In a startling development late in the presidential campaign cycle, editors of the satirical magazine The Onion have taken over the Bush-Cheney '04 Communications Office and seized at least operational control of Winger Central (WC), the office in downtown Washington near the corner of 17th and M, which sends out marching orders to conservative columnists.
The first sign of the overnight take-over came when Charles Krauthammer led off with this morning's column in the Post charging Sen. Kerry with being insufficiently respectful and supportive of America's traditional allies.
Confirmation of the scope of the takeover came later in the afternoon when President Bush denounced Kerry for dissing American allies.
"You can't lead this country" while undercutting a valued ally, the president said.
Rumors of a coming attack on Kerry for war-profiteering in connection with a secret no-bid ketchup contract for the Heinz Corporation could not be confirmed as this story went to press.
--Josh Marshall
Don Rumsfeld said yesterday that elections in "three-quarters or four-fifths of" Iraq might be good enough.
In other words, run the place on Florida rules.
--Josh Marshall
A generous way to put it -- the lede of Dana Milbank's piece in tomorrow's Post: "President Bush and leading Republicans are increasingly charging that Democratic presidential nominee John F. Kerry and others in his party are giving comfort to terrorists and undermining the war in Iraq -- a line of attack that tests the conventional bounds of political rhetoric."
Can we re-check the sprinkler system in the Reichstag?
--Josh Marshall
An amazing exchange from Jim Lehrer's interview this evening with Iyad Allawi, which opens and shuts the case on the latter's credibility about anything.
JIM LEHRER: What would you say to somebody in the United States who questions whether or not getting rid of Saddam Hussein was worth the cost of more than a thousand lives now and billions and billions of U.S. dollars?PRIME MINISTER IYAD ALLAWI: Well, I assure you if Saddam was still there, terrorists will be hitting there again at Washington and New York, as they did in the murderous attack in September; they'll be hitting also on other places in Europe and the Middle East.
So, if we hadn't <$Ad$>invaded Iraq we'd be experiencing repeated 9/11s, with similar events in Europe in the Middle East.
Is it necessary to say that, despite all the bad things Iraq's Baathist regime represented and did, there is no evidence (pace Laurie Mylroie) that it ever attempted, let alone succeeded in mounting, any sort of terrorist attack on the American mainland?
Presumably the dramatic loss of credibility suffered if the US had failed to invade Iraq would have led to a sudden reversal of Baathist policy and a sudden unleashing of a wave of Mukabarat terrorist strikes on the American mainland.
Every so often you just have to sit back and marvel at the Twilight Zone we're living in at the moment.
Here we have a US-installed foreign head of state, whose travel schedule is determined by the US State Department, visiting the US to buoy the president's election campaign and spouting demonstrable lies in order to support a retrospective rationale for war that the White House wants Americans to believe but lacks the gall to state explicitly.
--Josh Marshall
Look at this very odd article on MSNBC.com.
It's a Nightly News 'reality check' with the headline: "Violence surges even as conditions improve."
It reads like a classic example of the media's desire to find balance in cases where there really isn't any balance to be found.
The piece starts by noting Iraqis' skeptical reaction to Prime Minister Allawi's speech today, specifically with regard to the fight against the insurgency and how successful it's been.
"What he's saying isn't true. I can't even name an Iraqi city where there aren't clashes," says one Iraqi man-in-street.
The piece then goes on to describe the spiralling level of violence and the fact that insurgents are now increasingly targetting Iraqis themselves, which is presumably not an improvement, especially if you're Iraqi.
The reporter even notes that a good deal of reconstruction money has had to be diverted to security.
Then come the improvements. First there's a bulleted list of updates on reconstruction ...
Electricity: There is more than under Saddam but demand is up 80 percent, so it's still rationed — four hours on, two hours off.Water: U.S. officials say there's no clean drinking water in all of Iraq because of sewage contamination.
Oil: The biggest problem is sabotage, keeping overall production short of the three million target, at 2.6 million barrels a day.
Jobs: A major improvement — one year ago, 60 percent of Iraqis were unemployed. Today, it's almost half that — 30-40 percent.
So there does seem to be more electricty. And unemployment has come down.
Or has it?
As it happens, in a piece in the Washington Post today, Jessica Matthews -- who knows a bit about these things -- says the Iraqi unemployment rate still "may be 60 percent."
And just a few days ago the AFP said that estimates of Iraqi unemployment range from 20% to 60%. So perhaps no one has any really good idea.
In any case, the reporter then notes these improvements ...
Iraqis no longer live under the oppressive scrutiny of Saddam's government. The giant busts that once adorned Saddam's palaces have been torn down like his regime — giving Iraqis something unquantifiable — their freedom.Another freedom — the press. There are now about 200 independent newspapers; under Saddam there wasn't a single one.
Setting aside the sculptural improvements, freedom, or here more specifically the overthrow of a brutal authoritarian regime, is unquestionably a good thing. But you can't call this an 'improvement' in this context since Saddam's government was overthrown 18 months ago. And it's not clear that Iraqis have become more free since then.
'Freedom', at least at this level of abstraction, must be seen as a post-Saddam baseline.
In some measure they've probably become less free since creeping Islamization has reduced the rights of women in certain areas and brought de facto bans on drinking alcohol.
But the real point is that the unquestionable good of the end of a dictatorial government can't be pointed to as a sign that conditions are improving at the same time that violence surges, right?
Take a look at the piece yourself and tell me if the reporter doesn't struggle to find a single measure by which conditions in the country are improving or a single anecdote that would justify his headline.
--Josh Marshall
This afternoon, after John Kerry said that Iyad Allawi was painting an overly rosy picture of the situation in Iraq, Dick Cheney said "John Kerry is trying to tear down all the good that has been accomplished, and his words are destructive to our effort in Iraq and in the global war on terror."
In other words, democracy in America is harmful to building democracy in Iraq.
--Josh Marshall
Not that we really need to revisit this cudgel-issue of which candidate has more endorsements of foreign leaders, but on this issue pundits have shortchanged the incumbent.
Those who claim that Kerry has a lock on the support of foreign leaders have, rather unfairly, lumped all foreign leaders together into one pool, rather than dividing them into different subsets and weighting them accordingly. The issue is sort of like that raised by Ruy Teixeira about public opinion polls which have oversampled Republican voters.
If you take this more specific view, you see that among those foreign leaders President Bush has himself appointed to office his rate of support runs extremely high -- probably approaching 100%.
--Josh Marshall
"Foreign terrorists are still pouring in, and they're <$NoAd$>trying to inflict damage on Iraq to undermine Iraq and to undermine the process, democratic process in Iraq, and, indeed, this is their last stand. So they are putting a very severe fight on Iraq. We are winning. We will continue to win, and we are going to prevail."
Iyad Allawi
Prime Minister of Iraq
September 19th, 2004
This Week, ABC NEWS
"Yes, the American troops have advanced further. This will only make it easier for us to defeat them."
Muhammed Saeed al-Sahaf
(aka "Baghdad Bob")
former Iraqi Information Minister
[ed.note: I found the Sahaf quote on this famed Sahaf fan appreciation site. I tried to confirm it using Nexis. And I found several instances of it in reputable publications, such as the Times of London. But in each case these other publications seem to have sourced their usage to this same Sahaf fan website. So caveat lector. But you get the idea.]
--Josh Marshall
Why so many fringy right-wing nutball sites on GoogleNews? J.D. Lasica reports so you can decide.
--Josh Marshall
Talk about unorthodox.
A journalist -- Marc Sandalow, Washington Bureau Chief <$NoAd$>of the San Francisco Chronicle -- decided to discuss charges that John Kerry has waffled on Iraq policy by actually going back and reviewing his record as expressed in policy statements, speeches and votes.
Not surprisingly, he found Kerry has had pretty much the same position since the whole Iraq debate started ...
[A]n examination of Kerry's words in more than 200 speeches and statements, comments during candidate forums and answers to reporters' questions does not support the accusation [of flip-flopping]. As foreign policy emerged as a dominant issue in the Democratic primaries and later in the general election, Kerry clung to a nuanced, middle-of-the road -- yet largely consistent -- approach to Iraq ...[T]aken as a whole, Kerry has offered the same message ever since talk of attacking Iraq became a national conversation more than two years ago.
Someone's got to talk to this Sandalow guy and straighten him out. Maybe someone from CNN?
--Josh Marshall
"The path to our safety and to Iraq's future as a democratic nation lies in the resolute defense of freedom. If we stop fighting the terrorists in Iraq, they would be free to plot and plan attacks elsewhere, in America and other free nations. To retreat now would betray our mission, our word, and our friends."
That's President Bush from his appearance today with Prime Minister Allawi of Iraq.
Sentence one is certainly an arguable proposition and not without some merit, though it's bundled with so much rhetoricical mush as to have little concrete meaning. I think you can say the same thing for sentence three.
But surely sentence number two is pure foolishness. "If we stop fighting the terrorists in Iraq, they would be free to plot and plan attacks elsewhere, in America and other free nations."
Does anyone even possibly believe this is true? They're trapped in Iraq? We've got them pinned down so they can't hatch plots against US or European targets? 'The terrorists' are so busy with the insurgency in Iraq that they can't spare a few Mohammad Attas to blow stuff up over here?
Think about ...
--Josh Marshall
Another poll, Fox News/Opinion Dynamics: Bush 45%, Kerry 43% among likely voters. And this is in line with other recent 'likely voter' poll numbers. Of the five soundings of likely voters from the last week, the most recent (albeit a Dem poll) had a tie. Before that there was one with a four point spread (NBC/WSJ), two with a three point spreads (Zogby and IBD) and another with a four point spread (GWU Battleground).
--Josh Marshall
Is Prime Minister Allawi actually part of the Bush campaign? Or is he registered as a 527?
--Josh Marshall
In Newsweek this afternoon, Mike Isikoff and Mark Hosenball have a piece that touches on the fact that the FBI still hasn't managed to interview Rocco Martino, the guy at the center of the forged Niger uranium documents story. They put the question to the FBI and were told by a "U.S. law-enforcement official ... [that] the FBI is seeking to interview Martino, but has not yet received permission to do so from the Italian government."
Please.
The Bureau may well be looking to interview Martino now that they've been put on the spot.
But are they really willing to take 'no' for an answer from the Italians?
And more to the point, if it's really a jurisdictional issue, why didn't they try to interview Martino last month when he was in New York?
Or if not then, how about when he flew here in June?
The White House is now saying that it's imperative to get to the bottom of who's behind the CBS Memo forgeries. And they're right. But the US government has never made any serious effort to find out who is behind the Niger uranium forgeries.
Why not?
--Josh Marshall
The article in today's Post on the indictments of three top aides to House Majority Leader Tom DeLay mentions that one of them is John Colyandro, the executive director of DeLay's political action committee, Texans for a Republican Majority (aka TRMPAC -- an acronym which might perhaps be a subtle homage to DeLay's earlier partying days).
What it doesn't mention is that Colyandro is a one-time right-hand-shark to Karl Rove.
In fact Colyandro was at the center of one of Rove's uglier dirty-tricks from his Texas political days -- a story that is told in all its lizardly detail in a magazine article that's coming out about Rove next week.
Actually, after reading the article, you'll start to see that the whole Swift Boat business was pretty mild for what Rove is capable of.
If (or maybe 'when'?) he really wanted to lower the boom, or imitate past practice, we'd probably be hearing that Kerry was running his Swift Boat like an after-party for a Village People concert circa 1979. Or that when Kerry really wanted to party on the Delta he'd head to the local orphanage for a good time.
--Josh Marshall
Surprise, surprise ...
"A year from now, I'll be very surprised if there is not some grand square in Baghdad that is named after President Bush."
Richard Perle
AEI Keynote speech
September 22, 2003
PS. Note of thanks to reader MW for the heads up.
PPS. This site seems to have had the quote up days ago, so credit where credit is due. They also have the sound clip for your listening pleasure.
--Josh Marshall
In the final throes of a presidential campaign, the depth and breadth of a foreign policy debate are necessarily highly constricted. I am extremely pleased that John Kerry is now making the case against the President's Iraq policy in an aggressive and frontal fashion. But the thrust of that critique is inevitably on the policy's manifest failures rather than its intellectual and policy underpinnings.
A side note: It's revealing -- and the Kerry campaign should make something of it -- that whenever Kerry attacks Bush's management of the war all the Bush team can do is attack the alleged contradictions in Kerry's position on the war. That may work politically. But it's awfully telling. They have, quite literally, no response on the merits. Kerry should point that out and tell the president to stop making excuses for endangering the country.
In any case, back to the debate over foreign policy and war. If you're interested in getting more deeply into the questions raised by the Iraq war -- not WMD and troop strength, but the mix of empire, violence and democratic idealism -- I cannot recommend strongly enough John Judis' new book The Folly of Empire.
The book is half history, half polemic. Much of the historical focus is on America's experience as an incipient imperial power from the final years of the 19th century through the first two decades of the 20th century. The key events are the bloody war America fought to put down the Philipine rebellion and the ill-fated American intervention in Mexico. This Judis contrasts with a very different approach to foreign affairs that prevailed -- with relative consensus and consistency among presidents of both parties -- from Franklin Roosevelt until Bill Clinton. It was a model that in key ways grew out of the sobering experience of this imperialist interlude when America's deep-seated and in most ways benign missionizing impulses were wedded to the imperalism that would soon shake Europe, and much of the globe, to its foundations.
The image of Teddy Roosevelt that emerges from this book is very different from that which has been in vogue in recent years in Washington, DC. And in our current moment, when TR and Wilson loom so large in our historical imagination and disfigured latter-day versions of them direct our nation's affairs, it is an instructive examination of how the thirst for domination can masquerade as idealism, often in a toxic fashion fooling even itself.
With the US completely isolated and in a Mesopotamian snake pit, it's not hard to argue that President Bush's own special model of petulant unilateralism has been ineffective in securing American interests and security. But if you want to get more deeply into this -- how lessons of the past were ignored, how vacuous idealism can slide into hubris and then disaster -- this is the book.
Soon, another recommendation of a very different sort of book about empire: Hugh Thomas's new Rivers of Gold.
--Josh Marshall
Front line in the war against terror ...
Today, according to the AP, Cat Stevens was "denied admission to the United States on national security grounds."
When Homeland Security officials found that Stevens -- who now goes by the name Yusuf Islam -- was flying on a plane from London to Washington, DC they diverted the plane to Bangor, Maine.
He was expelled from the US after a brief interview.
--Josh Marshall
Yesterday I was talking to a friend who is pro-war but increasingly ambivalent about what's become of our venture in Iraq.
And we were speculating -- not rhetorically but in some real sense thinking out loud -- about how the president and his top aides could have ignored so many signs for so long that things were going seriously wrong.
Then you see something like this, and everything becomes a bit clearer.
Asked about the National Intelligence Estimate he received two months ago, which painted a bleak outlook for Iraq, the president said the CIA was "just guessing ... The Iraqi citizens are defying the pessimistic predictions."
In one ear and out the other.
Doesn't that tell you a lot about how we got to this juncture?
As Andrew Sullivan I think suggests in this post, the president and I dare say many of his supporters have little ability to distinguish between resolution, optimism and denial.
--Josh Marshall
It fell, it seems, to David Brooks to start the effort to distort what John Kerry said in his speech yesterday and pull the debate back from any discussion of what is actually going on in Iraq. His column in tomorrow's Times is a classic Brooks' 'faint praiser' in which he structures the column as an attempt to give his quarry his due while actually distorting what the person in question actually said.
I'll try to comment on this tomorrow. But for now a few salient points.
To read Brooks' column, Kerry came out foursquare for a rapid withdrawal from Iraq. But read the actual speech. That's not what he said at all. Brooks hangs the claim on a passage toward the end of the speech in which Kerry says that if the president does all the right things now we could begin withdrawing troops a year from now -- next summer -- and "realistically aim" to have all of our troops out in four years.
That, to Brooks, is rapid withdrawal and retreat: the possibility of any end in sight, ever.
Whether you agree with the speech and policies or not, what Kerry called for in the speech wasn't withdrawal. He said the president's policies have failed and that we need different policies and a different president if we are to prevent Iraq from "becom[ing] a permanent source of terror that will endanger America's security for years to come."
The point of Brook's column is to allow only two options: denial and 'retreat'.
The Brooks line, which is the Bush line, is that "the U.S. should stay as long as it takes to rebuild Iraq." But this platitude is simply a way of ducking discussion about whether the president's policies are working and whether things are getting better or worse.
Brooks, like Bush, is like a man in the sea, a fifty pound lead weight chained to his feet, slowly sinking into the waves. It's a tough road, he says as the water laps around his neck, but I'm going to keep at it as long as it takes until I start floating up instead of sinking down.
As long as it takes.
I'm staying the course.
Bubble, gurgle, bubble ...
Denial ... and did I mention the weight is chained to your feet too?
--Josh Marshall
"What Is Bush Hiding?" -- that's the title of E.J. Dionne's column in tomorrow's Post, which you should read.
--Josh Marshall
Investor's Business Daily/Christian Science Monitor poll out today has exactly the same numbers as Zogby: Bush 46%, Kerry 43% among likely voters. Among registered voters Bush 44%, Kerry 43%.
--Josh Marshall
Night Riders ...
From the The Lafayette Daily Advertiser: "Vandals set fire to signs and wrote pro-President Bush messages on the front of Lafayette’s Democratic Party Headquarters, the second time the office was hit by vandals."
--Josh Marshall
The net is abuzz today about Robert Novak's column suggesting that a reelected Bush administration would quickly pull American troops out of Iraq regardless of the status of the country at the moment or what the consequences of the withdrawal might be.
So what does it mean?
Has President Bush decided that we have to pull up stakes, opting for a far more immediate retreat from Iraq than the one he continually accuses John Kerry of supporting?
My take is that there's no possibility and really no point in trying to answer that question. Whether or not John Kerry has a clear plan for what to do in Iraq, it's quite clear that President Bush doesn't have any. The plan at the moment is simply to keep the troops there in order to keep from having to admit that the whole enterprise has gone south.
(The young and very serious John Kerry once asked "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?" A less anguished George W. Bush has decided that a soldier or two a day is a reasonable price to pay to avoid admitting a mistake.)
Given the identity of the reporter, I think this leak is simply an effort to give options to potential Bush supporters.
For those with their hands over their eyes, there's the president's slogans on the hustings. For those who see that what the president is saying makes no sense but yet really prefer not to vote for John Kerry, there's this leak which tells them with a wink that the president realizes his policy has failed and will pull the plug very soon.
The campaign will leave to individual voters which message suits their needs.
--Josh Marshall
Game. Set. Match.
CBS now says it regrets running the Memo story.
They concede that Bill Burkett was their source for the documents and though Burkett does not admit the documents are forgeries he "admits that he deliberately misled the CBS News producer working on the report, giving her a false account of the documents' origins to protect a promise of confidentiality to the actual source."
CBS says that while they have no specific knowledge that the documents are forgeries they also say that they cannot authenticate them and that the story should never have run.
This only prompts the question of why they took so much on faith from Burkett in the first place.
--Josh Marshall
Alan Keyes positioned for a break-out?
New St. Louis Post-Dispatch poll has him closing the gap to under 50 percentage points against Barack Obama.
Obama 68%, Keyes 23%, Other/Unsure 9%.
--Josh Marshall
A new Zogby poll out tonight has not great but decent news for Kerry.
Bush 46%, Kerry 43% on the head-to-head match-up.
Kerry's got his work cut out for him. But he's very much in this race. And the president's underlying weaknesses are still very much there.
--Josh Marshall
Following up on the post below about Rocco Martino, a number of readers have asked about the piece that appeared Sunday about Martino and the Niger business in the Telegraph.
The Telegraph piece contains some information that is accurate. But the article also relies heavily on intelligence and law enforcment sources who are using disinformation to cover for Italian intelligence.
The thrust of the piece is false.
--Josh Marshall
In recent days there have been a run of stories about the byzantine, or rather sovietological, new twists and turns in the Plame investigation. And whenever this story pops up into the news, there’s a rush of speculation about that other investigation.
That, of course, would be the investigation into just who forged the notorious Niger-uranium documents that purported to show that Iraq had purchased uranium from Niger --- the underlying issue that led to the Plame investigation in the first place.
It’s even been suggested in the press that the two investigations might have been consolidated into one.
The truth, though, the dirty little secret, is that there’s never been any real investigation into where those documents came from. Don't look for status updates on it because it doesn't exist.
Yes, back in March 2003, Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV), vice-chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence asked the FBI to investigate the matter. And it was on the basis of this supposed investigation that the Committee decided not to investigate anything about the forged documents before they showed up at the US Embassy in Rome in October 2002. (See page 57 of the Committee report.) But again, despite claims to the contrary, the FBI hasn’t made any serious effort to find out who was behind the scam.
I say this for several reasons, which I’ll be discussing over the next few days -- some are based directly on my reporting on the case and others from inferences I've drawn from what I've observed. But let me start with one.
One of the obvious places to start such an investigation would be with Elisabetta Burba, the Italian journalist who got copies of the documents and later turned them over to the American Embassy in Rome. And the obvious question would be, Who gave you the documents?
FBI agents did do a cursory interview with Burba not long after Rockefeller asked for an investigation. And they made a pro-forma request for her to contact her source to see if some arrangement could be devised under which they could speak to him.
But after that, they didn’t follow up with her for months to find out what the answer was. And when they did finally follow up with her, it was mainly because one agent was passing the matter on to someone else.
To this day they’ve never made contact with the guy who tried to sell Burba the documents.
Now, on the surface you might say, ‘Well, maybe she’s just refused to name her source. And maybe she’s the only one who knows who the guys is. So what can they do?’
But that excuse falls apart pretty quickly.
Here’s why.
My colleagues and I have known the guy’s name since late spring. And at least three European intelligence agencies knew who he was well before we found out. In fact, twice this summer we brought him to New York for interviews. Both time he travelled under his own name, Rocco Martino.
The first time was in June; the second time was in August. And it’s the second time that’s more telling.
By the time we brought Martino to New York in early August, he had already been identified by name in the Italian and the British press as the man who tried to sell Burba the forged documents. And when we whisked him out of the country he was under very active and conspicuous surveillance by Italian authorities in Rome (a point we'll return to later). He flew to New York under his own name and stayed for several days.
A colleague of mine and I actually had a friendly bet about whether we'd have any problems getting Rocco through Customs in New York the second time or whether FBI agents would be there waiting to talk with him since the word was out about who he was, what he'd done, and that he was coming to the US.
I told my friend that I doubted they were looking for him. And if they were, the last thing they'd want would be for it to be reported in the press that they'd questioned Rocco or taken him into custody. He was a hot potato. Everything we'd learned reporting on Niger uranium case told us that this was a story the US government did not want to get to the bottom of.
Needless to say, nothing happened.
Now, perhaps if the case weren’t that high a priority or if there were some jurisdictional issues, it might be understandable if the FBI made no effort to contact him in Rome. But if they were on top of this case or interested in getting to the bottom of it, you’d think they’d try to speak with him if he arrived in New York right after his name was plastered across a bunch of European newspapers --- including one, the Financial Times, which you can pick up at any decent newsstand in the United States. (The Italians were keeping a close eye on him. And through leaks to the press in Italy, they let it be known that Rocco had again gone to the US.)
But he came, spent several drama-filled or tragicomic days, and then left. And no one from the FBI or any other American law enforcement or intelligence agency made any attempt to contact him in any way. Nor have they done so since.
Now, there are other reasons why this information about Martino would have been easy for the Bureau to get a hold of. But once it was publicly known who he was and that he was traveling to the US under his own name, it seems pretty clear that they really just weren’t too interested in talking with him.
--Josh Marshall
