Boy, where to start with this article in Sunday’s Post?
Not only is it clear, according to the Kay team’s own internal findings, that Iraq had no nuclear program. But we’ve known this pretty much since we first pulled into Baghdad. The only reason it’s not public knowledge is that David Kay has taken it as his task, not to inform the public of the state of Iraq’s pre-war weapons programs, but to carry the water of the White House and obscure the truth as long as possible.
The defenders of the White House now seem intent on lowering the bar to the most comical of levels, arguing that Saddam Hussein had not relinquished the “desire” or the “ambition” to have nuclear weapons. But by this standard (viz, Matthew 5:27-30) probably half the married men in America have cheated on their wives with Pam Anderson or Angelina Jolie. So I’m not quite sure what that proves.
The imminent threat, it seems, was that Saddam was lusting in his heart for nukes, not that he was doing anything to get them.
Along the way, you’ve got lots of pitiful attempts at push-back spin from administration officials who won’t give their name. Here’s one choice example …
An administration official, defending the CIA's prewar analysis, said its message had been widely misunderstood. "The term 'reconstituting' means restoring to a former condition, a process often inferred to be short term," he said. "Based on reporting, however, Saddam clearly viewed it as a long-term process. So did the NIE."
Long-term, indeed ...
(And as I said in the last post, where do you figure all this information's coming from?)
--Josh Marshall
One key graf from the devastating article on Iraq's 'nuclear program' in tomorrow's Post ...
Among the closely held internal judgments of the Iraq Survey Group, overseen by David Kay as special representative of CIA Director George J. Tenet, are that Iraq's nuclear weapons scientists did no significant arms-related work after 1991, that facilities with suspicious new construction proved benign, and that equipment of potential use to a nuclear program remained under seal or in civilian industrial use.
Nuthin ... No program. Nothing.
And how might the Post have come by those "closely held internal judgments" ...
--Josh Marshall
In the previous post I noted that the 9/11 Commission is threatening to subpoena the White House over its refusal to turn over intelligence documents from the lead-up to 9/11 (specifically, they seem to be demanding copies of the Presidential Daily Brief from just before the attacks.)
Perhaps this goes without saying, but look at these various controversies: possible subpoenas over White House stonewalling of the 9/11 investigation, the multiple investigations of the pre-war intel on Iraq, the criminal investigation into the Plame disclosure.
There are differences in each, of course. But in each case, fundamentally, we're talking about the same players: the White House and Intelligence Community. Each is coming to a head. It's a combustible mix.
--Josh Marshall
What's going on here exactly?
Thomas Kean, former Governor of New Jersey, and Chairman of the 9/11 Commission, is threatening to subpoena the White House for 9/11-related documents it's apparently refusing the turn over. This according to an article in Sunday's Times.
The documents in question are apparently Presidential Daily Briefings (PDBs) President Bush received in the days leading up to 9/11. Kean says the White House is "quite nervous" about the contents of the documents becoming publicly known. But he wants them anyway.
(To the best of my knowledge, there is no reason to think that Commission would make such documents public, at least not in their entirety. They just want to see them and make their own judgments about what's there.)
Meanwhile, Commission member and former Senator Max Cleland says the White House is trying to run out the clock on the Commission. And, he says, he can understand why they're stalling. "As each day goes by, we learn that this government knew a whole lot more about these terrorists before Sept. 11 than it has ever admitted," he told the Times.
Now, in addition to, I suspect, being right, Cleland was also the victim of a vicious campaign offensive directed by the White House last year (the Vietnam-era triple-amputee was faulted for lacking patriotism). Because of that, it's only fair to say that you can see why he might take such an aggressive approach toward the White House.
Mind you, I'm not saying Cleland's wrong. I suspect he's right. My point is only that his well-justified bitterness at the White House can and will be portrayed by partisans as the source of his damning statements.
The same simply cannot be said about Kean, who has no partisan interest whatsoever in making trouble for the White House.
You can see why they wanted Henry Kissinger ...
--Josh Marshall
Now it's the Washington Post's fault ...
Yesterday we gave Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan), Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, another citation for great moments in water-carrying.
Looking at the unfolding pre-war intel debacle, Roberts put all the blame on the CIA, telling the Post that "the executive was ill-served by the intelligence community."
Now he says the Post "mischaracterized" his statement. This from Knight Ridder ...
Roberts issued a statement late Friday, saying the Post article had "mischaracterized" his statements. "The committee has not finished its review of the intelligence and has not reached any final conclusions or finished a report," Roberts said.A Roberts aide, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the senator's remarks to the Post weren't meant to be a broad critique of the CIA, but were instead aimed at specific instances of flawed intelligence work, such as the now-debunked claims about Niger sales of uranium to Iraq.
Oh, what a tangled web we weave ...
--Josh Marshall
Let’s call it the overt response and the covert response.
As we noted on Friday, there’s a pretty clear effort afoot to pin the whole intel debacle on the CIA. According to this new storyline, the White House didn’t deceive the country. They were themselves led down the garden path by the CIA.
(The next TPM Featured Book is going to be The Day I Woke Up as a Character in a Kafka Novel by George Tenet with Joseph Persico. But the pub date is still a few years off. So I may have to wait to post.)
In the Times on Saturday you have what you might call the official unofficial response from the Agency, a testy push-back from “four senior intelligence officials."
Here are the two key grafs …
In other words, these guys are living in fantasy land.The senior intelligence officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, as they outlined findings from a 405-page review being conducted by the National Intelligence Council, said David Kay, the American heading the search for illicit weapons in Iraq, would ultimately determine if the C.I.A. had been right.
"We don't think what we did was deficient, we don't think it was sloppy, and we're waiting to see what David finds to see whether we got it right," a senior official said. In an interim report this month, Mr. Kay said his team had not yet found any chemical, biological or nuclear weapons in Iraq. The search is to be completed sometime next year.
Nothing’s wrong. It's not that we share blame for the problems: there were no problems. Everything we said was right. David Kay is going to find the weapons. And then everything will be cool.
Up-is-downism would appear to be a pretty catchy malady.
Rather than living in fantasy land, it’s probably better to say that their positions and their complicity in the mess compel them to act as though they’re living in fantasy land.
What everyone is waiting for now is the other shoe to drop, the slow seep of leaks coming out of the Agency, and from the cadre of ex-CIA types who still have channels back in. In their own way, many of these folks are as embittered at Tenet as they are with the White House.
(Hersh's piece in The New Yorker is a preview.)
And even with Tenet, the picture isn’t so clear. Remember what happened the last time he ‘fell on his sword’ for the White House?
--Josh Marshall
Something I came across ...
“[His] principal issue was the war. The issue of the war was not like other issues. To a significant part of the electorate, the war was a passion, and opposing it had become something like a way of life. It had defined the politics of a generation. And now the war had been going on so long that to passion was added memory. To [this] generation, it was not only a candidate’s current position on the war that counted but his position on the war at every moment in the war’s long history. To them, a man’s record on the war was an index to his character, and [his] opposition had been strong and consistent from an early date.”
Just food for thought.
--Josh Marshall
I've been getting tons of emails over the transom this evening about the arrest of Abdurahman M. Alamoudi on various charges of illegal financial transactions tied to terrorist organizations and his ties to Grover Norquist.
Norquist, of course, is the capo di tutti capi of Republican insiders, and a close friend and advisor to the president and Karl Rove.
I don't have any unique insight into this particular relationship.
But if you want to know more, a good place to start is the excellent piece Frank Foer wrote on the subject back in November 2001: "Grover Norquist's Strange Alliance with Radical Islam."
Unfortunately, I think the piece is on the TNR site for subscribers only. But it may be worth paying a few bucks to read.
Now, I do know a bit about the "Free Markets and Democracy" conference that Norquist put on in Doha, Qatar back in the spring of 2001.
Norquist brought a dozen congressmen over and at least one of them had a sit down with the then-Foreign Minister of Afghanistan, Taliban grandee Ahmad Muttawakil. When I talked to him in August of last year, Norquist told me that he himself didn't meet with Muttawakil. The congressman who did meet with him was Dana Rohrabacher.
My sense has always been that Norquist got into the Islam business back in the late 1990s when it looked like a growth industry for the Republican coalition.
He had a lot of ideas about Muslims being natural cultural conservatives and free marketeers, and so forth. This three-cheers for Muslim capitalism! conference in Doha is a prime example.
His 'Islamic Institute' is run out the offices of his main operation, 'Americans for Tax Reform.' (I just checked the website and apparently it's now 'The Islamic Free Market Institute.' So, you know, Mohamed von Hayek.)
In any case, after 9/11 came along he probably realized that he might have gotten tied up with at least a few questionable characters. But he was too proud to admit he'd been naive and then just dug himself deeper.
That's always been my sense. But when people start getting arrested, maybe it's time to give the whole thing a closer look.
--Josh Marshall
What's wrong with this <$NoAd$>picture?
Here's the Washington Post's headline about the Madrid Donors' Conference ...
Iraq Donations Fall Short: Many Pledges in the Form of Loans, Debt Relief, Not Grants
Here's the headline in Reuters ...
Donors Promise Iraq $33 Billion, Smashing Expectations
And, yes, in case you're wondering, they're talking about the same conference.
It's pretty hard to figure out from the articles just what was pledged whether in loans or grants or anything else. But one key sign seems to be that the biggest donors turn out to be the IMF and the World Bank.
--Josh Marshall
The Washington Post says most of the aid pledges coming out of the Madrid Conference are in the form of loans rather than grants. Other pledges appear to be debt forgiveness for past loans which were likely uncollectable.
Meanwhile, most of the $1.5 billion pledge from Kuwait seems actually to be money the Kuwaitis say they've already given to the Iraqis.
I think we're going to have to wait at least a few days to figure out just what was put on the table and what was not.
--Josh Marshall
My God, this is such a joke.
We’re really in Moscow show trial territory here.
You’ve probably seen these stories which report that the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence is set to issue a blistering report on the CIA’s (and the broader intelligence community’s) pre-war Iraq intelligence. It was hastily prepared, the report will say. Much of the evidence was thin and circumstantial. And even much of that was single-sourced, and often to unreliable sources.
“The executive was ill-served by the intelligence community,” Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan), the lockstep Committee Chairman told the Washington Post.
(Roberts is one of the White House’s greatest assets in this whole mess, since he will literally do or say anything to keep the White House in the clear.)
Now, by and large, the bill of particulars above is a fair characterization of the National Intelligence Estimate which was assembled in the fall of 2002. And George Tenet deserves all sorts of criticism for his role in all this.
But this isn’t the criticism he should be getting.
What he’s guilty of isn’t ill-serving the White House but allowing the White House to stack the intel deck in favor of alarmist reports about Iraq.
As I say, we’ll be saying much more about the details of this. But let’s start with the essential observation. Why was the NIE so rushed?
An NIE is a systematic evaluation of all the Intelligence Community knows about a given subject. And it’s put together to help the government frame a policy to address a given problem or challenge.
But as the articles in the Washington Post today note (if rather obliquely), that’s not what happened here.
This NIE was done after the White House had already chosen its policy. And it wasn’t even the White House that called for it, but rather Senate Democrats who were miffed that the administration had never requested an NIE.
In fact, the White House specifically resisted requesting an NIE because it didn’t want the findings getting in the way of its policy.
So Roberts' claim that the White House was “ill-served” fails on chronology and simple logic. The NIE could not have failed the White House, because the White House didn’t use it. Simple as that.
(The point of this NIE was not to frame policy but to sway votes in the Senate. And on that count, if one wanted to be cheeky, one would say the administration was served rather well.)
And why was the NIE so rushed? Because it was a double-quick affair rushed into print at the last minute to get Senate Democrats to vote for the Iraq resolution.
The NIE was done after the White House was already on the record with a policy. So the White House’s views on what it wanted the NIE to say were, shall we say, rather clear. And this whole project came after 18 months in which the administration was mau-mauing the CIA to come up with more alarmist reports about Iraq.
George Tenet deserves censure for allowing himself to become complicit in the politicization and manipulation of intelligence on an almost unprecedented scale. Other top officials at the Agency do as well. (And there are certainly many other issues on which the Agency itself deserves to be taken to task.)
But this fish is rotting from the head down. And the head’s not George Tenet. It’s a many-headed monster. And they’re all at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and the OSD.
This is up-is-downism of the worst and most transparent sort.
Who will say so? Who will go along with it? Who will say, 'Enough. No more!'
--Josh Marshall
Some good news out of the donors' conference in Madrid.
The BBC says the conference is finishing up with pledges of between $18 and $20 billion. A good bit of that seems to be in form of low-interest loans. And I'm not certain just how that fits into the equation.
Most reports note that this remains well short of the $36 billion the US was looking for. But I don't think anybody thought that was even remotely possible.
I remain curious about the spread of loans and grants.
--Josh Marshall
This is the passage <$NoAd$>that caught my eye in the analysis of the new Democracy Corps poll. It's from Stan Greenberg, James Carville and Bob Shrum, though I hear Greenberg's voice the most ...
The country still wants to continue the Bush direction on the war on terrorism. (64 to the 32 percent who want significant change). While the country is looking for change and increasingly, new leadership, it is not seeking an anti-war President. Large majorities of the country think it was right to remove Saddam Hussein. The war on terrorism continues and the Democratic Presidential candidates will surely advocate carrying it forward in effective and credible ways.But the public is in a very different mood with respect to Iraq and with respect to our relations with our allies and countries around the world. Just 48 percent believe the war was worth the cost, while 46 percent now say it was not. Support for the war has dropped in every poll, including this one, since May. While 49 percent say they want to continue Bush’s direction on Iraq, 47 percent say they want to go in a significantly different direction.
On foreign policy, more voters now say they want to go in a significantly different direction than continue with Bush (47 to 45 percent). People understand the instability and the cost of a unilateralist foreign policy, borne in the front line by the troops and paid here at home with reduced funding for essential programs. Bush continues to lose people’s confidence in this critical area.
When it comes to the 87 billion dollars, voters are conflicted because they do not want to leave the troops exposed. In this survey, 47 percent support the money and 49 percent oppose, though there are many more strong opponents. But when it comes to the vote in Congress, a majority opts for "yes," largely because of the argument to support the troops. The biggest bloc of voters agrees with a member .who votes yes to support the troops but expresses many doubts about the open-ended reconstruction aid.
There's a lot for the current crop of Democratic contenders to ponder there.
--Josh Marshall
More on the disclosure of Valerie Plame's employment at the CIA.
The Post today runs a story, basically similar to the one which ran yesterday afternoon in the Associated Press. There's not too much there beyond word that a dozen-member FBI team has now interviewed more than three dozen administration officials.
They're also poring over phone logs and memos and the like. And the investigation remains centered on the White House.
The sizzle to the story is that Karl Rove and Scott McClellan, the president's press secretary, have both been interviewed.
Here's what catches my eye though. These are, as the Post notes, voluntary interviews. And I doubt that either of these men is the actual culprit (I suspect Rove pushed the story after the fact, but was likely not the original leaker, though he may have known about it.)
I'd be much more interested to learn whether the investigators have interviewed anybody in the Office of the Vice President, or the NSC, for that matter. These are voluntary interviews. So have the investigators asked but been rebuffed? Just not gotten to it yet?
That's the story I'd read with great interest.
One other point: The Post piece says "McClellan has specifically denied that any of three prominent White House officials -- Rove, Vice President Cheney's Chief of Staff I. Lewis Libby and National Security Council official Elliott Abrams -- had leaked the information or authorized leaks."
As we've noted here before, that's not precisely what he's said. He's hung his statements on a very precise -- and to my mind -- highly technical and obfuscatory statement that none of them has "leaked classified information."
He's never made any blanket statements about things they may have told reporters about Plame.
--Josh Marshall
A number of readers have written in to say that the book I recommended about the conquest of Mexico came down too quickly, and can I repost the title?
Absolutely. It's The Conquest of New Spain by Bernal Diaz del Castillo. Click here to see the mini-review I wrote of it on October 13th.
I will say this: TPMers turn out to be voracious readers. When I posted the recommendation of Mike Lind's Up From Conservatism on Wednesday, it's Amazon ranking was down around 100,000. (Honestly, I don't remember the exact number. But I glanced at it briefly and saw a lot of digits. And it was in that ballpark.) By yesterday afternoon it had gotten up to 131, though now it's fallen off a bit again.
--Josh Marshall
I'm willing to believe that China is a peaceful and even a benign force in East Asia.
But is it "work[ing] to secure the freedom of its own people"?
So says President Bush.
From his remarks to the Australian parliament ...
We are encouraged by China's cooperation in the war against terror. We are working with China to ensure the Korean peninsula is free of nuclear weapons. We see a China that is stable and prosperous, a nation that respects the peace of its neighbors and works to secure the freedom of its own people.
Isn't that laying it on a bit thick?
--Josh Marshall
Alas, a TPM contest.
Certain conservative mumbojumbocrats have been trying to rewrite history by claiming that the White House never argued that Iraq posed any sort of imminent threat to the United States.
For my money, one of the most revealing quotes is the passage in the National Security Strategy the White House released in 2002, which essentially argues that the concept of ‘imminent threat’ must be reinterpreted to apply to countries like Iraq.
But back to our contest. Because this debate wasn’t hashed out in NSC documents, but in public statements on the hustings.
Our wingerly friends have made a lot of the rarity of occurences in which the phrase ‘imminent threat’ was used. But they rather ignore all the instances in which administration officials told the public we had to depose Saddam right now before he could use his nuclear weapons and smallpox on us. Any quotation which conveys the imminent threat message is acceptable even it doesn't contain the phrase 'imminent threat.'
(One example, though certainly not the best one, might be President Bush’s statement on March 7th of this year that he would no longer “leave the American people at the mercy of the Iraqi dictator and his weapons.”)
So now it’s up to you. Send us your best Bush administration ‘imminent threat’ quote.
The Rules: Only one submission per reader. It has to be sent to contest@talkingpointsmemo.com. It must include a citation to some published account in which the quotation appeared. And it must be received by October 27th.
Entries will be judged on imminence, relevance, provenance, bouquet and other such qualities.
To the winner goes a brand-new TPM T-Shirt (fresh from the Paris runways) in addition the resultant fame, glory and honor.
--Josh Marshall
Of late, The New York Daily News has become ground-zero for anti-Rumsfeld leaks from the White House. Here’s today’s example: “Rummy’s on Hot Seat: Glum Memo on War Steams White House.”
So why’s all this stuff going to the Daily News?
I suspect there’s a fairly straightforward answer.
It’s not the Daily News. It’s Daily News Washington Bureau Chief Tom DeFrank. All the stories have his byline.
The other big one was from October 10th (“President reportedly unhappy with Rumsfeld, Powell”).
DeFrank has deep ties with various Bush One insiders including the president. (I discussed this in May 2001.) DeFrank even co-wrote James Baker’s Bush years memoir.
Back in early 2001 DeFrank was a major conduit for the later discredited White House vandalism mumbo-jumbo. But that was when the Bush One/Bush Two split wasn't nearly as salient as it is now.
Don’t get me wrong. There’s nothing necessarily untoward about this. Reporters have to work their sources. But it does seem like DeFrank has become the go-to reporter for some Bush One type at or in the orbit of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
Oh, who could that be ….
--Josh Marshall
Do not miss this article in the New York Times on the backstory behind the overthrow of Bolivian President Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada.
--Josh Marshall
I just read the Rumsfeld Memo. And my reactions, I have to say, are rather muted. There is something oddly refreshing about hearing the Sec Def think out loud rather than seeing him give press conferences in which he remains relentlessly on message --- especially since he’s often pressing messages at odds with what’s actually happening.
In a similar way, there’s something appealing about listening in on his brainstorming.
What jumped out at me was this line down at the bottom of the memo in which he tosses out the idea of founding a sort of Muslim MacArthur Foundation (Ansar al-MacArthur?) which will subsidize madrassas that are crazy but, you know, not that crazy.
Here’s the line: “Should we create a private foundation to entice radical madrassas to a more moderate course?”
Couldn't we just build a super-strong ladder up into space instead of using those rockets?
You’d think the madrassas backed by the America-funded Madrassa Foundation (administered, no doubt, by General Boykin) might take a bit of a hit to their legitimacy. But, you know, I’m a details man. And why quibble with a bold idea …
All this aside, what’s missing here, what’s troubling about this memo is that it really does seem to be a candid appraisal meant only for his top advisors. And even in that context there’s apparently no sense that any of the key strategic decisions in the war on terror might have been flawed or misguided.
Yes, there's pessimism. But it's pessimism of a certain sort. The theme of the memo isn’t that there might have been too much of X or too much of Y, but that they need to consider 2X or 2Y. And perhaps if things get really freaky, Y squared or even cubed.
--Josh Marshall
In today's edition of The Nelson Report, Chris <$NoAd$> Nelson says that, according to his sources, the Pakistani-Saudi nuclear pact story reported today in the Washington Times is simply bogus.
As Nelson says in his lede ...
This is one of those "famous last words" risks….but…reliable sources in Washington (including Capitol Hill, professional Middle East watchers, and fellow journalists) all say that the "Pakistan/Saudi nuclear weapons" story being passed around by UPI, The Washington Times, and by the head of Israeli intelligence in testimony to the Knesset, is false. Sexy as hell, but false.-- several sources note the "coincidence" that the stories come barely one day after the EU, Iran and Russia reached separate but interlocking agreements which offer real hope of defusing the Iran nuclear weapons crisis before it gets out of hand.
Nelson, himself, clearly leaves room for uncertainty. But until I hear more, given who's publishing the story and who's knocking it down, my assumption is that this is mainly or even entirely disinformation.
Of course, none of that changes the fact that Pakistan is the most serious nuclear proliferation threat in the world today.
--Josh Marshall
Following up on the earlier post, I've had a slew of readers write in to ask me what the other best political book is.
To recap I said that David Frum was the "author of one of the two best political books I’ve ever read."
So what's the other one? Michael Lind's Up From Conservatism.
Idiosyncratic, penetrating, erudite, highly original, with shards of auto-didacticism cutting through it, and all strung tightly over a rock-solid narrative.
It's a must-read for anyone who wants to understand American politics.
--Josh Marshall
This requires a response because I believe David Frum has twice mischaracterized me.
Yesterday Frum, who writes a blog at the National Review Online, wrote a brief post about how some journalists who themselves write things which inspire anti-Semitic fantasies have pounced on Gregg Easterbrook for one off-hand comment.
He includes me as one of those writers.
First, I think it’s pretty clear that my two posts on the Easterbrook matter were written in his defense, rather than as an attack on him. So this criticism is just mistaken.
Frum then writes that I -- along with two other writers -- have “inveighed against 'American Likudniks' and 'neoconservatives' in a way that seems almost calculated to fuel anti-Jewish fantasies.”
He also implies --- though the structure of the prose is a tad less clear on this --- that I am one of the “journalists who show virtually zero interest in the fate of … five million Israeli Jews – and many more Jews worldwide in countries from Iran to Argentina – [who] are threatened with mass murder.”
(It’s a short post, so if you have any question about how I’ve characterized Frum’s comment, please look at the actual text.)
As it happens, I have a lot of respect for Frum. And not just in the sense that you say you have respect for someone before you criticize them.
Just a couple days ago I told a friend that Frum was the author of one of the two best political books I’ve ever read. And he’s been kind enough to help me understand certain aspects of the Iraq-hawks' thinking on democratization and change in the Middle East.
But I must tell you that I am growing more than a little weary of the Jewlier than thou comments emanating from some of my co-religionists on the other side of the aisle. (Similar aspersions from non-Jews are no great shakes either. But those guys are just practicing unwitting self-parody.) I would ask Frum to note any specific quotes or any general arguments from my writing which provide any basis for these claims. Needless to say, I think there are none.
I think I could say, with far more merit, that those who make these charges are exploiting and trivializing the issue of anti-Semitism by using it as a tool to blunt criticism of their foreign policy views and the foreign policy pursued by this administration. One does not have to agree with the policies of Ariel Sharon’s government to be a Jew in good standing or even an Israeli for that matter. I have some acquaintance with more than a few of the latter. And, believe me, they don’t all see eye to eye on this issue. (There is a reason, after all, why they call it ‘revisionist Zionism.’)
So, David, with all due respect, I have to say: put up or shut up.
--Josh Marshall
So much for the Bush Bounce. The last time we discussed the president's job approval numbers, we noted that the CNN-USA Today poll, which showed the president popping back up to 56%, seemed to be an outlier.
Most of the other polls taken around the same time showed him hovering just over 50%
Since then three new polls are out. And they tend to confirm that judgment. If anything they show an extremely slight deterioration.
Pew has the president at 50%; Zogby has him at 49%; and Fox/Opinion Dynamics has him at 52%.
The Fox/Opinion Dynamics poll is constantly more favorable to Republicans than the other major public polls -- at least by my experience as a pretty close observer.
If he can't get over 52% in that one, he's got a bit of work to do.
--Josh Marshall
Okay, still more on this Boykin ridiculousness.
After writing the post below I read Fareed Zakaria’s excellent piece in Newsweek on what a no-brainer it should be to fire Boykin.
Then I noticed that there’s actually a debate going on as to whether there would be any constitutional restrictions on firing him --- as in restrictions on 1st Amendment grounds (free speech or exercise of religion).
This strikes me as inane.
There may certainly be some constitutional issues in play for whether a general can be cashiered for expressing such views as Boykin has, though I strongly suspect they can. At a minimum I suspect he could be reassigned to a position in which he would not come into regular contact with people he believes are allied with Satan. (Eugene Volokh’s got a good run-down on this)
But in this case, Boykin isn’t a general. Or, rather, he’s wearing two hats. And the general’s hat isn’t the one that’s really at issue. He’s deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence. In other words, he’s an appointee like anyone else. And the president can fire him for any reason under the sun.
As Zakaria notes, criticizing the Iraq war would have gotten anyone at the Pentagon canned in a second. No one denies that. But, according to some, saying the Iraq war was a righteous battle against Beelzebub should leave you in the clear.
--Josh Marshall
Well, here’s some first-rate Washington Kabuki.
Lieut. Gen. William Boykin, the deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence who’s now in trouble for saying that the war on terror is actually a war pitting our Christian nation against Satan and his Muslim infidel minions, has now ‘asked’ Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld to have the Pentagon’s Inspector General investigate whether his remarks “violated any Pentagon rules or procedures.”
This, of course, rather begs the question of which “rules and procedures” his comments would have violated. Conduct unbecoming an officer from this millennium? Use of hellfire in violation of the Geneva Convention? You could really go on and on, couldn’t you?
Clearly, the administration feels a bit trapped on this one since firing this guy wouldn’t go down well with a prized constituency. So we’re going to be treated to an ersatz investigation to see if there's some Pentagon reg which bars you from having views that are difficult to distinguish from those of Savonarola or perhaps Urban II.
My favorite Boykin moment so far is the general’s attempt to repackage his claims that Islam is a form of idolatry into comfortable-sounding modern-day Oprah-talk. When Somali warlord Osman Ato boasted that Allah would protect him from American power, Boykin said “I knew that my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God, and his was an idol.”
Trying to save his job, Boykin now says his reference to idolatry referred to Ato’s “worship of money and power.” In other words, Ato’s shortcoming wasn’t Islam but some sort of hyper-aggressive warlord consumerism. Yeah ...
--Josh Marshall
Jury duty, at last, is over. And I’m now free to talk about it.
I sat on a jury in DC Superior Court.
The defendant was charged with one count of distributing PCP and one count of possession with intent to distribute. The alleged crime took place in an area in Southeast Washington which the prosecution and the defense called an open air drug market.
We heard three full days of testimony. And we deliberated for a bit more than half a day.
We convicted the defendant on count one and acquitted him on count two.
--Josh Marshall
My recent weekdays have been given over to jury duty. So I’ve been a bit out of the news loop. But I’d heard murmurings about Sy Hersh’s new piece in The New Yorker. So I set aside some time tonight to read it.
My main reaction is: pitiful.
Not the article, mind you. That's great. But the story it tells is truly pitiful. It would be funny if it weren’t so serious and so sad.
As I’ve written many times before in TPM, I’ve always believed that this whole manipulated intelligence matter was at least as much a matter of self-deception as it was deception of others. There was plenty of mendacity, don’t get me wrong. But in most cases it was willful dishonesty meant to sell the public on falsehoods which the purveyors of those falsehoods had actually gotten themselves to believe.
At heart this was an issue of people who had something they were just dying to find, just dying to believe in. By cutting themselves off from anybody who was a dissenting voice --- which usually also meant anybody who knew what they were doing --- they managed to isolate themselves with their own credulity and walk their country into a profound embarrassment and a potential disaster.
More later this evening on this must-read article.
--Josh Marshall
A graf to ponder from Sy Hersh's new piece in The New Yorker ...
By early March, 2002, a former White House official told me, it was understood by many in the White House that the President had decided, in his own mind, to go to war. The undeclared decision had a devastating impact on the continuing struggle against terrorism. The Bush Administration took many intelligence operations that had been aimed at Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups around the world and redirected them to the Persian Gulf. Linguists and special operatives were abruptly reassigned, and several ongoing anti-terrorism intelligence programs were curtailed.
Great call ...
--Josh Marshall
Here's a good piece in Newsweek about the White House's new front in the war on terror -- the battle against the media. They note one question that I've wondered about a lot. We hear quite a bit about all the schools reopening. But how many of them ever closed? Certainly, there were schools before the war, right?
Says Newsweek ...
Yet reporters who covered the war say that some of the Coalition’s achievements are less impressive than they sound. Paul (Jerry) Bremer, the U.S. civilian administrator in Iraq, proudly announced the reopening of Iraq’s schools this month, while White House officials point to the opening of Iraq’s 240 hospitals. In fact, many schools were already open in May, once major combat ended, and no major hospital closed during the war.
My own view of the reconstruction <$Ad$>question chalks up a lot to inertia, poor planning and drift. If you go back to last fall, or even the early months of this year, there was plenty of talk about reconstruction in Iraq. But if you look closely most of the talk was about social and political reconstruction: building a free press, purging the army of Baathists, creating the building blocks of a rule-of-law society, and so forth.
There was precious little talk about rebuilding their stuff, i.e., the physical infrastructure of the country -- bridges, schools, telephones, electrical grids, all up to western standards.
Certainly, there was a recognition that we'd need to rebuild stuff that we broke in the course of prosecuting the war. But the entire focus of reconstruction underwent a wholesale transformation in the months after the war.
The reason for this, I think, is that we very quickly found out, on entering the country, that the social and political reconstruction task was vastly harder than the planners of the war had anticipated, and that they were woefully underprepared for it. That left them scrambling for a new raison d'etre for the war, a new justification for what we were doing there. What we came up with was rebuilding their stuff. Of course, fat cats of all varieties were ready on hand to enable this drift in policy. And needless to say, most already had the president's ear.
Building bridges and schools can be terribly expensive. But it's something we know how to do and something that shows concrete results. Building civil society can be, to paraphrase Bolivar, like plowing the sea.
I grant you that this is a very broad brush analysis. But I think it captures much of what has gone on in our Iraq policy over the last six months.
--Josh Marshall
I guess this is a sign of how tangled and jumbled up feelings about the Easterbrook matter are. About half the people who wrote in took my comments last night as foolishly exonerating of Easterbrook's alleged anti-Semitism, while just as many thought I was accusing him of being an anti-Semite. No point in my interpreting my own comments: the post itself is just below this one.
Meanwhile, Atrios says that people like me or those at TAP or TNR have a blind spot when it comes to “taking a harsh look at people like Easterbrook, or Jack Shafer, or Kaus, etc.”
As I said, I’ve never met Easterbrook. But most every one of my friends has. It’s probably just coincidence that I haven’t. I completely stand by what I said last night. But I also think this is a very reasonable point to make. Opinion journalism is an extremely small profession --- getting smaller everyday, it would seem. The people in the profession tend to know each other --- even to a great degree across ideological boundaries.
It’s not necessarily that people are unwilling to criticize each other or to malign each others’ characters, though there's certainly plenty of that. It’s more that it’s harder to malign someone or take a very dark view of them when you have some sense of the whole person --- or even that the person in question is a person. This is as much a caveat about DC opinion journalists as it is a defense of them. It's like part of the warning label that each of them should have plastered on them --- like cigarettes or booze.
I’ve lived in DC now for just over four years. And for my part, I’ve struggled to balance my acclimation to the place with an abiding recognition of its essential corruption and vapidity. I commented on this last May when I said that the reaction to Sid Blumenthal’s book, the Clinton Wars was an example of …
Washington's insider culture and its prestige press corps which is -- as a group, if not individually -- corrupt, rudderless and often insipid. (I'd say nasty, brutish and short, but many of them tower over me.) The coverage of the Clinton presidency is the ultimate example, with its whole swirl of babyboomer self-loathing, historical ignorance and nonsense, the willingness to be led around by black-minded reactionaries, politics as Society page, the whole lot of it. (Much of what I'm talking about here I discussed more clearly and crisply in a column on Maureen Dowd's Pulitzer Prize in the now-defunct online magazine Feed in April 1999.) This is difficult for me to say -- not least because I live and work and know many of these people, and consider many to be friends -- and even more because I'm not nearly established as most and must rely on these folks for my livelihood. But there's no getting around the truth of it. Blumenthal is disliked by many in DC because he is a critic -- and to my mind, a devastating one -- of their vapidity, ignorance and willingness to be used.
These thoughts were driven home to me this weekend when I watched the discussion panel on Meet the Press. With the exception of Robin Wright, who’s a real pro, the group has become as perfect an example of Washington’s geriatric and right-leaning insider culture as you’ll ever see.
Oh, the stories to tell …
--Josh Marshall
I’ve made no comments yet on the still-unfolding flap about Gregg Easterbrook.
Partly, this is because the end of the week was just so hectic and I didn’t hear more than the bare outlines of what had happened. Then I wanted to take a day to mull over it before saying anything.
What Easterbrook said was weird and something a hair's breadth short of ugly. It seemed out of context not only for the writer, but even in the post itself. The anti-Semitic undertones of the sentences in question are obvious: it's the same old game of taking Jews to task for failings that all sorts of poeple share, but seeing their failings through the prism of their Jewishness -- an irrelevance behind which often hides a malign intent.
Try as I might to explain to myself how Easterbrook could have unwittingly walked into such an unfortunate formulation, I still find it a bit difficult. What was he thinking? I go back and forth. I’m not sure.
Jews have some license to engage in intra-communal polemic along these lines, just as blacks do within their own community. Gentiles don't.
But two points occur to me.
First, when something like this gets said, I think you have to look at the breadth of the writers’ work. Is there a pattern? Are there other signs of an anti-Semitic mindset or animus? To the best of my knowledge, there’s none. In fact, quite the opposite in this case. I take what he said in that context, as I think do his friends and colleagues.
(For what it’s worth, I’ve never met Easterbrook and didn’t agree with the overall thrust of the actual post, which was a rant against violence-saturated movies.)
One friend asked me how this was different from the Trent Lott situation. And that's certainly a reasonable question to pose of me. To me, though, the two situations seem quite different. The issue with Trent Lott was that his remarks about Strom Thurmond came after a decades long history of nostalgia for Jim Crow, hostility to civil rights, and cavorting with crypto-racist or not-so-crypto-racist groups like the Council of Conservative Citizens -- a track record the press shamelessly ignored for years. What happened in Lott's case was that the open secret of his unreconstructed views on race finally came up in a way that was just impossible to ignore.
Second, ESPN fired Easterbrook over this incident. He had a sports writing gig there. That’s one of his two jobs. So I’m sure it’s a major financial, not to mention professional, blow.
Why did this happen? Not because ESPN has a zero-tolerance policy for intolerance, to put it mildly. It happened because one of the guys Easterbrook criticized was Michael Eisner. Eisner runs Disney and Disney owns ESPN.
What happened here is old-fashioned payback, empowered by media concentration and hidden beneath a mantle of opposition to intolerance.
That’s wrong.
--Josh Marshall
