in this article, an American invasion of Iraq will at first almost certainly be viewed as a neo-Imperialist attempt to take over an Arab country, secure its oil wealth, and do various other bad things.
Certainly, this will be the case outside Iraq and probably inside as well. There's a good chance it will always be seen that way. But the only chance of changing the equation is to undertake the sort of thorough-going internal transformation of the country that we managed in Germany and Japan. But as I say, the situation doesn't admit of half measures. You can go in, topple Saddam, turn it over to some oppositionists and wish'em the best. Or you can go for a massive military occupation and thorough reconstruction of the society. (The Army Chief of Staff told a Senate committee yesterday that the numbers needed would total several hundred thousand soldiers.) Anything in between seems doomed to disaster since you'll get all the down-sides of being a non-muslim occupying power and none of the (possible) upsides of installing a quasi-democratic regime. You'll get the fruits of all the region's deep-seated pathologies and no chance to uproot them.
For my own part, I think proponents of the root-and-branch approach miss an important part of why Germany and Japan worked. It's called World War II. One of the reasons the Germans and the Japanese stood still for what we accomplished in their countries is that we had just spent a couple years thoroughly bludgeoning their countries. Day and night bombing against major population centers, the disruption of the economies, the very real threat that if it wasn't us it'd be the Russians taking over, etc.
By 1945, we had pretty much destroyed the Germans' and Japanese' will to fight. And they were pleasantly surprised when they discovered how relatively benign our rule was. The same set of circumstances won't apply to Iraq. And that should be a cause of real concern.
Believe it or not, this isn't meant to say we shouldn't try to accomplish this. Once the decision for war is made it is really the only policy we can pursue. But the scope of enterprise is awe-inspiring.
--Josh Marshall
One of the small, ugly ironies of all this haggling at the UN is this line of reasoning that the UN's credibility and future are on the line in all this. To a significant degree, I think this is true: The Security Council said Saddam had to disarm. Now they really need to make sure he does. But the people in the administration who are pressing this argument about the UN's credibility are also people who have more or less unconcealed contempt for the institution in the first place and would probably just as soon see it trashed anyway. As John Judis notes, they haven't worked with the UN. They've bullied it.
--Josh Marshall
With so much sound and fury and just plain old crap being written about Iraq, be sure not to miss John Judis' new article about the Bush administration's three contending factions on the Iraq question and how they brought us to this current point. It's one of the most clear-minded and enlightening pieces I've read on the topic in some time.
--Josh Marshall
Cover-ups are so easy when no one chooses to pay attention. Yes, we're talking about GOP Marketplace and the phone-jamming scandal.
(Click here to see the "You are not authorized to view this page" sign where GOP Marketplace's website used to be)
The New Hampshire Republican party has always claimed that the $15,600 it gave GOP Marketplace was supposed to be used for get-out-the-vote calls, not the sabotaging of the Democrats' phone-banks for which it was actually used. In fact, members of the New Hampshire state GOP professed to be so irate that they were demanding a refund. "If we don’t get it back," State party Election Law Committee member Richard Kennedy, R-Hopkinton, told The Manchester Union Leader, "you might see a theft of services charge."
Now, if you're interested in getting to the bottom of these sorts of hijinks you want to see dust-ups like this because if things get ugly -- and especially if they go into the courts -- you know all the details are going to come out.
But now it seems the New Hampshire Republican party isn't quite so interested to see that happen. Late last week, the head of the New Hampshire GOP, Jayne Millerick, told the Union Leader that she's decided not to seek any refund after all, preferring instead to "move forward."
That's what's called the other shoe dropping.
--Josh Marshall
As most of you know, the standard six degrees of separation mumbo-jumbo seldom applies to the political world, since you can usually connect up most things with two or perhaps three degrees tops.
Like Miguel Estrada -- would-be conservative ideologue in residence at the DC Circuit Court of Appeals and the still too-little-noted phone-jamming scandal in New Hampshire.
How do they connect up? Let's go to the tape ...
According to this press release, the Republican Leadership Council (RLC) is now running Spanish-language TV ads in California, Florida, Nevada and New Mexico attacking Democratic Senators who are part of the filibuster of Estrada's nomination.
Now, as you -- the loyal Talking Points reader -- will well remember, the Executive Director of the RLC, Allen Raymond, is also the president of GOP Marketplace, the Republican phone-bank chop-shop which sabotaged Democratic phone banks in New Hampshire last election day and is now being investigated by state and federal authorities.
Now, my mistake here was to imagine that the eight Republican Senators who are on the board of the RLC would have blanched a bit at the head of their organization getting caught hatching political dirty tricks which also seem to violate state and federal laws. But apparently it's not that big a deal. Last week I spoke Dave Lackey, a spokesman for Maine Senator Olympia Snowe (R). He told me they didn't have any comment. And if I had any questions I should take it up with the RLC, i.e., not their problem.
I'll call some of the other Senators' offices tomorrow and see what I come up with.
--Josh Marshall
Some stuff you just can't make up.
Until a few months ago Saddam Hussein was sending his Mig-21 jet engines abroad for refits and upgrades. That wasn't all. The sanctions-busting company doing the refits was also apparently working with the Iraqis on converting some of their jet trainer aircraft for remote piloting. This would have made them into so-called 'poor man's cruise missiles,' capable of delivering thousand pound munitions up to 900 miles.
Where was this factory?
Germany?
Pakistan?
North Korea?
The island in the South Pacific Osama bin Laden is setting up as a new Shariah-based version of Fantasy Island?
Nope
Try a section of Bosnia (Republika Srpska) under the jurisdiction of the United States military.
Oops ...
Check out this new article in The Washington Monthly for all the ugly details.
--Josh Marshall
