Every working journalist should read this Kevin Drum post on John Kerry's position on the Iraq war and the Iraq war resolution. It's sad, but perhaps predictable, to see so many members of the print and electronic press getting led around by the nose by the Bush crew on this one.
I think I've demurred from discussing or rather defending Kerry's position on this issue because I have an element of bias, since it is also my position. But as Kevin notes, whether or not you agree with that position, it is really not difficult to understand so long as you are not being willfully obtuse.
Sometimes in baseball a batter decides to take a pitch. He's decided in advance that he's not going to swing no matter what comes down the pike. But in most cases, when a batter steps up to the plate, he doesn't decide whether he's going to swing until he sees the pitch. Only an idiot decides in advance not knowing what he's going to face. And yet this is roughly what the Bush camp says was the only reasonable, or I suppose manly, approach to the Iraq war.
I see the war decision in very similar terms to this baseball analogy. Voting for the war resolution was not remotely the same thing as going to war at the first possible opportunity.
Forcing inspections meant seeing what inspections would yield. And seeing what inspections would yield was the best insurance against getting ourselves into the current situation and finding that the WMD, which constituted the premise for the whole endeavor, didn't even exist.
To extend our baseball analogy, Bush went to the plate knowing he was going to swing at whatever pitch he got.
I've been sketching out notes recently for a retrospective essay on the lead-up to the Iraq war, trying to capture on paper the mood of those months, to think through particularly where I think I saw things correctly and where I went wrong. And it's brought into some perspective for me the silliness of the argument the president makes about the war resolution and the point he means to convey when he says that everyone thought Saddam had weapons of mass destruction.
The point he's trying to make in the latter instance is that you can't blame him for the mess we're in because everybody (or, for these purposes, almost all the leading political figures in Washington) thought Saddam had at least some chemical and biological weapons, and thus everyone else would have gotten us to this same point. But here of course is the beauty of actually taking the WMD issue seriously as opposed to merely using it as a cudgel and a pretext as the president did.
One might well have gone into the whole drama thinking Iraq had a retooled WMD program. But inspections allowed us actually to find out. Not just to guess, but to find out, to know. Certainly inspections would not have been perfect. But they were quite good at answering the key question, which was the status of the Iraqi nuclear program. And they would have been good enough at gauging where other non-conventional weapons programs were too.
(The great undiscussed matter in this whole debate is that well before we pulled the trigger in March 2003 it was quite clear from the IAEA inspections that there was no Iraqi nuclear program to speak of.)
In any case, all of this is merely a too-lengthy way of noting that giving the president the authority and the muscle to force the inspectors back into Iraq (i.e., giving him the authority to go to war if they were not allowed back in) simply cannot be equated with giving the president the go-ahead to game the process and go to war immediately even if they were allowed in.
That doesn't mean that Kerry is in the clear on any legitimate criticism. But ironically the best argument against Kerry's position is one that is simply off-limits to the president -- namely, that Kerry should have or perhaps did know that the president was lying when he said he needed the muscle of the resolution to force the inspectors back in and have some hope of settling the crisis short of war.
The president was dishonest with the world and dishonest with the American people. He gamed the process and it blew up in his face -- though with a long fuse. By any reasonable moral reckoning he deserves all the comeuppance of his bad faith. The tragedy is that the American people, the folks he scammed, have to suffer the brunt of the tragedy and will continue to do so long after he is, hopefully, tossed out of office in just less than a dozen weeks.
--Josh Marshall
In politics, being a little ahead and motionless is a delicate, tremulous place to be. And that is, arguably, where the Kerry campaign is right now. If you look at the rivers of commentary flowing out over the Internet you see a note or an undertone of concern among many Democratic partisans who believe that in the last couple weeks the Kerry campaign has failed to react sharply or dexterously enough to his opponents.
First, there was the back-and-forth between Kerry and the president over the Iraq war resolution, which many seem to think Kerry bobbled. (Why the Kerry campaign has allowed itself to be placed on the offensive on this isn't clear to me at all.)
And then there's the background noise of the swift-boat malarkey, which, if painfully thin and discredited on close inspection, nevertheless may do damage simply through repitition. I do my best to ignore our domestic Falange on matters like this, but at the moment they seem to be exulting in the fact that while they first insisted John Kerry never could have been in Cambodia as he has often claimed it now turns out that he was there, though not in December 1968, but January and February 1969.
I have a certain bias for February 1969 so perhaps that's why I don't see this as a particularly big deal.
In any case, even as these things are going on, and some are beginning to fret, we have an entirely contrary motion, at least reflected in public opinion surveys. After heated words on both sides in the days just after the convention, what now seems clear is that there was a small but appreciable bounce for Kerry. Small compared to previous bounces, as Republicans argued, but perhaps understandably so given the polarized electorate and the fact that Kerry, the challenger, was already slightly ahead, as Democrats replied.
Yet, in the almost two weeks since the convention, something else novel has happened. The logic of a 'bounce' is that it's a run-up in the polls which slowly subsides. But the reverse has happened with Kerry. While his bump in the polls coming out of the convention was relatively small, the numbers which have appeared since that time has shown a slow increase in his lead and -- more pointedly -- a deepening of the underlying bases of that lead, as measured in approval on key issues, trust, likability, and so forth.
The trend has also been apparent in key state match ups. For instance, since the convention, the two independent polls of Florida voters -- one of likelies, another of registereds -- both show Kerry ahead by 7 points. A third poll, the oldest of the three, was done by a Republican firm. And that one shows the race as a tie.
--Josh Marshall
Steady leadership in times of change ...<$NoAd$>
I have told my staff, I want full cooperation with the Justice Department. And when they ask for information, we expect the information to be delivered on a timely basis. I expect it to be delivered on a timely basis. I want there to be full participation, because ... I am most interested in finding out the truth.In January, Justice Department investigators asked White House staff members to sign a waiver requesting "that no member of the news media assert any privilege or refuse to answer any questions from federal law enforcement authorities on my behalf or for my benefit." But in February the Washington Post reported, "Most officials declined to sign the form on the advice of their attorneys."
No wonder he can't get our allies to do anything he wants them to do.
[Special thanks to TPM reader BG.]
--Josh Marshall
Fred Kaplan has a bleak but, I fear, quite possibly accurate piece on Iraq today in Slate.
The key sentence is this one: "the U.S. military—the only force in Iraq remotely capable of keeping the country from falling apart—finds itself in a maddening situation where tactical victories yield strategic setbacks."
This is the essence of the present situation. For us Iraq has become the geopolitical equivalent of a Chinese finger puzzle, the more we exert ourselves the more the situation constricts around us and the higher the price becomes to get ourselves out, at least in any way that mainstream foreign policy types, among whom I would class myself, find acceptable.
And the key is Kaplan's point about tactical victories and strategic setbacks. Yet, I think we can go further and say that these don't 'yield' strategic setbacks, they are strategic setbacks in and of themselves.
Winning a pitched battle against Shi'a insurgents in the heart of one of Shi'a Islam's holiest sites (and by this I mean not just the Imam Ali Mosque, but the cemetery near it and the area immediately surrounding it) is itself a defeat for us.
(Here is a piece just out from the Post that illustrates the bind into which we've sunk the Army and Marines.)
As the shrewdest thinkers on the left and the right concede on this issue, our true strategic challenges in the Muslim Middle East are not conventional military ones, but hearts-and-minds challenges. The trick is to figure out how we can solve or ameliorate that hearts-and-minds problem while simultaneously destroying the relatively small (in numerical terms) but highly lethal groups that constitute an imminent danger. Or, to put it more crisply, how do we wipe out al Qaida (and al Qaida-like groups) without generating so much bad blood in the Islamic world that the Islamic world keeps producing new al Qaidas faster than we can destroy them?
It's not clear to me necessarily what the best way to strike that balance is. But I think this is probably the worst way -- engaging in pitched battles with fighters who pose no direct danger to the US whatsoever in a way that does profound damage to our standing within the population that al Qaida and other similarly-inclined groups hope to do their recruiting.
On Iraq specifically, think about where we've gotten ourselves. The Shi'a were supposed to be our friends. They were the ones most lorded over by Saddam. They were the community upon which we intended to build an Iraqi democracy.
Now, that is admittedly a broad brush and simplistic way to put it (though I'm not sure the architects of this adventure gave it much deeper thought). And it's quite true that al Sadr and his Mahdi Army do not represent all Iraqi Shi'a. But fighting a pitched battle in Najaf is probably the best way to move things in that direction.
--Josh Marshall
You've no doubt now seen Jim McGreevey's announcement: "My truth is that I am a gay American." etc.
I don't have anything to add or bright comments. Clearly, if the expected sexual harassment allegations are valid, then obviously it's just as bad as heterosexual sexual harassment. But, for the moment, leaving that as an open question, McGreevey managed to give some true nobility to a painful, ignoble moment.
You can see the video of the press conference here.
Take a look. It's worth seeing it for yourself.
--Josh Marshall
Okay, enough Alan Keyes for the moment. Let's go back to a golden oldie from yesteryear, the GOP phone-jamming stunt from 2002.
You'll remember that this was the case in which the New Hampshire Republican Party hired an outfit called GOP Marketplace to arrange for a barrage of hang-up calls to phone banks doing get-out-the-vote work for the Dems, thus putting them out of commission for most of election day morning.
Well, in the background this case has been plugging along. And two folks -- the executive director of the state party, Chuck McGee and Allen Raymond, head of the now-defunct GOP Marketplace -- have pled guilty to federal charges in the case.
A lingering question coming out of the investigation though is the identity of this "official in a national political organization" who played a role in putting the whole scam together.
Now, a little while back I got a tip about who this person was, a certain someone involved in the Bush-Cheney reelection effort. I can't tell you a lot about the person other than that he has very poor phone etiquette.
I called this person several times, told him who I was and who I was with, and that I'd like to ask him some questions about the phone-jamming case. Try as I might, though, he never returned my calls, which struck me as somewhat rude. But what could I do?
I wasn't sure where else to go with that story and I had a convention to cover and other matters that needed attending to. But now it seems the Manchester Union Leader has comfirmed the involvement of the person in question.
Saith the Union Leader today: "We can’t tell you who it is or whether he broke any laws, but we can tell you the person questioned by the feds has a significant role in the Bush-Cheney campaign."
Perhaps some of the national outlets should start poking around on this one?
--Josh Marshall
Not a happy day for the New Jersey Democratic Party. I don't know any more than I read in the papers on this one. But it don't look good.
Thank God it's not a swing state anymore ...
--Josh Marshall
Perhaps Obama can work in some version of this clever quip <$NoAd$>once used by now-Sen. Chris Dodd. This from a piece in the New York Times, dated October 28th, 1980 and sent along this afternoon by a friend ...
Connecticut's most spirited race, appropriately, is also the most significant. It is a contest for the Senate between Representative Chris Dodd, a Democrat, and James Buckley, the Republican who sat in the Senate from 1970 to 1976 as a Conservative from New York. Mr. Dodd mocks him with a reminder that each state elects two senators, not each senator two states.
Of course, it's difficult for Obama to keep up when it comes to getting laughs at the expense of Keyes' outsider status. Keyes is far, far ahead of him.
When CNN's Candy Crowley asked Keyes why his out-of-state run in Illinois was any different from that of Hillary Clinton in New York, he pointed out the as-yet-unexplored 9/11 connection ...
Well, I think I have addressed the issue of the very deep differences between what I am doing and Hillary Clinton. She used the state of New York as a platform for her own personal ambition. I had no thought of coming to Illinois to run until the people here in the state party decided there was a need. Just as people faced with a flood, or people in the case of 9/11, would call on folks, firefighters and others to help them deal with the crisis that they were faced with. The people in Illinois have called on me to help deal with what they regard as a crisis.
Alan Keyes: Ambassador, Talk Show Host, First-Responder ...
--Josh Marshall
This endorsement of Alan Keyes by a prominent Illinois Republican is so deeply feeble that I'm not certain it counts as an endorsement. But former Illinois Governor James R. Thompson tells the Sun-Times: ""I'd be inclined to vote Republican. His views are very conservative. Some of his positions would make me uncomfortable as a voter. I'm willing to give him a chance to tell the people of Illinois what his views are. I have not endorsed him."
Okay, I guess on second thought we can say definitively that that was not an endorsement. But I'm going to let it in anyway.
Meanwhile, yesterday Keyes gave a Chicago television station an impromptu performance of 'Somewhere Over the Rainbow', which you can see here.
It's actually not bad, makes me think he may have missed his true calling. Of course, Keyes isn't in Maryland any more, or Kansas for that matter. So, if he's offering renditions of appropriate-to-the-moment tunes, I think I would have suggested Otis Redding's classic 'Mr. Pitiful." But of course I wasn't there.
And finally we have one of the first verbal clashes between the two men. Keyes is insisting that Obama agree to meet him in no less than six debates, as he had apparently agreed to do with departed-nominee Jack Ryan.
Obama says he'll debate Keyes two or three times, not six.
To which Keyes responded: "So let's see. Before I came on the scene, Barack Obama thought of himself as if he was in the same class as Lincoln and Douglas in the critical drama of American life. And now he realizes that he's not in that class. Well, I think that the state of Illinois remains in that class. . . . And I think that it is a disservice to the people of this state to allow him to cower in timidity, and before the real historic challenge that is before us in this campaign."
Obama replied, pretty cleverly I thought, that the six debate offer was "a special for in-state residents."
And then Keyes with this marvelous piece of ridiculousness: "OK. So a guy from out of state steps into the ring, and Barack Obama wants to get out of the ring. I don't know, because you see when he goes into the Senate of the United States, if he should get there, he's not going to find one person from out of state standing there. He's going to find 98 people from out of state. . . . If he's not ready for me, he's not ready for the Senate of the United States."
--Josh Marshall
From the Post editorial page ...<$NoAd$>
Ahmed Chalabi played a prominent role in convincing many people in Washington of the threat Saddam Hussein posed to this country, and his Iraqi National Congress received U.S. intelligence resources and funding to help overthrow the Baathist regime. The American administration in Iraq played a role both in appointing him to the Iraqi Governing Council and, later, in limiting his influence. As many remember, Mr. Chalabi sat behind Laura Bush this year during the president's State of the Union speech. If he is a fraudster, then those who supported him must be held accountable for doing so. If he is not, then the United States has an obligation to insist, publicly, that he not become the new Iraq's first political prisoner.
Held accountable?
Do the folks at the editorial page need to take a look in the mirror on this one?
--Josh Marshall
I just saw a preview of a study that finds the Swift Boat ads quite effective among independents in raising doubts about John Kerry's war record. And that suggests that Karl Rove will want to send more money toward the group running the ad.
This of course is only the beginning. The temperature will get much higher in the next couple months since, as Charlie Cook, aptly argues this week, President Bush is in the process of losing this election unless there's a major change in the dynamic of the race.
--Josh Marshall
I've gotten quite a few responses to my discussion of the priorities and interests involved in whether journalists should be compelled to disclose confidential conversations with White House officials who may or may not have leaked the identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame. Most of them critical, some supportive.
I suspect that the journalists in question -- for the moment, Matt Cooper of Time -- will run through their appeals and lose. As a matter of law, as I wrote earlier, I think I agree with that, though I also support journalists' refusing to comply and accepting the consequences.
I expect to have more to say about the various issues involved in this case. But before we get tangled in debate over journalistic ethics here and see Matt Cooper become the only person to serve a day in jail over this, let's draw back and see the big picture.
President Bush could have settled this matter in a flash a long time ago and spared the country a destructive exploration of the limits of journalistic confidences before the law. He still could.
Scooter Libby, the vice president's chief of staff, has now freed at least two journalists from their obligation of confidentiality to him. Presumably, in at least those two cases, he has nothing to hide.
There must be others still relying on a confidence who do have something to hide.
President Bush could make it known either implicitly or explicitly that he wants to get to the bottom of this mystery and that anyone who is asked should free journalists in the way Libby has. If they don't feel they can do so -- which is certainly their right, working in the White House doesn't mean you lose your right to defend yourself -- they should take a leave of absence from their job or quit.
When I mentioned this possibility some time ago, many readers said this was wrong as it compromised the rights of possible targets of prosecution. But I don't think that's a problem here. Everyone has a right to defend themselves in a criminal probe. But there's no constitutional right to work at the White House.
Needless to say, I'm not holding my breath waiting for this to happen. But let's not lose sight of the president's passivity and indifference to this probe. He's dragging the country through this. And the reason, I think, is obvious. He doesn't want the probe to succeed.
--Josh Marshall
I truly wonder sometimes about the New York Times. Judith Miller was not the only reporter to be bamboozled by Ahmed Chalabi. But her case was one of the most long-standing, thorough-going and troubling -- and it has never been fully or adequately addressed.
Today, Miller writes about the Volcker investigation into alleged corruption in the UN's oil-for-food program. And Chalabi, though not mentioned by name in the article, is at the center of that story.
The investigation, you'll remember, has several layers. Two key questions are a) whether the former regime skimmed money off the funds generated by the program (a given, and something that was known before the war) and b) whether the regime used oil-for-food funds to give bribes and kickbacks to various diplomats, politicians and international luminaries, including Benon Sevan, the head of the UN office that administered the program.
The second, far more inflammatory charge is the heart of the matter. Indeed, it is the accusation that got the whole series of investigations at the UN, on Capitol Hill and in Iraq under way. And that charge stems entirely from a series of documents discovered by members of Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress.
We've noted earlier Chalabi's rather suspicious unwillingness to allow anyone who can even remotely be considered an independent observer to review these documents to determine their authenticity -- something which, given Chalabi's track record, is rather more than a matter of passing concern. And Miller's article reveals that Volcker still hasn't gotten to see them.
According to the Times, he has still "not yet received the original list of oil vouchers supposedly awarded to diplomats and United Nations officials, which was published by an Iraqi newspaper several months ago. Nor had he determined how his panel would vet such documents to see if they were forgeries."
Perhaps it's difficult at the moment for Chalabi to produce the documents and verify their authenticity given that he is apparently holed up in Tehran on the run from counterfeiting charges in Iraq. But then irony is no defense and he's had plenty of time already.
Miller repeats the charges against Sevan, as well as his denial. But she would have done better to note the highly dubious source of the original allegations.
--Josh Marshall
I've had a number of readers write in today noting the news that two reporters were threatened with jail time by special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald for not revealing what they know about administration officials who may have leaked the name of Valerie Plame.
Most have wanted to know my reaction.
As this story in the Washington Post notes, "Newly released court orders show U.S. District Court Chief Judge Thomas F. Hogan two weeks ago ordered Matt Cooper of Time magazine and Tim Russert of NBC to appear before a grand jury and tell whether they knew that White House sources provided the identity of CIA officer Valerie Plame to the media."
Cooper refused and the judge ordered him sent to jail. He is now out on bond pending an appeal to a higher court. Russert apparently agreed to testify after jail was put on the table.
As you likely know, I've taken a great interest in this case -- both in the Wilson/Plame matter and the underlying issue of the discredited charges about uranium sales from Niger to Iraq.
I have to tell you that I have a lot more respect for Cooper's actions in this matter than Russert's.
I guess it would be possible to argue that given the potentially criminal nature of the leak, that that crime -- and the bad act behind it -- freed the reporter of the obligation to protect his source's confidentiality. I don't think I agree with that in this case. But I could see that argument being made.
Yet, if that were the principle at stake, I don't see why a jail threat should have been necessray to bring it into play. If that's how Russert felt, he could have talked to the grand jury from the beginning. But clearly he didn't.
It seems like he just didn't want to spend any time in jail, which is human, but not honorable.
Cooper, on the other hand, is putting himself on the line, taking a courageous stand in a situation that all journalists know they might one day find themselves but hope they never will.
I know many readers will likely see my position here as contradictory, a hyocrisy, given how much emphasis I have given to getting to the bottom of this matter. Perhaps some will suggest that my own work as a journalist makes me biased, that I'm letting that bias cloud my view of this case, or speaking out of a sort of professional tribal loyalty.
Perhaps they're right.
All I can say is that finding out who revealed Plame's name is not the only interest at stake here. Or, just as we do not knock down every right or procedural norm to get a conviction of a guilty party in a court trial, so too should we not do the same to get to the bottom of this mystery.
I think that the confidences of journalists play a role not unlike that of defense attorneys. They protect the interests of various bad actors. But they are an essential part of a system that, overall, produces good results.
Some time back in Slate, Mike Kinsley, in characteristic fashion, elegantly summarized this argument, only to suggest that it really may not apply here, or at least not in an absolute fashion ...
It is no solution to say, as some do, that it is journalist's job to protect the identity of his or her sources and it is the government's job to expose them. This isn't a game. There is no invisible hand to guarantee that the struggle of competing forces will achieve the correct balance. Journalists ought to be concerned about national security, and government officials ought to be concerned about the First Amendment. When these interests conflict, those involved ought to have an obligation to strike the balance for themselves. Or they should have it.The purpose of protecting the identity of leakers is to encourage future leaks. Leaks to journalists, and the fear of leaks, can be an important restraint on misbehavior by powerful institutions and people. This serves the public interest. But there is no public interest in leaks that harm national security, or leaks that violate the law, or leaks intended to harm blameless individuals. There is no reason to want more of these kinds of leaks. So, there is no reason to protect the identity of such bad-faith leakers.
I'm not sure I have a good response to this argument, or at least not a crisp one.
The best I can do is to say that I'm not sure that the line between bad-faith and good-faith leaks is necessarily so clear as to make this argument work in practice. I guess I have some confidence that the correct balance between the competing forces Kinsley notes will sometimes have to be found in the tension between the judge's ability to impose jail time and the reporter's ability to endure it.
But I'll mull the matter more and see if my opinion changes.
Having said that, I also agree with the court ruling that says that the 1st Amendment does not grant an absolute shield for journalists seeking to avoid testifying before grand juries -- not just that that is the law but that it should be the law. And that means that journalists must in some cases be willing to go to jail to protect a source, even if the source isn't particularly deserving of protection.
Perhaps this seems like another contradiction. But I don't see it that way. I don't see any conflict between believing that the state has a right to demand answers from a journalist in certain highly restricted cases and also believing that the journalist may have an ethical right or obligation to deny that demand, so long as he or she is willing to accept the consequences. I simply don't see where journalists, as a group, can get off with an absolute protection against getting hauled before grand juries. They're too ramshackle and unregulated a bunch to get the protections the law provides to doctors and psychologists. And even those are not absolute.
This is just one of the perils of the profession, just as doctors arguably have an obligation to risk exposing themselves to certain contagious diseases in order to heal the sick.
Of course, all of this leaves rather a mystery about why Fitzgerald is picking on Cooper and Russert, while not putting the same screws to Robert Novak -- the man who clearly could give the most salient and probative testimony in this case and who, let's be frank, most deserves to be put in this position.
He, after all, is the one who actually chose to report the leak and become the hand-maiden of the bad act.
--Josh Marshall
So many disputes about John Kerry's military service record that even the 'wingers can't sort them all out ...
Deborah Orin, 8/5/04, New York Post: "The book, by Vietnam vet John O'Neill who served with Kerry, adds: 'What [Kerry's] fellow Swiftees concluded was that Kerry had a very high regard for his own wellbeing and very little nerve for facing serious combat.'
Luiza Ch. Savage, 5/5/04, New York Sun: "Mr. O'Neill did not serve with Mr. Kerry, but took over his boat several months after Mr. Kerry left Vietnam."
--Josh Marshall
If anyone thought that Alan Keyes was going to start marching around Illinois spouting clownish bombast and giving Barack Obama a chance to play the statesman in the face of the Illinois GOP's cynical nonsense, boy do they have another thing coming.
Today Keyes attacked Obama for taking the "slaveholder's position" by voting against a ban on late-term abortion which had no exception for protecting the life of the mother.
"I would still be picking cotton if the country's moral principles had not been shaped by the Declaration of Independence," Keyes said. Obama, he said, "has broken and rejected those principles -- he has taken the slaveholder's position."
When asked about the "slaveholder" comment, Obama told the AP that Keyes "should look to members of his own party to see if that's appropriate if he's going to use that kind of language."
--Josh Marshall
Keyes picks God as running mate.
From AK's campaign announcement speech: "I will promise you a battle like this nation has never seen ... The battle is for us, but I have confidence because the victory is for God."
--Josh Marshall
I think we may have a winner for the feeblest endorsement of Alan Keyes from a prominent Illinois Republican. In this vaguely Sovietological nod, Cong. Ray LaHood (R-IL) says, "If the party believes he's the best candidate for the race, then I'm with him."
With rather more gusto, Republican Jim Oberweis, who lost out to Jack Ryan in the GOP Senate primary called the Obama-Keyes race "a debate between good on the right and evil on the left" which I take it amounts to an endorsement.
--Josh Marshall
Okay, this simply <$NoAd$>won't fly.
I haven't yet been able to get a handle on just what happened with the public release of the identity of this al Qaida operative who was apparently cooperating with Pakistani intelligence in some sort of sting operation. Nor do I yet have a clear sense of what I think about the larger issues.
But on Wolf Blitzer's show yesterday, Wolf had the following exchange with Condi Rice ...
BLITZER: Let's talk about some of the people who have been picked up, mostly in Pakistan, over the last few weeks. In mid-July, Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan. There is some suggestion that by releasing his identity here in the United States, you compromised a Pakistani intelligence sting operation, because he was effectively being used by the Pakistanis to try to find other al Qaeda operatives. Is that true?RICE: Well, I don't know what might have been going on in Pakistan. I will say this, that we did not, of course, publicly disclose his name. One of them...
BLITZER: He was disclosed in Washington on background.
RICE: On background. And the problem is that when you're trying to strike a balance between giving enough information to the public so that they know that you're dealing with a specific, credible, different kind of threat than you've dealt with in the past, you're always weighing that against kind of operational considerations. We've tried to strike a balance. We think for the most part, we've struck a balance, but it's indeed a very difficult balance to strike.
Here Rice seems to be implying that things discussed 'on background' aren't for public release and thus that the White House did not in fact release his name.
But that's simply false. White House officials give 'backgrounders' all the time, Rice at least as often as others. The information discussed in those briefings is very much for public use. The restrictions are simply a matter of identifying who is talking.
--Josh Marshall
Best endorsement of <$NoAd$> Alan Keyes so far.
This entry by Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert, as related by The New York Times ...
"I spent five weeks trying to find good people," said Mr. Hastert, who said he approached state legislators and the former Chicago Bears coach Mike Ditka and Gary Fencik, an Ivy Leaguer who was a hard-hitting safety."I got down into last week interviewing a 70-year-old guy who was a great farm broadcaster in Illinois," Mr. Hastert said. "He decided because of his health problems he couldn't do it. You know, we were down — we needed to find somebody to run, somebody who wanted to run. And, you know, Alan Keyes wants to run, and I hope he's a good candidate."
I will be much obliged if readers can send me examples of other similarly ringing endorsements or examples of Keyes' verbal nonsense from the campaign trail, though I concede the volume of the latter will likely be formidable.
--Josh Marshall
Quite simply, I knew that Alan Keyes -- whom I recently called the master of grandiloquent nonsense -- would not let me down.
Keyes kicked off his campaign in what I guess we should be calling his new hometown of Chicago today. But first he had to get over the fact that a few years ago he not only knocked Hillary Clinton for relocating to New York to run for Senate -- after all most every Republican did that -- but had to dress it up in typically Keyesian mumbo-jumbo.
Harkening back to the wisdom of no one in particular, Keyes intoned, "I deeply resent the destruction of federalism represented by Hillary Clinton's willingness to go into a state she doesn't even live in and pretend to represent people there. So I certainly wouldn't imitate it."
The best walk back I heard for this one was the response from a Republican party official in Illinois a few days ago -- as related to me by a TPM reader -- who, when confronted with this seeming change of mind, shot back that ... you guessed it, 9/11 changed everything!
Clearly, something like that is far too banal for Keyes. So he described his flash of light on the road to Chicago experience like this ...
As Keyes told his new Illinois supporters today, he was at first dead-set against running for senate in another state. But then he was shown copies of Barack Obama's state legislative voting record and he decided he had no choice -- flip flop or no flip flop -- but to jump into the ring.
"I'll tell you by the time I got through the records, I was convinced that somebody had to run against Barack Obama," he said.
And then after this long dark night of the soul Keyes spent with Obama's voting records he decided that "I must leave the land of my forefathers [i.e., Maryland] in order to defend the land of my spirit, of my conscience and my heart -- and I believe that that land is Illinois."
Only Keyes could manage to bring a flourish to the rather prosaic work of backing out of backing out of a flat promise or turning a flip-flop into something vaguely reminiscent of St. Paul's decision to abandon the teachings of the Pharisees and launch off on foot around the shores of the Mediterranean preaching Christ crucified.
What I can't help but wonder is what issues get pulled into the mix when Keyes and his wife get in an argument about ... say, whose toothbrush is whose? Or when one of the kids won't take out the trash?
"You have said that you will not take out the trash, that you will take out the trash after you play Nintendo. But I tell you today that taking out the trash is no mere chore. Just as a righteous society is preserved by preserving what is good and just and tossing aside what is bad, just so with the ..."
"Dad?"
Well, you get the idea.
In any case, I think Mike Murphy has the right take on this at The Weekly Standard when he argues that hiring Keyes for an election Kamikaze run is a foolish and self-destructive move for Illinois Republicans that shows just how bad a state they're really in.
As Murphy puts it, "Keyes will be the perfect foil for Obama to campaign against, and the selection of Keyes will seem exactly the shoddy and cynical move that it is. The Republicans should know better."
--Josh Marshall
For years now I've been interested in one of Washington's lesser known and subtler forms of corruption -- one that is in no way illegal and one which can be found in both political parties. In the broadest possible sense it's the corruption of expertise; specifically, it's the corruption of think-tanks. Is it okay for think-tanks to get funding for their foreign policy or trade policy programs from foreign governments? Middle East policy paid for by the Saudis or the Israelis? Asia policy paid for by the Chinese? Should all of a think-tanks telecom policy scholars be funded by one cell provider?
There is one think-tank in DC, for instance, that has a region studies program which is paid for out of the foreign ministry of one of the countries in the region in question -- somewhat less than entirely independent, you might say.
I would say that it probably is okay so long as there's disclosure. These aren't black and white issues, after all. Think-tank presidents have to find funding for their scholars. And fundraisers quickly find that there isn't that much wholly disinterested money out there. Is it really so bad if such-and-such think-tank gets a grant for its program on peace-keeping from Germany or Japan?
Unfotunately, there are no disclosure rules for where think-tanks get their money. They don't have to tell the public anything. And in many cases corporate and foreign interests (and union interests too, though they have far less money) have used this loophole, if that's the best word for it, as a way to use money to affect the political process without having to disclose anything.
In any case, the person who interested me in this topic is Steve Clemons, whose new blog I introduced you to a few days ago.
Today Steve has follow-up post on a topic related to this issue: it is on Jim Woolsey and how Steve says Woolsey has personally profited from the Iraq War that he played a key role in leading the country into.
--Josh Marshall
A follow-up to the earlier post about the arrest warrants sworn out against Ahmed Chalabi (for counterfeiting) and Salem Chalabi (for murder).
This article from a few days ago in the LA Times has more details on the circumstances of the murder in question and why the prosecutor was looking at the younger Chalabi as a potential suspect.
Another thing occurs to me though. As much as I think the elder Chalabi is a bad actor in this entire sorry tale -- and perhaps the younger one too, it's impossible to ignore that this new Iraqi government -- presiding over a slow-motion civil war, wracked by assassinations, headed up by a would-be strong-man -- inspires little confidence that its judicial actions are separate in any way from the rest of the hardball politics being played out in that country.
Of course, this creates an odd bind for the Chalabites who, to fish Chalabi's reputation out of this soup, must, of necessity, tag the new Iraqi government as a dictatorship in the making with no respect for the rule of law.
--Josh Marshall
Department of full circles.
According to the Associated Press the government of Iraq today issued arrest warrants for Ahmed Chalabi (on charges of counterfeiting) and his nephew Salem Chalabi (on charges of murder).
Salem, of course, remains head of the war crimes tribunal charged with trying Saddam Hussein and other leaders of the former regime. But the tribunal covers crimes committed under the former regime, not the present one. So perhaps there's no conflict.
--Josh Marshall
Doug Feith, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, had an OpEd in Saturday's Washington Post. It is, I think, one of the clearest pieces of evidence for the strategic myopia at the heart of the Bush administration's 'war on terror'.
I say this for the following reason. One can find various statements Feith or his ideological soulmates have made and point out what you might find to be their conflation of the al Qaida and other threats, terrorist or otherwise. But here Feith is specifically trying to respond to such criticisms, thus putting his best and most focused argumentative foot forward.
And the result really does seem to be a fallacy as crude as one could possibly imagine.
It's a short piece. So I strongly recommend reading it in its entirety. But a few quick points.
First of all, on the way to making his central argument, Feith indulges in some silly caricatures of his opponents' thinking -- never a good sign.
Here for example ...
In the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11, the intelligence on the attackers was far from fully developed, and some critics of the administration were demanding evidence of the type needed for a conviction in a law court.
First, I think we can say that the predicate here is close to being false, though the language is vague enough as to be inherently subjective.
Whatever failures there may have been before 9/11, it seems undeniable that US intelligence rapidly compiled a great deal of information on the 9/11 attacks. And within days, if not hours, it was quite clear that this was an al Qaida operation. So the uncertainty Feith wants to convey just isn't there.
As to the second point, who were these 'critics' exactly? The fall and winter of 2001 weren't that long ago. And I can't remember anybody who I would consider at all in the political mainstream either arguing that we lacked sufficient evidence to hold al Qaida responsible for 9/11 or that we needed courtroom evidence to strike out at them.
Either Feith is just being dishonest here or he is reacting to numerous subsequent cases where critics have demanded evidence for various groundless charges he has made and projecting this experience back on to 9/11.
But on to the crux of the matter.
The grafs that follow the above are these ...
The term "war" meant that the enemy could not be thought of as a set of individuals who had perpetrated a particular crime. Nor was the enemy necessarily a single distinct organization. Rather, the enemy was understood to comprise all those who contributed to the terrorist threat to the United States, of which Sept. 11 was just the most serious instance to date. The enemy was thought of as the network of individuals, groups and states that committed or supported such acts of terrorism.Going to war against terrorism meant going to war against this network. Obviously, those most directly responsible for Sept. 11 -- we soon understood them to be the al Qaeda group based in Afghanistan -- were primary targets. But that did not necessarily mean that attacking al Qaeda bases in Afghanistan had to be the first order of business. The timing and nature of U.S. military and other actions had to be designed to serve U.S. strategic purposes and to take into account what we could or could not expect to achieve militarily.
Here we have the heart of the fallacy, or rather an unknowing dissection of the fallacy by one of its authors. Finding particular points of interaction or cooperation between various hostile forces isn't necessary because everyone constituting a certain sort of threat is bundled together into 'the enemy'. And then once Feith has bundled them, the bundle is dubbed a 'network', thus stating as fact what Feith only sentences earlier thought unnecessary and, by implication, impossible to demonstrate with evidence.
Let's look more closely.
Feith states that we are at war not with individuals (which is certainly true) nor even an organization (which is largely true). Then he makes the key leap. We're not at war with any particular entity or organization, but rather all who pose a particular kind of threat -- which he calls terrorist, but given the context he provides might also be called asymmetric or unconventional.
However that may be, he groups all these possible actors together based on the nature of their threat, regardless of whether they include the same individuals or even members of the same organization. It's simply, if you pose a terrorist threat to the US then we're at war with you.
Then in the next sentence he takes all of these threats -- which he's just classed together notwithstanding whether or not they are collaborating with one another -- and calls them a 'network'. And then in the very next: "Going to war against terrorism meant going to war against this network." [itals added]
In other words, all those who present a terrorist threat to the United States are by definition in league with each other. If not by definition, then somehow it is assumed to be true almost a priori, without a need for any actual evidence.
We often hear wags mocking the president or other members of the administration for clumsy uses of the phrase "the terrorists". As in, the terrorists want to do this, or the terrorists want to do that, as though "the terrorists" were a distinct group as opposed to various different actors using similar means. When we hear such things it's easy to think, "Well, that's unfair to criticize them for that. He's talking broad brush or using rhetorical license."
But when you see stuff like this you realize that's not the case at all. The mumbo-jumbo isn't a just matter of soundbites or campaign trail slogans. It goes right to the heart of the strategy.
--Josh Marshall
