Good as his word ...
"Nearly 100,000 fully trained <$NoAd$>and equipped Iraqi soldiers, police officers, and other security personnel are working today. And that total will rise to 125,000 by the end of this year. The Iraqi government is on track to build a force of over 200,000 security personnel by the end of next year. With the help of the American military, the training of the Iraqi army is almost halfway complete."
President George W. Bush
News Conference with Prime Minister Allawi
September 23rd, 2004
"There's 100,000 troops trained: police, guard, special units, border patrol. There's going to be 125,000 trained by the end of this year."
President George W. Bush
Presidential Debate
September 30th, 2004
And then this from Reuters, out today ...
But many of these assertions have met with scepticism from key lawmakers, congressional aides and experts, and Pentagon documents, given to lawmakers and obtained by Reuters, paint a more complicated picture.The documents show that of the nearly 90,000 currently in the police force, only 8,169 have had the full eight-week academy training. Another 46,176 are listed as "untrained," and it will be July 2006 before the administration reaches its new goal of a 135,000-strong, fully trained police force.
Six Army battalions have had "initial training," while 57 National Guard battalions, 896 soldiers in each, are still being recruited or "awaiting equipment." Just eight Guard battalions have reached "initial (operating) capability," and the Pentagon acknowledged the Guard's performance has been "uneven."
Training has yet to begin for the 4,800-man civil intervention force, which will help counter a deadly insurgency. And none of the 18,000 border enforcement guards have received any centralised training to date, despite earlier claims they had, according to Democrats on the U.S. House of Representatives Appropriations Committee.
They estimated that 22,700 Iraqi personnel have received enough basic training to make them "minimally effective at their tasks," in contrast to the 100,000 figure cited by Bush.
Has any reporter asked the president or his advisors about this? They really do seem to be just making this stuff up ...
--Josh Marshall
Kerry pulls ahead.
According to the first post-debate poll, from Newsweek, John Kerry leads President Bush by a margin of 49% to 46%. Put Nader in the mix and Kerry's margin drops from 3 to 2.
Notably, on the front page of the MSNBC site, the headline reads "Kerry Boost: Poll shows Democrat even with Bush after Debate."
Statistically speaking it's probably fair to call that a tie or basically even. But given how much emphasis has been given to the polls with big Bush leads (Gallup, CBS, etc.) over those with narrow Bush leads (IBD, Fox, Zogby), it seems a funny way to headline the first poll to show Kerry in the lead in like a month.
Late Update: Sheesh! It's worse than I thought. The blurb on the Newsweek poll on the right side of the front page of the MSNBC website reads: "A solid majority of viewers surveyed say the challenger outperformed the president in their first face-off, and Bush's lead among registered voters has all but vanished."
All but vanished? My God. Yes, this is just one poll. Others may well differ. But the article is about the new Newsweek poll that shows Kerry beating Bush among registered voters. So doesn't that mean Bush's lead has all vanished, rather than "all but vanished."
I was never good at math. But isn't MSNBC a bit off on this one?
--Josh Marshall
More good stuff from Fox. Was Cameron in on this one too? Fox News took a Kerry-bashing Republican group called "Communists for Kerry" and interviewed a 'member' of the group as though it were an actual pro-Kerry group.
Sample quote: "Even though he, too, is a capitalist, he supports my socialist values more than President Bush ... The North Koreans are my comrades to a point, and I'm sure they support Comrade Kerry, too."
See Atrios for the details.
--Josh Marshall
A few questions and points about Carl Cameron's Kerry-bashing fabrications on Fox, or A Guide for the Perplexed (media reporters) ...
1. How long did the fabricated quotes run on the Fox News website?
2. Fox News says Cameron has been 'reprimanded.' How? Are there any consequences? What happened to him? How was he reprimanded? Fox spokesman Paul Schur, who first spoke to TPM yesterday afternoon, told The Daily News "We're simply moving on from this, we have no further comment." And that doesn't inspire a lot of confidence that the 'reprimand' is anything more than a 'Carl, Don't post any more fabricated quotes on the website.' Meanwhile, Schur declined to tell the LA Times what if any discipline Cameron faced.
3. Just for the sake of discussion, can there be any question that Carl Cameron has contempt and disdain for John Kerry -- contempt and disdain that he has great difficulty keeping a lid on?
4. Shouldn't Cameron be taken off the Kerry campaign beat? Assume for the moment that Cameron's fabricated story wasn't supposed to run on the site. If Cameron sits around writing up phony news stories only for Fox News colleagues which portray Kerry as a swishy fool, can he really credibly cover the campaign as a straight news reporter? The answer is obvious, I think. Of course, he can't.
5. Fox says Cameron made an "error" because of "fatigue and bad judgment." What was the error? Making up the fabricated quotes? Sending a Kerry-bashing parody around to colleagues at Fox News? Posting it on the website as a news story?
6. Did Cameron post the material to the site himself, not realizing there was a problem? Or did a tech person or editor at the website get a hold of Cameron's fabrications and post it not realizing it was a fabrication?
7. How tired is Carl Cameron and will Fox News be requiring him to get more sleep?
8. Why did comments very similar to Cameron's fabrications come up again and again from Fox commentators on debate night?
9. If CNN's John King posted a story on the CNN website with fabricated quotes that had the president joking about funneling money to Halliburton or telling a crowd how only saps went to Vietnam, what would the fall-out or consequences be?
--Josh Marshall
I will spare you any pretense of mock surprise that Fox News is ridiculously biased against the Kerry campaign. But it's one thing to know it and another to get such a blazing and undeniable example of it as a story with fabricated Kerry-bashing quotes put together by the Fox News reporter covering the Kerry campaign.
(Carl Cameron, the reporter in question, according to Fox spokesman Paul Schur, is Fox's 'chief political correspondent'.)
But it brings up a point raised in an article by Howie Kurtz a few days back.
On Monday Kurtz discussed a study by the Center for Media and Public Affairs that showed that Fox News coverage of Kerry was overwhelmingly negative.
Kurtz got these quotes from Cameron's boss Brit Hume ...
Brit Hume, Fox's Washington managing editor, whose "Special Report" was examined by the study, says he's surprised by the anti-Kerry findings. "Our day-in, day-out coverage by Carl Cameron has been extremely fair to Kerry, and the Kerry campaign has recognized this," he says."We did a lot on the Swift Boat Veterans. We thought it was a totally legitimate story and found it an appalling lapse by many of our competitive news organizations that were treating that story like it was cancerous." But even there, Hume says, "we were abundantly fair to John Kerry's side."
"Extremely fair" to Kerry? "Abundantly fair" about the Swift Boat stuff?
The same reporter who made up these 'Kerry quotes'?
"Women should like me! I do manicures.""Didn't my nails and cuticles look great? What a good debate!"
"I'm metrosexual — [Bush's] a cowboy."
Kurtz could do us all a favor and get Hume on the horn to see if he's still willing to call Cameron "extremely fair to Kerry."
--Josh Marshall
Fox News has now posted a retraction and apology for the piece with the fabricated Kerry quotes ...
Earlier Friday, FOXNews.com posted an item purporting to contain quotations from Kerry. The item was based on a reporter’s partial script that had been written in jest and should not have been posted or broadcast. We regret the error, which occurred because of fatigue and bad judgment, not malice.
The only retraction doesn't name the reporter in question, Carl Cameron, which was noted in the statement Fox News gave TPM this afternoon.
--Josh Marshall
Okay some more details on that bogus Kerry story that ran this morning on the Fox News website. As we noted earlier, this morning the front page of the Fox website ran a story with a series of phony Kerry quotes (see post below). After questions were asked the offending material was quickly pulled from the site, without explanation.
So what happened?
Late this afternoon I spoke to Fox spokesman Paul Schur who told me the following ...
“Carl [Cameron] made a stupid mistake which he regrets. And he has been reprimanded for his lapse in judgment. It was a poor attempt at humor.”
So the Fox reporter covering the Kerry campaign puts together this Kerry-bashing parody right out of the RNC playbook with phony quotes intended to peg him as girlish fool and somehow it found its way on the Fox website as a news item.
Imagine that.
More to follow ...
--Josh Marshall
Follow-up to the previous two posts ...
I just placed a call to Fox News in Washington, DC to see if they had any explanation for the fabricated Kerry story they were running this morning on their website.
We're waiting to hear back. We'll update when he hear their explanation.
Howie, are you gonna be following up on this?
--Josh Marshall
Caught red-handed?
This morning on the Fox News website, Fox was running a post-debate story about Kerry with several apparently fabricated quotes meant to disparage the Democratic candidate.
(See the previous post for details.)
Some examples ...
"Women should like me! I do manicures"
About himself and the president: "I'm metrosexual — he's a cowboy."
Now Fox has pulled the article from the front page without explanation. And on the article itself the passages I quoted in the post below have all been removed -- again, without explanation.
[ed. note: I saved a copy of the offending article in its original form. Normally, I'd upload it to the site in .pdf format. But I'm away from my office and without my .pdf making software. I have a copy of it saved in Microsoft's .mht format. So I'll work on getting a copy online.]
So what's the deal here? Where did the fabricated piece come from? Who made up the quotes? How long did it run? Why did it get taken down? What happened?
--Josh Marshall
Is Fox News literally making stuff up out of whole <$NoAd$>cloth about John Kerry?
I don't expect much from this Republican operation. But this does seem to break new ground.
If you go to the front page of the Fox News site, there's a link right there up front to "Trail Tales: What's that Face".
Link through and you find this ...
Rallying supporters in Tampa Friday, Kerry played up his performance in Thursday night's debate, in which many observers agreed the Massachusetts senator outperformed the president."Didn't my nails and cuticles look great? What a good debate!" Kerry said Friday.
With the foreign-policy debate in the history books, Kerry hopes to keep the pressure on and the sense of traction going.
Aides say he will step up attacks on the president in the next few days, and pivot somewhat to the domestic agenda, with a focus on women and abortion rights.
"It's about the Supreme Court. Women should like me! I do manicures," Kerry said.
Kerry still trails in actual horse-race polls, but aides say his performance was strong enough to rally his base and further appeal to voters ready for a change.
"I'm metrosexual — he's a cowboy," the Democratic candidate said of himself and his opponent.
A "metrosexual" is defined as an urbane male with a strong aesthetic sense who spends a great deal of time and money on his appearance and lifestyle.
Did Kerry really say that stuff? Stuff that sounds like classic winger parody? I looked around on google and no other reporters seem to have gotten those choice quotes from Senator Kerry. A source on the Kerry campaign told me Kerry certainly didn't say anything remotely like that.
So what's the story from Fox? Are these quotes real? Made up? Unidentified parody? Straight-up fabrications?
--Josh Marshall
So much indecision in the world ...
Last night the Miami Herald and a local TV station put together a panel of eight undecided voters to judge the debate. And as you can see from the lede of the piece in the Herald, one of them wasn't too impressed.
After the debate undecided voter Ted Lyons said Kerry sounded like "an idiot" in his response to several questions.
Then you look down into the article and see that Ted Lyons is a Republican political consultant. (Here he is hanging out with fellow members of the North Dade Republican Club.)
Maybe I've just gotten too cynical and jaded. But was Ted Lyons really undecided?
What the hell was the Herald thinking?
--Josh Marshall
"In Samarra, the Iraqi government has tackled the insurgents who once controlled the city."
Iyad Allawi
Address to Congress
September 23rd, 2004
"U.S. and Iraqi forces launched a major assault Friday to regain control of the insurgent stronghold of Samarra, trading gunfire with rebel fighters as they pushed toward the city center."
Associated Press
October 1st, 2004
You really can't believe a word these guys say.
Remember too that Allawi had a representative of the Bush campaign working on his speech.
--Josh Marshall
From a reader: "The 'hard work' is not getting the casualty report. The 'hard work' is being the casualty."
--Josh Marshall
Another point that the Democrats should hit on mercilessly: "He's isolated."
That might well be an apt description of the president himself. But it was actually his description of Osama bin Laden.
Kerry hit again and again on the fact that the president failed to bag bin Laden in late 2001 and early 2002 in large measure because he started drawing off troops for the coming war in Iraq. He also put the final showdown in the mountains of Tora Bora into the hands of Afghan warlords, or rather their fighters, who had no real interest in taken bin Laden down.
To this President Bush's only response was that bin Laden is "isolated." In other words, he's pinned down and doesn't really matter any more.
Is that really how it is? Then why are we so worried about this terrorism thing?
Wasn't the White House telling us just a couple months ago that bin Laden was personally plotting and directing new attacks on America?
This was a feeble excuse for misplaced priorities. And Democrats should hit hard on it.
Late Update: Greg Wythe has the details. As recently as two months ago, one of the President Bush's top counter-terrorism deputies was telling the public that bin Laden was personally directing plans for a new large scale terrorist attack on the US. But the president says he's "isolated". So it doesn't matter that he botched the manhunt.
--Josh Marshall
Did CNN get scammed by an 'undecided voter' who happens also to be a big muckety-muck in his campus branch of College Republicans? Take a look.
Does someone at CNN have a response they can send in about this?
By the way, I'd be happy to come on as an undecided voter too ...
--Josh Marshall
A there it is. The DNC has up 'Faces of Frustration' -- a compilation of presidential grimaces, moments of pique, agitation, impatience and anger. 'Hey, why do I have to be up? I'm the president! What'd you say about me? I'm the president!'
PS: This is good on quick turnaround. But I think I remember a lot of gestures and grimaces that didn't make it into this video, some of the worst ones I think. Keep this one up. But the vid-wizards at the DNC should have their folks pore over that debate footage for the best stuff and re-edit that tape.
--Josh Marshall
Another angle the Democrats should hit.<$NoAd$>
In various ways last night the president kept coming back to how being president is hard, how Iraq is hard, hard work, really hard, etc.
I see others have already picked up on this. And, for instance, Atrios quotes this passage ...
In Iraq, no doubt about it, it's tough. It's hard work. It's incredibly hard.It's-and it's hard work. I understand how hard it is. I get the casualty reports every day. I see on the TV screens how hard it is. But it's necessary work.
We're making progress. It is hard work.
If one wanted to be ungenerous one might note that what's really hard is being over in Iraq getting shot at every day. But the president did give the impression of being a little worn out.
I think we all know that the presidency is tremendously hard work, even for a president like this one who keeps notoriously light hours. It's amazing to look back at the way the office ages the men who occupy it. But worn out and complaining isn't exactly presidential or an example of strong leadership. No one's making him be president after all. Maybe it's time to move on. He's punched his ticket. He can move on to the next gig.
--Josh Marshall
Perhaps someone can help me with this. But I'm pretty sure both campaigns agreed in advance that they wouldn't use clips from the debate as part of TV ads. But I assume that doesn't mean the DNC can't use them on the site or that independent groups can't use on their sites or even, themselves, use them in ads.
As I noted last night, President Bush's reactions during Sen. Kerry's comments looked really bad. I've heard various people say he looked peevish or irritable or tense of sullen or whatever. But what came through to me most though was that he didn't like being up and hearing himself criticized.
Whatever moods or feelings you ascribe to him, Democrats really need to pick up this ball and run with it and have people see those images again and again because they play to an impression of a man who is out of touch, doesn't like being questioned, petulant, unable to take criticism, as short on temper as on facts. Small, angry and in over his head.
Nervous, unpredictable ... (could I go on and on? Yes, and so should the Dems ...)
--Josh Marshall
Now comes the hard part: winning the spin.
John Kerry made a good start of it tonight. But it is absolutely critical for his campaign and his supporters, formal and otherwise, to hit the ground running with a plan to use the grist from the debate to shape perceptions in the final weeks of the campaign.
As I said earlier, I think Kerry did himself the most good tonight simply by belying the Bush campaign's portrayal of him as weak-willed flip-flopper.
But that positive impression could quickly dissipate if the follow-up is not effective. Some of this will involve zinging the president for misstatements he made or knocking him for other similar missteps. But what is critical is for them to burrow into the president's performance and sift out the most damaging impressions he conveyed -- ones that voters may have been troubled by while watching the debate but need to have driven home again and again over the coming week.
The key point I think, the key impression, was of a president who was out of touch. Erratic. Without a plan. In a cocoon. Unwilling to admit mistakes. Unwilling to level with himself or voters about what's happening in Iraq. Lost.
These are broad brush of course. But I suspect these impressions are at least some of the ones that are most damaging for the president coming out of tonight.
There was an air of prickliness and entitlement about the president that Kerry's surrogates should play up too. If you notice, one of the president's major attacks on Kerry through the debate was his claim that Kerry's criticism of the president's own war policy made him unfit to be president.
That's extraordinary -- certainly a set of rules that would put Kerry in something of a bind if he followed them, no?
And that's the best he could come up with: say I've made a mistake in Iraq and you're letting down the troops.
Notice the structure of the president's thinking: The point isn't whether he's made mistakes or screwed things up. But saying he has is bad.
Again, denial. Refusal to see what's happening. Lost. Adrift.
--Josh Marshall
It's a rather technical matter. And I'm not sure how much attention it will garner since the issue hasn't gotten that much attention in the US press. But one of the notable things in the debate was that President Bush didn't seem to have any really clear idea what his administration's North Korea policy even is.
To a degree that's understandable since the policy has been muddled and divided from the beginning. But even taking a charitable view, taking the present policy on its own terms, President Bush couldn't seem to explain it more clearly than to say that it'd be bad to have bilateral talks with the North Koreans because then the Chinese wouldn't help us or else that it wouldn't be fair to the Chinese.
--Josh Marshall
"And I hope it‘s as soon as<$NoAd$> possible. But I know putting artificial deadlines won‘t work. My opponent at one time said, 'Well, get me elected, I‘ll have them out of there in six months.' You can‘t do that and expect to win the war on terror."
That was another throw away line from President Bush in tonight's debate.
Needless to say (and as Sen. Kerry later made clear), Kerry's never said any such thing.
As best I can tell, what President Bush was referring to was this passage from Sen. Kerry's recent speech on Iraq ...
If the President would move in this direction … if he would bring in more help from other countries to provide resources and forces … train the Iraqis to provide their own security …develop a reconstruction plan that brings real benefits to the Iraqi people … and take the steps necessary to hold credible elections next year … we could begin to withdraw U.S. forces starting next summer and realistically aim to bring all our troops home within the next four years.
A bit different, no?
In addition to being unaccustomed to being criticized, President Bush also seemed unused to having people call him on it when he makes up 'quotes' they never said.
--Josh Marshall
"The A.Q. Khan network has been brought to justice," President Bush said in the debate tonight.
Brought to justice?
Really?
The White House went along with a deal in which Khan was immediately pardoned after making a perfunctory apology for spreading nuclear weapons technology all over the globe.
I guess it's really not about law enforcement.
--Josh Marshall
I've been watching the rerun of the debate. And that's given me a chance to look more closely at the body language and other things I didn't see on the first go through. What jumps out at me in the second viewing are the times when the camera was on Bush during Kerry's responses (obviously some networks had more of this than others.)
Bush looked tense or impatient or peeved or even a bit miffed that he even had to be up there on the stage with Kerry. At other times he just looked lost. Obviously, one can read many things into these expressions or grimaces. But whatever they were they didn't look good.
What occured to me somewhat while I was watching the first time and even more on the second go through was just how long it's been since President Bush had to face someone who disagrees with him or is criticizing him.
Every president gets tucked away into a cocoon to some degree. But President Bush does notoriously few press conferences or serious interviews. His townhall meetings are screened so that only supporters show up. And, of course, he hasn't debated anyone since almost exactly four years ago.
Frankly, I think it showed. It irked him to have to stand there and be criticized and not be able to repeat his talking points without contradiction.
--Josh Marshall
I just flipped off the volume on the TV so that I could try to put down some initial impressions of the debate before being inundated by the spin from both sides and the endless pundit chatter.
For the first ten minutes or so, my pained reaction was, "Where did we get these two guys?"
I'm going from memory here without reviewing the text or anything. But I remember thinking that John Kerry's first answer was awfully meandering and unfocused. A laundry list, playing exactly to the critique of him.
But then President Bush was just as bad in his own way.
Soon enough, though, both guys settled down to their game.
From there I thought Kerry got better, sharper and more focused as the debate progressed. Roughly speaking, I thought he was at his best in the second third of the debate. He was clear. And he hit on some of the central points of criticism against the president -- the lack of a plan in Iraq, the failure to come clean on what's really happening there, turning the president's 'strong leadership' into stubborn obstinacy, etc.
There were certainly no Ronald Reagan moments. But there were several times when Kerry landed solid punches that the president seemed unable to counter.
President Bush hit on his core messages again and again: Kerry changes his positions, perseverance, no mixed messages, etc. His campaign will be glad he kept driving those points home.
But there were a number of times through the debate where the president stumbled through responses and seemed almost lost. More than a few times he appeared to struggle to fill up the alloted time.
Where he was strong were those few times in which he mobilized what I think is one of his true strengths: an ability to keep his ears open to turns of phrase which can be used against his opponent, ones that allow him to cast himself as a no-nonsense tough-guy and his opponent as either feckless or weak. To me, it's an ear for the cadence of a rancid populism. But that's a subjective view. The relevant point is that it is a strength.
Two things stand out to me about the debate.
First, for most of the 90 minutes Kerry kept the initiative and kept the president on the defensive. The president was able to parry many of those challenges, at least in a way that would be convincing to his supporters or those inclined to support his policies. But I was surprised how few times President Bush brought the debate to Kerry or got him on the defensive. The standard bludgeon lines the president and his surrogates have been using against Kerry for months only barely got into play. When they did, Kerry came back quickly.
I remember that when both men came out to shake hands at the outset, President Bush came out quicker and shook hands with Kerry on his own side of the stage. I took this as the president's way of getting in Kerry's face, asserting dominance. But that's not how the rest of the 90 minutes went.
My point isn't that Kerry clobbered the president or anything. But for most of the 90 minutes I thought Kerry held the initiative, keeping the energy of the debate on questions about the president's record.
It's the second point however that is, I think, the really big deal about this debate.
If you look at the dynamics of this race and the small but durable lead President Bush has built up over the last month, it comes less from people becoming more enamored of President Bush or his policies as it has from a steep decline in confidence in Sen. Kerry.
To put it bluntly, the Bush campaign has created an image of Kerry as a weak and indecisive man, someone that -- whatever you think of President Bush -- just can't be trusted to keep the country safe in these dangerous times.
Often they've made him into an object of contempt.
Whatever else you can say about this debate, though, whatever you think of his policies, I don't think that's how Kerry came off. I think he came off as forceful and direct. And I suspect that most people who were at all genuinely undecided came away from the 90 minutes with that impression.
If President Bush's current lead is built not upon confidence in him or his policies but in a simple belief that Kerry isn't solid enough to be president, then I think this performance could help Kerry a good deal.
--Josh Marshall
What happens when mockery can't catch up with reality?
I know we're all waiting for the big debate tonight. But somehow I missed this article in today's Post by Dana Milbank and Mike Allen. And it can't go unremarked upon.
You'll remember that a few days ago I joked about whether Iyad Allawi was actually part of the Bush campaign or registered as a 527.
When John Kerry took Allawi's speech to task for presenting an unrealistic view of the situation in Iraq Dick Cheney and the later the president railed against him for disrespecting a prized American ally.
But, like I said, what happens when mockery just can't keep pace with reality?
It seems they decided not to register him as a 527. According to today's Post, "the U.S. government and a representative of President Bush's reelection campaign had been heavily involved in drafting the speech given to Congress last week by interim Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi."
That's extraordinary. It almost takes your breath away. This whole operation has been saturated in politics from the word go. And the Post piece gives more of the nitty-gritty about Allawi's speech.
But that's really all you need to know. It would be pretty dubious to have the White House writing Allawi's speech. But the Bush campaign itself ...
What more can you say about that?
That puts team Kerry in something of a bind (doesn't it?) if the Bush campaign can send our appointed leader of Iraq up to the Hill to deliver a speech from the Bush campaign and Kerry can't criticize it? Did the Kerry campaign get to have input on the speech too?
The whole Allawi speech was exactly what the most cynical observer would have figured, a cheap Bush-Cheney '04 campaign stunt.
I mean, they won't even go through the motions of avoiding the level of 'coordination' that would make this illegal if Allawi were an independent expenditure group in the United States as opposed to a foreign leader.
Our appointed leader of Iraq is working on behalf of the Bush reelection campaign -- not figuratively, but literally -- which is another reason why, as I've stated before, it's so important for us to democratize Iraq, and quickly. Because once we do, some of them can come back here and re-democratize us.
--Josh Marshall
"The hawks' whole plan rests on the assumption that we can turn [Iraq] into a self-governing democracy--that the very presence of that example will transform politics in the Middle East. But what if we can't really create a democratic, self-governing Iraq, at least not very quickly? What if the experience we had after World War II in Germany and Japan, two ethnically homogeneous nations, doesn't quite work in an ethnically divided Iraq where one group, the Sunni Arabs, has spent decades repressing and slaughtering the others? As one former Army officer with long experience with the Iraq file explains it, the "physical analogy to Saddam Hussein's regime is a steel beam in compression." Give it one good hit, and you'll get a violent explosion. One hundred thousand U.S. troops may be able to keep a lid on all the pent-up hatred. But we may soon find that it's unwise to hand off power to the fractious Iraqis. To invoke the ugly but apt metaphor which Jefferson used to describe the American dilemma of slavery, we will have the wolf by the ears. You want to let go. But you dare not."
--Josh Marshall
Juan Cole picks up on a key development reported in today's LA Times. Andrew Sullivan does too, if on a more thematic level.
As the Times reports, the US has launched a series of airstrikes targeting rebels in Baghdad's Shi'a Sadr City district. A strike Monday killed four insurgents, according to the US military. But hospital officials said ten people were killed and that the number included civilians. Another attack came Tuesday but the exact number of casualties or fatalities in those raids remains unclear.
Reacting to this the President of Iraq Ghazi Ajil Yawer called the attacks "collective punishment" and compared them explicitly to Israeli raids in the West Bank and Gaza.
There are numerous layers to what is happening here. One is that the US military is trying to reduce the number of casualities its own troops are sustaining, especially during the run-up to the elections -- thus the heavy reliance on airpower. That's understandable; but there are consequences. Even the 'smartest' munitions kill a lot of innocent people if you're operating in heavily populated slums.
Yawer's comparison of these attacks to the IDF's operations in the occupied territories speaks for itself. Perhaps even more important, though, is what remains implicit in Yawer's remarks -- that the 'sovereign' government of Iraq has no control over these operations. Or, to put it another way, that Iraq remains under military occupation. That seems certain to make the interim government into an object of contempt among the country's population -- something Yawer was clearly trying to head off with his comments.
I haven't written as much lately as I usually do about Iraq because it is, quite simply, hard to know quite what else to say.
Anyone who can't now see the Lebanonization of Iraq for what it is will never see it, is incapable of seeing it.
The issue isn't the number of US military deaths or even the number of Iraqi civilians getting killed -- at least not in and of themselves. It is the evident reality -- observable by every measure available -- that we are on the downward side of a slippery slope, that the insurgency is spreading rapidly both in its geographical scope and and its diffusion into the population, horizontally and vertically, you might say. That spread is a sign that if the majority of the population does not quite support the insurgents specifically, they also do not support the occupation, or, in other words, us. And without the support of the population, the cause is more or less lost.
Many have drawn attention to this private letter by Wall Street Journal reporter, Farnaz Fassihi, which has been making the rounds. Let's look at one passage from the letter ...
It's hard to pinpoint when the 'turning point' exactly began. Was it April when the Fallujah fell out of the grasp of the Americans? Was it when Moqtada and Jish Mahdi declared war on the U.S. military? Was it when Sadr City, home to ten percent of Iraq's population, became a nightly battlefield for the Americans? Or was it when the insurgency began spreading from isolated pockets in the Sunni triangle to include most of Iraq? Despite President Bush's rosy assessments, Iraq remains a disaster. If under Saddam it was a 'potential' threat, under the Americans it has been transformed to 'imminent and active threat,' a foreign policy failure bound to haunt the United States for decades to come.
What strikes me about the stir this letter has caused is not so much what's contained, as its backstory. What's in the letter is not what we're reading in the daily reportage. And why the cleavage? It almost as if a mighty membrane has been built up -- largely because of the election calendar -- to keep out the full force of the reality of what's happening in Iraq. But here in this letter you can see the membrane springing leaks -- and some of the reality bursting through.
And speaking of that membrane, the Post today has another example of the Orwellian moment we're passing through. On Monday the Post ran a story about the sheer scope and spread of the insurgency in Iraq based on data from USAID compiled by the security contractor Kroll Security International.
The response, according to today's Post, is that USAID will stop making the data public.
That's their solution. Just think about for a second. That's their response.
Meanwhile, the Pentagon is sponsoring a PR campaign by hand-picked Iraqi-Americans and former CPA officials who will be speaking at US military bases around the country. The memo sent out to base commanders says the presentations will be "designed to be uplifting accounts with good news messages" and that commanders should try to get local news coverage for the speeches since "these events and presentations are positive public relations opportunities."
That's their policy: denial.
I was reading an article a day or so ago (perhaps someone will recognize the anecdote and email it to me) in which a US military officer told the reporter in question that despite all the turmoil the occupation forces had still not suffered one tactical defeat.
The insugents had killed many Americans; but they'd been defeated in every actual engagement. I'm not sure even that is really true because I think the withdrawal from Fallujah has to be seen as a defeat, by that measure. But that aside, the (unnamed) officer went on to say that the only way the insurgents could ever win would be for the US population to decide to give up the fight.
The historical resonances of those comments, I guess, need no elaboration.
But the key is that this argument is both narrowly true and completely irrelevant. One could have said the same thing -- and it certainly was said -- before the Russian withdrawal from Afghanistan, the British de facto withdrawal from Iraq in the 1920s, the French from Algeria, and so forth.
Insurgencies can seldom beat big conventional armies on their own terms -- certainly not when the asymmetry is as great as it is here. They are battling to make the cost of occupation intolerably high and secure the support or at least acquiescence of the civilian population. If they can achieve the latter goal, our strategic goal becomes impossible.
The fact that we could probably stay in Iraq just like this for twenty years as long as we don't mind burning through our military (which might come in handy if we ever faced a security threat outside Mesopotamia) and our sons and daughters isn't really the point.
Unfortunately, I don't think we're in a position to just pull up stakes and leave the place. We're in a position something like that a surgeon might face if he started an operation only to realize once he'd cut the patient open that the operation should never have been attempted. But now the patient's gone critical and he's got to stabilize him and close him up without having him die on the operating table.
In that situation, why the operation started in the first place or whether it should have been attempted at all is sort of beside the point. The issue is keeping the patient alive.
Our situation, I think, is a similar one in Iraq. And that's why the thousand soldiers we've lost so far, painful as it is to say, is really the least of our problems.
The one sensible thing that can be said is that old saw about digging a ditch. If you find that you're digging yourself into a hole, the first thing to do is stop digging. The Bush strategy at this point is to persevere in digging until we get down to the planet's molten core -- and pretend we're going up, not down.
At least until after the election...
--Josh Marshall
Distributed spin from the GOP on tonight's debate, as reported by CBS News Market Watch.
Do the Dems have something similar? And if so, are they trumpeting it, as the Repubs are, to demoralize their opponents?
--Josh Marshall
From the Cincinnati Enquirer during <$NoAd$>the Republican National Convention (article link) ...
Frank Luntz, who will conduct nationally televised focus groups for MSNBC today and Thursday in Cincinnati, donned his other hat Tuesday at the Ohio breakfast at the Republican National Convention - as a Republican consultant trying to win Ohio for the president.• Don't use the phrase trial lawyers, he told delegates. Use "personal injury lawyer." Use "lawsuit reform," rather than "tort reform." Use "careers" rather than "jobs."
"Tort reform is something you serve in a French bakery," he said.
• Stress how many taxes an Ohioan pays every day.
• Men older than 50 hate Hillary Clinton, he said: "She reminds them all of their first wife."
• Luntz said the swift boat ads had single-handedly lowered Kerry's ratings, thanks to a very powerful word: "betrayal."
"This is why people are turning against John Kerry in the last 10 days," he said.
• Ohio's undecided voters tend to be 25 to 39, mostly female, mostly white, conservative fiscally but moderate socially. She knows someone who lost a job, or she might be worried she'll lose hers.
"If we have to trust our future to anyone, I trust it to Ohio," he said.
So many hats.
And Fox News will control the video cameras filming the debate. So you know everything will be on the up-and-up.
--Josh Marshall
A success: MSNBC has decided to pull the plug on the Frank Luntz focus group they had planned to run as part of their presidential debate coverage tomorrow evening.
(As noted in the earlier post, Luntz is not only a partisan pollster -- like, say, Stan Greenberg or Celinda Lake on the Dem side -- but a strategist and message massager who continues to work actively for GOP candidates and organizations.)
As recently as yesterday, I've now learned, he was slated to be part of the show. But according to a late report in Roll Call, MSNBC has decided to pull the plug on this extremely ill-advised plan. And that is at least in large part because of some very effective mau-mauing on the part of Media Matters, David Brock's (still relatively) new media watchdog outfit.
For the moment, that's a real feather in their collective cap.
It's also an important step in what will be a long and difficult -- but I believe eventually successful -- effort to provide a center-left counterbalance to the right-wing noise machine that creates such a skew in the contemporary media landscape.
Now the conversation should turn to how it was that this was ever going to happen in the first place. NBC giving a hard partisan the mic to himself to shape first impressions of one of the central events in the presidential campaign?
What does that tell you?
--Josh Marshall
I can't tell from this post whether MSNBC has already decided to use Republican pollster and strategist Frank Luntz as its presidential debate focus group pollster or not. But if they are it truly defies comprehension.
See the links Atrios provides here.
See this post too for evidence of Luntz's track record.
Perhaps MSNBC will even things up by having James Carville serve as anchor for the evening's coverage.
--Josh Marshall
Paul Krugman today touches on a crucially important point about Thursday night's presidential debate. If 2000 was any indication -- and there's every reason to think it is -- the winner of the debate won't be determined during the 90 minute encounter itself but during the spin war that will follow it. And with the advantage the Republicans have on the cable nets, talk radio and chat TV shows, the odds are stacked in their favor.
(As Krugman alludes to, the initial public reactions to the first Bush/Gore debate had the then-veep coming out on top, if narrowly. It was only after several days of pundit churn that Bush became the winner. The Bush team won the post-debate debate.)
More than just these built-in advantages, though, Democrats, I think, have seldom really appreciated that there is such a thing as a post-debate debate. I don't mean that they don't know about putting out surrogates or trying to spin the results. Of course, they do. But in 2000 at least (a certainly in analogous situations in this cycle) the effort was very reactive and scattershot. And that inevitably leaves the Democrats trying to parry or deconstruct the ways that Republicans are trying to define what happened. In that way, they're fighting at best for a draw.
Republicans are already leaking hints and taunts about whether Kerry will sweat profusely under the lights, whether he's too tanned and other similar nonsense. But the antic nature of these taunts doesn't mean they won't be effective. They're meant to throw the other side off balance and, in a related manner, to provide grist for a catty and frivolous press corps.
So what's the Democrats' plan going into this debate? You can see what the other side is planning from visiting Drudge or listening to the GOP surrogates on the chat shows.
But what do the Dems have in mind?
It's easy to predict that there will be several exchanges in the debate where the president will describe the situation in Iraq in ways that are entirely belied by the reality of the situation. Perhaps he'll mention the situation in Fallujah where his intervention in the battle planning had such disastrous and feckless results. Will the pundits and talking heads be primed for those moments? Or only for Kerry's moments of over-fancy rhetoric?
Will the Dems be ready to hit on these issues and focus the post-debate debate on the president's recklessness, lack of a plan and inability to level with the public about what's happening in Iraq?
There are many other possible examples. But the point is that we have a pretty good idea what the president is going to say. And what he'll almost certainly say will open up a number of solid lines of attack. But if the Democrats don't hit the ground running with a plan in mind they'll be overwhelmed by the GOP spin machine -- no matter how many fibs the president tells or how many times he says up is down.
--Josh Marshall
Take a look at what "New Donkey" (i.e., a sharp Dem politico from Georgia) has to say about who's winning the ground game going into the election.
As ND says, the ground game only really comes into play if the election is within a few points, tops. But if it does -- and there's certainly reason to believe this one will -- the ground game can be decisive.
At the same time a good ground game -- at least the voter registration part of it -- can be hobbled mightily if opposing elected officials find ways to disqualify or throw out lots of new voter registration applications, as they seem to be doing in Ohio.
--Josh Marshall
So now we get some <$Ad$>details about how the Rove treatment works -- and not just speculation, but with descriptions from former Rove staffers who helped organize some of his trademark whispering campaigns.
An article out this week in The Atlantic Monthly focuses specifically on a series of races Rove ran in Texas and Alabama in the 1990s.
The Alabama races in particular haven't gotten that much national press attention in the past. And one of the most lizardly passages in the article describes how Rove launched a whispering campaign against one Democratic opponent suggesting that the candidate -- a sitting Alabama state Supreme Court Justice, who had long worked on child welfare issues -- was in fact a pedophile ...
When his term on the court ended, he chose not to run for re-election. I later learned another reason why. Kennedy had spent years on the bench as a juvenile and family-court judge, during which time he had developed a strong interest in aiding abused children. In the early 1980s he had helped to start the Children's Trust Fund of Alabama, and he later established the Corporate Foundation for Children, a private, nonprofit organization. At the time of the race he had just served a term as president of the National Committee to Prevent Child Abuse and Neglect. One of Rove's signature tactics is to attack an opponent on the very front that seems unassailable. Kennedy was no exception.Some of Kennedy's campaign commercials touted his volunteer work, including one that showed him holding hands with children. "We were trying to counter the positives from that ad," a former Rove staffer told me, explaining that some within the See camp initiated a whisper campaign that Kennedy was a pedophile. "It was our standard practice to use the University of Alabama Law School to disseminate whisper-campaign information," the staffer went on. "That was a major device we used for the transmission of this stuff. The students at the law school are from all over the state, and that's one of the ways that Karl got the information out—he knew the law students would take it back to their home towns and it would get out." This would create the impression that the lie was in fact common knowledge across the state. "What Rove does," says Joe Perkins, "is try to make something so bad for a family that the candidate will not subject the family to the hardship. Mark is not your typical Alabama macho, beer-drinkin', tobacco-chewin', pickup-drivin' kind of guy. He is a small, well-groomed, well-educated family man, and what they tried to do was make him look like a homosexual pedophile. That was really, really hard to take."
This is just one snippet from the piece. But when you read the whole thing, what happened in South Carolina in 2000 and what's happening now with Kerry and the Swift Boat business will all seem a lot more clear.
--Josh Marshall
I was just here talking on the phone and watching Meet the Press on mute. Seeing their end-of-show commentary panel really drives home the state of affairs in what now goes for balance in DC conventional wisdom.
Of the four panelists, one is the profoundly middle-of-the-road David Broder, a paragon of Washington's establishment assumptions. For the sake of discussion, let's call him balanced or neutral.
Two of the other four are Bill Safire and Bob Novak, two of the most prominent and conservative columnists in the country.
Finally, you have Doris Kearns Goodwin. In her personal views, it's probably fair to call her a liberal. But, as you might say, she doesn't play one on TV. She goes in for high-minded commentary, which is fine in itself but makes her little balance for Safire and Novak.
There's your balance. Two against one -- and the one has one arm tied, voluntarily, behind her back.
--Josh Marshall
